Remember the whole band-name hullabaloo between British alt-rockers Bush and a Canadian one-album-wonder group of the same name?
Seems the Brits formerly known as Bush X managed to win the right to go by "Bush," while their same-named counterparts on this side of the Atlantic Ocean whimpered into history.
San Francisco singer/songwriter Dan Hicks can sympathize. Seems Hicks, once a drummer for the seminal '60s psychedelic group The Charlatans, encountered a similar name-battle with a '90s Britrock group. But Hicks, playing Zaphod Beeblebrox 2 tonight backed by his Acoustic Warriors, says his Charlatans crew stood their ground.
"One of our guys made it mandatory for the British band to use the UK suffix whenever they played in North America," Hicks says. "Because our guys didn't want to hear about this. Frankly, I didn't either. Like, come on, get your own name. There's lots of other words in the English language."
Hicks' observational humour would take off by 1968 when he picked up a guitar and focus on writing his own acoustic-based songs coloured with female background vocals.
The result was Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, a marriage of complex rhymes and jive vocabulary about ironic romances, barflies, innocent freedoms and flying saucer pilots.
Between 1968-76, the troupe released five critically acclaimed albums featuring eccentric, witty numbers such as Where's The Money, I Scare Myself and How Can I Miss You If You Never Go Away?
Twenty-four years later, after he put his internationally acclaimed Hot Licks to bed, Hicks' next disc marks a comeback for the seminal '70s group -- sort of.
Their newest release, Beatin' The Heat offers up cameos from Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones and Bette Midler. The CD is due Aug. 29.
SURF-IN' INDIE-STYLE NOW: How ironic that post-grungers Nada Surf lived through one of their album titles -- 1996's High/Low. On the "High" end, the New York-based trio -- formed in 1993 -- had a promising future with producer and ex-Cars leader Ric Ocasek, a major label deal with Elektra Records and a hit single in Popular. The "Low" end kicked in with their follow-up album The Proximity Effect, originally planned for late '98 until Elektra effectively nixed releasing the disc. "(Elektra) really were looking for a big, easy single and unless we had that, they didn't want to put it out," says Matthew Caws, lead singer-songwriter-guitarist for Nada Surf, who perform at Zaphod's 2 Sunday night with Mercy Miners and Ottawa's Bluster.
