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

Side 2 starts with America Drinks, a parody of the kind of music Zappa had played when he was starting out, playing cocktail lounges with a band called Joe Perino and the Mellowtones.

Interestingly, I've read in several places that the intro to America Drinks is a parody of Love's My Little Red Book, with Zapper himself saying so in at least one interview.

I can sort of hear that after it's been pointed out, but it's not something I'd have thought of even though I've known both records for decades.

But compare that intro...

and you can sort of see what was going on there.

This is a recurring thing in Zappa's work as his career progresses.

References and parodies that are either so distorted, or to such niche bits of culture, that his audience can't possibly expect to understand them.

Though possibly the parody of Love might have been more obvious to the Mother's local audience, as Love and the Mothers played the same venues and appealed to the same freak crowd.

Status Back Baby, the second song on side two, is a song that dated back to the musical I Was a Teenage Malt Shop that Zappa had worked on with Captain Beefheart several years earlier.

A version of the song had been recorded by the PAL Studio Band back when Zappa had been working with Paul Buff at PAL Studios.

The version on Absolutely Free, though, continued the repurposing of 20th century classical music by including a great chunk of Stravinsky's Petrushka as the instrumental break.

Uncle Bernie's Farm, which follows, is a satire of commercialism.

Then comes Son of Susie Creamcheese, a piece of what Zappa referred to as conceptual continuity.

On the previous album, there had been a liner note letter from a supposed teenager named Susie Creamcheese, who disapproved of the mother's filth in decadence.

Here, in another song inspired by Louie Louie, Susie Creamcheese becomes a portmanteau character with elements of several of the groupies on the Sunset Strip scene, who has taken too much acid, got in trouble with the law on the strip, and moved to Berkeley to join the protests there.

Zappa actually got his friend Pamela Zarubica to appear as Susie Creamcheese for a while, in promotional appearances with the band.

Ground Shoes Don't Make It, which comes next, is one of the most powerful things Zappa ever wrote, and had to be recorded in many short sections and edited together.

The group weren't capable of playing through it fluently enough, which is saying something given how good these musicians actually were.

It's also a truly disturbing song, and I have to be very careful about which bits I excerpt here, because there's some very upsetting material in it.

It's about, fundamentally, the way that authoritarian politics is driven by repressed sexual desires, usually ones that are societally unacceptable for very good reason.

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