Welcome to the home base of Patrick Hicks Music Stories.
My name is Patrick Hicks. I am a storyteller, digital creator, podcaster, and dad based in Chicago. I make mini music documentaries and have gained over 500,000 followers and millions of views on various social media platforms. I also created a music history podcast called Good Measure with Patrick Hicks. My videos are like episodes of Behind the Music if they were shorter and only included the best parts.
I’ll never forget the first cassette tape I ever got. My dad came home one day from getting gas and gave me a tape that he bought at the gas station - a compilation called Cruisin’ Classics. It was made specifically for Shell gas stations and this volume had oldies hits by artists like Dion, Roy Orbison, and the Coasters. I was only 7 or 8, I didn’t really know any music outside of cartoons. I have no idea what possessed my dad to buy this for me. But I became obsessed.
I listened to Cruisin’ Classics non stop but then expanded my cassette collection to more current popular music. Michael Jackson, Prince, MC Hammer. My parents weren’t especially musical. They didn’t own any records; they listened to the radio but only in the car. So I think my passion for music was something of a curiosity to them. Nonetheless they fed my obsession. With books.
Every time my dad went to the library he would come home with a new music biography for me to read. He didn’t know what kind of music I liked, and didn’t recognize most of the artists, but he would bring me everything he could find. I absorbed biographies about Vanilla Ice (which ended up being mostly fake), B.B. King, U2. I read a library book about Depeche Mode before I had ever even heard their music. (It wasn’t as easy to listen to music in the early 1990s). Now not only was I obsessed with listening to music, I was obsessed with learning about music history.
By the time I got to junior high in 1994 my life pretty much revolved around music. MTV. VH1. Behind the Music, Headbanger’s Ball, Yo! MTV Raps, 120 Minutes. Grunge, alternative, hip hop, R&B… I loved it all. I grew up in Southern California so I was lucky enough to grow up with best radio station of all time: The World Famous 106.7 KROQ, which was huge for my musical education. In high school I started playing in punk bands and going to shows every weekend. There was a time where I just assumed that music was going to be my career.
And then life went in another direction. After a few aimless years in my 20s playing in bands and working as a booking agent at places like the Whisky a Go-Go, I went back to college and got a degree in history. Then I moved to Illinois to go to law school. I got a normal, boring corporate job. I got married and had kids. I tried to stay creative and do other things like studying improv and writing scripts. At no point in my 39 years of life up to 2022 did I ever imagine I would somehow become a content creator on social media with hundreds of thousands of followers. I don’t think anyone else would have believed it either.
In April 2022 my wife, Ellie, said I needed a new creative outlet and said I should do a 30 day challenge. I decided to make a TikTok channel. And I thought there was really only one topic that I knew more about than anything else - music history. In just a few weeks my channel telling music stories started growing like crazy. Thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of followers. Millions of views. I started doing more and more research. Pretty soon I became known for having detailed, in depth videos about music history and the universal themes that could be found in the stories of our favorite bands and musicians - determination, resilience, ambition, confidence.
And now I am bringing these mini music documentaries to Substack. Each month I will be telling stories that all revolve around a common theme. I am hoping to make even better content and forge an even deeper connection with my audience through this platform. I am still working that corporate job, but I am hoping that some day I will be able to be a full time content creator. And this project is bringing me one step closer to that goal. I want to be like my dad…bringing home obscure cassette tapes and worn out library books - but in video form to all of you.
Why subscribe?
Free subscribers:
Access to the best music history docuseries around.
Paid subscribers:
Extra video content - regular full length stories - plus other Substack exclusives like artist interviews and a chat feature with me and other paid subscribers.
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