Cheap Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks (DVD) (Dan Hicks) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks

The CD contains 13 tracks. The DVD has the same songs plus 2 extra tracks. The DVD has a few extras, like interviews.

This is from a concert in San Francisco, and features a band of 45 musicians and singers. Dan Hicks claims that everyone he ever played with is on the stage. The most famous version of the Hot Licks is there, along with the Acoustic Warriors. Also appearing is It's A Beautiful Day's David LaFlamme. All 45 musicians are on stage during the whole show.

The biggest problem with this set is that it just isn't enough. There are 15 songs, and around one and a half hours of music. It should be twice as long and it would still be highly entertaining. With so many musicians and such a huge library of material, you just don't get enough of anything to be fully satisfied. I don't know if all the songs from the concert were included on the DVD.

There are some great moments on this CD. As always, the show stopper is I Scare Myself, with 5 violinists taking turns doing the solos. (Note that Thomas Dolby used to play this song in concert).

The sound quality of this set is OK. It starts out bad, but gets better later in the show. The vocals sound out of place in the first track. The audience drowns the band on some of the early tracks. But later there places where the acoustic intruments are sharp and clear. Note that is hard to get a good sounding Dan Hicks CD. A poor job was done on converting most of the Hot Licks albums to CD. The Most of Dan Hicks is one that has great sound.

The camera work on the DVD is not perfect, but is better than many other concert DVD's I have seen. It starts out with the camera moving around a lot and zooming in and out. But, it settles down later on. With so many musicians, the cameramen do occasionally have problems finding the soloists. I have seen many that are much worse, like Gov't Mule and Roger Waters.

My other complaint is that I wish they would have cut out Dan Hicks talking between songs on the CD. The CD should be music only. The talking to the audience should only be on the DVD where you want to get the whole feel of the concert. As I drive around in my car, listening to the CD, I don't want to hear Dan Hicks' stories over and over again.

I once saw Dan Hicks and the Acoustic Warriors at a bar in Tucson. I got free tickets to the second show because the first show did not sell well enough. Dan Hicks was so drunk that he forgot the words to his songs and had to start them over again. He doesn't show any of those problems at this concert.

Licked but never beaten.
It's great to finally have a visual record of a Dan Hicks concert. The greatest treat is to see, and hear, his classic line-up from the early seventies sounding and looking so good on numbers like Payday and Canned Music.
Dan swaps his lineup around throughout the concert and gives everyone a turn to show their licks. The laconic, acerbic, Mr Hicks can seem a surly humorist but there is no other acoustic music like this out there. Whatever labels are put on it, it is essentially a contemporary form of jugband music (minus the jug). The tunes are keenly observed (from the pages of the Police Gazette, claims Dan), humorous, syncopated, jazzy, and quirky. There is a kind of croony 1920's feel to some of them and others - the very early songs like "How can I miss you if you wont go away" - are awkward, amateurish, and just delightful. The DVD's main value is archival - the tunes have been done better, the camera operators had no hope of finding all the soloists amongst the throngs on stage, Dan seemed unfocused in his monolgues, etc.., but it is a definite keeper for anyone who has ever grinned along with this guy - a cantankerous, controlling, but lovable, genius. His voice-over commentary is worth a listen and the interviews give a much better idea of who the man is than his bluff on-stage persona does. It doesn't rate a 5 because it is so loose and because the cameras too often show someone strumming when another artist is ripping it up somewhere else on stage. Very, very, worth having though IMHO.