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
By this point, Van Vliet was manipulating the band members and turning them against each other, so French and Cotton, who had been close friends in blues in a bottle, were by now enemies, and as each new band member came in, that person would become Van Vliet's temporary favourite, and used to show the other band members how awful they were by comparison.
Shortly after Harkelroad joined, Jerry Handley, the last of the original instrumentalists from the Magic Band, and the only one not to be living in the communal house, quit the group.
According to Harkelroad's autobiography, Handley quit because Beefheart came to the band with some new material, and Handley asked, Where are the blues tunes?
Another reason for Handley leaving seems though to have been that strictly personal was also not going to come out.
Buddha Records were insisting that the magic band was still under contract with them, though they had not picked up the band's contract.
According to French, this was because of some shenanigans on Krasno's part to get them out of the contract, though that would conflict with Gary Marker's suggestion that the label had wanted to drop them.
This had given Blue Thumb's distributor, NGM Records, cold feats about releasing the album they'd recorded.
So Van Vliet's old friend and rival Frank Zappa came to the rescue.
Zappa and Herb Cohen were in the process of setting up bizarre straight records, as we heard about in the last two episodes, and Captain Beefart and his magic band seemed a perfect fit for the labels, which would be a home for music that could never get released anywhere else.
Zappa offered his old friend Van Vliet the perfect deal.
He would sign the magic band to his new label and give Van Vliet complete creative control.
Zappa would be the producer, but his job would be to make sure that Van Vliet's vision got realized, not to impose his own.
With no bass player, they got Gary Marker in again on a temporary basis.
He was very clear that he was not going to rejoin the band full time, and the magic band went into the studio with Zappa.
The plan initially seems to have been to re record most of the plain brown rapper material yet again, but also to record a couple of new songs.
Those new songs were cut first.
The anti war song Veterans Day Poppy.
And another new song, Moonlight on Vermont, which had three desperate inspirations.
The old standard Moonlight in Vermont.
The folks on Dat Old Time Religion, which had been recorded by artists as disparate as Woody Guthrie and Sister Rosetta Thorpe
Showing 441–460 of 2,253 · page 23 of 113
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