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
Gabulla Zabo, a Hungarian jazz guitarist and sitarist who had started to incorporate the influences of both rock and Indian music into his playing, and who the magic band had seen live and been impressed by.
Listening to the plain brown rapper sessions, you see a massive stylistic change from Safe as Milk, with songs being far more guitar oriented, more based on improvisation, and crucially much longer.
Terror Plane, a reworking of Robert Johnson's Terror Plane Blues, interpolating lines from various other classic blues songs but solely credited to Van Vliet, is a whole nineteen minutes long.
Van Vliet had by this time started playing guitar a little, according to French.
He couldn't actually play, but he would occasionally hit upon a lick he liked, and if he wasn't around a tape recorder he would have to yell for one of the band members to come and figure out what it was he was playing so it could be incorporated into one of the songs.
French says in his autobiography, sometimes the translator, whether it was Jeff, Alex, Jerry, or myself, would wind up actually playing something vastly improved and more musical than Don's attempt, and he would often claim it as his own, using the phrase You knew exactly what I meant.
Many little bits and pieces of songs came together like this, but though Van Vliet was always the one with the vision, credit for anyone else's contribution was never considered.
Other songs recorded during these sessions were slightly more coherent and less jamming based.
Trust us, for example, has been described by John French as being Beefheart's attempt to write something in the style of the Rolling Stones We Love You.
If you compare the stones tracking
With the beef high one.
You can see that there's a definite similarity there.
These sessions were produced by Krasno alone, without the participation of Richard Perry.
Apparently the last interaction that Perry had with the band came as a showcase gig that Krasno had organized, though in what seems to have been a recurring complaint that the group had about Krasno's managerial incompetence, he hadn't arranged for there to be a PA system at the gig.
The group had borrowed a rehearsal PA from Michael Nesmith, but then Van Vliet had decided he was going to play guitar for that gig, had plugged French's electroacoustic into the PA, and spent the entire gig making feedback noises and failing to play properly.
Perry had come backstage after the show and told the group You guys are crazy, which they took as a compliment, but which Perry didn't mean as one.
He was soon off to warn of others to work with the comparatively normal tiny Tim.
So Krasno was left as sole producer of the sessions for the group's second album, which was intended not only to be a double album, but a double album by two different groups.
One disc was going to be the proper songs like Trust Us and Beetle Bones and Smokin' Stones.
That was going to be the disc by Captain Beefart and his magic band.
Showing 381–400 of 2,253 · page 20 of 113
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