By
Richie Unterberger
Dan
Hicks's stint with Warner Brothers in the mid-1970s yielded just one
album, recorded shortly after he broke up the Hot Licks, the band he'd
led since the late 1960s. Yet It
Happened One Bite had the idiosyncratic wit and lively swing
characteristic of all his work since he'd left the Charlatans to start
recording with other musicians in the late 1960s. Its journey from
genesis to release, however, was about as odd as any undertaken by a
major-label LP of the era. So convoluted was the route that it was
something of a feat for the record to even see release at all, its
subsequent under-promotion ensuring that it's been one of the more
difficult of his albums to find over the last few decades.
Soon after the Hot Licks split and Hicks signed with
Warners as a solo artist, Ralph Bakshi—the director responsible for the
smash 1972 animated feature Fritz the
Cat—contacted Dan with a mind to use some of Hicks's music in
what was intended to be the next full-length Bakshi cartoon, Hey Good Lookin'. "The part I liked
was that this film had all these cartoon characters," explains Hicks
today. "They had maybe six-seven-eight main characters in the movie,
and there was, ideally, a little theme song for each character. So I
wrote a song about, say, Vinnie ('Vinnie's Lookin' Good') and Boogaloo
('Boogaloo Jones'). That was a cool part, coming up with little
melodies and lots of words. I tend to be kind of wordy; I put in little
descriptions.
"In a way, that's kind of the same as some of the
other things I do that aren't movies. I think of a character and I
create a picture, and a story. So I did all that, and Bakshi liked my
lyrics. As a matter of fact, he said, 'I gotta use more of these kind
of words that you're using in my dialogue with the characters'; I had
some kind of colloquialisms and stuff. And there was more, like, kind
of incidental music; say, where they're in a car and supposed to be
going along. And that was 'Cruizin.'" Similarly, "Mama, I'm an Outlaw"
was for "the footage where they show old-time black-and-white '30s
gangsters shooting it out from their car, sped-up and going around
corners."
Though he began writing songs for the project at
home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hicks traveled to Los Angeles to
work "with this guy Milton, an old movie music pro. There were parts of
the movie, or parts of my assignment, where I was to write something
that lasted a certain length, and then have it stop right at [a
certain] moment. They have a formula, like frames per second times the
metronome beat, and you can figure it out exactly where supposedly you
get in there and set the metronome. Whoever is playing, they play for
this length of time; and it all matches up. I had a little difficulty
in that I sort of guesstimated some things, [but] everything seemed to
be okay as far as that goes. It wasn't like, 'Oh no, you're way off.'"
Adds Dan, "It wasn't like I got the final film and
did all this music. I saw little bits of things on a Moviola, [and]
just made it work myself. I stood there and looked at it, and then went
into another room with my guitar and worked on stuff. I stayed at the
Tropicana Motel [in Los Angeles], and they rented me an Ampex— I think
it was four-track—in the room so I could work out stuff."
When the material was recorded in the studio,
producer Tommy LiPuma (who'd produced Hicks' previous three albums with
the Hot Licks for the Blue Thumb label) brought in some L.A. jazz
musicians. While two of them, drummer Richard Borden and bassist Lyle
Ritz, do play throughout the LP, three of the former Hot
Licks—guitarist John Girton, violinist Sid Page, and singer Maryann
Price—were brought in to get something closer to the sound Hicks had
pioneered on his previous outings. "He's one of those 'I'll let you do
pretty much what you want' kind of guys," says Hicks of LiPuma. "He did
a typical good job." Michael Franks supplied what Dan terms "kind of a
[Earl] Scruggs banjo," while Ritz overdubbed some ukulele as well.
"I liked all those tunes I came up with," remembers
Hicks, naming "Vinnie's Looking Good," "Collared Blues," and "Cruizin'"
as his favorites. He recorded the sole non-original on the album,
"Garden in the Rain," because Bakshi "wanted incidental music in the
background going on the jukebox, standards of the time. It was supposed
to be set in the '50s or something like that, so I said to him, 'Hey, I
can sing those. You know, like "Garden in the Rain"' [a hit for the
Four Aces in 1952]. So that's why we recorded 'Garden in the Rain.'
There was no other reason. The idea would have been they're sitting in
a joint, and there's something going on the jukebox in the background."
But though the soundtrack was delivered to Warner
Brothers in April 1975, the movie was far from finished. "The movie
never got to where my stuff was used," Hicks explains. "I guess they
were running out of money, so [Bakshi] showed it to the Warner Brothers
people or the money folks. We went to some private screening here,
probably on a Warner Brothers lot. A handful of people watched this
movie, including me, and they used a lot of my stuff. He had other
music in there too. He had like Benny Goodman's 'Sing Sing Sing' and
other stuff; it was kind of a hodgepodge of music. He had live action,
live people, animation, and even rotoscope, where you take live action
and sort of trace it, turn it into a cartoon. And there were places in
the film where he hadn't finished even animating. They were just line
drawings; the dialogue kept going, but you just saw drawings of stuff.
The movie ended, and if I remember correctly, people stood up, and
nobody applauded or anything. Everybody just filed out silently.
Hey Good Lookin' would
not come out until 1982, by which time it had taken a much different
form, losing entire scenes in which actor Yaphet Kotto (playing a
boxer) appeared. Gone too was Hicks's soundtrack. "There was none of my
music in it when I saw it finally," says Dan. "He used some kind of
other music altogether when he finally patched it together. There was
like a bunch of more rock'n'roll-type music. I can't even say if it was
from that period."
Back in 1978, however, Warner Brothers—for whom
Hicks hadn't finished a conventional album, though he did a jam-type
session for the label in mid-1976—decided to release the recordings Dan
had done for the Hey Good Lookin'
soundtrack as an LP. As he tells it, "The movie never seemed to be
happening, so we said, 'Let's put this out anyway.' So I made up a
name; I thought I'd just do a movie takeoff, and call it It Happened One Bite. I submitted
artwork. I never really meant it to be the cover. I was doing it as
sort of an example, like 'it could kind of be like this, maybe,' and
they used it." Upon its release, he adds, "I don't remember any
support, really. It must have gotten around a little bit, because there
were some reviews. But I think it wasn't long after Warner Brothers
somewhere along the way dropped me anyway, so I don't know what they
were thinking."
As a three-year-old soundtrack recording without a
movie into which to tie it, It
Happened One Bite was perhaps doomed to commercial obscurity.
Yet the irony is that, removed from its back story, it plays as well as
a typical accomplished Hicks album. As Melody Maker astutely noted at the
time, "This is not, however, soundtrack music—long instrumental themes
repeated ad infinitum—but thirteen songs in the typical Hicks mold...He
takes the expression 'laidback' about as far as it can go, never
rushing, always taking the laziest route possible—but then he's not a
singer-songwriter. His music contains the same soporific feel as
western swing—but then he doesn't play country. If he has a reference
point, then it's the pop music of the '30s and '40s—but then he's not a
revivalist like Manhattan Transfer or the Pointer Sisters, nor does he
have that energetic sharpness typical of those vocal groups." As the
review concluded: "A lovely album, this, and a reminder, if any should
be needed, that the Wonderful World of Rock 'n' Roll stretches far and
wide." – Richie Unterberger
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