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
It's also worth pointing out that Zappa apparently lent Van Vliet his copy of the Ewan McCall in AL Lloyd album we just heard a clip of, and Van Vliet liked it so much he never gave it back, and said in an interview in nineteen eighty that it was his favourite album.
Musically, the initial influence on the track seems to have been painted black by the Rolling Stones, and it started out as an Indian inspired drone before contributions by the band made it more harmonically complex.
But there's another influence on the track which may not be obvious at first, but which John French points out, and which seems even more outside Beefheart's usual range than the folk song inspiration.
The lyrics by Herb Berman are apparently about both actual electricity and about the telepathic transmission of thoughts through the air.
And in this of course they are like another song that had been a hit shortly before the recording of the album, and one which, like Electricity, has a prominent thermoming part.
Rather than use Paul Tanner and his electrotheramine though, the electricity uses an actual thermine.
This is the work of doctor Samuel Hoffman, who we talked about in the Good Vibrations episode, and who had been the preeminent session theramin player before Tanner's invention took most of his work away.
My guess, and it is only a guess, is that because the production team on Safe as Milk were all from the East Coast, they didn't know that if you wanted a theramin sound you called Tanner, and so they looked for the only actual thermine player on the musicians union's books.
Given the opportunity to shine though, Dr.
Hoffman turns in a great performance, with the natural unsteady vibrato that comes from the difficulty of finding the pitch on a real thermine actually adding to the effect.
Hoffman's performance on that, and on the album's closing track Autumn's Child, would be, as far as I can tell, the last recordings he would make before his death later that year.
Captain Beefart and his magic band looked like they were going to become a big success, and were becoming favourites of a lot of influential people in the music industry.
In the UK, John Peel, who had recently returned to the UK, started playing their records regularly on his pirate radio show, and when Michael Nesmith of the Monkeys visited John Lennon, he was delighted to find that Lennon, like him, was a beefheart fan, and had a promotional sticker for Saver's Milk on display.
Nesmith in his autobiography places that story during his first visit to Lennon's house, but that visit was before Safe as Milk was recorded.
Lennon did own that sticker though, so it must have been a subsequent visit.
Nesmet actually befriended the magic band, and especially Van Vliet, while the group were recording Safe as Milk.
The monkeys were using the same studios, RCA, and the same engineer, Henry Chicalo, to record their own album headquarters at the same time.
Indeed, there's even a joking monkeys track from this period that seems to be riffing on a beefheart track, or at least a shared reference to the voice on Ampex alignment tapes used for checking recording equipment settings.
Here's the opening of Yellow Brick Road from Safe as Milk.
And here's the monkeys joke track special announcement, unreleased at the time but included on some CD editions of their follow-up to headquarters, Pisces Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Limited.
Showing 321–340 of 2,253 · page 17 of 113
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