Dan Hicks Swings at the Palm Ballroom

The presided over his Kollege of Musical Knowledge at the  in San Rafael Saturday night, serving up a wry and swinging revue of American popular music that only Professor Hicks could’ve concocted.

School was never this much fun.

“I’m going to be laying some facts on you tonight, so deal with it,” Hicks told the big crowd in his sly deadpan style.

He dropped a fact or two about the blues – both “Tutti Frutti” and the “Batman” theme are 12-bar blues, he noted – before digging into a delightful version of the classic jug-band blues “Beedle Um Bum.” 

Played by the crack Out of School Orchestra, it featured some of Hicks’ eccentric yodel-flavored scat singing and a charming double-kazoo chorus by Roberta Donnay and Daria, the female half of the swinging Whiz Kid Singers.

It was a prime performance by an American master whose irresistible music – an original mix of jazz, folk, country music and western swing – sounds as fresh today as it did 40 years ago, when Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks became a national sensation.

A crafty songwriter who composed such classic numbers as “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?,” “Where’s the Money?” and “Canned Music,” Hicks gained an ardent following that included fellow musicians like Bette Midler, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, all of whom appeared on his much-praised 2000 album, Beatin’ the Heat.

On Saturday, wearing striped trousers, a bold-colored tie emblazoned with musical notes and two-tone black and white wingtips, Hicks and company played a rich range of music that stretched from Bing Crosby to Bob Dylan, from Charlie Parker to  Merle Travis, Bob Wills, Tom Waits and Paul Simon. 

“It’s a good thing Dylan changed his name,” Hicks observed. “Otherwise we’d have a generation of kids with the first name of Zimmerman.” After the crowd stopped laughing, he launched into a popping version of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick  Blues,” which Professor Hicks informed his students was based on the Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger song “Taking It Easy.”

Hicks sprinkled such fascinating factoids throughout the pleasing 90-minute performance, which included two of his classic originals, “I Scare Myself” and “I Feel Like Singin’.” They fall into the folk-swing genre that the songwriter modestly noted “was invented by a San Francisco State graduate named Dan Hicks.”

The flamenco-flavored “I Scare Myself,” colored with the snapping sound of castanets, featured a bracing flute solo by Louis Aissen,  followed by Paul Robinson’s fiery electric guitar solo. Hicks pretended to play along with it in a hilarious bit satirizing rock guitar heroes. He ran his fingers over the back of his guitar and feigned flicking the strings with his tongue.

The crowd went crazy for “I Feel Like Singin,’” which danced in a brisk four-to-the-bar groove. Hicks swapped swinging call-and-response phrases with the Whiz Kids (Tim Eschliman, Jimmy Dillon,  Donnay and Daria), did some comic rubber-legged dance moves and seasoned his scat solo with a Louis Armstrong growl.

Earlier, during an interview, Hicks talked about finding fresh ways to sing his classic songs.

“I always try to approach them differently,” said Hicks, a jazz-loving improviser who began his career as a drummer before focusing on his singing, songwriting and guitar playing (he was the drummer in the seminal San Francisco rock band The Charlatans).

“I try to entertain myself, to see what I can do, and to see if I’ve gotten any better. Sometimes I’ll sing something and say, ‘I never sang that song that way before.’ I feel like I’ve had some growth.”

An artist as well as a musician, Hicks designed the little blue Kollege of Musical Knowledge diplomas he handed out Saturday night. Everybody got one, whether or not they remembered that Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” was based on the chords of “How High the Moon,” or that Bing Crosby and Karen Carpenter were both drummers before they became singers.

They won’t forget the A-plus performance, which inspired a rousing standing ovation.