I Scare Myself: A Memoir

By Dan Hicks, Elvis Costello and Tommy LiPuma

'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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jawbone Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911036241

Dan Hicks

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His award-winning research focuses on decolonisation in art and culture, and academic disciplines, and on the role of cultural whiteness in ongoing histories of colonial violence and dispossession.

Book preview

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

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Chapter 3 In Head First

Chapter 4 Sizzlin’ Licks

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Chapter 5 Tunnel vision

Chapter 6 On Music

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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 Truman¹—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 Club²—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.

Anyhow, Santa Rosa. When I was in the sixth grade in Santa Rosa, my class held a talent show, and me and a little girl who lived next door lip-sang to this song called ‘Poor Little Josie’ that was a two-part thing recorded by Rosemary Clooney and Jimmy Boyd, who was a pretty well-known kid singer at the time. We had a 78 recording of ‘Poor Little Josie,’ which was about this little bird walking to Missouri because it couldn’t afford to fly. We also practiced ‘Dennis The Menace.’ So, this little next-door neighbor girl and I did ‘Poor Little Josie’ for the class, and afterwards the teacher said to me, ‘I didn’t know you had it in ya.’ In other words, I was a quiet kid, but I jumped up and did this thing, then I sat back down. I felt comfortable up there doing it.

A lot of movies were shot in Santa Rosa because it had that all-American good look to it. Alfred Hitchcock shot Shadow Of A Doubt there in 1943. It was ten years later when we moved there, but some of the stuff you see in that film was still there when we arrived, looking exactly the same. There was a bar in the film called ’Til Two, and I know just where that is. I’ve been in there. The train station was the same, and there was this great ivy-covered library that was still the same, too.

There’s another movie called Storm Center that was made in Santa Rosa that stars Bette Davis, who plays a librarian, and they shot it there because of the library. They needed kids to be extras and for some speaking parts, so they contacted the Boys’ Club, looking for kids. I was in the Boys’ Club, so I went to a meeting about being in the movie, and they told me I had to have a Social Security card, so I got one. I was just gonna be sitting in the library, but when they called our house and needed me immediately I was out, so I missed being in the movie. My mother was in the movie as an extra, though. There’s a fire scene at the end where the library’s burning down at night, and there’s a crowd in front looking up at the flames, oh, terrible, and there’s my mom looking up at the goddamn fire. She’s in there for a couple of seconds. It’s cool. She’s wearing a little hat, and these 50s glasses, a coat, a typical-looking woman, and there she is.

My mother had little part-time jobs here and there when I was growing up, and she did some volunteer work, but mostly she was at home. I was really close to my mother—I guess she was the parent I identify with the most. She wasn’t especially creative, though. I never saw anybody sitting around writing or drawing, and I wasn’t a reader as a child, so I don’t know how I got involved with writing and music.

My parents had a sense of humor, and they were my first audience, and I’d crack them up at the dinner table. I wasn’t the class clown or anything like that, though. As for what played a role in shaping my sense of humor, well, when I was a small child there was an accident and I lost three toes, and the guy who took care of me at the hospital taught me to laugh at life and appreciate what you have. And he took those toes and he put them in a mason jar in some formaldehyde, and there were my little toes floating around in there … and I started writing at that point. Three little toesies in a jar … everything started then. Not really, I’m just kidding here. But as to which funny things I remember from back then? I remember seeing Spike Jones on television, but he means more to me now than he did then, and I bought Mad Magazine when it first came out. It was like a little paperback book then.

The humor thing really began when I started getting up onstage with my guitar by myself. It’s a great thing, too, because when you make people laugh, they’re probably gonna be on your side. The first thing I say when I start my shows is intended to be funny, and I can gauge what kind of audience it is right away by the response I get. I also try to not repeat myself and to be spontaneous, and for years I never said a line that I’d said before. I didn’t care what it was—I’d try to find a different way to say it. I really like it that I can make adults laugh, and I don’t take it for granted. But it wasn’t something I consciously set out to do like, gee, I think I’ll go into comedy.

We lived in a neighborhood of Santa Rosa called Montgomery Village. It was kind of like tract homes, all on one flat level in an area that used to be full of prune trees and different kinds of fruit trees. It was built in the 50s, and all the houses were designed by somebody named Eichmann. It was a new suburban development, so it had baby trees, and there was a central shopping area nearby.

We lived a block from there, and when I was in junior high I met this guy named