[Dixielandjazz] Dan Hicks R.I.P. - San Francisco Chronicle, NY Times

[Robert Ringwald]

Dan Hicks, a True Original of S.F. Music Scene, Dies at 74

by David Wiegand 
San Francisco Chronicle, February 6, 2016

Dan Hicks, the Arkansas-born musician known for his wide-ranging musical and personal style, the wit and outright humor of his songwriting, and his role in the San Francisco folk and ’60s rock scene, died Saturday in Mill Valley after a long battle with throat and liver cancer. He was 74.

News of his death was posted on his web site and on social media by his wife, Linda “CT” Hicks.

Mr. Hicks emerged in the San Francisco folk scene in the late ‘50’s and in 1965 became the drummer for the Charlatans, an early folk rock band. Two years later, he formed Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, the group with which he was best known.

The Charlatans never achieved the success of other bands of the era, but as time went on, their significance as an influential part of the scene in the mid-’60’s was widely acknowledged. The Charlatans became the house band for the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada.

Former Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin summarized the group’s status in a 2015 article for the paper:

“Today the band is little recalled by those who weren't there, but the Charlatans were the first important new rock band in San Francisco when LSD first rolled through town and things started getting weird. When the five-man band of Edwardian dandies in immaculate vintage wear returned from playing all summer 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, the Charlatans were the headline attraction at A Tribute to Dr. Strange, the Longshoreman's Hall dance/concert that was ground zero for the '60s San Francisco rock scene.... Farther down the program that evening was another new band just starting out at a former pizza parlor in the Marina with the peculiar name of Jefferson Airplane.”

Selvin interviewed surviving members of The Charlatans in Sonoma as they were about to gather for a kind of “Last Waltz” performance at the Red Dog.

Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks first became the opening act for The Charlatans and then took off on its own. The Hot Licks signed with Epic Records, but their first album, “Original Recordings,” was a flop. After a label change, though, the band scored critical success with the albums “Where’s the Money?,” “Striking It Rich” and “Last Train to Hicksville.”

Mr. Hicks pulled the plug on the band in 1973 because of personal and business pressures. He later said the reason he disbanded the Hot Licks was simply that he didn’t want to be a bandleader anymore and called himself essentially a loner.

Over the next several decades, Mr. Hicks enjoyed success first as a solo artist, then as the founder of the Acoustic Warriors in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, before releasing “Beatin the Heat” in 2000, with a revival of the Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks name.

Mr. Hicks’ celebrated his 70th birthday in 2011 with an all-star concert at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, and two years later, released a recording of the evening, “Live at Davies,” with guests Rickie Lee Jones, Tuck and Patti, Van Dyke Parks, David Grisman and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

In 2014, despite undergoing cancer treatment, Mr. Hicks performed a tribute to Fats Waller at SFJazz, telling Jesse Hamlin, “ "You do it, you get through it, especially when you have an obligation, when you made a deal. A deal is a deal."

Daniel Ivan Hicks was born on Dec. 9, 1941, in Little Rock to Ivan and Evelyn Hicks. When he was 5, the family moved to California, settling in Santa Rosa. He began playing drums in elementary school and by the time he was a teenager, was playing paying gigs. He also had a 15-minute radio show in high school called “Time Out for Teens.”

He enrolled at San Francisco State University in 1959, where he later earned a degree in broadcasting. Around this time, he also began to play the guitar and was soon active in the area folk scene.

Over the next 50 years, Mr. Hicks remained defiantly impossible to categorize. He described his music as “folk jazz,” which comes as close as any description. Musically, he was a free spirit, and that earned him a fiercely devoted fan base.

His songs were often laced with tongue in cheek humor, evident in the titles “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away,” “I Scare Myself” and “Canned Music” and “Santa Lost a Ho.”

A true original throughout his long, rich career, Mr. Hicks was acknowledged for his influence on other musicians such as Tom Waits and Elvis Costello.

  Funeral arrangements are pending. -30-

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Dan Hicks R.I.P.  

Dan Hicks, 74, Leader of the Hot Licks, Who Countered the ’60s Sound, Dies

by Peter Keepnews
New York Times, February 8, 2016

Dan Hicks, a singer, songwriter and bandleader who attracted a devoted following with music that was defiantly unfashionable, proudly eccentric and foot-tappingly catchy, died on Saturday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 74.

The cause was liver cancer, said his wife, Clare.

Mr. Hicks began performing with his band, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, in the late 1960s in San Francisco, where psychedelic rock bands like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead dominated the music sound. The Hot Licks’ sound could not have been more different.

At a time when rock was getting louder and more aggressive, Mr. Hicks’s instrumentation -- two guitars (Mr. Hicks played rhythm), violin and stand-up bass, with two women providing harmony and backup vocals -- offered a laid-back, all-acoustic alternative that was a throwback to a simpler time, while his lyrics gave the music a modern, slightly askew edge.

He came to call his music “folk swing,” but that only hinted at the range of influences he synthesized. He drew from the American folk tradition but also from the Gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt, the Western swing of Bob Wills, the harmony vocals of the Andrews Sisters, the raucous humor of Fats Waller and numerous other sources.

“It starts out with kind of a folk music sound,” Mr. Hicks explained in a 2007 interview, “and we add a jazz beat and solos and singing. We have the two girls that sing, and jazz violin, and all that, so it’s kind of light in nature, it’s not loud. And it’s sort of, in a way, kind of carefree.”

Songs like “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?,” “Milk-Shakin’ Mama” (“I saw the girl who keeps the ice cream / And now it’s I who scream for her”) and “Hell, I’d Go,” about a man whose fondest wish is to be abducted by aliens, displayed his dry and often absurd wit, as did his gently self-mocking stage presence. But he had his serious side, too: “I Scare Myself,” a longtime staple of his repertoire, was a brooding, hypnotic minor-key ballad about being afraid to love.

Mr. Hicks’s records never sold in the millions, but at the height of his popularity in the early 1970s, he and his band appeared on network television and headlined at Carnegie Hall, and he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Fellow musicians were among his biggest fans: Guest artists on “Beatin’ the Heat” (2000), the first Hot Licks album after a long hiatus, included Bette Midler, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits, while Willie Nelson and Jimmy Buffett joined him in the studio four years later for “Selected Shorts.”

Daniel Ivan Hicks was born on Dec. 9, 1941, in Little Rock, Ark., the son of Ivan Hicks, a career military man, and the former Evelyn Kehl. His family moved to Santa Rosa, Calif., near San Francisco, when he was a child.

He took up drums in sixth grade and guitar as a teenager. After graduating from San Francisco State University with a degree in broadcasting, he performed in local folk clubs while also playing drums with dance bands.

>From 1965 to 1968, Mr. Hicks was the drummer and occasional vocalist with the Charlatans, widely regarded as the first San Francisco psychedelic band, although he himself remembered it as less a band than “just kind of some loose guys.” While still with the Charlatans, he formed the first version of the Hot Licks.

The group’s 1969 album, “Original Recordings,” sold poorly, but three subsequent albums for the independent Blue Thumb label established it as a successful touring act.

Mr. Hicks nonetheless disbanded the group in 1973, at the height of its popularity. “It was getting old,” he explained in 1997. “We became less compatible as friends. I was pretty disillusioned, had some money, and didn’t want to do it any more.”

His career stalled after that, but he returned in the 1980s with a new group, the Acoustic Warriors, which duplicated the Hot Licks instrumentation without the female singers. In the late 1990s, he added two singers and brought back the Hot Licks name.

The band, with frequent changes in personnel, toured regularly and continued to perform occasionally in recent years when Mr. Hicks’s health allowed, most recently in December in Napa, Calif.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Hicks is survived by a stepdaughter, Sara Wasserman.

“I will always be humble to my dying day,” Mr. Hicks, tongue in cheek as usual, said when interviewed in 2013 by Roberta Donnay of the Hot Licks. “On my dying day I will explain to the world how lucky they have been to be alive the same time  as me.” -30-


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