It was released nearly a year after the band had taken to the studio to record the follow-up to 1967's Safe as Milk, and was composed primarily of material intended for an aborted double-LP entitled It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper.

The intention, according to drummer John French, was for one disc of the LP to consist of structured studio tracks by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, while the second disc would consist of unstructured blues jams by The 25th Century Quakers, an alter-ego version of the group (who would perform live in Quaker costumes as an opening act during the band's concerts, although this never came to pass).

Much other material from the 1967 sessions has since been released: the compilation I May Be Hungry But I Sure Ain't Weird (1992) contained eleven of the original cuts taken from master tapes.

Barret Hansen, in a December 1968 review for Rolling Stone, was unsure of the value of the record; he felt that Beefheart and his band had "the capability of making the ultimate white blues album", but that the "noisy, discom-bobulated freakout shit" and "liquid audio" spoil the potential, so that it was unclear to him if the album was the work of "the world's greatest white bluesman", "a competent musician, capable of occasional titanic moments", or "a hack performer" with genius production.

Lyricist Herb Bermann has contested this, claiming to have written the lyrics to the songs "Safe As Milk", "Trust Us", "Gimme Dat Harp Boy" and "Kandy Korn"[8][9] The Magic Band (2003–2017)