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.
Trend
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
But before that journey, the Mothers were on their way back to New York.
For the whole spring and summer of 1967, the Mothers of Invention played a residency at the Garrick Theatre, originally titled Pigs and Repugnance, but later changed to Absolutely Free when the album came out, though for some reason Zapper always claimed that it was just a coincidence that their show was named the same as the album.
The support act for the first week or so was another act managed by Herb Cohen, the folk singer Tim Buckley, who had been discovered by Jimmy Carl Black.
Buckley wasn't the only folk act to perform as the support act for the mothers during that residency.
There were several others, like Ritchie Havens, but the most impressive was one that wasn't actually billed.
Frank Zappa had met Paul Simon at a music shop, and had been invited to Simon's home for dinner, where, after complaining that his tax bill that year was $600,000, something with which the relatively impoverished Zappa had little sympathy...
Simon and Art Garfunkel, who was also there, had taken to reminiscing about their days as Tom and Jerry in the 50s.
Zappa suggested to them that it would be fun if the two of them supported the mothers as Tom and Jerry, just playing their 50s material, and the two agreed.
They performed The Sound of Silence, and the penny dropped for the audience that they had been watching Megastars.
One of the audience berated Zappa for mocking the duo like that, which just confused him.
In his autobiography, he talks about wondering if she had thought that these two superstars had just dropped in out of nowhere and we had forced them to sing Ooh Bop-a-loo-chee-bah, she's mine.
Sadly, the mother's shows at the Garrick were not audio recorded, which is a great shame as these shows were the most important thing to happen in the mother's career, with Gail Zapper comparing the group's time at the Garrick to the Beatles' time in Hamburg.
At the start of their residency, as it was the Easter holidays, there were queues round the block for the group's show.
But as the spring turned into the summer and the schools went back, the audiences dried up.
On at least one occasion there were fewer people in the audience than on stage, and the group decided to get the audience to be the band and entertain them instead.
Another time there were only three people in the audience and the band dressed up like waiters, served food and drink to those three people, and then spent the next hour and a half just talking to them personally.
Each show turned into a unique event, sometimes more conceptual art than musical performance, such as one time when three marines in full dress uniform turned up to the show.
Zappa got them to come on stage and sing Dylan's Rainy Day Women.
He then brought out a baby doll and got them to pretend it was a Vietnamese baby and show the audience what they did to Vietnamese kids and then displayed the dismembered body parts to the shocked audience while sombre music played.
During their time at the Garrick, the mothers went through various line-up changes.
Showing 1141–1160 of 2,253 · page 58 of 113
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