Andrew Hickey
speaker
2,253 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Soon the remains would split up, and Captain Beefart and his magic band were dropped by A and M after Moon Child, their second single for the label, also flopped.
There was another lineup change right after the A and M sessions as well.
Richard Hepner quit the group, and Sinclair switched back from drums to guitar.
In St.
Clair's place came PG Blakely, who had actually been the drummer at the group's earliest rehearsals, but who had been unable to keep a steady tempo, and been dropped by the group before any gigs in favour of Mortensen.
Blakeley also soon left though, and was replaced by John French, who
French tells a story in his autobiography about how, soon after joining the group, he and Van Vleek drove past the last church French had attended as a teenager, and saw a sign saying Beware of magic bands outside.
According to French, the pastor of the church, when Van Bleek confronted him about this, said that it was a reference to marauding bands of magicians in the Bible, and he had no idea there was a local group called the Magic Band.
But in retrospect French, who is now a born again Christian, sees it as something of a warning.
French had been the drummer of the Maltese Men, a surf band who also played at the Teen Expo, and had been noticed by Van Bleet then.
And he had then gone on to join a band called Blues in a Bottle as the vocalist.
Blues in a Bottle were actually inspired to a large extent by Captain Beefart and his magic band, and two of the group's other members, Jeff Cotton and Mark Boston, will come up again.
When Blakely had left the magic band, he'd wanted to start his own band, and had approached some of the members of Blues in a bottle.
And some sort of miscommunication had led French to believe his band had split up, when apparently the other members still wanted to continue working with him.
At one of Blues in a Bottle's last gigs, they had supported the Magic Band, who had just started playing sets that were made up predominantly of their own material.
When French had been surprised to discover that blues in a bottle had actually gone down rather better.
Captain Beefart and his magic band were huge in Lancaster and the surrounding areas, and making waves in LA, but they were floundering.
And once again Van Vliet had been watching the competition.
Right after French joined the band, they moved to a communal house in Laurel Canyon, the same area that Frank Zappa moved to around the same time, and which, thanks to Zappa's influence, was about to become where all the hippest people lived.
Getting the group to live under one roof was the first part of Van Vliet's plan to make the band fully his, rather than the semi democracy it still was at this time.
Showing 201–220 of 2,253 · page 11 of 113
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