Dan Hicks could have been Dan Rather. He was interested in broadcasting and graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in communications. But "I kind of went off with the Charlatans," he says, choosing life with musicians over associating with what some also would call charlatans.

"It seemed to me that this folk-rock thing was the essence of my desire," Hicks says in a recent telephone interview from his home office in Mill Valley. He'll perform Saturday at the Palms in Winters.

Hicks is widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of the Haight-Ashbury music scene of the 1960s, and the Charlatans were right there in the scene with such seminal "San Francisco sound" generators as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and the Beau Brummels.

Hicks, who says he used to hang "down at the Coffee Gallery with Dave (Frieberg, who would form Quicksilver Messenger Service) and Marty (Balin, who launched the Airplane)," co-founded the Charlatans in 1965. He played drums and sang with the group. In 1968, he started the Hot Licks, an acoustic opening act for the Charlatans. But the off-shoot group would surpass the headliners in fame and longevity.

"The Charlatans just didn't seem to be too cohesive. There was a lot of internal strife," Hicks said, "and I just decided to go my own way and do the Hot Licks."

The Hot Licks expanded on the folk-rock format to include other musical forms of interest to Hicks: swing, country, jazz and jug-band music. Its instrumentation included violin, string bass and mandolin in addition to guitar and drums. The group also featured two women singers - "the girls," Hicks still calls them.

The Hot Licks lasted only about five years, but their freewheeling concert performances spawned intensely loyal fans. The group disbanded in 1973, and Hicks went on to perform solo and to form another popular group, the Acoustic Warriors.

On his 60th birthday on Dec. 9, 2001, Hicks participated in an all-star party that reunited him with nearly every living musician he'd ever performed with, including the original Hot Licks. Out of that event came the decision to return to the Hot Licks name and format. The lineup isn't identical, but the flavor is the same, Hicks insists. Saturday's concert will be the first time the newly reconstituted Hot Licks has played the Palms.

"I was reluctant at first," he says of the decision to resurrect the name, "because I didn't know how people would take to it. Folks associate me with that name still, though, and I said I would do it if I could maintain the original sound."

The 2002 recording "Beatin' the Heat" is the first album in almost 30 years to bear the Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks name, but it won't be the last. Hicks is working on a follow-up.

"We're just finishing up on it," he said. "There are 15 songs, but I don't know if we'll use all 15. Thirteen of them are originals, and I'd say five of them, I might have done on an Accoustic Warriors thing, but the rest are new."

Though he says he hasn't "done a heck of a lot the last couple of months," Hicks has half a dozen Hot Licks shows scheduled. And, he's got another side project, "a jazz band, just piano, bass, drums and tenor sax. I don't play guitar. I just sing," he says.

Admitting that at his age and with four decades of performing under his belt that "there's stuff about traveling that's a drag," Hicks says he continues because "I like getting up there.

"If you've got a good sound and something to sing, it feels great."

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Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks

WHEN: 8:30 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: The Palms, 13 Main St., Winters
TICKETS: $22
INFORMATION: (530) 795-1825

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