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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And weirdly that's what Bob Krasnow thought of them as at this point.
One thing that everyone involved seems to agree on is that Krasno would say over and over to anyone who would listen, that Captain Beefart and his magic band were going to be as big as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
According to John French's autobiography, in fact, Krasno told the band that he had moved to the west coast from the east specifically to sign the Magic Band after hearing Diddy Wa Diddy.
The intention on Krasno's part was to make them the biggest band in the world.
So as the sessions for the album that became Safe as Milk started in RCA's studios, there were essentially three different creative visions at work, any of which could have made for an interesting album.
Van Vliet was starting to move towards a vision he didn't yet have the musical vocabulary to express, but of something that wasn't quite psychedelic rock and wasn't quite blues.
Gary Marker had come up with the tag Psychedelta for this combination of Delta Blues and Psychedelic Rock.
Perry was a pop producer and wanted to make a pop record.
And while Krasno was a credited co producer, and Artie Rip was also supposedly a co producer for the sessions, everyone involved agrees that Perry did all the actual production work.
of work, including coming up with drum parts and arranging backing vocals and horn overdubs.
And Rai Kuda by all accounts had wanted to join a blues band, and felt like he had been somewhat misled as to what the music he would be playing was, but he also ended up being the person who shaped Van Vliet's ideas into finished songs and came up with much of the actual music that was played by the band members.
Knowing this, there's a temptation to see the album as falling between multiple stools, and certainly some of the members of the magic band at the time talk about it that way.
John French, for example, talks in his autobiography about the album sounding thin as a result of Perry's inexperience in the studio.
Coming to the album without the context of what the different people involved expected though, it's actually a very impressive record, and I personally suspect that French's later distaste for the mix comes from the stereo mix, which was the default version for decades and the only version on CD when French wrote his book.
But the mono mix, which was of course the more common version when the album was released, and which didn't get reissued until twenty thirteen, is anything but thin.
Mono and stereo differences aside, the album is fascinating in part because of the sheer range of different influences that go into it, partly a product of the different creative visions we talked about, but also reflective of the LA music scene more generally at the time.
Safe as Milk is obviously a distinctive album.
Captain Beefheart was always too idiosyncratic to sound like everyone else, but it's very much a part of the LA Zeitgeist, with sections that sound very like Love, Other Doors, or even the Monkeys.
Running through a few of the tracks quickly, we can see just how many influences were going into the mix.
Take the opening track, Sure Enough and Yes I Do as an example.
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