I Scare Myself

Dan Hicks

Description

'We won’t leave any stone unturned here. We’ll get to all the stones, because I’m a giver.' Dan Hicks

'There are lots of people who can point to music on the shelf. Some like to light candles to it, others seek only to snuf them out. Dan burned them all brightly, and here is his tale.' Elvis Costello, from his foreword to this book

Dan Hicks didn’t have his heart set on a career in music. It all just sort of happened to him. It didn’t hurt, of course, that he was in the right place at the right time—San Francisco, 1966—and had a front-row seat for the birth and death of the counterculture.

Among other things, I Scare Myself is a classic story of the 60s. More importantly, though, it’s a story of musical genius. By the time the Summer of Love limped to a close in the fall of ’67, Dan Hicks had quit The Charlatans—the pioneering psych-rock band with whom he played the drums—and turned to jazz, the music he’d secretly loved all along, as he began building his own band.

‘I just started taking ingredients I liked and putting them together to see what came out,’ he writes. What came out was an amazing blend of complex time signatures, unusual instrumentation, and intricate vocal harmonies that took him to the top of the 70s rock world but also into a downward spiral of drink and drug abuse.

Emerging from a long wilderness, which he details here with wit and candor, Dan eventually returned to recording and performing, making a number of acclaimed albums, including Beatin’ The Heat, a set of duets with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones, and more. Along the way, his music continued to subtly permeate the culture, turning up everywhere from The Sopranos to commercials for Levi’s and Bic.

Though he passed away in early 2016, Dan’s music, and the stories he tells here, remain as fresh and irresistible as ever. Combining those stories with dozens of rare photographs and an annotated discography by the writer and critic Kristine McKenna, I Scare Myself takes readers on a journey behind the music and into the life and mind of the fantastic artist who created it.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911036241
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 14 Mo

Extrait

A Jawbone ebook
First edition 2017
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2017 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Dan Hicks. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

Editor Kristine McKenna
Design Tom Seabrook


Contents

An Introduction by Elvis Costello
Chapter 1 The California Kid
Chapter 2 America The Beautiful
plate section
Chapter 3 In Head First
Chapter 4 Sizzlin’ Licks
plate section
Chapter 5 Tunnel vision
Chapter 6 On Music
plate section
The Best Years by Kristine McKenna
An Afterword by Tommy LiPuma
Discography by Kristine McKenna
End Credits

The music of Dan Hicks first filtered through to me in England in the early 70s.
I was puzzled and a little unnerved.
Those were earnest times.
Pale young man and woman were hunched over acoustic guitars as if in a confessional. I was a mere apprentice to this trade. Suddenly, here was this MAN; fully-grown, sometimes sporting a moustache which seemed to really belong to him.
Quite aside from his evident abundance of style, he clearly felt the swing and sway of ancient forms, and, rarest of all, he had a sense of humor about it.
It would only become apparent later that there could be such a sting to his wit, his heart and soul sometimes clothed in the disguise of a curious curmudgeon.
It’s possible that some people mistook the novel for novelty, but listening just beneath the panache was to be heard a deep cry from within; ‘I Scare Myself,’ ‘It’s Not My Time To Go’ …
Like I said, unnerving songs from a young man to an even younger man.
What is to be found in these beautiful and fascinating pages is that the license to the carriage which bore Dan Hicks’s most soulful, joyful, and painful words did not arrive overnight.
It was not unearned.
He went out looking for clues and cues to the music that he loved. Sought out the mystery and masters at the source, took a couple of stumbles, sipped a couple of concoctions, dreamed an original dream.
It is a consolation to my younger, bedazzled self that Dan Hicks should have written the bones of songs as assured as ‘’Long Come A Viper’ and ‘Reelin’ Down’ during such travels at the age of just twenty-one.
No wonder his later records seemed so impossibly complete.
Yet he went on to hone and whittle that vocabulary until it was like an intercom, breaking through from another room and another time; no fake antique, it all came to vivid life in the moment of performance.
There are lots of people who can point to music on the shelf.
Some like to light candles to it, others seek only to snuff them out.
Dan burned them all brightly, and here is his tale.

Elvis Costello
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
September 2016

We won’t leave any stone unturned here. We’ll get to all the stones, because I’m a giver.
My dad, Ivan Hicks, was born in a small town in Illinois called Gladstone that was right across the Mississippi from Burlington, Iowa—that’s where his side of the family was from. My granddad, Jesse—my father’s father—was a farmer and was supposedly kind of a mean guy, but I never met him. I did know my grandmother on my dad’s side for a long time, though. She lived in Napa and worked as a nurse at a mental institution, and so did her daughter, who was my aunt Cecile.
My dad left the farm in Gladstone when he was eighteen and went off to join the National Guard. After that he was in the army, then in 1947 he joined the air force. He was a military guy, but I never felt like I was raised with any kind of army excessive discipline kind of thing. Maybe it was going on and I didn’t know any better, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Like, the guy Robert Duvall played in The Great Santini ? There was none of that. My parents were middle-class Midwesterners, though, so there were rules about when I had to be home and so forth, and I had little chores. But I think I had a happy childhood and never thought about being an only child—I never thought I was missing anything, because I didn’t know anything else. I don’t think I was spoiled like an only child might be, and I was a shy child. I think I’m basically … well … I’d call myself shy all the way up until now.
My dad was in supplies and signal corps, and early on he was a cook. I’ve wondered whether he dug being in the service, and I think he must’ve, because after the Korean War ended he was still over there in Okinawa or someplace, so he must’ve liked not being home—he was away a lot. I really liked it when he came home—that was a great moment.
There’s a snapshot I have that he took when he was coming back from Korea or someplace on a big military ship. As it docked in San Francisco he took a picture from way up there on the ship, looking down at the families on the dock waiting to meet their relatives coming in, and you can see me and my grandma and my mom there in the crowd. I remember I used to listen to the radio at ten in the morning, when they’d report which ships were coming in at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and I remember hearing that my dad’s ship was coming in one time while my mom was down at the grocery store, and running down there to tell her.
My mother, Evelyn Kehl Hicks, was born in 1910, in Minneapolis, then her family moved to Omaha, which is where she mostly grew up. That’s where my parents met. The story is that they were married for about a year before they told anybody, and I guess that was because they couldn’t afford to live together—it was the middle of the Depression when they got married. Anyhow, seven years later, I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. My mom was thirty-one when she gave birth. My earliest memory is of being a little toddler and looking up at my mother and seeing her smile. I also remember being someplace with my parents, and there was a little girl there, and they were saying something like, ‘Danny’s got a girlfriend.’
Because my father was in the military we moved all the time, and we left Arkansas about a month after I was born. When we were moving around we’d live in these government projects, cheap military housing for government employees. It wasn’t that hard on me, all the moving around and changing schools; you know, here’s a new house, this is where we’re gonna live, there’s a new school a few blocks away . I have lots of memories of being in new schools, but it never felt strange, and I just flowed with it.
I’m not sure exactly where we went after we left Arkansas, but there are photos of me in Albany, New York. I went to kindergarten in Topeka, Kansas, and when I was five I supposedly sang this song, ‘Bell-Bottomed Trousers,’ at some kind of school assembly—I was really young when that happened. I went to first grade in Ralston, Nebraska—that was in 1948, the year that Dewey defeated Truman 1 —and at one point we lived in Lomita, in southern California. I remember coming into town and seeing those grasshopper-type oil pumps going up and down.
We moved three times when I was in the sixth grade. In September of 1952 we were living in Vallejo, California, and I got lost in the rain. They had some projects there, and I remember walking by them with a really runny nose. Just before Christmas of that year we moved to Cambria, which is by Hearst Castle and Morro Bay. We were only in Cambria for a few months, but during that time I joined the 4-H Club 2 —my thing was electricity—and I was in a school production of The Nutcracker Suite . It was on December 18, 1952, and I was one of the big wooden soldiers.
The fifth and sixth grades were together in one class in Cambria, and this class had a contest where the students wrote a play they would perform for the school. I came up with this play called Valentine’s Day In South America , and the teacher chose my play. The class was studying Mexico at the time, and these little kids in the play want to find out what Valentine’s Day means. At the end the children are all at a party, and they sing ‘Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes,’ or maybe it was ‘Mañana.’ Maybe it was both. I might’ve written a couple of little poems before that, but this play was an isolated kind of thing. We also did this thing about the story of Columbus in that grade that was sort of like a radio play, and I played the part of ‘the innocent bystander’; that phrase always stuck with me.
♠
In the early spring of 1953 we moved to Santa Rosa and finally stopped moving around all the time. The week before I started at this new school in Santa Rosa, the kids in the neighborhood told me that they beat up new kids there, and I remember praying to God the night before the first day of school that they wouldn’t beat me up. And they didn’t beat me up, so I consider that to be the beginning of my belief in God.
Believing in God has been drummed into me so much in this twelve-step program that I got that going. In meetings, God is the first word out of everybody’s mouth, and it goes on from there. And that’s something I choose to believe, whether intellectually or emotionally—it makes just as much sense to believe in God as it does to believe that we’re here on our own. I feel like I’m not alone and something is kind of watching over me, whether it’s my parents who’ve passed away or whatever. There have been periods when I didn’t pay attention to any presence that might’ve been there, but whatever it is, there’s a presence, and I feel like I’ve been blessed. Somehow I was given the gift of being able to write and play music, and all the stuff that I have. Clean and sober, you’re more accepting of life on life’s terms, and you’re straight, and you have to deal with stuff.
Anyh