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
According to John French, that started out inspired by the Yardbird's version of Jimmy Reed's blues classic I Ain't Got You, but by the time they took it into the studio it had been reworked, mostly by Kuda, and in its final version it's very clearly inspired by the blues standard Rollin' and Tumblin', and specifically by Muddy Water's version of the song.
The line about I was born in the desert seems to have come from a different variation on that musical idea, Noah Lewis's New Minglewood Blues, though it's also true that while Beefart wasn't born in the desert, Lancaster where he grew up, is indeed in the Mojave Desert.
Call on me in this version has much the same feel as a lot of records by the Birds or Love or other jangly folk rockers of the Sunset Strip.
At least until the end, when it suddenly incorporates the riff from Denny Kissed Me by the Crystals.
Dropout Boogie seems at least partly inspired by the kinks you really got me, with a very similar riff in the main section.
Later in the song though, we get a section in Waltz time, with what is apparently a harp playing along with the band.
This, like many of the other bits of arrangement on the album, was added at quite a late stage.
The World's Time sections aren't in the earliest demos of the song.
Rikuda was responsible for many of those sections, but in this case it was apparently a suggestion of Van Vlietz.
Much of the rest of the album is, by the standards of Beefheart's later work, comparatively straightforward.
A song like I'm Glad could be a soul inflected song on a million different albums from the period.
There are, though, a couple of tracks that stand out as something different.
But even the most obviously beef heart esque track on the album, Electricity, is seemingly made up of elements from other songs, just from a wider palette than the folk rock and blues that influence most of the album.
The opening riff is, of all things, seemingly inspired by an old Appalachian folk song, the wedding dress song.
which seems, from what I can find, first to have been recorded by Peggy Seeger in nineteen fifty seven, though I wouldn't be surprised to find an earlier version somewhere.
It might surprise listeners to know that among his other musical interests, Frank Zappa was particularly interested in traditional folk music and sea shanties, and he was listening to a lot of recordings by Seeger's husband Ewan McCall and by AL Lloyd in the mid sixties, and one of the regular pieces in the Mothers of Inventions repertoire in nineteen sixty six and sixty seven was an instrumental medley of the wedding dress song and a sea shanty about a woman who stowed away to sea dressed as a man.
that McCollin Lloyd had recorded, the handsome cabin boy.
Now Van Vliet would always deny that he was ever musically influenced by anyone, and especially by Zappa.
But compare the introduction to the mother's medley.
With the opening riff of electricity.
Showing 301–320 of 2,253 · page 16 of 113
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