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
To make matters worse, when people have researched these, it's often, but not always the
Turns out that the ones that sound made up are closer to the truth than a lot of the more straightforward ones.
So it's impossible to say with any certainty what the truth is about many of the stories that haven't been researched.
Reality would never be one of Van Vliet's strong points.
He'd say later, speaking of his childhood, I wasn't very much in reality, actually.
But what does seem to be the case is that he was a very willful child, and one who was convinced of his own genius from an early age.
He would order his parents around, referring to them by their first names and often screaming at them Sue, bring me a Pepsi and they would largely obey.
Van Vliet was a child prodigy, though like many prodigies he had what we would now call a spiky skill set.
He won awards for his sculpture when he was a very small child, but he always had difficulty reading and writing even into adulthood.
He was almost certainly undiagnosed dyslexic, and later said this was probably one of the main reasons why I'm a poet, because I couldn't accept the English language as it was, and I changed it.
Van Vliet was born in Glendale, California, but when he was a teenager his family moved to Lancaster, a small town seventy miles north of LA, which Van Vliet considered culturally dead, and he would often claim his family had moved there deliberately to put him off a career in the arts, which seems unlikely.
Soon though, another family would move to town, the Zappers, and Van Vliet would find in Frank Zapper, who was a few weeks older than him, someone who shared his taste in music.
The two would spend hours listening together to Blues and Doo Wop records, with a particular fondness for the works of Johnny Guitar Watson.
Van Vliet would later claim that he never listened to music at all in his teens, but Zappa's recollections were very different.
Van Vliet dropped out of high school after his father had a heart attack and took over his father's bread delivery route, but according to Zeppa, part of the time Dunn was helping out by taking over the bread truck route and driving up to Mahave, and the rest of the time he would just stay at home and listen to Rhythm and Blues records and scream at his mother to get him a Pepsi.
Van Vliet very briefly attended Antelope Valley Junior College studying art, and Zappa was also a student there studying music, and during their brief time there, Zappa persuaded Van Vliet to make his very first recording with Zappa on guitar.
Lost in a Whirlpool is a tasteless, seemingly improvised blues parody, in which the singer has been flushed down the toilet by his ex girlfriend and has to fight a big brown fish.
Its humour is far closer to Zappa's later work than to Van Vliet's.
But you can hear the potential there for both singer and guitarist already.
Little is known of Van Vliet for the next few years.
Showing 61–80 of 2,253 · page 4 of 113
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