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
Despite signing the mothers, MGM Records was always the most notoriously conservative of the record labels, and there would be nothing but problems between Zappa and the label the entire time he and the mothers were with MGM.
Zappa, for all his abstruse music, actually had a keen commercial instinct and an understanding of advertising, and he was at this point actually in the process of putting together an ad agency, named Nifty Tough and Bitchin', with Herb Cohen, to provide services to companies who wanted to advertise to the counterculture and underground.
That didn't go very far, as it would turn out, but Zappa had very strong ideas of how to appeal to a particular audience.
The Mothers were, for example, the first rock band to advertise in Marvel Comics, at a point where superhero comics were just starting to be appreciated by college students.
And in particular, he wanted to take control of his record's packaging, and there were two issues with the packaging of Absolutely Free.
The first was that the collage Zappa had created for the album cover included the slogan, War Means Work For All.
The label objected to this, but eventually compromised and allowed it to be printed, so long as it was in a faint grey rather than the original black.
But the other sticking point was that Zappa wanted to include a copy of the lyrics with the album, something that had not been done in rock music previously.
Oddly, these delays led to the album being released at the same time as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album that's generally considered to be the first major rock album to do exactly that.
The problem with the label this time wasn't with the idea of actually printing the lyrics, it was with the content of the lyrics.
MGM's legal department, rightly or wrongly, believed that the lyrics to the album were legally protected when performed, as art, but that they would be considered obscene if printed.
They gave Zappa a long list of changes to the text.
Some of these were just ridiculous, but possibly defensible.
Where Zappa had written magnificent instrumental ejaculation to describe a moment in the music, they wanted him to change the word ejaculation to climax.
But they also insisted, for example, on him editing the lyric, she's only 13 and she knows how to nasty, to remove the word 13.
And, amazingly, the line I'd like to make her do her nasty on the White House lawn became, after MGM's censorship, I'd like to make her do the crossword puzzle on the back of TV Guide.
Eventually, a compromise was reached.
In the US, the lyrics would be published by Zappa, as a booklet which people could send their money off for, with the address to send the money published on the record sleeve.
That way, the label itself would not be involved in publishing this obscene material.
In the UK, the lyrics would instead be published in the underground magazine International Times, and the transcriptions would be done by Pauline Butcher, a secretary who Zappa met on a trip here to promote the album, and who would soon become his right-hand woman for several years.
Showing 1121–1140 of 2,253 · page 57 of 113
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