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 main source for his early years is Frank Zappa, who moved away from Lancaster in the late fifties, and the two men didn't get together again until nineteen sixty three.
But apparently Van Vliet had a succession of odd jobs, mostly sales based, and was a surprisingly good salesman.
Van Vliet and Zappa next connected when Zappa was in the process of buying PAL Studios and turning it into Studio Z, as we talked about in the episode on Trouble Every Day.
Zappa had formed a band called the Soots, with a revolving lineup usually including guitarist Alex Snoofer, who soon changed his name to Alex Sinclair, and drummer Vic Mortensen, and Van Vliet became the group's singer.
They recorded several tracks together at Studio Z, like Metal Man Has Won His Wings
And Tiger Vouch.
Both those songs have band leads improvising lyrics based on comic books that were lying around.
Metal Man Has Won His Wings comes from an issue of The Metal Men with a story about a living gun, which also had an advertisement for a Hawkman comic reading in part Electrifying Announcement Hawkman has won his wings and from now on his famous Wheat Wheat Battle Cry will appear in his own magazine, while Tiger Roach was inspired by Green Lantern number thirty four, whose cover has Green Lantern fighting a funny looking lizard, and the story title Three Way Attack Against Green Lantern.
None of this material got released at the time, or for many decades later, though they at least made attempts at getting some of it out.
Dot Records rejected a submission of some early Sutz recordings, saying The material has been carefully reviewed, and while it does have merit, we do not feel strongly enough about its commercial potential to give you any assurance of a recording.
More specifically, they said that the guitars were distorted.
Guitar distortion was not the only uncommercial aspect to the material Zappa, Van Vliet, and other collaborators like Euclid Sherwood and Ray Collins were working on though.
Collins and Zappa had written a track called Hey Nelda, parodying Hey Paula by Paul and Paula, and released it under the name Ned and Nelda on a small label.
That was, as one can imagine, a miserable failure as far as sales went.
But that didn't stop Zappa, Collins, Van Vliet, Sherwood and others planning to expand it into a full scale rock opera.
In nineteen sixty three, the
to be titled I was a teenage malt shop.
According to Sherwood, it was supposedly about a kid, Ned the Mumbler, who came into one of these small closed up towns where they didn't allow rock and roll, and so he wrote these songs.
He was going to get the whole town singing and enjoying music.
Zappa was the main creative force for the collaboration and wrote several songs for the project, some of which, like Status Back Baby, would later turn up on mothers of invention albums, but the local CBS affiliate rejected the outline when it was proposed as a TV special, saying We remain unconvinced that the outline submitted can ensure a quality show.
Showing 81–100 of 2,253 · page 5 of 113
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