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
Instead, they moved on to yet another project.
A feature film to be titled Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People.
This film was meant to be a science fiction film, and Van Vliet was to play the titular Captain Beefheart, who was named after an unpleasant behaviour by one of Van Vliet's uncles, who used to leave the toilet door open when Van Vliet's girlfriends would come over so he could expose himself to them while urinating, and boast of his member, that it looks just like a giant beef heart.
This was to be filmed at Studio Z, but unfortunately, as we heard in the episode on Trouble Every Day, Zappa was arrested after a sting operation for making a pornographic audio tape for an undercover policeman, and he lost the studio and the loose collective of musicians working there split up.
Sinclair, Van Vliet and Mortensen soon formed another group, with bass player Jerry Hanley and guitarist Doug Moon.
This group took their name from the abandoned film and became Captain Beefheart and his magic band.
Mather than being named after their singer, at this stage the group, rather than just Van Vliet as an individual, were thought of as Captain Beefheart, and if anyone was the leader at this early stage it was Alex Sinclair.
But soon, because Van Vliet was the lead singer, he became identified with the name, which had, after all, apparently been the name of his character in the proposed film.
And from this point forward I'll be using Van Vliet and Beef Heart somewhat interchangeably.
The magic band part of the name also came from the film.
The character of Captain Beefheart had magical powers and could appear and disappear, and somebody suggested that he should have a magic band who he could make appear wherever he wanted.
While Sinclair was the leader of the group, Van Vliet was always a dominant force in it, and from early on he would try to shape the group's original material.
Knowing little about the formalities of music though, he was unable to play any instruments other than the harmonica, he didn't have the vocabulary to get his ideas across to the other musicians.
Not that those ideas were very sophisticated at this point.
Don Van Vliet would later become one of the most innovative songwriters in the rock music field.
But at the moment he and his band were mostly just playing the blues and Rolling Stones covers.
The group's first appearances were at Battle of the Band shows and similar, but everything changed for them at a teenage fair at the Hollywood Palladium in April nineteen sixty five.
A show we talked about a bit in the GTO's episode a couple of episodes back.
Captain Beefart and his magic band weren't the only blues band playing there.
Another band on the bill was The Rising Suns, playing what some members have described as their first ever gig.
Showing 101–120 of 2,253 · page 6 of 113
← Previous
Next →