Dick Prall’s recent album “Headful of Hiss” lets it all out. Photo: Trilix Studio
Writer: Anthony Taylor
When Dick Prall stands on the stage at xBk, singing the final track from his newest EP, “Headful of Hiss,” his eyes tell a whole story.
He’s always scanning the crowd, making eye contact, drawing people in, gauging the energy. Par for the course. But every once in a while, his gaze lifts up, over the heads of the people watching him play. And that’s where the magic is.
It doesn’t last long, just three or four seconds usually. But in those brief, crystalline moments, you can watch his eyes and see every second, every mile, every ounce of pain and death and sadness and joy that has brought him to this moment. It looks like he’s just staring at the back wall, but he’s really looking back through time.
Prall — Dickiebird to his mother, but just Dickie on stage — was born about 55 years ago in Hannibal, Missouri. He lingered in the Show Me State only for a year before his family packed up and made its way to Sheffield, up toward Mason City. Prall doesn’t remember his time in Hannibal, but he does remember the day his father died.
“I grew up in death,” Prall said simply, kicking back on the couch in his downtown loft. And while it sounds like a very Johnny Cash thing to say, it’s not uttered with any pretension or ploy for sympathy. It’s just the facts.
Prall’s dad died the day before Prall’s fourth birthday. Two years earlier, the Prall family had lost another son. And while Prall admits that he doesn’t remember much about his father and nothing of his brother, the pall those two deaths cast over the rest of the family was like a weighted blanket around the shoulders of the rest of his childhood.
It’s a blanket Prall has never fully shrugged off. He admits to struggling with depression throughout his life. (“My dad was dead and my name is Dick, for chrissakes,” he said. “Kids can be mean.”) He’s been through three marriages, and he briefly owned a music venue in Cedar Rapids — Dick’s Tap and Shake Room — that was embraced by local business boosters but ignored by the general public.
But through it all, Prall wrote. A debut album with the Dick Prall Band in 1998; a follow-up with an act called Starch Martins in 2001. Solo albums in 2005 and ’07. But it was a 2015 album that was supposed to take his career to the Next Level.
And, like most every other touchpoint in Prall’s life, it came from underneath that blanket.
“That was on the heels of my mother passing, and my stepfather passing three weeks later,” he said. “Three months after that, my wife left.”
And just like that, the man who grew up in death had a fresh crop of pain to process. Changing his stage name to Dickie, an homage to that nickname from his mother, Prall released the album of the same name.
It was a painfully personal, incredibly cathartic experience that seemed to split Prall wide open and let every creative spark inside him fly out at once, like sparks from a flint.
Prall had been close to mainstream success before. The Starch Martins were on the doorstep in ’01, and Prall was signed by Reid Hunter, who was also representing John Mayer at the time and had similar ideas for Prall’s career. So when the “Dickie” album turned into a critical darling but landed just short of commercial success, it wasn’t new for him. But with material this deeply personal and unabashedly good, it felt crushing.
After “Dickie,” Prall settled into life. Single, working a nine-to-five in Des Moines, still writing a bit but without the same urgency he’d carried for the past two decades. He released another album, “Minus Thieves,” in 2019, but the pandemic shut down any groundswell it might have had, and it seemed like Prall was snakebitten once again.
But then, in 2024, something different happened. Prall had written some more songs and he shared a single with a couple of friends. They liked it. He showed it to a couple of industry folks, and the praise came back even stronger. He gave Bryan Vanderpool at Golden Bear Records a listen, and praise turned into an imperative: These songs had to see the light of day.
Suddenly, there were enthusiastic investors, willing to help make the studio time happen. Prall cautioned them: Thank you for your interest, but there’s a good chance you’ll never see your money back. Nobody was dissuaded. At times, it almost felt like Prall was the least enthusiastic person involved, or at least the most jaded. But people kept telling him he needed to get this out there.
Eventually, plans were made for two EPs: “Headful of Hiss” slated for 2024 and a second EP to drop this spring. He lay down five tracks at Golden Bear and teamed up with Des Moines-based marketing firm Trilix for help with social media, promotion and the production of music videos for two of the songs. A pair of shows were booked at xBk: an album listening party in September and an official release show in December.
And that’s how we got to “Headful of Hiss” and to Prall, standing on this stage, looking at a point somewhere just beyond the heads of a full house, to the past that brought him here. Every loss and sorrow, every decision that didn’t pan out and dream that he had to let go. Looking for just a few seconds backward in time. Past “Dickie” and Dick’s Tap and Shake Room, past the Starch Martins and the Dick Prall Band. In those heartbeat-long moments, his eyes could see all the way back to that house in Sheffield, and to his mother, swaddled under that same blanket of pain and loss but looking into the future at her Dickiebird.
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