Unlike their rock 'n' roll predecessors, many rock musicians of the mid-sixties came to consider themselves as artists--self-consciously presenting themselves as creators of a new sonic medium.

Sixties Rock offers a provocative look at these artists and their innovations in two pivotal rock genres: garage rock and psychedelic music. Delving into everything from harmony to hardware, Michael Hicks shows what makes this music tick and what made it unique in its time. Looking at bands like the Doors, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and Love, Hicks puts legends and flashes in the pan alike through a rigorous analysis that places their music within rock history while exploring its place in the oft-swirling contexts of the time.

At times jubilant, at times elegiac, this set of ten essays by music historian Michael Hicks navigates topics that range from the inner musical life of Joseph Smith to the Mormon love of blackface musicals, from endless wrangling over hymnbooks to the compiling of Mormon folk and exotica albums in the 1960s.  It also offers a brief memoir of what happened to LDS Church President Spencer Kimball’s record collection and a lengthy, brooding piece on the elegant strife it takes to write about Mormon musical history in the first place.  There are surprises and provocations, of course, alongside judicious sifting of sources and weighing of evidence. The prose is fresh, the research smart, and the result a welcome mixture of the careful and the carefree from Mormonism’s best-known scholar of musical life.

Mormonism begins with a memoir: Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove until two-thirds of the Godhead appear and promise him a quixotic religious renown. Since then, the faith Smith birthed has raised up memoirs as gritty as Parley P. Pratt’s quasi-­canonical Autobiography or as luminously sarcastic as Elna Baker’s New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. Grafted somewhere into those works’ genealogy comes this boyhood memoir, rooted not in Mormonism but in the Protestantism of American suburbia and the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s, then in, out, and back into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Michael Hicks’s story is a tale studded with awkward episodes of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not necessarily in that order), along with alcohol, sci-fi, theft, radical politics, cartooning, halfway houses, and the musical avant-garde. The one constant is the brooding figure of Jesus Christ behind Hicks’s various personal reclamations and metamorphoses, often via methods admittedly off the books. While many readers know Hicks as a Mormon academic—thirty-five years a professor of music at Brigham Young University—­Wineskin excavates the path, from boyhood to a PhD, that led him toward a faith that is both primitively Christian and highmindedly Mormon.