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

Zappa said after his frustrating conversation with McCartney that McCartney was "...disturbed that I could refer to what we do as a product, but I'm dealing with businessmen who care nothing about music or art or me personally.

They want to make money and I relate to them on that level or they'd regard me as just another rock and roll fool."

The eventual release had the albums intended in a gatefold, with the band in drag on a yellow background of the same colour as the one on the Pepper gatefold, as the outside cover, while the parody of the Sgt Pepper outer cover was placed in the gatefold, as a way to avoid legal action.

Later CD reissues restore the intended front cover.

Most of the figures on the cover, created by Cal Schenkel, a former boyfriend of Ezra Mohawk who was soon dating Miss Sandra of the GTOs and would have a long artistic association with Zappa, had their eyes blacked out in the style of scandal sheets.

But while this was an artistic decision, it was also a pragmatic one.

Picture rights for celebrities like Lyndon Johnson would be practically impossible to get, and this way they avoided some of the legal problems that kept delaying Every Mother's Release.

Rights issues weren't the only things that MGM's legal department had a problem with though.

Some of the lyrics once again raised objections.

Deleting some of them was to be expected.

There's a passage from the song Mother People that uses various words I also avoid using on my podcast, and with that Zappa agreed to take the passage and play it backwards in the run out groove.

Similarly, in the song Harry You're a Beast, there is a section where Zappa references a famous routine by Lenny Bruce, to is a preposition, come is a verb, in which Bruce riffs on the phrase to come and its various meanings for several minutes.

The middle section of Harry you're a beast, which again is one which may require a warning for some listeners if they listen to the playlist, as it deals with sexual assault, had the lyrics don't come in me in me, don't come in me in me in tribute to Bruce.

MGM insisted that that too be reversed, and the result actually sounds better to my ears.

But there were other cuts that MGM made to the album as released, at least in some territories, which Zappa wasn't even notified about until after the release, and some of these were frankly absurd.

One line that was cut out by MGM Legal, which Zappa always pointed out as particularly egregious, was in the song Let's Make the Water Turn Black.

The sick filth in question was that foul, depraved, unspeakable line, and I still remember Mama with her apron and her pad feeding all the boys at Ed's Café.

MGM Legal decided that rather than a normal description of a waitress taking orders, the word pad must actually refer to a used sanitary napkin, which Mama was feeding to all the boys, and deleted it without telling Zapper, who later said that he didn't hear the edited version until he was collecting an award for the album, at which point he said he shouldn't get the award and it should instead be given to the person who butchered it.

Perhaps it's becoming clear at this point that the Mothers of Invention, the most outrageous and unconventional of the major rock artists of the period, and MGM, the most conservative of the record labels, were not a great fit for each other.

Realistically, it was not a relationship that was going to last much longer.

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