Live Shots

Bill Hicks: An American Icon Remembered

After someone's been dead the better part of 15 years, there are only so many revelations left about his life. And the Bill Hicks: An American Icon Remembered SXSW panelists – Hicks' brother Steve, former Houston comics John Farneti and James Ladmirault, and Austinite friend David Johndrow – have recounted most of their favorite stories in other formats previously. The most interesting part of the panel was the rarer pieces of footage that Matt Harlock, co-director of the film American: The Bill Hicks Story, had culled. Bits from Bill's teenage years at the Annex in Houston aren't even widely accessible on the repository of the entire recorded history of humanity (aka YouTube), so it was a glimpse into the onstage confidence Hicks had at such a ridiculously early age. Again, there's only so much of a man's life that can be remembered in an hourlong panel, and fittingly it was on a panel pegging him an American icon, since by almost any measure Hicks has never been more than a fringe phenomenon in America.