Review
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Title: Wineskin: Freakin’ Jesus in the ‘60s and ‘70s
Author: Michael Hicks
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 260
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781560854531
Price: $18.55
Reviewed by Michael Austin
Informed sources opine, and none seriously doubt, that the three most important elements of any great Mormon Künstlerroman are, in no particular order: hippies, sex cults, and at least one Beatles album. Having met all three of these conditions, Michael Hicks’ most recent book, Wineskin: Freakin’ Jesus in the ‘60s and ‘70s, contains all the seeds necessary, but not entirely sufficient, for greatness.
Fortunately, it also has nearly all of the other elements that make this particular kind of memoir great: shoplifting, marijuana, demonic possession, Satanism, gospel music, polygamists, anti-Mormons, one excommunication, four baptisms, and a small-but-not-inconsequential flood in Deseret Towers.
All of these elements went into the making of Michael Hicks, Mormon Studies’ best and best-known musicologist. Hicks is the author of Mormonism and Music (the starting point for serious students of, well, Mormonism and music), The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (published just before the choir had to give up the name “Mormon” like the rest of us), and Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music. He is also the author of several books of music history about things other than Mormons and the endlessly fascinating Street Legal Version of Mormon’s Book, a full translation of the Book of Mormon into . . . well, read it for yourself.
Wineskin—the book takes its title from a Christian coffee shop (since new wine can’t go in old bottles, get it?) that Hicks was involved with in high school with other Evangelical students of the sort known as “Jesus Freaks”—is a collection of fascinating incidents that just happen to be true. Hicks grew up in the San Francisco area at a time when it was ground zero of the massive cultural shift known as “the sixties.” And Hicks absorbed it all: drugs, free love, Vietnam, protests, psychedelic music, and long-haired freaky people with flowers in their hair. However, as a younger teen at the time, Hicks absorbed it all in tiny, bite-sized bits—except, perhaps, for the music.
And he also absorbed a fair bit of religion. Hicks tells of growing up in a conservative, Evangelical home with parents who believed, even if they did not always follow, the tenets of their religion. Wineskin reads like the street legal version of Augustine’s Confessions, complete with a frank account of his early sins, his high-school devotion to Pentecostal Evangelism (for Augustine it was the Manicheans), and his eventual conversion to, falling away from, and re-embrace of Mormonism.
From the beginning, the Mormonism that Hicks embraces contains all of the world’s truth and beauty—a view very similar to that of many nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints whose view of the gospel was truly expansive—Orson F. Whitney, Susa Young Gates, Amy Brown Lyman, John A. Widtsoe, to name just a few. Like them, Hicks embraces art and poetry, which he frequently indulges in, and music, which became one of the governing passions of his life.
Wineskin: Freakin’ Jesus in the ‘60s and ‘70s is a marvelous book, mainly because Michael Hicks is a marvelous writer who has had a fascinating life—one in which (as he describes it himself) he has meandered around the straight and narrow path, crossing it as often as possible, and almost always going in roughly the right direction.