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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs · Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

It's hard to express just how big the Batman TV show was in 1966, and everyone seemed to be trying to cash in on it, including musically.

As we heard a few episodes ago, the Who recorded the Batman theme,

along with several members of the Blues Project, performing under the name The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale.

That album had been produced by The Mothers producer Tom Wilson, and Wilson was clearly invested in the idea of making a Batman hit.

He actually got Burt Ward, the actor who played Robin in the series, signed to Verve, and produced a single for him with Zappa arranging, and with The Mothers, augmented by orchestral session musicians, as his backing band.

They recorded over two sessions.

The first produced the B-side, a version of the old standard orange-coloured sky, chosen because the wham-bam-alakazam line was reminiscent of the biff-bam-pow overlays that would appear in the TV show.

But after that session, and the revelation that Ward was possibly not the world's greatest singer, the plan shifted.

And while Ward was given singing lessons just in case his record took off, the A-side was written so that Ward would only have to speak, not sing.

Zappa wrote the track, and you can already see the ambiguous fascination with female fandom that would lead to him producing the GTO's album we heard about last episode.

Ingber leaving the group kicked off a number of other line-up changes in a very short period of time, though always around the core of Ray Collins on vocals, Frank Zappa on guitar, Roy Estrada on bass, and Jimmy Carl Black on drums.

Van Dyke Parks either returned to the band on keyboards or joined for the first time, depending on which of the convoluted sources you read, but didn't remain long enough to be heard on any recordings.

Another musician who didn't stay long enough to be recorded was Denny Bruce.

Jimmy Carl Black was a great drummer, but he was a great R&B drummer, and not a great technical musician.

Zappa respected his musicianship enough to want to keep him in the band, but wanted to augment him with other drummers or percussionists more fluent in the kind of complex time signatures and polyrhythms that Zappa was now writing.

Bruce was brought in as a second drummer for a few months, but developed mononucleosis and was unable to continue.

So he was replaced with Billy Mundy.

Mundy was a former timpanist for the LA Philharmonic, who had become a session player, playing with Van Dyke Parks, guitarist Larry Beckett and Jim Fielder, who was a bass player, on the first album by Tim Buckley, who shared a manager with the Mothers.

Mundy had also briefly been a member of a band called The Lamp of Childhood, formed around Jim Hendrix, Cass Elliott's former husband who we heard about performing with her and Tim Rose as the Big Three, and who had been in the mugwumps with Elliott, Denny Doherty, John Sebastian and Zalianovsky.

Mundy left The Lamp of Childhood after their first single, a cover of Donovan's Season of the Witch.

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