On the Road with Chris Hickey
The music industry is driven by the desire to make money. A decade ago, the most universal of the American music companies (including Universal itself) were controlled by the likes of Seagram. Today, the honor goes to Vivendi. Perhaps Monsanto will be in control tomorrow.
“How does a music company become more profitable?”
This is the question that those that have the pocket change ask themselves occasionally. The answer is usually somewhere along the lowest common denominator. What do people already like? What is already selling? Let’s recreate that!
If music executives are profiteers, the music industry is just a game of swiping and rebranding merchandise that has already been manufactured. How exciting is that? Still, within this industry of economic virtues, there are some who are advocates of resilient music. These are the Good Samaritans who take the gains of a megahit and employ a portion of them to support genuine artists. You can only hope that Chris Hickey gets support for having written songs, such as these, that will find listeners for generations to come.
“…the questions lose their feel/nothing is real/we swim in great peace…” sings Hickey.
Chris Hickey has participated in the music industry as a uniquely gifted singer and is now a seasoned songwriter. Subversively and sublimely, he has managed to create songs that propel the listener to rethink ideas, reconsider past notions, and get moved in the process. The way Hickey creates songs as reckoning media can only be compared favorably to the work of the greatest living songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, Sufjan Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Mark Eitzel, Sam Phillips, and Tom Waits. Like these other artists, Hickey doesn’t censor himself and restrict his output to positive, uplifting songs. He focuses on questions and on the meaning of existence.
You don’t have to be in the Marcel Proust Club to find depth and raw sophistication in the unadorned timeless songs of Razzmatazz. In Razzmatazz, Hickey makes compact, sentient observations about life and death. He resurrects conundrums about restlessness and the human condition, describes the city from the ground up, ponders the role of the individual in society, taps into the desire to savor time and, consciously or not, reiterates the will to persevere.
“…maybe in the end, we all suffer the same…” sings Hickey in Down, a song that captures a pink pants-wearing ruffian spots “skid row luxury lofts” and bloomed after a five-hour trudge through the bowels of downtown Los Angeles.
In these 16 songs, the longest of which clocks in at just under two-and-a-half minutes, you might perceive traces of the influence of Hickey’s literary and literate idols, such as Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Langston Hughes, Loudon Wainwright III, Bob Dylan and Charles Bukowski. Even the casual listener will find echoes of family, of South Pasadena, and of nature―all the way down to the almost invisible swarms of insects you can only see if you are really looking.
Hickey on the origin of the album:
“My daughter asked me if I wanted to go with her to her church one day (Church of Religious Science), I did, and the speaker was talking about being nice to yourself as though you were being nice to someone else, like doing yourself favors… I thought it was a generic message but I witnessed my sort of cynical reaction and decided to take his advice, make the trip worthwhile, So, I offered myself about an hour a day to write and record a song (I’m out of the habit of writing much because no one is paying me to write – so it’s a luxury which sometimes I don’t know if I deserve or can afford when I’m always scrambling to pay the bills – and that is really just an excuse for not writing because i find time to read and walk…). I wrote the first one, recorded it, and e-mailed it to my old friend Scott Seskind and I called it the “song of the day”. He liked it and was anxious to hear more – and that helped, to have someone to hear the recordings. He cheered me on. That went on for about three weeks – I stopped when I went out of town for a few days, and I was ready to stop at that point. Scott encouraged me to put it out. I was a little scared that people wouldn’t like it but I knew I liked it, so I put it out there. And I’m glad I did.”
Hickey, a free thinker who was raised Catholic, learned to meditate at The Zen Center in Los Angeles during the same three-week period that he spent crafting these songs. The basic concept of Zen Buddhist meditation, according to the Zen Center is to “…forget the self, practice the precepts (of the Bodhisattva), and serve others”. When artists, such as Jack Kerouac, who was one of the few Americans to tackle haiku with any success, or Hiroshi Teshigahara, the Japanese filmmaker who spent much of his time doing ikebana (flower arrangements), allow Zen Buddhism to penetrate their craft, the resultant work seems to take on a greater dimension than would otherwise be produced. Zen meditation influences art by allowing the moment to be what it is. The enlightened artist sees the moment for what it is and seeks not to put a pretty pattern around it, but to reflect it. Being of the moment, the art becomes ephemeral and timeless all at once. Instead of bearing the signature of an auteur, a work of art resembles something of the natural world. This type of art reflects a state of meditation and, therefore, invites contemplation. When you encounter this kind of art, you may sense simplicity because the stylization isn’t there, but you will also sense a greater complexity because our understanding of the natural world is always in a state of development.
“I guess the basic philosophy here, and I’m just making this up right now, can be found on Charles Bukowski’s gravestone: First, two words: “DON’T TRY”. And right under that, the silhouette of a boxer – Bukowski was a real fighter who walked through the fire. See if you can reconcile “DON’T TRY” and “FIGHT” and that is the question. On “Places To Go” I say “I like to stay home but it’s good to have places to go.” And I wasn’t even trying. It’s effortless to be true,” said Hickey, “The records alternates between “daily existence” and “existence” – in a game of chess, “daily existence” would be, for example, I just moved my pawn, I’m losing… and “existence” would be that I’m playing chess. During this period that I made this record, I was learning how to meditate at the Zen Center in Los Angeles and reading lots of books about Buddhism. And I read a lot of Jack Kerouac books too, including “Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha” in which Kerouac talks about our senses as illusions. I tasted , or I think I tasted, some unknowable, unremark-on-able (hard to explain) things… and I endeavored (didn’t try!) to the extent that it’s possible to reflect that experience in some of these songs.”
Hickey on fulfillment:
“I remember waking up in early in a hotel closet in Montreal. I was on tour with Show of Hands and we had no place to stay on that night so we shared rooms with the Indigo Girls who we were opening for. I woke up at about five a.m. and tip-toed out of the hotel and walked around Montreal. I found an open bakery and got a fresh baked piece of sourdough wheat bread. That was fulfilling. Not fully filling – I guess I’ve never been fully filled – but many of my best memories involve freshly baked bread. I remember as a child getting a nice hot pretzel from a street vendor in New York City. I guess I’m trying to be funny, but I’m serious really. Or I could say that one day I realized that I’m already full. Did you ever buy a toy for your kid and think “I should get batteries” and you look at the package to see what kind of batteries and it says “batteries included”? I’ve come to realize that the batteries are included.”
And so it is with Chris Hickey’s Razzmatazz. It is pure, profound and unfettered songwriting. It is also a unified collection of phrases and perceptions that resonate with the clarity of seeing what hasn’t been perceived, even though it has already been there. Let’s hope that Hickey, who hopes to work with producer Rick Rubin, continues to forage a path on the road to simplicity. “…a man is rich whose needs are few…” he sings.
Written by John R. Williamson
Click to watch Chris Hickey’s Kerouac video