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
You know, what's a girl like you doing in a place like this?
All that stuff.
And then Jim Zanocchi wanting to beat up a Mexican who is Ray.
Those things are so carefully constructed that it breaks my heart when people don't dig into them and see all the levels that I put into them.
The album was mixed over Christmas while the group were in New York, where they were booked in for a month-long residency at the Balloon Farm, the same venue where the Velvet Underground had made their name.
It was a rather unhappy time for the group, who weren't used to East Coast winters, and who also discovered that their freaky apparel and long hair had not yet made it to New York.
and they couldn't get any cabs to stop for them and had to walk back to the hotel in the snow after every gig.
When they got back to LA, Zappa commenced work on what was intended to be his first solo album.
Unfortunately, things didn't work out as straightforwardly as he planned.
Lumpy Gravy was originally conceived as a purely instrumental album, and a way for Zappa to make some extra money.
The Mothers of Invention were signed as a band to MGM Verve, but Zappa was only signed as a performer, and so he found a loophole that allowed him to work for another label.
He signed a contract with Nick Vennett at Capitol to record an album of his orchestral works, on which Zappa would be composer, producer and conductor, but would not perform.
The performances instead would be by an ensemble credited as the Abnusils Emuka Electric Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, a group actually made up of normal Hollywood session musicians like the Sid Sharp Strings and various members of the Wrecking Crew like Tommy Tedesco and Lyle Ritz.
The only member of the Mothers of Invention to play on the album was Bunk Gardner, who may also not have been signed to Verve, as he'd joined the group after the first album.
Though John Balkin, who was a friend of Gardner's who often played free jazz with him, and who had also played on Absolutely Free, was also on the sessions.
A small number of copies of the album were released on the four-track cartridge format, which Capital was briefly very keen on, and which would soon be replaced by the eight-track cartridge, itself long obsolete.
But then, trouble struck...
While, as far as Capitol were concerned, they had the rights to release an album of Frank Zappa's compositions because he wasn't the performer, MGM had different ideas, and the album became a legal battleground between the two labels.
The problem was eventually resolved by MGM paying Capital the recording costs and getting the rights to the record, but the version of Lumpy Gravy that would be released on MGM Verve would turn out to be very different than the purely orchestral album that Capital had released, and that original version of Lumpy Gravy would remain unavailable for more than 40 years, until the release of the archival collection The Lumpy Money Project Object in 2009.
There were also problems with the release of Absolutely Free.
Showing 1101–1120 of 2,253 · page 56 of 113
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