Enigmas on Thin Ice: Dan Hicks Breaks Up His Hot Licks
“I was born in 1947. I got my first guitar when I was ten. I toured with Chuck Berry for a year. I was with Herbie Hancock for a good count. I’ve paid my dues. They were, ah, $13 an hour, I believe.” —Dan Hicks, The Famous Musical Cowboy
What sort of man is Dan Hicks?
Only Jimmie the Talking Dummy knows for sure. Jimmie’s had his opportunities to tell. He had half a dozen words on the first Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks album. There were two photos of him on the second album, Where’s The Money? and a part in the “Dan Hicks Look-Alike Contest—Look Just Like Dan Hicks” coupon that was included in Striking It Rich.
There was a time when Dan would bring Jimmie to gigs in his own little hatbox, but only on one occasion did he ever get up the nerve to bring him out onstage. Finally Jimmie’s body started to rot and in a fit of pique Dan tore him up. The Hot Licks remember being greeted as they came to one rehearsal at Dan’s old Sausalito houseboat by the sight of an armless Jimmie sitting on the deck.
Today, though, Jimmy is nothing but a dummy’s head, sporting a golden moustache and granny glasses, on the wall in Dan’s living room.
What we’re dealing with, Jimmie might have said if he chose to, is a rare talent and a mysterious temperament. A talent that has created a unique body of music and laboriously assembled an equally unique group of musicians to play it; and a temperament that decided to hang the whole thing up just before the release of his most successful album. Now Last Train to Hicksville is around No. 65 on the LP charts and the band’s sitting around collecting unemployment. What sort of man is Dan Hicks, anyway?
About the talent there’s no doubt. For five years he’s been violating the heavy-electric and wispy-folk pop clichés alike with a band that has always featured two girl singers, the Lickettes, and at least one violin, usually no drums and never any electrified instruments. The music reflects most of the American pop tradition before the rock era: ragtime, C&W, Hoagy Carmichael ballads, Hawaiian music, mellow swing. But many people have been discovering lately, there’s more to it than a nostalgia turn. “I’m not trying to write old songs,” as Dan says.
One of the things Dan has done is take the occasionally arbitrary stylization of old standard pop tunes and turn it into a motif. So whether the melodies are melancholy or exuberant, whether the lyrics are of wistful romance, frustration and dismay, crazy jiving, mental expansiveness or ironic anecdote, the rhythms are extremely tight—so light, stylish and jaunty that a certain dissonance is set up with the lyrics and melodies. Music to keep on troupin’ by.
The band has always looked like troupers in the noblest showbiz tradition, dressing as they do in the stagestruck duds of several other eras. In fact, they have acted like troupers, too, in spending most of the last two years on the road. Their Salvation Army vamp gowns and Hawaiian shirts not only underline the sense of tradition they work out of, they add to that stylistic complexity, that vibrating high note of sophistication that marked the Hot Licks as a band apart.