In 1973, Dan Hicks told Rolling Stone magazine that he was going to make a slow comeback and he wasn't joking. Now, with the release of Beatin' the Heat, Hicks has suddenly re-emerged as one of music's very rare birds - a quirky, largely forgotten legend with more than a touch of genius. With contributions from Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones and Bette Midler, the album is a remarkable piece of work, and a source of quiet pleasure for the man himself.
"I wasn't a singer in high school and if somebody had told me back then that I was going to be making my living as a singer and a songwriter, I wouldn't quite have believed them. So I haven't always been some kind of guy who could sing - I worked at it and took some lessons a few years ago. "I'm trying to get better and do a good job but I'm not so convinced about my ability. I'm not so charmed with my own voice that I just sit there and enjoy it - it's not that way. There's still that self doubt which I think is probably good."
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1941, Hicks spent his early years on the move. His father, an airforce career man, moved from place to place, before finally settling in California. Hicks soon took to drumming and although he found himself in the flag corps in junior high, his drumming instincts led him very quickly to the swing music of the day. By 14, he was drumming professionally with local dancebands.
"I was an only child so it was just me, my mom and dad. He was stationed in different places and he went off to World War II and the Korean War, but I was pretty stable by the time I was about seven. He wasn't any kind of a regimented guy or anything, so I had a good childhood. It wasn't like a strict deal or anything, and they were always pretty supportive of my playing and being a musician."
Those early drumming years were important for Hicks. Not only did he later make his name as drummer with the first ever psychedelic band, the Charlatans, it was a skill which was to directly inform his way of singing. He refers to his song-writing as being "drummer-knowledgeable" - meaning that his songs owe much to these jazzy, swinging roots and are, he acknowledges, often very difficult to sing.
"I work at that too, but maybe from my jazz thing, I have that sense of rhythm. Being a drummer at first, I played a lot of different stuff - a lot of dances with trumpet, piano, drums and bass. I'd play these gigs called `casuals' at the weekend and I was a Benny Goodman fan right from the beginning. So really my whole thing was a jazz thing."
His other major interest was radio. At the age of eight, he attended radio shows in Hollywood and subsequently joined the high school broadcasting club. Soon he was performing skits on the local airwaves and eventually he took a degree in broadcasting. Opportunities for broadcasting drummers were thin on the ground, but when he finally graduated, times were certainly changing. It was the summer of 1965 and Hicks was loose in San Francisco.
He joined a band called the Charlatans. Their odd bluesy folk with feedback and freaky lyrics put them right at the heart of the early San Francisco scene, and despite releasing only one album, they were soon regarded as the seminal psychedelic band. Still uneasy with the label however, Hicks believes that the term psychedelic meant just one thing: LSD.
"It refers to the experience you have when you take acid, and people were doing that in the mid-1960s in San Francisco - I did it a couple of times. There was the whole hippie thing, but to me psychedelic music has got to be psychedelic and that is far-out, mind-stretching stuff. It also went along with the light shows we had on the screen behind the players - weirdo stuff - and the whole dancehall scene. So to me, psychedelic relates to LSD and is more of a general term."
Much has been written about what it all meant, but musically they were mostly souped-up (drugged-up) folk groups who liked to get a little outlandish with their sounds and their lyrics. It all caught on very fast and by 1966, the Charlatans weren't the only show in town. Bands such as Jefferson Airplane, The Great Society, and Big Brother and The Holding Company were soon spreading the California message to a surprisingly accepting public.
"I don't know about this psychedelic thing, whether it was intentional or not - because it was more to do with the press putting a tag on it. The bands didn't even use the word. A lot of those bands in San Francisco formed out of folkie groups. These were guys that were playing guitars and, a few years before, I had seen them around the coffee-houses. Then all of a sudden they're getting a drummer and they're pluggin' in and they're a dance band. But then any band comes up with what they can come up with. The sound comes out of who's in it."
Things really began to move for Hicks when he left the Charlatans and concentrated on his own band - Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. With two vocalists (the Lickettes) he soon developed a national following largely thanks to television appearances on the popular network shows of the day - Dick Cavett, Flip Wilson and Johnny Carson. The debut album Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks appeared in 1969; Where's the Money? followed in 1971; Striking it Rich came the following year and finally Last Train to Hicksville was released in 1973. The band then split up, with Hicks at his height, having just appeared for the second time on the cover of Rolling Stone. There have been a few releases in the intervening years, but it's with Beatin' the Heat that Hicks has really reminded the world of his understated talents. For those who don't yet know, the sound of Dan Hicks might well be something of a revelation.
"Hey, in America they don't know me either," he laughs, "but we're trying to reach some of these people."
Beatin' the Heat from Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks is on Surfdog Records