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.

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

Casher was replaced by Jim Fielder, who was, as we have established, a bass player, but switched to rhythm guitar when he joined the Mothers.

Fielder was a friend of Jimmy Carl Black's, the two of them having worked in the same music shop.

But while Casher's tenure in the group was very brief, and he never recorded with them, his time in the band did make a huge difference to rock and roll music history.

One of the jobs Kasha had at the time was playing in a promotional band for Vox Amplifiers, and he was an advisor on developing new equipment.

And one of the things he was involved in in some way was the development of the wah-wah pedal.

This is a contentious area, with three different people having claimed to be the one who came up with the idea, all telling plausible stories, but Kasher was definitely involved in developing it in some way, and he made the first ever recordings with the Wawa, in February 1967, for a cardboard demo disc that was sent out to retailers.

Casher was still in touch with Zappa when the pedal was being developed, and depending on what you read, he either gave Zappa one, or evangelised about it enough that Zappa bought one as soon as they came on the market, when they were still primarily being marketed to horn players.

Zappa started using it immediately as his effective choice.

A month later, Zappa met up and jammed with Eric Clapton, who immediately got his own pedal and used it on Cream's Tales of Brave Ulysses.

And over summer 1967, Zappa also spent time with Hendrix, and introduced him to the wah-wah pedal, which Hendrix took to even more than Zappa had.

So it's very likely that Del Cash's brief time in the Mothers of Invention, a period so brief that for decades Zapper fans argued about if he had even lasted as long as a single gig, changed the sound of rock guitar forever.

The big change in the Mothers' sound, though, came with the addition of Bunk Gardner, the brother of Don Preston's army bunkmate Buzz.

Bunk Gardner is a serious multi-instrumentalist who plays saxophone, flute, clarinet, bassoon and piano, and like Preston was significantly older than the rest of the band.

Happily, both Preston and Gardner are still alive today in their 90s.

He had played bassoon in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra from 1950, before being drafted during the Korean War, and his first recordings had been in 1959, playing on an album of orchestral versions of TV western themes, titled Themes from the Hip.

Gardner and Preston between them allowed Zapper to expand the Mothers' instrumental palette immensely.

Having musicians who could sight-read music, who were familiar with the avant-garde world that Zapper had always had one foot in, who were able to improvise in modes a million miles away from the blues-based grunting of most rock players of the era, and who played instruments that weren't just the standard guitar, bass and drums, allowed for a whole range of possibilities for orchestration.

The Mothers weren't the only band on the LA scene to do something like this.

At almost exactly the same time, Love expanded to have Alban Snoopy Pfisterer on harpsichord and organ, and jazz sax and flute player Jay Cantrelli, who would later play with Jimmy Carl Black and the Gardner Brothers in Geronimo Black.

But they went further in that direction than anyone else.

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