“Some of the most holy men and women in the bible were mad, full of lust, hatred, theft, abuse,” he muses, “all God asked was for their eyes to be set on him.
“It didn’t matter too much what the people did, it was where their heart was – that’s an interesting concept I think. But I ain’t a Bible thumper,” he qualifies. “Music provided me with an outlet and a job – something I could do and people would support me in it.”
Hinson’s father was a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University, an appointment that reflects his parents’ religious observation. Hinson’s love for his parents is obvious – “they provided for all my childhood needs. I was fed. I was clothed. I was loved” – and while spirituality was a significant element, he figures that “religion wasn’t a big plate we were forced to eat off”.
“My pa helped a ton of people as I was raised,” Hinson recalls. “He helped keep people alive. He has a brilliant mind and he happened to give the glory to God.”
When Hinson was eight years old, his father bought him his first guitar. “It was a plywood piece of shit acoustic,” he recalls. “We’d listen to John Denver LPs and he’d show me chords and the progressions and how to fingerpick; all this I feel can be heard on my songs – that early influence.”
At age 10 Hinson performed in a school talent show (playing Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit); by his teenage years, he’d been bitten by the performing bug.” I wasn’t much good at anything else. Still ain’t,” Hinson laughs.
By this time Hinson had become immersed in the dysfunctional, chemical-infused lifestyle that would lead him to the precipice of existence. “Abilene, while I was younger, was like California in the ’60s: loads of grass, LSD, mushrooms, mescaline,” he remembers. “We wanted to open our third eye. We wanted to experience something outside of ourselves – something beyond the desert.”
Hinson concedes a number of his hard-living contemporaries never came back from that trip, though he’s sanguine about his own activities. “I ain’t sure it was a reaction to boredom or my small town upbringing,” he muses. “I think we were lost, and I was lost, and we used these things, this trouble, to find our way. I’m still looking.”
Hinson went broke, was arrested, was committed to a psychiatric institution, and eventually moved back home with his parents. Hinson’s parents helped him move to the Texas town of Denton (“a small great music city up north”) and he started playing and recording, while still grappling with his demons. “I had tons of lows, and several people tryin’ to help and save me, but I wouldn’t have it until I was ready. And I still don’t feel ready, I just got a wife who takes me for who I am and a better sense of responsibility ensued.”
Hinson’s latest record, Micah P Hinson And The Pioneer Saboteurs, reflects Hinson’s ongoing personal and academic investigation into the American Dream. “I feel the American Dream is still alive,” he admits. “People can come from all around and try to be all they can, do all they can do. Turn something out of nothing.
“And if it doesn’t work, you can just wake up the next day and try it all again. But the things that make this possible are disappearing at an alarming rate. Freedom is being taken away, not given out.”
