Clear Spot by Captain Beefheart

Clear Spot, the seventh album from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, came out on Reprise in 1972, and the original American pressing came wrapped in a see-through plastic sleeve, about the only transparent thing the Captain ever did. Trout Mask Replica had won him the critics and lost him the cash registers, so this time he went looking for a hit, hiring producer Ted Templeman and engineer Donn Landee, the pair who'd cooked up hits for Van Morrison and the Doobie Brothers.

The band shifted under him, too. Roy Estrada, late of the Mothers of Invention and Little Feat, joined on bass under the name Oréjon, Milt Holland added percussion, and with John "Drumbo" French missing from a studio record for the first time, fellow Mothers alumnus Art Tripp, alias Ed Marimba, held down the drums alone. The result is Beefheart's blues and hard rock at its most muscular and nearly danceable, with "Big Eyed Beans From Venus" jabbing like a live wire.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.