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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 2. 7th March 1973

Striking IT Rich—Hicks and the Hot Licks

Striking IT Rich—Hicks and the Hot Licks

The Hot Licks sound a bit like the old Jim Kweskin Jug Band; they have the same good timing sound, and they use fiddles, string bass and percussion effects on the same strange type of songs; even the vocalists sound alike. But unfortunately, that's not all. Jim Kweskin was very popular during the folkie revival and when that folded he left the music business altogether to become an "enforcer" on, the fascist communes run by his old har-monica player, Mel Lyman. Mel, also known as God, spreads a message of hate to the world via a band of followers who have their heads specially re-arranged by God in intimate 1500 microgram "interviews".

I think Mel would really like the Hot Licks, too, it's one of the scariest records I've ever heard, and what's really weird is that it's so hard to Say why. Individually the songs are pleasant, innocuous even. The melodies and harmonics have the mindless charm we tend to associate with music from the thirties and forties. It's just from listening to both sides at one sitting that it starts to get to you. There's a song about a boy who keeps himself company, charms wicked pirates and a nasty uncle by laughing maniacally and rolling on the ground. There's a song called "I scare Myself" which has the backing vocalists twittering "It's me I'm scaring, it's me I'm scaring" from speaker to speaker throughout the song. And there's a lovely waltz tune about domestic bliss with lines like

"Five years, six years, seven years eight Has turned my love to deepest hate"

And in the last track someone screams that "it's bidey; bye time and I hope you all out there will go home and have a real good sleep and thanks to Dan Hicks for making it all possible 'cause he's such a real nice guy ..."

You can take all this on a lot of levels, but I still scare myself listening to the damn thing. I think some of this unease comes from hearing how completely he's penetrated the mood of this music; it's not [unclear: just] the Byrds or Van Dyke Parks nostalgically playing round with old time music, this really does seem to come from the centre of another era; yet of course it was made in 1972. That's what is so unsettling about it, that it is so completely removed, it's not just a glimpse of the past, but an attempt to live it, to turn completely away from any musical allusion to the world we're living in. It's what finally makes this record such great mood music for sitting quietly in the sun, weaving cane baskets and chuckling maniacally to yourself.