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
None of it.
That great art can come from abuse is no excuse for the abuse.
And if a great record or film can only be made by a genius abusing his and it's pretty much always a him, subordinates, then that record or film just shouldn't be made.
But in this case the great art really is inseparable from the abuse, because Beefart broke these young men down and molded them in his
Image.
His first artistic love was sculpture, and the band members talk about how he essentially sculpted their performances, using the younger men as raw material, and taking utter control of their lives to do so.
He got them, particularly Harkelroad, to approach their instruments in a way nobody else would, and make sounds nobody else could.
Trout mask replica of the masterpiece is inseparable from the abusive way it was created.
And reading interviews and autobiographies of the band members, even nearly fifty years on they seemed unsure about how they felt about that combination themselves.
Eventually the group rehearsed all of Beefart's pieces to a point where they were ready to record.
Zappa's initial idea was to make the album as essentially a field recording of the band at home, and an attempt was made to do this.
There are recordings of the band playing the instrumental tracks for many of the songs recorded this way.
Most of those recordings were done without vocals, though there is a fantastic version of the blues song China Pig recorded during those sessions.
But Van Vliet soon became convinced that Zappa was actually trying to rip him off, that Zappa was trying to save money on the studio by recording this way, rather than trying to capture the authentic sound of the band.
He insisted on going into a proper studio and me recording everything from scratch.
However, it's a sign of the contradictions at play in Van Vliet's mind that while he insisted on recording in a proper studio, when they went into the studio he tried to replicate as much as possible the way the performances had sounded in the house, because that was what he was used to.
For example, French had taken to muting his drums with cardboard because the noise would get complaints from the neighbours.
Van Vliet insisted that French do the same thing in the studio.
Van Vliet also objected to the idea of using headphones in the studio when he was overdubbing his vocals.
During the sessions for Savers Milk he'd had feedback in his headphones which had hurt his ears, and ever since then he'd not wanted to wear them, though he made up excuses about them limiting his creative freedom and him being good enough intuitively to keep to the right beat, and what was the point of staying in time with anyone because music was meant to be free, and so on.
Showing 561–580 of 2,253 · page 29 of 113
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