Wineskin: Freakin' Jesus in the '60s and '70s
Michael Hicks
(Author)
Description
Mormonism begins with a memoir: Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove until two-thirds of the Godhead appear and promise him a quixotic religious renown. Since then, the faith Smith birthed has raised up memoirs as gritty as Parley P. Pratt's quasi-canonical Autobiography or as luminously sarcastic as Elna Baker's New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. Grafted somewhere into those works' genealogy comes this boyhood memoir, rooted not in Mormonism but in the Protestantism of American suburbia and the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s, then in, out, and back into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Michael Hicks's story is a tale studded with awkward episodes of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not necessarily in that order), along with alcohol, sci-fi, theft, radical politics, cartooning, halfway houses, and the musical avant-garde. The one constant is the brooding figure of Jesus Christ behind Hicks's various personal reclamations and metamorphoses, often via methods admittedly off the books. While many readers know Hicks as a Mormon academic--thirty-five years a professor of music at Brigham Young University--Wineskin excavates the path, from boyhood to a PhD, that led him toward a faith that is both primitively Christian and highmindedly Mormon.
Product Details
Price
$19.95
$18.55
Publisher
Signature Books
Publish Date
November 21, 2022
Pages
260
Dimensions
5.83 X 8.9 X 0.55 inches | 0.6 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781560854531
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Michael Hicks taught music at Brigham Young University for thirty-five years. Among the books he has authored are Mormonism and Music: A History, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography, and Spencer Kimball's Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music. He has also contributed to the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and the Oxford Handbook of Mormonism and has published in Journal of the American Musicological Society and Journal of Aesthetic Education. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his writing about music and as editor of the journal American Music. He and his wife, Pam, are the parents of four children and have several grandchildren.
Reviews
"I can rarely say of a memoir, 'I could not put it down.' I could not put this one down. Michael Hicks's story is marvelously compelling. Every life plays out in a sequence of intended or accidental events, and the pull of the Tao into places unexpected and uncanny. But here? Get ready. There are many surprises ahead." --from the foreword by Steven L. Peck, author, A Short Stay in Hell and Heike's Void "Wineskin is the least plausible and most compelling conversion story you're ever likely to read. An astonishingly well-documented and vividly portrayed recollection of a singular consciousness at once alive to the currents of change in the 1970s in America and in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and keenly attuned to the transcendent and eternal. Altogether remarkable." --Kristine L. Haglund, author, Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal "Intimate and surprisingly revealing, Hicks's memoir opens to us a unique journey to Mormonism. The prose is compellingly and unusually frank. Readers will quickly find themselves in the volatile and intriguing era of 1960s and '70s America and its searching countercultural impulses. Hicks magnifies the intensity of his yearning for Christianity, leading to his LDS Church conversion, and the personal experiences that embellished and complicated his life. Wineskin is a real treat." --Ronald O. Barney, author, Joseph Smith: History, Methods, and Memory "Michael Hicks is a true polymath: composer, performer, arranger, scholar, teacher, artist, editor, award-winning poet, and now memoirist. There are no dull moments here. Some chapters are so rife with surprise and reversal that if this were packaged as fiction no one would believe it. The prose is brisk and detailed, the voice relaxed but revelatory, the tone both earnest and ironic. And the story, or rather stories--for there are legion--are absorbing. How could they not be, steeped as they are, in the rhythm and Americana of 1960s and 1970s counterculture and a young man's search for true religion. This volume makes clear, above all, that Hicks is a quester, with an insatiable desire to ask big questions, make connections, and create art, and lots of it, out of life. Pick up Wineskin only if you're ready to binge-read your way through Hicks' topsy-turvy but ultimately redemptive world."--Lance Larsen, Utah Poet Laureate, 2012-17
