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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs · Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa · 21 Jul 2026
podcast
This is followed by Duke of Prunes, a song that had a long history.
The melody for it had started as a piece of orchestral music that Zappa had written for Run Home Slow, the western film written by his high school teacher that he had scored.
There it had been the main melodic theme for the score.
Zappa had put fairly straightforward love lyrics to the track, entitled it And Very True, and it had become a regular part of the Mothers live set.
A recently released recording of the Mothers playing it in 1966, the only recording of the Del Casha line-up, shows it sounding at that point very like some of Brian McLean's work with love around the same time.
But then in the recording session, Ray Collins decided to have some fun.
As he later recalled, Frank had this beautiful tune called And Very True, and when we went in to record it, being a little crazy at the time, I just ad-libbed on the spot.
The original lyrics I think were something like Moonbeam through the night, something very loving, although Frank didn't like love songs, and I changed it to Moonbeam through the prune in June I can see your tits.
I just made it up on the spot.
Duke of Prunes goes straight into two other tracks.
Amnesia Vivace, a short free jazz freakout including a quote from Stravinsky's Firebird, and Zappa saying Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Prunes as a reference to Gene Chandler's Duke of Earl.
which then goes into a sped up reprise of Duke of Prunes before transmuting into Call Any Vegetable, the second major melodic theme of the side.
The vegetables referenced in this track are of course a sneering reference to apathetic people, much like the plastic people of the beginning of the side.
But I've always found it intriguing that around the same time that the Mothers were recording that, the Beach Boys were recording the song Vegetables, which bears some slight resemblance to the Mothers track, and was co-written by Van Dyke Parks, who had recently been a temporary member of the Mothers.
I have no idea if it's an example of convergent evolution, just ideas that were in the air at the same time, or if one influenced the other.
And if so, I don't know whether it was Brian Wilson hearing Zappa's song and doing a more naive version, or Zappa hearing the Beach Boys and parodying them.
Both groups were aware of each other's work.
Zappa later wrote in his autobiography, One of the most exciting things that ever happened in the world of white person music was when the Beach Boys used the progression 5-2 on Little Deuce Coop, an important step forward by going backward, while Carl Wilson and Mike Love both praised Zappa in 1969, with Wilson saying cruising with Ruben and the Jets was really out of sight, man, while Love said, If he keeps coming up with titles like that, he's going to have friends for life from the Beach Boy organisation.
The tracks on the rest of Side 1 are extended, semi-improvisatory variations on the theme of Call Any Vegetable, along with a brief burst of Hulse's Pirate Suite.
As with the Stravinsky, Zappa was mixing references to high and low art.
Showing 1041–1060 of 2,253 · page 53 of 113
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