In 1971, Megan Sue Hicks, was living in Sydney, Australia, with her family, working at noted music mag, Go-Set, and singing for tips with a group of local musicians. Some how, the then 20-year-old, ended up in the studio with one of Australia's leading groups at the time, Flying Circus, as her backing musicians, and recorded what was to become one of the most sought after folk albums of all-time, Maranatha. It was eventually released in 1972 on Warner Bros, by which time Megan was back in the US. The album – and Megan – seemingly disappeared without trace. Today, it is a highly regarded collector's item that sells for up to $500 – if you can find a copy. In this exclusive interview, for the first time ever, Megan Hicks, talks about this remarkable record with Mike Gee.
UPDATE 30.05.2020 – MARANATHA AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD: Due to the massive global response to this interview, Megan Sue Hicks has kindly made Maranatha available to download on Bandcamp for a very small price. It is the first time it has ever been available outside the initial release of 200 vinyl LPs. What a wonderful outcome. Thank you! For those interested here is the link: megansuehicks.bandcamp.com.
MEGAN Sue Hicks, or Megan Hicks as she is known today, has been in isolation in her Philadelphia home for nine weeks thanks to COVID-19 but you wouldn’t know it. Just as she doesn’t know that she is music legend. As a young singer/songwriter in late 1970/early 1971, in Sydney, Australia, Megan Sue Hicks recorded an album called Maranatha, and then returned to her native America and disappeared from view. Now, as the 50th anniversary of its recording nears, she is finally talking about what is regarded as one of the great folk treasures of all-time. We’ll get to that. It is, of course, why we’re hooked up on Facetime at 8am on a cold, wet Sydney Monday in May and 6pm on an equally bleak Sunday in Philadelphia. Now 70, Megan Hicks bubbles over with genuine emotion and humour and has the energy of somebody half her age. She still graces the stage, telling stories, but not as a folkie anymore. In fact, she hasn’t done that for a very long time. But it is the story of that young folk singer I’ve come to find.
She seems to be coping with COVID lockdown remarkably well. “Every day is Saturday. My husband and I are exceptionally privileged in that while we live in a suburb there’s a forest all around us. We’re surrounded with nature and beauty and birds and wonderful eye food.
“I miss face-to-face conversations though. You have to plan ahead and be very intentional about them. For instance, last night we went over for drinks at our next-door neighbour’s house and sat six feet across the patio from them. You go the grocery store and you don’t get in if you don’t have a mask on. At least that’s how it is here. In other places in the States it’s like ‘what epidemic?’. That’s weird.” We speak briefly about the President of the United States, Donald Trump: “He’s a sick and crazy man and on top of that he’s stupid and fundamentally bad. Just a bad human being. You get them now and then.”
And the forthcoming US presidential election scheduled for Tuesday, November 3: “I’ve seen yard signs saying ‘Anybody but Trump 2020’. It’s like just vote for anybody but him. Will he go? I don’t know. The Republican party he represents screams about voter fraud, that ‘people are voting twice’ or ‘dead people are voting – how does that happen?’ But, actually, that happens a miniscule amount. There have only been a handful of true voter fraud cases and yet that party has stolen three elections in the past 30 years. They stole Bush/Gore, I believe they stole Bush/Carey and they stole Trump/Clinton. They’ve got it in them to steal this one too. I don’t think he could get elected honestly. But he can get elected crookedly. You might be heartened though to hear how many people here loathe him.”
And then there are the rednecks and neo-conservatives with their guns, incited by Trump, coming out to push for their so-called freedom from a state of lockdown: “This country was established on the neck of slave labour and that’s baked into it. Racism is baked into it. When you start with those foundations that are so irreparably flawed I don’t know how you can get away from them without tearing things down to ground, making reparations, saying ‘We messed up, we’re sorry! What can we do to make it up to you?’”
It reminds me of 1969, ’70, ’71 when we – disenchanted youth and parts of society – were fighting about different issues but, in some ways, the same issues as now. Yes, it was the time of the Vietnam war, but it was also a time of ultra-conservatism, racism, homophobia, inequality and of change … Sounds familiar, hey. “If Vietnam didn’t have a resource the United States wanted, there wouldn’t have been a war there,” Megan says. “But there was a country to pillage so we had to think of some reason to defend ourselves against this tiny little country. But, yes, there are definitely similarities with those times.”
They are the background to why we are here – Megan Sue Hicks, the musician, the folkie who never made the headlines she should have. The woman who used to sing along to the Mickey Mouse Club on TV when she was seven-years-old.
Megan was born in the Texas oilfields during the Baby Boom to two survivors of the Great Depression – a fighter pilot and a war bride.
"I am from Oklahoma City and its northern bedroom community, Edmond. My mom and dad met at Edmond High School. I graduated from high school during the Nixon Era – when the Watts Riots, the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Movement, and the Vietnam War were breaking news. I got my undergraduate degree at Central State University in Edmond. I spent three years of childhood and 16 years of adulthood living in Oklahoma City. That’s where my kids were born. My mother, soon to be 95, still lives in Edmond, and so does my younger sister. The far-flung nieces, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews are increasing and multiplying in communities further east.
“I was just a normal middle-class suburban kid," she says. "I was as ordinary, as ordinary, as ordinary can be. I had aspirations. I wanted to be a mouseketeer.” So when did you start performing? “I started identifying as a performer when I was in my teens in high school. I joined the folk music club at my school, and I had my guitar, and that was my shield. I could go anywhere behind that guitar. I sang at the talent shows just like a million other high school kids did. That changed when we got to Australia. “My father was in the petroleum industry and he got around a lot. On this particular occasion he was posted to Sydney for several years. And I aged out of the family visa while they were still living there in Raeburn Ave, Castlecrag.
“Do you know Clelia Adams? she’s a well-known country singer in Australia. They love her in Tamworth. Well, she was the office manager at the music paper, Go-Set. Somehow or other we met and hit it off and became flatmates with Sandy Voss, another girl from Minneapolis in the US. We had a little flat in Balmain, when Balmain was a place you didn’t go out in after dark. It was pretty run down. But we had a good Christian landlady. “Anyway, Clelia being office manager at Go-Set had all these music connections and the business was expanding. They needed more office help so she got them to hire me as her assistant. She was also dating Doug Rowe [lead guitarist of the noted Australian group, Flying Circus] at the time – at least, I think she was dating Doug. I know she had a huge crush on him.
“One day, Doug was over for supper or something and he heard me sing a song I had written for a friend before I left the US and he told me if I could write enough songs for an album that he would produce it for me. I was like ‘heck, yeah’. I wanted to be a rich and famous singer-songwriter [laughs]. Within three or four weeks I had 10 songs. “At the time Flying Circus were recording with EMI, but they had also just won Hoadley’s Battle of the Bands in 1970 [Zoot and Autumn were second and third, respectively]. The winner got a free trip to the US. In 1971, Flying Circus left for San Francisco and then re-located to Toronto, Canada, where they signed a deal with Capitol Records.
“So Doug and I went into the studio in late December 1970/January 1971. Doug played electric guitar and Orlando Agostino, who lives in Calgary, Canada now, played a lot of acoustic guitar. For a couple of the songs, Doug got the full band in so we had drums, bass, everything.
“I didn’t know anything about songwriting. I didn’t know that every song needed a hook. I didn’t know what a bridge was. I just wrote what spilled out of my 20-year-old adolescent heart. “I remember Doug’s bandmates looking at a chart he made of one of my songs. And they were like ‘how do you expect us to play this?’. It had absolutely no structure. I wasn’t trying to be avant-garde or anything. I was just writing songs. Totally naïve, totally. And primitive too. “We cut the album and it was mixed late at night because we went into the studio after hours. The engineer let us in but EMI didn’t know this was going on. “We were in the studio seven or eight times; maybe one night for every song. I don‘t know! I’ve done storytelling recordings as long as that album and I do those in a day. So it was mixed and forgotten about until somehow – after beginning life at EMI it ended up at Warner Brothers and there was this Maranatha by Megan Sue Hicks . It was ‘what the hell is that? Who the hell is she? Let’s press a little run and see what happens.’ I never signed a contract, I never signed any papers so there was no legal work at all, no lawyers were involved, it was entirely under the table. And I hope the statute of limitations has expired or I’ll never get to come back to Australia. “Doug’s sister, Sally, who I saw a few years ago in Wellington – Doug was a New Zealander, is an exceptionally talented graphic artist and she did the album cover; all that lovely hand-lettering and calligraphy. Oh my god!”
At this point I hold up a copy of Maranatha to the camera. “Holy shit, you’ve got one. How did you get that?” That is a long story. A long journey, in fact. But first I tell her that today Maranatha is a rather mystical collector’s item that sold for up to $500 when the market was really strong three or four years ago and today still fetches up to $400. “No way!” She bursts out laughing.
To cut a long story short, I first heard Maranatha at a hippie guru’s place on the outskirts of Melbourne in 1973. Bill was a big, beautiful, bloke, all fuzzy hair and gnarly beard, who lived in a large house, in two rooms of which he grew marijuana hydroponically to help pay for his amazing – and I mean AMAZING – record collection which lived in the lounge room along with a state-of-the-art stereo. One afternoon we were sampling the homegrown and listening to some of his imported LPs when he got up, rolled over to the stereo, bagged what was previously playing, headed to one of the six rows of records leaning against the wall, plucked out an LP, put it on, and handed me the cover. “Have a listen to this and tell me what you think,” he said. The cover was delicate – a hand-drawn picture of a young woman in pastel tones; the back cover features a rather delicate-looking woman in her late teens or early 20s.
The music was a revelation. Maranatha is the great lost folk record of the 1970s. As Megan said earlier in the interview, she didn’t know about song structure so its songs are just pure emotion encased in slightly off kilter musical shapes. I was blown away that day and I still am today.
The lead track, Hey, Can You Come Out And Play, is effortless folk psych and was rediscovered by a larger audience in 2017 when it was included on the excellent compilation album of Australian rarities and obscurities, Follow The Sun.
As far as Maranatha goes I rarely saw another after 1973, apart from the odd copy which came and went on eBay over the years since it went live in 1995. I either didn’t know or was three times outbid at the death. Then a few months ago, I found one online amidst an old collection being sold off by a husband and wife in rural Queensland. The records had belonged to his late father. I’m not sure who was more excited – the son or me. He was excited his dad’s copy had a new home where it would be as loved as much as it had been in the past and I was excited to finally have a copy in my collection. Turns out, it had been hidden away in a cupboard for 20 years. And that’s the way it often is where very rare records are concerned.
Megan herself only has two copies of Maranatha and one of Follow The Sun. “I saved all the correspondence from those dear kids that put together Follow the Sun. It was just kind of quaint. But I have to say I’m delighted and gobsmacked and just totally bemused by all this. You know, Marantha was such an obscure little release and I never did anything with it.
“It all happened so quickly. We started recording Maranatha in late December 1970 or early January 1971. Doug and the guys left in late February and my birthday was coming up on March 10 and I had to get out of Dodge. So it was all smooshed in there in early 1971. “When I came back to the States, every time I got in front of an audience with my guitar and sang, if it was on a stage with lights and the audience was in the dark, my hands would tremble so badly I could barely find the strings and my voice – It was a very high reedy voice to begin with, with a little tremolo in it – now had a huge tremolo.
“I was terrified of singing in public. Fifteen years later I started storytelling. I can get up on stage in front of a crowd of any size and tell a story and I am never more at home. It’s so much fun."
As it turns out, Megan and Orlando Agostino, one of the acoustic guitarists on Maranatha, also played on the same bill together – at Macquarie University on February 24, 1971. Orlando appeared as a member of Greg Quill and Country Radio.
Megan has mixed memories of the gig: “I kind of remember it. I played solo to an audience of, I don’t know, four or five people. I sat on the edge of the stage and shut my eyes when I sang so I obviously didn’t create any rapport with anybody.
"When it was over a young man came up and told me how much he loved my music. It was abysmal. Stage fright was a real thing for me whenever I tried to sing live in public.
"I only did a couple of other appearances. There was one at an established club in downtown Sydney. I opened for, I’m thinking it was [the late, great queen of the 1960s Australian folk revival] Marian Henderson. That name rings a bell. She blew me out of the water. Good heavens she could sing! And, more importantly, she was fearless.
"And there was another gig in a little dark club that I hitchhiked to. My guitar and I rode there on the back of some dude’s motorcycle. No helmet. Shod in sandals. Trusting a total stranger to not be a jerk. He was actually very sweet. And a good biker with that imbalance hanging out behind him. I think Orlando took me home. I haven’t thought of these little flashes from the past in decades... DECADES."
It’s funny how memory works. Some things disappear for good while others just need a decent jolt to pop up again. In Orlando's case, he remembers the Maranatha sessions but is a little unclear on some of the details.
“I remember the session being in a different studio to the one where we recorded Fleetwood Plain. I only went in for one session and played on two or three songs, basically. The rest was left up to Flying Circus’ Doug Rowe [who produced the album and played lead guitar] and his fellow band members, one of whom was the bass player, Terry Wilkins, who also lives in Canada these days..” Did you hear anything about the album when you returned to the US? “Not really. I got a reel-to-reel mixed tape which I listened to and cried and felt sorry for myself about missed opportunities. Then, a little while later, I got the album – I now have two copies, my mother’s copy which she gave to me and my own copy. I’m going to give them to my kids. I don’t know if they’ve even heard it! That’s okay with me. That’s just fine. I have cousins who are about 10 years younger than me and they told me they used to play their famous cousin’s album at their slumber parties. So I was famous to some cousins in Atlanta, Georgia!”
So who were your influences then? Were you a Joni Mitchell kid? “Err, Peter, Paul and Mary!” Much laughter. “And Joni, Joan Baez. I had really prosaic tastes. I was not eclectic. I was very narrow taste-wise. My daughter was dating a bloke who saw my name in a review of the compilation on a music blog he was looking at online. And he said, ‘Hey is this your mum?’ and she was blown away. It was a glowing review of Hey, Can You Come Out And Play. It said it was ‘loner folk’. So I guess I was a loner folkie.”
And she kept singing. “I was very religious at the time, and I sang in church when I could, and I wrote a lot of religious songs. The whole of Maranatha was my little born-again Christian statement. I have since totally lapsed from that mind set. When my kids came along I joined an episcopal church choir and loved singing with a big thumping organ behind me and all those voices and all that harmony. “But, you know, I still have one of my two guitars. I gave one of them away – it was pretty badly damaged and I gave it to a storyteller/singer-songwriter I know who refurbishes guitars. And then when he finds an up-and-coming musician who need an instrument, he has one to give them. And this is a Martin 00018 [anybody who knows anything about guitars will know that this a classic!]. I paid $150 for it when I was in high school and it was in bad shape. But when he gets done with it, it’s going to be a cherry of a guitar and some kid is going to have a killer instrument. “I also have a little Martin 0-16 [also a classic]. My son was dabbling in trying to play after his father died. His dad was a really good musician but he never taught his kids how to play. I was hoping my son would go for it so I’m still holding the 0-16 for him or his kids. If they want granny’s guitar it’s there for them. You know what? Now, from time to time, I take ukelele lessons.” It isn’t hard to imagine Megan Hicks strumming a ukulele as she sits on her porch surrounded by the forest. Today, she is a recognised storyteller who has travelled the world with her tales. How she got there makes up part two of this story. But it’s important that this chapter stands alone, because Maranatha stands alongside the great rare-and-essential folk recordings of that era such as Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms.
Maranatha track-by-track by Megan Hicks
Side One
Hey, Can You Come Out And Play
This was my very first song. Written when I lived, briefly, in Texas. I had just dumped my boyfriend, and he promptly started dating the cutest girl on campus, who was apparently smitten with him, so of course, I wanted him back. Shallow. I know. What can I say? We were 19.
One Last Alley
This one was written for Doug Rowe. From my tight little Jesus freak window, it looked to me as though he was wandering, lost. The lyrics are still with me. Where on EARTH do you encounter "man's inherent curse" in a folk-pop song?
Cle's Song And this one is for my flatmate Cleo. In the Go-Set office she was Cleo Calvo. After marriage, kids, divorce, and a launching a music career, she is now Clelia Adams (https://cleliaadams.com/). Tons of albums. European CW fans adore her as do the folks in Tamworth. Anyway, it's about breaking from the conventions and expectations you grow up with in order to find your own path.
Peter's Song (And He'll Probably Never Hear It)
I had a desperate crush – all my crushes in those days were desperate – on a boy who was leaving Australia to go to England with his friend for awhile. I wrote it sitting at the end of the pier in Balmain. Turns out, Peter did get to hear the song. Clelia played it for him when he dropped by the flat a few months after I had come back to the States. She said he was sweetly touched.
Vespers
Doug's manager (who was Jeff Lang's manager that put us in touch with each other all those many years later) told me I needed to write something that wasn't "a day in the life of Megan Sue Hicks". I always liked Winnie the Pooh, so Orlando Agostino [who played with then Go-Set journalist, Greg Quill, on the first Greg Quill and Country Radio album, Fleetwood Plain – you can see him on the front and back covers] and I put the final poem from When We Were Very Young to music. I think it was a bit or an ordeal for Warner Bros. to get permission from Dutton & Co. to use it.
A Continent And A Million Miles Away
There was this guy who lived in Texas who I kept up a long distance crush with... while I was having desperate, unrequited crushes in Sydney. (Youth!) Oh, and another set of unlikely lyrics in a wistful love song: "... rationality offers a half-hearted consolation prize." To my credit, I did manage to get it to scan.
Side Two
Martha
My best friend's boyfriend was off in New York trying to launch a music career with his band, The Blue Sky Investment Company. Later they became Lazarus, and had one album here in the US. Long distance relationships can be hell. I hoped I could cheer her up with a song.
Where Have I Been
This was me, whistling in the dark, trying to be philosophically upbeat about being cluelessly adolescent. I'm trying to recall these lyrics, and only snatches of them are coming back to me. I do recall Doug's guitar work on this one, though. Heavens! He was good.
Prefaced With Maybe
My mom and dad were in the process of splitting up, and I was trying to come to terms with it.
Pink And Blue Dreams
Another song that was intentionally NOT about a day in the life of MSH. I had little nieces in the US whom I had only seen a couple of times, I couldn't afford to send them presents from Australia on $38/week wages from Go-Set, so I wrote them a song. Actually, Orlando started playing that little lilt (nobody's could make a guitar ring like Orlando) and the words and music followed more or less automatically. I had recently read Lord of the Rings and discovered the Chronicles of Narnia, which was not available in US bookstores at the time, so Aslan the Lion of God gets a mention.
Group W Bench
This is about the time of Alice's Restaurant, and I was feeling frisky and defiant in my Jesus freak persona, and this came out. This is the one that one of Doug's bandmates looked at, written out, and said, "Mate, how are we gonna play THAT?" I'm not even sure this one has a time signature. Mother's Pride Cola was a little local brand of pop.
Visit Megan Hicks at www.meganhicks.com
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