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
Indeed, French
which isn't even credited under his Drumbo pseudonym for playing on the record on its initial issues.
This is partly because by the time the album was released, French was out of the band.
Beefheart had decided that he was to be the latest victim of his abuse and literally threw him down the stairs.
This seems to have caused French to suddenly realize that he didn't have to keep doing this.
He phoned his estranged parents and went back to them.
Van Fleet got in another drummer, Jeff Braschel, who even looked like French, and started referring to him as Drumbo.
He didn't last long, though, and he was replaced by Art Tripp from the Mothers of Invention after Zappa disbanded the mothers.
Rochelle did, though, in turn force Jeff Cotton out of the band, hospitalizing Cotton by kicking him in the ribs, which was Cotton's cue to leave.
Hayden departed the band as well, having only been a semi detached member anyway.
Tram Mask Replica was the closest thing to a hit Captain Beefheart had had up to that point.
It didn't chart in the US, but it made number twenty one in the UK, in large part because it was championed by John Peel on his radio show.
But Beefheart was annoyed at Zappa for how the album was promoted, because he felt that rather than being treated as a serious artist, he was being promoted as a freak in the manner of Wildman Fisher, of other outsider artists that Zappa had signed to Bizarre Strait.
The two resumed their semi-hostile relationship, though Beefart still provided vocals for Willie the Pimp on Zappa's Hot Rats album, as we heard in the last episode.
Troutmask Replica would go on to become one of the most highly regarded albums of all time, and regularly included in lists of the best albums ever.
Though annoyingly legal issues between Zappa and Herb Cohen, which we'll talk about later, have meant that it keeps going in and out of print over the years, and it's currently not legally available anywhere in any format, which also means that the streaming playlist for this episode is rather less comprehensive than I would like.
It's a difficult work, by far Bifart's most difficult work, though those difficulties are relative.
If you've listened to a lot of free jazz, or to modern art music composers like Cage or Schoenberg or Stockhausen, or to any of the many noise rock and postpunk bands of later decades, a large proportion of whom were influenced directly or otherwise by Trap Mask Replica, of course, it's not that difficult.
But if you're coming to it from a basis of commercial rock music, as the bulk of its initial audience was, it sounds like nothing you've ever heard before.
It was at this point that Beefheart started what became a regular habit of talking negatively about Zappa in the press, saying things like Zappa is the most disgusting character I have ever encountered.
Showing 621–640 of 2,253 · page 32 of 113
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