The Avachives Department of Musical Preservation
Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks: Tangled Tales
A Review by Dr. Horace Plimwell
There are albums which announce themselves with the solemnity of a cathedral bell, albums which demand that the listener sit upright, adjust the spectacles, and prepare to be transformed. And then there is Tangled Tales, an album which seems to stroll into the room wearing a slightly rumpled hat, order something cold to drink, and begin telling you a story that may or may not have happened.
Dan Hicks was never particularly interested in the conventional responsibilities of the singer-songwriter. He preferred instead to occupy that peculiar territory between jazz, folk, country, Western swing, vaudeville, and the sort of sophisticated musical mischief one might encounter if several highly accomplished musicians were left alone in a drawing room with insufficient supervision. Tangled Tales is therefore not so much an album as an elegant conspiracy.
The first thing one notices is the lightness. This is deceptive. Lightness, properly executed, is one of the most difficult aesthetic achievements. Anyone can be ponderous. Anyone can throw a philosophical anvil onto a piano and call it profundity. But to sound effortless while maintaining rhythmic precision, harmonic intelligence, and lyrical wit requires an almost alarming degree of control.
Hicks possesses this control in abundance.
His songs often appear to be wandering aimlessly, but this is merely a clever illusion. They are wandering with purpose. They take the scenic route through human folly, romantic confusion, social absurdity, and the general inconvenience of being alive. His characters do not so much experience existential crises as mildly misplace them.
And then there are the Hot Licks themselves.
The musicianship is superb, but never ostentatious. The instrumentalists seem to understand that virtuosity is most impressive when it doesn't stand in the doorway shouting, "LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!" Instead, the playing slips into the music with a kind of conversational ease. Strings pluck, voices intertwine, rhythms swing, and suddenly one realizes that the entire structure has been assembled with the precision of a Swiss watch disguised as a secondhand cuckoo clock.
This is where Tangled Tales achieves its greatest ontological density.
The album is, on the surface, relaxed. Beneath that surface, however, one detects an elaborate negotiation between sincerity and irony. Hicks is funny, but he is not merely a comedian. He is whimsical, but never weightless. His songs contain characters who seem ridiculous until, with almost imperceptible chromatic resonance, they begin to resemble ourselves.
This is the great trick.
We laugh at the tangled tales because they are tangled. Then we discover that our own tales are considerably more tangled, and that we have been laughing at the wrong person.
The album's relationship with time is also fascinating. It sounds simultaneously old-fashioned and impossible to date. One can hear echoes of Western swing, jazz clubs, folk gatherings, and smoky rooms where somebody's uncle knows a song that nobody else remembers. Yet the record refuses to become a museum piece. Its charm is too alive for that.
There is a looseness here, but not sloppiness. A casualness, but not indifference. The music gives the impression that it might fall apart at any moment, when in fact it is being held together by musicians who know precisely where every thread is located.
Hence the title.
Tangled Tales does not merely tell stories. It tangles them.
It tangles sincerity with satire, nostalgia with modernity, jazz with folk, sophistication with foolishness. It creates a peculiar musical space in which a man can sing about the absurdities of life while sounding as though he has just discovered them himself.
And perhaps that is Dan Hicks's greatest achievement.
He makes intelligence sound relaxed.
In an era when artists frequently feel compelled to demonstrate the seriousness of their intentions, Hicks seems content to let the songs wander about in their slippers. Yet beneath the slippers is an intricate architecture of rhythm, melody, harmony, and language. The result is music that rewards attention without demanding it.
This is an important distinction.
One can listen casually to Tangled Tales and simply enjoy the swing, the voices, the musicianship, and the dry humor. One can also listen more closely and discover an album of remarkable subtlety. The deeper one investigates, the more one encounters the curious Plimwellian paradox: the apparently simple becomes increasingly complex, while the apparently complex reveals itself to have been enjoying a joke all along.
I would therefore describe Tangled Tales as a work of controlled informality.
It is the musical equivalent of a person who arrives late to a formal dinner, apologizes charmingly, tells an amusing story, and then—without anyone quite noticing—proceeds to make the most intelligent observation of the evening.
There are albums that attempt to capture life.
Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks seem to have realized that life cannot be captured.
It can only be tangled.
And occasionally, if the musicians are good enough, the tangling produces something approaching beauty.
Rating: 4½ out of 5 Ontological Licks
—Dr. Horace Plimwell
Itinerant Lecturer in Unnecessary Interpretation
Author of The Semiotics of Absence: Towards a Theory of Negative Space in Regional Watercolors
