Bill Hicks - Biography
By Tony Goldmark
Over his all-too-brief thirty-two years on the planet and fifteen years as a touring stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks was the quintessential sane man in an insane world. During stand-up comedy’s embarrassingly mainstream turn in the 1980s, when every comedian yearned to perform lazy, hackneyed celebrity impressions for tourists in overpriced clubs, Hicks preferred yelling at his audiences to pandering to them – even when they’d request specific bits of his, he’d shoot back “I’m not a jukebox!” Before the term “politically correct” became a national standard, and LONG before every two-bit stand-up with a Viagra joke started calling themselves “politically incorrect,” Bill Hicks was ACTUALLY subverting his audience’s preconceptions about the societal standards he referenced, always looking at both sides of the coin so he could mock absolutely everyone, not just those who disobeyed the fashionable point of view. He performed the comedic equivalent of punk and metal – his routines even got quoted in Faith No More and Tool lyrics – as he mocked the same societal mores and pop-culture ephemera everyone else mocked, while always taking it several steps further, and telling the truth far more bluntly. For example, while every other comedian on the planet simply mocked Dan Quayle’s idiocy, Hicks openly portrayed him as a beastly Satanic demon yelling “I’ll spell potato any fucking way I want!”
William Melvin Hicks was born in Valdosta, Georgia on December 16, 1961, and until age seven his family moved around a lot – they lived in Florida, Alabama and New Jersey before finally settling in Houston, Texas. He was raised Baptist, but from a very young age he never trusted his church’s teachings, preferring to find his own philosophy in life. This worried Bill’s parents, who sent him to a psychoanalyst whose diagnosis was that there was nothing wrong with Bill, and that his parents were the ones who needed therapy.
Heavily influenced by the likes of Woody Allen, Johnny Carson and Richard Pryor, young Bill developed a knack for stand-up comedy, frequently cracking up his friends at school and Bible camp with irreverent takes on the soul-crushing conformity surrounding such institutions. Hicks longed for a chance to speak to a larger audience, and that chance came in 1978 when The Comedy Workshop opened in Houston. Unable to get parental permission, Hicks would sneak out with friends Kevin Booth and Dwight Slade and perform at the weekly Tuesday night open mike, where before long Hicks began to stand out as the funniest performer, even compared to all the older comics. By age sixteen Hicks was a local star, with sold-out audiences lining up to see him perform.
After graduating high school, Hicks briefly moved to Los Angeles, where he performed at Hollywood’s legendary Comedy Store and appeared in the unsuccessful sitcom pilot “Bulba” before moving back to Houston. It was then that he started heavily experimenting with drugs – everything from coke to LSD to Quaaludes to meth to alcohol, and he swore that alcohol had the worst affect on him by far (the first night he drank, he wound up beating up a few audience members). Eventually, his addictions became too much for him, mentally but more so financially, and by 1988 he was clean and sober of everything except cigarettes, with which he had a love/hate relationship until the day they killed him. He began his episode of HBO’s “One Night Stand” by mocking smokers who cough so much they can barely answer the question “Any smokers out here tonight?” Then he asked “Any NON-smokers out here tonight?” and when an enthusiastic roar came back, Hicks called them “whining little maggots” and “obnoxious self-righteous sadists” then lit up a cigarette for himself. “I’d quit smoking if I didn’t think I’d become one of you.” Then he’d rant about the hypocrites who try to ban smoking but still love drinking, arguing that far more innocent people die from drunk drivers than from second-hand smoke. Even in his sobriety, however, Hicks remained a great advocate of drug use and legalization on stage and off, claiming “I had a GREAT fucking time on drugs. Sorry. So where’s MY commercial?” He argued that mind-altering substances have greatly benefited society, and anyone who disagrees should burn all their records and tapes, because without drugs great music wouldn’t exist.
Indeed, one of Hicks’ greatest talents – one that he shared with Lenny Bruce and George Carlin – was his unique ability to reduce seemingly complex issues down to a single unhinged statement which is damn hard to argue, from gays in the military (“Anyone DUMB ENOUGH to join the military should be allowed to”) to female priests (“Now there’s priests of both genders I won’t listen to, who cares?”) to the war on drugs (“Those untaxed drugs are the ones that are bad for you!”) Another one of his great talents was his ability to utterly eviscerate hecklers, unable to contain his disdain for lesser intelligence – at an infamously bootlegged 1989 show, he screamed at a heckling girl, calling her the infamous C-word with at least ten times as much vitriol as Michael Richards’ rant, and at least twenty times as hilariously – “I want you to go find a fucking SOUL!” At the same show he reacted to a heckler’s incessant cry of “Freebird” with an indignant rant about pathetic masses that need to be constantly entertained because they can’t entertain themselves – “Hitler had the right idea! He was just an underachiever! KILL ‘EM ALL!”
Hicks released his first album, Dangerous, in 1990 on the New York-based Invasion Records. Dangerous opened with the frighteningly true story of a Waffle House waitress who saw Hicks reading a book and asked, “What you reading for?” Hicks: “God dang it, you stumped me…I guess I read for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones is so I don’t end up being a fucking waffle waitress.” He followed this up with 1992’s Relentless, an album/video in which he shared the opinion that every performer who does a commercial is automatically a talentless hack (except Willie Nelson of course) and depicted all “rock against drugs” musicians as Pepsi and George Bush supporters who give Satan fellatio. Neither album got very far in American sales, but Hicks became an overnight sensation in London and Ireland, where he toured for almost a full year and recorded the Channel 4 special Revelations, which shows a rare look at a more casual and subdued Hicks, clearly relieved to not have to perform for brain-dead redneck Americans. He even manages to end on a positive note, with “It’s Just A Ride,” a life-affirming philosophical plea to the world to not take life so damn seriously.
Hicks never had much interest in television, a medium he despised and railed against, aside from stand-up specials and the occasional heavily-censored appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where he couldn’t even say the word “Jesus.” But by 1993, British television was firmly ready for Hicks, and that year he filmed a pilot for a Channel 4 talk show “Counts of the Netherworld.”
Hicks didn’t live long enough for it to go to series. On June 16, 1993, Hicks was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He received weekly chemotherapy treatments throughout the rest of the year, but it was too little too late. Hicks played his final show at Caroline’s in New York on January 6, 1994, and admitted that with his talent, he could have just been another franchising millionaire, “but no, I had to have this weird thing about trying to illuminate the collective unconscious and help humanity. Fucking moron.” Hicks’ final television appearance, and he hoped his final message to the world, was to be a Letterman appearance – but unfortunately, the producers cut the segment at the last minute (to Letterman’s eternal regret), and that footage has never been seen. Shortly after his final show, Hicks moved into his parents’ house in Little Rock, Arkansas, and died there on February 26, 1994 at the age of thirty-two.
Two posthumous albums, Arizona Bay and Rant In E-Minor, were released in 1997 by Rykodisc, who also reissued Dangerous and Relentless the same day. Since then, five more Bill Hicks CDs have seen the light of day, including the compilation Philosophy: The Best of Bill Hicks, the rarities collection Love, Laughter and Truth, and the unreleased concert Flying Saucer Tour Volume 1, named for Hicks’ assertion that like flying saucers, he, too, seemed only to be appearing in small Southern towns in front of rednecks, and that he, too, was questioning his own existence. Unlike Hicks’ other albums, the audience on Saucer is quite hostile, and Hicks, naturally, is quite hostile back.
Like Hicks’ greatest musical hero Jimi Hendrix, Hicks’ star and legacy has only risen since his premature death, but though he is revered as a legend among comedians and comedy nerds, Hicks has never been the household name in groundbreaking comedy he deserves to be. Hicks was not above self-hype, but always tried to make himself known as the smartest and most evolved comedian, not the most marketable one. And in retrospect, Hicks almost did his job too well – his point of view was so forward-thinking, and so influential on the comedians that followed, that nowadays his act seems almost tame, if not preachy (remember, though, that there were fewer converted at the time). If a comedy-absorbing young person of today were to watch Hicks in 1990, as Hicks tried in vain to open his audiences’ minds to the dangers of bland music and organized religion, it’s easy to imagine that young person wondering WHY Hicks thinks his audience wouldn’t agree with him.
It may be an exercise in futility to imagine what Hicks might have accomplished had he lived longer, but what comedy fan hasn’t? How would Hicks’ act have evolved into the new millennium, with all its new avenues of free speech? Would he have needed to evolve at all, or would society have finally evolved to suit HIM, just as Britain had? Certainly he could have grown into a mirror-universe Robin Williams, endlessly rehashing the same observations about President Bush’s backwards-thinking Christian fundamentalism and greedy oil-hungry war in Iraq to appreciative audiences paying hundreds per ticket for the same bits they’ve seen and heard before. But more likely Hicks would have shied away from any such laziness and stagnation, and evolved his act even further, taking stand-up to unimagined new levels of personal bitterness and risk of audience alienation, always staying ten steps ahead of all other comedians. Bill Hicks in 1992 said many of the same things all the hack comedians finally got around to saying in 2002. If Hicks were still around in 2008, it stands to reason that he’d make observations everyone will make in 2018. Would Hicks have celebrated and utilized the internet as a means of free speech? Or would he have brutalized it for making free speech too easy and accessible to the common moron? Or both?
Through it all, in his comedy you could tell Hicks was an idealist, like when he’d end his act by suggesting we take all our trillions of defense spending and use it to feed, clothe and educate the impoverished of the world, then he’d mime getting assassinated. Beneath all the vitriol, Hicks yearned for a world where everyone got along and respected each other, a world where people didn’t make superficial “Satanic” enemies out of drugs, pornography, rock music and alternate cultures just to compensate for having such miserable lives, a world where people stopped fearing “God” and started loving the God within. It’s a world he never saw, and probably, neither will we. But at least we have his comedy to remind us why it’s not our fault.