In March of 1994, everything was going gangbusters for the career of
comedian/social commentator Bill Hicks. He had two albums of funny, penetrating
material in the can and ready for release, two previous albums and a pair of
HBO specials under his belt, a relentless touring schedule, and a growing UK
fanbase that was making the American export with fearless material and killer
timing an instant legend. And, in a move that’s been the ultimate career boost
for so many, he had just died.
Hicks’ death at age 32 came as a shock to the growing number of people who
were becoming fans of his acerbic, fearless brand of comedy, a scythe-like,
relentless wit that had critics putting him in that small book of great comics,
alongside Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen. It came as a shock to his friends as
well; Hicks had chosen not to tell anyone about the diagnosis of his pancreatic
cancer until he had literally weeks remaining in his life. Typical of Hicks, he
couldn’t be bothered to tell anyone — there was too much to get done
and too little time.
Hicks was born on December 16, 1961, perhaps not coincidentally Beethoven’s
birthday, and through his youth was bound and determined to be on stage, or
make one out of wherever he was. One of his high school teachers got so
frustrated with him that she offered Hicks the first five minutes of class to
perform — on the condition that he return control to her afterward. By age 15,
he was sneaking out of his parents’ Houston home to perform at the local Comedy
Workshop, and in time became one of the founding members of the Outlaw Comics,
an unruly group of comedians that also featured Sam Kinison. Hicks was easily
as loud as Kinison, and he peppered his routines with language as shocking as
that of any “raunchy” comic, but behind his epithets was a cry for reason, for
understanding in a world he felt had gone mad. His use of obscenity was not a
cheap ploy for “blue” laughs but an expression of rage. Once, I informed him
that Andrew “Dice” Clay would be appearing in town the night before his own
performance. “Consider me the antidote,” he shot back.
A typical Hicks rant would find the boyish-looking tornado railing at some
real obscenity, like war or hunger, using humor to deliver a scathing
assault on the problem: “[hysterical woman voice] `Oh, childbirth is such a
miracle, it’s such a miracle!’ — Wrong! It’s no more a miracle than eating
food and a turd coming out of your ass. You know what a miracle is? A miracle
is raising a kid who doesn’t talk in a fuckin’ movie theatre. There’s your
goddamn miracle. If it were a miracle, then not every nine months any ying-yang
in the world could drop a litter of these mewling fucking cabbages on the
planet. And in case you haven’t checked the single mom statistic recently, the
miracle is spreading like fuckin’ wildfire.”
Fan and peer Dennis Miller admirably summed him up as “one of the best
comedians in the world; a discernible point of view, great mind, attitude —
the whole bag. He works completely for me.” Hicks’ uncompromising stances kept
him from reaching the heights Kinison did (though the two remained close
friends), but make no mistake, Hicks was maniacally driven.
If getting his word out meant screaming to crowds of yokels in “comedy
hollers” in backwoods towns every night of his life and sleeping in cheap,
smelly motel rooms, then that’s damn well what he would do. While Kinison gave
up being a preacher to become a comedian, Hicks simply found a way to be both
at the same time. As such, Hicks never really had one home to speak of,
choosing instead a nomadic life that had him staying with friends or in hotels
in cities such as Austin, which he first visited around 1980 when his friend
Kevin Booth came to UT. Not surprisingly, Hicks grew to love Austin,
considering it one of his homes, yet claiming he couldn’t stay here for long
periods due to a dread of falling into the “slacker” lifestyle.
He hung around long enough to become friends with loads of Austin musicians,
and at one of his last Austin shows offered up this typically astute
observation: “I was in Australia, and the Australians had a big contingency at
the Branch Davidian compound. I’m from Texas so they were very curious and they
were asking me all about it. `Oh, he’s so weird, this guy Koresh is so weird,’
and I was thinking, well, wait a minute… Frustrated musician, with a
messianic complex, armed to the teeth and trying to fuck anything that moves…
I don’t know how to tell you this, but that sounds like every one of my friends
in Austin! I don’t know if this is gonna be an isolated incident — I’m waiting
for Will Sexton to build a complex somewhere.” If memory serves, Sexton was in
the audience that night, laughing harder than anyone.
Hard touring throughout the Eighties eventually paid off and Hicks graduated
to television, racking up 11 Late Night appearances with David Letterman
on NBC between ’91 and ’93, only to find his first (and only) Late Show appearance on CBS cut from the broadcast, even though his material had been
approved and re-approved by the network. Letterman would later express his
regrets over the incident, for what good that did. Hicks had already told me
previous to the Letterman debacle that “I wanna come out on TV one night with a
straitjacket and a gag over my mouth and just hop out, go `hurrur, urrur, hurr
hurrur,’ and hop away.” With an interest in his work rising in the UK, the
Late Show incident was the final straw for Hicks regarding the States.
Hicks gave himself over to England, where his performances were demanding
larger and larger venues. Unfortunately, by this point, he was running out of
time.
Hicks died on February 26, 1994. He left behind him a sizable body of work,
including the albums Dangerous (1991) and Relentless (1992) on
the Invasion Records label, and the unreleased Rant in E Minor and
Arizona Bay. Three concert videos exist: the Austin-made Sane
Man, an HBO One Night Stand, and the made-for-British-television
Revelations (shown in truncated form on these shores by HBO). There is
also an album of music by him and his friends under the name Marble Head
Johnson. All told, a strong legacy. Now, if only some of it were available
to the public.
More than two years after Hicks’ passing, Rant in E Minor and
Arizona Bay remain unreleased, Relentless and Dangerous are nearly impossible to find, and the concerts, aside from Sane Man,
are available on video only in the UK. Fans around the world scramble for any
and all bootleg Hicks material they can scrounge. They are frustrated and
confused, and, as a search on the Internet will reveal, they are rabid, and
growing rapidly in number. Imagine then the flurry of speculation created by
progressive noise-metal mongers Tool and their new,
expected-to-go-multi-platinum album Aenima, which features samples of
Hicks’ routines as well as a prominently displayed painting of the late
comedian titled “Another Dead Hero.” Coupled with persistent rumors that
Rykodisc is on the verge of releasing some of the aforementioned items, and it
suddenly became clear that a few inquiries to the Hicks estate needed to be
made. First stop, Kevin Booth. Entering Booth’s central
Austin home, I note with some irony that I’m From Hollywood, the
documentary on the later years of comic madman Andy Kaufman, one of the few
stand-ups whose flair came anywhere near Hicks’, is running on Comedy Central.
Still more ironically, when I leave, several programs will have gone by and the
image on the screen will have devolved to that of prop-dependent gagster
Gallagher preparing to smash a watermelon for a squealing crowd — an act that
particularly galled Bill:
“Only in America can you have a comedian who ends his show by destroying good
food with a sledgehammer!” Hicks once stated. “I guarantee there won’t be any
Gallagher World Tour any time soon — and if there is, there will be no dates
in Somalia. [Child’s voice] `We will get tickets to Gallagher and hopefully we
will catch a watermelon rind and live another day!'”
Booth is sitting in his home studio, Fossil Creek, where he does the audio
portion of his work for Sacred Cow Productions, from whence has come works both
with Hicks (Sane Man and the kung-fu parody Ninja Bachelor Party)
and without (videos by bands such as Coffee Sergeants and Pam Mayo). It’s very
quiet, with the only distraction being his cat and two wolf-dogs milling about.
Here is where Booth has been mixing and remixing Hicks’ posthumous works,
Rant in E Minor and Arizona Bay. Most of this summer, in fact,
has been spent in mixing Rant. and Booth is happy to have not heard it
for around three weeks.
In fact, it’s been during the long mixing process that Booth says he found
himself starting to fight with people: “You listen to your dead friend
screaming 10 hours a day, and it starts to take its toll on you. My
ex-girlfriend comes over and she’s just, `I don’t know how you can do this’.
I’m like, `I have no choice — I couldn’t just walk away from it.’ The very
last time I talked to Bill and he could barely speak, I promised him I would
see this thing through.” Booth pauses at this point, then sighs, “I’m going to
punch Bill when I see him again.”
But the question is why is Booth mixing Rant. Why and for whom?
The answer to both turns out to be Rykodisc, but to say that’s the whole story
would be an understatement of biblical proportions. Thus the story begins to
unravel.
“When somebody dies that everybody cares about a lot,” explains Booth,
“everybody just kind of freaks out and everybody really freaked out when Bill
died. It’s been kind of a long, hard road.” Two grieving parties, Booth and
Hicks’ family, found themselves thrown into a situation where they became
adversaries of sorts. Hicks was very ill when he wrote his will, resulting in a
document that Booth says “didn’t exactly spell out how he wanted everything
done” and left Booth’s and the Hicks family’s lawyers with plenty of room for
interpretation. Basically, it stipulated that the Hicks family owned all of
Bill’s material, while Booth owned the tapes that material is on. The
result? “I inherited Bill’s mom,” jokes Booth.
Some fans who have seen Hicks’ parents, Jim and Mary, on It’s Just a Ride,
the biographical documentary about the comedian — or are simply aware of
the fact that they are Southern Baptists — have formed the (believable)
assumption that they might be the cause for the delay. After all, Hicks
was never one to shy away from controversial subjects like cross-wearing
Christians (“When Jesus comes back, you think he wants to see a fucking
cross?”) or pornography (“One of my big fears is that I’m gonna die and
my parents are gonna come over to clean out my apartment and find that porno
wing I’ve been adding onto… There’ll be two funerals that day — I’ll be the
only one going through the gates of heaven with his Mom running behind spanking
him”). These are not subjects that tend to get tossed around at the Ice Cream
Social.
The elder Hickses are in the middle of a bus tour of the northern states and
Canada when they get word I want to speak to them about the forthcoming
Rykodisc releases. Mary Hicks, described accurately by Booth as “a very
powerful woman,” phones promptly to set up a time when we can speak. Jim Hicks
is out with a group of other tourists observing the eclipse of the moon when I
call back and appears to be quite satisfied to stay out of the negotiations. In
fact, nearly everyone I spoke to during the course of my investigations
repeated his same quote, the one immortalized on It’s Just A Ride: “I
couldn’t understand why Bill used the `F-word’ so much. I said, `Well, Bill, I
don’t hear Bob Hope using it…’ And of course he didn’t like that, and he
didn’t like Bob Hope too much, so he took issue with that statement.” (Others
repeat Bill’s actual reply as “Well, Dad, Bob Hope doesn’t play the shitholes I
play!”)
Mary Hicks is sitting out the lunar phenomenon and is brief and businesslike
in her pronouncement that “You’re lookin’ for nitty gritty? There’s no nitty gritty. It just took a long time. I don’t know anything about this type
of business — I wish it had come out immediately, but as far as I can tell,
things don’t happen just like that. The bottom line of all of this is: All of
Bill’s material — every bit of it — belongs to the Hicks family. Kevin has
been asked to be the producer.” Things are not without tension, even at this
stage. At one point she blurts out, “Why? What did Kevin tell you?”
Bill’s brother Steve Hicks, speaking on his patio phone to avoid the “four
10-year-olds doing the Macarena” inside at his daughter’s birthday party,
elaborates somewhat on his mother’s statements, offering that “there was some
animosity, but that’s probably normal in a situation like this.” He shoots down
the idea that his parents might have a problem with his brother’s material:
“Sure, their friends don’t talk that way, [but] they would tell their friends
at church when Bill was going to be on Letterman or HBO.” He further describes
a performance by Bill in Las Vegas where “my father was trying his hardest not
to laugh, but he couldn’t hold it in.”
Mary clearly respects her son’s work; she just wants to be assured that people
understand the soul behind it. “Bill was a very special person,” she says
sternly but earnestly. “He was a very gentle person. He was not like what he
did on stage. He believed what he did and he believed what he said, if you get
his underlying message, but he was not that person offstage.”
Still, this attitude didn’t keep Booth from sweating bullets when it came time
for Mary Hicks to approve Rant. “When I sent her the first copy of
Rant in E Minor, I was holding my breath,” says Booth. “I had no idea
what to expect — [Motherly voice] `Kevin, I like the second take of the “Suck
your own cock” bit, but I think you should put a little more compression on the
voice and tweak up the guitars.'” In the long run, though, Booth says that any
offense to her sensibilities in the material takes a back seat to her maternal
instinct: “I think she just likes hearing Bill talk.” Between disagreements over the handling of the albums and dealing with their personal loss, it took
nine months before the two parties began to accomplish anything. At that point,
Bill’s manager/fianc�e, Colleen McGarr, initiated a deal with Zoo
Entertainment which “went down the toilet” when the label balked on a clause
allowing the rights to eventually revert back to the family, says Booth. Steve
Hicks notes that there were long delays during that time when Zoo wouldn’t
return calls or the person they needed to contact was on vacation, dragging
things out further.
Finally, Rykodisc, a label known for its reverential treatment of the late
Frank Zappa’s catalog, came through with an offer, and negotiations (and the
delays that come with them) began anew. What with working things out among
Ryko, Booth, and both Booth’s and the Hicks’ lawyers, it took until May of this
year to get all the contracts signed. So, that leaves us with the albums, or at
least Rant. on the racks now, right? Unfortunately, no. Things seem
fuzzy in the latest delay; Ryko and Mrs. Hicks have both implied that Booth
didn’t get all the tapes to the label when he was supposed to. (Ryko A&R
director Jeff Rougvie says, “I’ve been waiting for that tape of
Rant.” but adds without indignation that “it was worth the wait!”)
Booth, on the other hand, says that Ryko had Rant. in hand for months
before the one person who needed to listen to it did so.
When I make a return visit to Booth’s house, he plays back a phone message
that has just come in from the person in charge of the project at Ryko, David
Greenberg. In his message, Greenberg says he has just listened to the album and
suggestions are on the way. “Now he wants to be a producer,” moans
Booth. The notes, which arrive the next day, are extensive, calling for less
music with the comedy and a major rearrangement of the material. Booth sighs
deeply, wondering aloud if Greenberg is aware that the music in question is
Hicks’, and that it’s there because the comedian wanted it there. Booth wants
it, too.
“The music is like the sugar that helps the medicine go down,” explains Booth.
“It gives insight into who he is; it shows a very vulnerable side of Bill you
don’t see in his comedy.” Booth steels himself for a long letter of his own to
Greenberg, who has also included a draft of a potential warning sticker for the
album where “weenies,” “right-wingers” and “hoo-hahs” should prepare to be
offended. Greenberg’s notes do not explain precisely what characterizes a
person as a “hoo-hah.”
It’s not likely that having tapes in hand — if in fact they didn’t —
would’ve saved a 1996 release date for Rant., as Ryko says they didn’t
want to lose the album in the pre-Christmas shuffle, anyway. This, then, pushes
the release date back to February, 1997. (Booth, sounding uncannily like Hicks,
asks the inevitable question: “What better to buy your honey [for Valentine’s
Day]? I could get her a box of chocolate, flowers, or this guy screaming about
Barbara Bush’s flaccid labia lips”). Wait a minute, scratch the Cupid gig.
Rougvie says he can’t guarantee a February release, though he seems sure
Rant. will come out in the first quarter of next year.
And here’s a surprise: Rougvie says that all four albums will be making their
appearance at the same time, though separately packaged, not as a box set. In
fact, he’s already looking forward excitedly to the release, gushing that “I’m
pretty much ready to do anything.” Since many bands are known to listen to
whatever Hicks material they can get their hands on while in the tour van,
Rougvie jokes that “I almost feel like putting an ad in Pollstar saying,
`If you’re going on the road, call this number and we’ll send you a free
tape!'”
His enthusiasm is admirable, but I doubt even that would save him from Hicks’
wrath. As the comedian cries in the Revelations video: “By the way, if
anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself. No, no, no it’s
just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they’ll
take root. I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously
though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there’s no rationalization for what
you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay — kill yourself — seriously.
You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke. You’re
going, `There’s going to be a joke coming.’ There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage.
You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save
your fucking soul, kill yourself.”
McGarr, whose voice evokes a cheerful spirituality akin to Hicks’ more
introspective moments, takes the delays as a blessing. She points out that
while the albums may still not be available, “every year since Bill has left,
something has happened, just not on album.” She cites the It’s Just a
Ride documentary, a recent tribute to Hicks at the Montreal “Just for
Laughs” International Comedy Festival, and a snowballing underground interest.
Steve Hicks presents a partial list of Bill-related items and events:
references in books by New Yorker critic and Hicks aficionado John Lahr,
comedienne Brett Butler, and a British professor named Will Kaufman, the last
of which gave Booth a few chills: “He came to my house and seemed normal
enough, but then he jumped out of his chair and asked, `Did Bill ever sit in
this chair?’ I said `Yeah, I guess,’ and he got all excited and took pictures
of it.”
McGarr, who still manages comedians as a partner in Strauss/McGarr
Entertainment, further asserts that when Hicks was around, comedy albums were
“pretty much a dead issue,” and that due to successful discs from Jeff
Foxworthy and Adam Sandler (both comics that Hicks would’ve had many choice
expletives for), “now there’s a market for comedy records again.” Steve Hicks,
a manager for the Hastings Records chain flagship here in Austin, points to
last week’s Billboard, which sported no less than five new comedy albums
in a cover feature, and the fact that Eddie Murphy is now starting a new comedy
label. Bill’s friend and fellow comedian Dwight Slade currently has an album
out that’s dedicated to Hicks and contains a photograph of the two of them
together, while several bands including Radiohead have dedicated albums to him
as well. That’s not surprising, as critics have often referred to Bill as a
“rock & roll comedian,” in that he brought an edge to comedy similar to
that in rock, making him interesting to the young and rebellious.
The biggest boost to public awareness of Hicks then, probably comes in the
form of Aenima, the aforementioned new Tool album. Tool founder Maynard
James Keenan even defies a band decision not to do interviews just to talk
about Hicks (see sidebar), all but shouting, “Our album was out October 1 and
at least Relentless and Dangerous should be available so kids can
go and buy the records… I’ve spoken to [Ryko] quite a bit. They don’t seem to
get it. I’ve yelled at them, but they don’t seem to get it!” McGarr, a friend
of the band, says that Tool has already been getting e-mail to their website
demanding information about Hicks.
Steve Hicks says he gets e-mail “constantly” from fans and is accosted at his retail job when Bill
followers realize who he is. Fortunately, he says, he never tires of talking
about his brother. Booth does tire, but then he gets the bulk of the
communications. For example, he showed me one recent letter from a 15-year-old
wanting to purchase videotapes of Ninja and Sane Man, shows that
he produced for and with Bill, which caused another snag along the road of
negotiations since the Hicks family doesn’t want him selling the tapes. This
only frustrates him further since the Internet is full of fans selling bootlegs
of the videos because they’re not available.
Booth also finds himself frequently asked out to dinner by fans of Hicks, and
mutters that, “There’s nothing like sitting down with a complete stranger and
answering a million questions about your dead friend. Really helps the food
settle, alright….” Then there’s the one about the young lady from Scotland
whose entire American vacation was built around visiting the Hicks’ home and
Graceland.
All this, however, is better than no interest at all in Hicks. Still, some
fans worry that by the time Hicks’ final projects finally reach the
marketplace, his material will be dated. McGarr will hear none of this. Calling
Hicks’ material “timeless,” she says that “every time I look at the news, the
players haven’t changed.” Nevertheless, Booth bemoans the fact that Arizona
Bay would be perfectly timed right now because current events in Iraq so
closely parallel what Hicks called the “Gulf War Distraction”: “People said;
`Uh, uh, Bill. Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world.’ Yeah, maybe, but
you know what? After the first three largest armies, there’s a real big
fuckin’ drop-off, alright? The Hare Krishnas are the fifth largest
army in the world, and they’ve already got our airports, okay? I think
that‘s the greater threat right now.”
There is one fear that overshadows Booth’s concern about Hicks remaining
topical, and it’s a telling one on the subject of topicality; the pilfering of
the comedian’s material. Booth says he hears Hicks’ best routines coming from
the mouths of vampiric young comics every time he watches Comedy Central —
sometimes almost verbatim. But McGarr remains unfazed.
“There are always going to be people trying to emulate Bill in the wrong way,”
she explains, her words betraying no trace of negativity. “But no one can do
the material the way he did. That’s why Bill is eternal.”
Hopefully, sometime in the first quarter of 1997, a lot more people are going
to find that out for themselves. n
Hicks was easily as loud as Kinison, and peppered his routines with language as
shocking as that of any “raunchy” comic, but behind his epithets was a cry for
reason, for understanding in a world he felt had gone mad.
“The very last time I talked to Bill, I promised him I would see this thing
through,” says Booth, pausing at this point, then sighing. “I’m going to punch
Bill when I see him again.”
Some fans who’ve seen Hicks’ parents, Jim and Mary, on the biographical
documentary about the comedian — or are simply aware of the fact that they are
Southern Baptists — have formed the assumption that they might be the
cause for the delay of unrelelased albums.
Critics have often referred to Hicks as a “rock &roll comedian,” in that he
brought an edge to comedy similar to that in rock.
Booth says he hears Hicks’ best routines — sometimes almost verbatim — coming
from the mouths of vampiric young comics every time he watches Comedy Central.
This article appears in October 4 • 1996 and October 4 • 1996 (Cover).