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

Meanwhile, we have all these union people sitting around at triple time because it was a holiday.

They were waiting to find out what to do.

Finally, they decide what they're going to cut.

We make two tracks with the union guys, and then the animals themselves show up around four o'clock in the afternoon, and they run through four or five old R&B songs like Long Tall Sally and Hit the Road Jack.

The two songs the union cats played on sounded pretty tight.

There was yet another band that Zappa worked with at this point, The Factory, a band led by the singer and guitarist Lowell George, who had come to the attention of Zappa and Herb Cohen as a regular support act for the Mothers.

Zappa produced a single for the group, Lightning Rod Man.

The single went unreleased though, and the factory instead made some recordings with Marshall Lieb, formerly one-third of the Teddy Bears, producing.

But of course the most important piece of work that Zappa was working on in late 1966 was the second Mothers of Invention album.

Absolutely Free was the first album by the expanded line-up of the Mothers of Invention, and the only one to feature Jim Fielder, who left the band between its recording and release and went on to be a bass player again.

Fielder is uncredited on the album, but played rhythm guitar.

Various other musicians contributed as well, including John Balkin, a bass player who worked a lot with Buzz and Bunk Gardner both before and after their time in the Mothers, and various session string and horn players.

While the album credited Zapper's old school friend Euclid Motorhead Sherwood as a band member, even though he didn't join the band until after the sessions.

This would be the first in a long line of Zapper and Mothers releases where the credits don't quite match reality.

But for the recording of Absolutely Free, the Mothers of Invention were Zappa and Jim Fielder on guitars, Don Preston on keyboards, Ray Collins on vocals, Bunk Gardner on woodwinds, Roy Estrada on bass, Jimmy Carl Black on drums, and Billy Mundy on percussion.

The album comprises two side-long suites of sorts, something that was very unusual at the time of recording for rock music.

While it was recorded in November 1966, over just four days, issues with the record company led to it not getting released until May 1967, almost simultaneously with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, another album with no gaps between tracks, thus somewhat blunting the impact of the innovation.

It opens with Plastic People.

In live performances, this had been a straightforward parody of Louie Louie, setting lyrics attacking conformism to Richard Berry's original music.

A piece with multiple shifts of mood and time signature, and with spoken sections referencing the then-recent Sunset Strip riots.

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