Search - Grant Peeples :: Prior Convictions

An album of songs that delves into the pitfalls and perils of Belief itself, that dangerous ledge upon which all faith and conviction rest. The second of Peeples' CDs produced by Gurf Morlix, Ruthie Foster sings a duet on the Bob Dylan song, Things Have Changed. In 1991 my friend, Hugh Roche, gave me a book of stories by Dave Hickey, called Prior Convictions. Hickey was a friend of Hugh s brother, Jimmy, the Tallahassee artist whose work and vision were so influential during my formative years. The book was not the first time I d heard Hickey s name. Not hardly. In the early 1970s Hugh had gone with Jimmy to Texas for a rendezvous of artists in Lubbuck, and had come back with a homemade recording of five songs written and recorded by Dave Hickey. The songs were character-rich, powerful, intelligent, ripped with poetic metaphor; they were witty and melodic and chock full of beautifully phrased assonance and alliteration. And yet they were gritty and gravelly and calloused, too -the sweetest juxtaposition imaginable. I d never heard anything like them in my life. That tape, and those songs (which were never formally recorded by Dave or anyone else) were carved into my creative identity as deeply as any songs ever written. So when I got the book, I tore into it. The stories were great. Some tender, some brutal. But all were compelling, and wrought with the same nuance and insight into character that had been in those songs I had come to know twenty years earlier. I flipped through the pages in a two-day read. And then I got to the last story. It was different. And it took a little while before I realized that it wasn t really a story at all. It wasn t fiction. But an essay. An explanation about why Dave Hickey wasn t going to be writing any more stories, that this was it; he was shedding his skin like a snake, while most snakes were just swallowing their tails. For me the essay was like a lucid, rational suicide note. And in effect, that s exactly what it was. It took Hemmingway s brains spattered all over Idaho, Dave says in the essay, and three years of my fretting over them, to awaken me to what I should have known all along that style and lifestyle were inseperable that it was all about the swoon, and the triumph of hallucination. In other words, creation was buried in the past, and there really was nothing left to be revealed that was of any consequence. The dance was done for Dave Hickey. Commentary would be the only choreography left for him. I felt vertigo. Like a child learning there s no Santa Claus. But Dave had moved on. Leaving nothing but the dust on the highway behind. He was turning off amps, unplugging, packing it in. He had found some sort of new ground to plow. A new way to sort through the trash. Even today when I re-read that essay I get anxious and uneasy and short of breath, and experience that same sort of angst that rises in one s chest at a funeral, but that is brought on by reflection upon one s own mortality, rather than that of the dead man s in the coffin. It is in tribute to this very angst and uneasiness, anguish and drift, and in honor of the terror that artists around the world have tenderly embraced -ever since charging bulls were first painted on cave walls in France that I gratefully assume the title of Dave Hickey s book for this collection of songs. Primus circumdedesti me