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
The only music he heard was leakage through the control room window, and it's likely he didn't even hear much of that, because one explanation sometimes given for his timing issues was that he sang so loudly and forcefully that the pressure closed up his eustacean tubes, meaning he could barely hear the band on stage.
Given this, and Van Vliet's well known issues with timing, it's amazing how well he stays with the rest of the band on the opening track Frounland, one of the last songs to be written for the project, and also one of the most complex.
Beefheart would later criticize Zappa's hands-off production process on Troutlask Replica, but towards the end of his life, Zappa explained exactly why he had been hands-off, saying
You couldn't explain from a technical standpoint anything to Don.
You couldn't tell him why things ought to be such and such a way, and it seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, the easiest thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible, whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not, like covering the cymbals and the drums with cardboard and overdumbing his vocals with no earphones, hearing only vague leakage through the studio window, rendering him only slightly in sync with the actual track that he saw.
Singing on.
That's the way he wanted it.
While Beefheart himself had barely rehearsed with the band at all and took several days to do his vocals, the instrumentalists were so well rehearsed that they did every track in one take, recording the instrumental tracks for the whole double album in a single day.
The tractors may joke that it sounds like everything is one take because it sounds very chaotic, but anyone who has any doubt that every note played on the album is intentional, other than the horn parts by Van Vliet and Hayden, which are more aleatoric, should listen to the field recordings, later released as part of the Grove Finn's Rarities box set, where they played the instrumental parts near identically to the performances on the finished album.
Compare for example the field version of Farmland.
So the studio version with vocals.
Or Elagaroo Field Recording.
And studio recording.
Sugar and spikes peeled.
And studio.
If you need any further proof that this music is intentional, compare that passage to this from Myles Davis's Sketches of Spain.
There are a few moments on the album which quote other works like that.
We've already heard Moonlight on Vermont, which, along with Veterans Day Poppy, was included from the initial studio sessions with Gary Marker.
But there's also the end of Pachuco Cadaver, where the group player riff that's a slight variant on shortening bread, a favourite song of Van Bleeds.
That track, Pachuco Cadaver, was the single off the album, incidentally.
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