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 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

He started doing stuff like Pulcinella, writing music in his day and age but using forms that were thoroughly out of style and frowned upon by the academic establishment.

you have to remember that the American people don't have much going for them in the way of taste.

I mean, taste is something that's inflicted on the American public by other outside forces.

So if somebody tells you that something is cool, well, you'll think it's cool and you'll go out and buy it.

To make an album like Cruising with Ruben and the Jets at that time in history, in 68, was very unfashionable.

And everybody went, oh, I can't own that, it's not cool, it's not acid rock, it's not fuss tone, it's not psychedelic, who needs this?

I didn't do it just to be arbitrary.

I like that kind of music and I wanted to have some examples of that style in my total catalogue output.

There are Stravinsky references on the record itself, too.

Like at the end of Fountain of Love, you can hear the opening notes of Rite of Spring.

While there was an artistic reason for the creation of the Rubin and the Jets album, there was also a very pragmatic one.

Rubin and the Jets was a very quick album to record, and Zappa wanted to get something to MGM quickly to complete his contractual obligations to the label.

Lawyers at MGM had forgotten to send out the required forms to pick up on the group's option in March 1968, and Zappa wanted to take advantage of that to free himself from the contract and start his own label.

Knowing that he still owed MGM two more albums on the existing contract, though, he delivered them Ruben and the Jets and a compilation titled Mother Mania.

Stravinsky comparisons may all be very well, and Ruben and the Jets is a worthy addition to Zappa's canon, and one I think anyone who enjoyed my early episodes on Doo-Wop and Vocal Group R&B would enjoy.

But Zappa wanted his next major work to be one that wouldn't be subject to the kind of nonsense that he'd been dealing with from his old label.

MGM were not people he could work with.

Herb Cohen, Zappa's manager, helped Zappa co-found a new label, actually a pair of labels named Bizarre and Straight, though they're usually referred to as the compound Bizarre Straight these days.

Those two labels would be distributed by Reprise Records, a subsidiary of Warner's that had been founded by Frank Sinatra for himself and his Rat Pack friends, and their children like Nancy Sinatra and Dino, Desi and Billy, but which by 1968 had pivoted to rock acts like Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix.

Because Reprise had been started by an artist to put out work by his own close friends and family, the label had a much fairer attitude towards things like artists owning their own catalogue than other major labels.

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