Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

Slade describes it: “We got up on a Sunday, and we were silent the whole day. Lit candles, did prayers back and forth. The idea was to offer up ourselves to God’s will, or the will of whatever the Universe’s power was.”

They started out with meditation. Dwight doing a TM and Bill doing a TM that morphed into a thing of his own design. They listened to a tape Bill had picked up in Austin of an Indian chanter named Kuthoumi. Then, according to Slade, “The next step was to invite in all the masters to help us, to surround the area with white light and protect us as we went through this prayer.”

They exchanged prayers about what they wanted. “Bill’s prayers were surprisingly Christian in their nature,” Dwight recalls. “Mine were kind of generic in terms of ‘higher power,’ ‘universe,’ ‘nature.’ His were ‘God, the father,’ ‘Jesus.’ They were very Christian-oriented, which was odd because he felt so betrayed by Christianity. Creative people, especially greatly creative people like Bill, can’t ignore their spirituality because it is so essential to their work and their being. It comes up whether they like it or not. And Bill was raised in an environment where you have this – the only way you get to express it is with this two-dimensional dogma that is more about the process than it is the goal. He was so betrayed by that.

“I remember him saying what he wanted most was to do God’s comedy. He wanted to do stand-up, and he wanted to do it like it had never been done before. He wanted God to speak through him.

“Later on we went and had doughnuts. It’s like we were exhausted so, ‘Let’s go have some fucking sugar, Jesus.'”

A couple of weeks later Bill left LA. And even though he left some of his belongings behind, it was clear he wasn’t coming back any time soon.

When he left, he wrote a note and adorned it with a drawing, a self-portrait of Bill playing the guitar, cigarette dangling from his mouth. WDPS.

Calling the comedy biz in LA “Sybil in reverse,” Bill was happy to be back home. “There are 10,000 bodies out there with one personality,” he said. But LA had taught Bill that he didn’t even truly have his own voice yet. Yet. He was about to take a big step towards finding out how to let that voice scream. The dirty clothes in Bill’s suitcase had barely had time to air out when he decided he was going to try taking mushrooms.

Bill rang the bell. It’s a user’s term. He had that seminal experience. On stage that night he claimed he could read the audience’s thoughts. Mushrooms did things meditation clearly couldn’t. All it took was a few caps and about a half hour and Bill transformed himself into a clairvoyant with dick jokes.

This was the answer. How could he bomb if he could tap into what the audience was thinking? Easily. Bill started taking mushrooms and going on stage every single night. It got less and less effective, and he got less and less funny.

One night he exhausted the mushroom magic completely. He went up on stage after dosing and soon ended up lying in the fetal position on the corner of the stage. The audience took their coasters, their wadded-up napkins, and started playing target practice with Bill’s inert body.

Then he turned around. He said to his friends, “You know what? I’m never going to take drugs and go on stage again.”

Bill quit doing mushrooms and immediately turned to alcohol. He was at the Comedy Workshop in Austin when, having never drunk a drop in his life, Bill started downing tequila shots before going on stage. Here was a kid who had never had those formative experiences where you learn about losing control. Part of teen drinking is learning what you can and cannot handle. Bill missed out on that in his priggish crusades.

When he got on stage, he unloaded, and started berating the audience in general.

Then he got into it with individuals in the audience. That set the blueprint for the mythos of Bill. It wasn’t every night. It wasn’t even most nights. But it could happen any night. First Bill would get drunk, then he would get really drunk. He’d go on stage and someone in the audience might say something to set him off. And that was it. He’d tear into anything. Says Pineapple, “You know, people were kind of wary about hiring us, because you never knew what was going to happen.”

There was one certainty with Bill: the party had started.

Once Bill started drinking, he completely transformed his lifestyle. He wore all black – black shirt, black leather jacket, black sunglasses. The diet was changed. He was off tofu and rice. Smokes? If he couldn’t get a Marlboro Red, he’d tear the filter off a Marlboro Light.

His material was changing as well – less pilfering and emulation of his idols – but it still wasn’t that hard-hitting. There wasn’t any politics, there wasn’t any religion. He was angrier, but there was no mission, no message. The anger wasn’t focused on anything, it was just stand-up. “Those army commercials, they’re inspiring. Aren’t they? ‘The Army: we do more before 9 a.m. than most people do in a whole day.’ Is that supposed to get me to join? I got to bed at eight.” Or, “You turn the air conditioner on in a Chevette while driving it, it’s like hitting the car in the nuts. Erh. Erh. Erh. Errrr. It goes to five miles an hour. It’s like the Flintstones are driving this thing. I hit a moth the other day and did $400 worth of damage.”

He did have jokes on the joys that accompanied his new-found appreciation for alcohol: “Regularity is more important than lust to me now. You drinkers know what I’m talking about? If I have a solid shit, that pretty much makes my day.” And he still did the goober dad.

Bill got an apartment in the Montrose area of Houston, not far from the Annex. The club and the Outlaw Comics became his life. Kinison was gone, but there was still a solid group of comics dedicated to speaking their minds. Epstein had also come back from the aborted assault on LA. They all had the same comedie ethos and generally the same affinity for drinking and drugs.

Was it really that bad? It’s a matter of perspective. To a guy like Ron Shock, who had both been a CEO and spent time in jail, the drinking was pronounced but not excessive. Says Shock: “My memories of that time do not include a bunch of drunks. There would be times when they would get plastered, but it wasn’t out of hand.”

But to someone with a little more white-bread background, like Laurie Mango, who also had the perspective of being more to the edge and not quite in the thick of it, it really was that bad. “You can pretty much summarize the whole thing by the fact that they’re now all in AA. It was all about drinking. Going from one drinking thing to another, one bar to another.” Pineapple, Jack Mark Wilks, even Hicks himself, they all ended up getting with the program, literally.

On 16 December 1982, Bill turned 21. He celebrated with a set at the Annex in Houston. It wasn’t like he and the Outlaws needed an excuse to party, but give them one and they’d take it and run with it.

Bill’s 21st was supposed to be a monumental event. When Dwight moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon, his address was 2021 Lakeshore Drive. When he moved to Burbank with Bill, their address was 2021 West Olive. That was enough to convince Bill the universe was orchestrating a scheme with the numbers 20 and 21 involved. Bill had concluded that when he was 21 and Dwight was 20, that’s when they were going to make it.

So Dwight called Bill at the Annex on his birthday. Bill was with Laurie, and he was absolutely shitfaced. He was slurring. Dwight was disenchanted. He hung up and thought, “Bill’s gone.”

Two months later, in February of 1983, Jay Leno came to Austin for six shows. Bill drew the opening slot.

For Bill, it wasn’t so much of a break as he was already a known quantity in Austin, but it was six nights in front of locals who might not otherwise make it out to the Workshop. More importantly the friendly relationship the two comedians would forge that week would last Bill’s entire life, both for good and bad.

Leno’s visibility had increased in the previous year thanks to David Letterman. Letterman’s fledging NBC talk show, Late Night with David Letterman, had become the hip channel destination for college kids and insomniacs. Leno had already made appearances on Late Night since the show hit the air in 1982. Letterman would have Leno on and ask him what his current “beef” was, then Leno would tee off. He wasn’t political, it was middleweight ranting. But it was funny and it brought Leno fans.

To wit: Jay packed the house at the Workshop for the week.

Leno hung out backstage with Bill’s friends all week: Bill and Laurie, who had come to town for the week; Kevin and his girlfriend Jere; Mavis, Leno’s wife, talked astrology and gave the couples personal readings.

From his earliest interactions with Bill, Leno knew he was good, recalling: “I was playing in Austin, and he would come and listen. You know, when you’re a comedian, you’ve been on TV, inevitably, the comedy club owner always says, ‘Oh, there’s a group of people in the city, would you talk to them about comedy?’ Okay, so, one of the afternoons, you go down, you talk to them about comedy … I always find when you’re teaching comedy, the one who sort of gets up in disgust and leaves and thinks you’re a jerk is usually the best comedian in the room.”

That was Bill. With Bill opening for him that week, Leno gave him a nickel’s worth of free advice. He had to clean it up if he wanted to do television. That was the best way to make it to the next level, to be seen by millions of people at once. “Fuck” wasn’t going to get it done with Standards and Practices on any network.

In March of 1983, Bill headed back out to LA to collect his things. He brought his new pet ferret, Neil, with him. When he got to the California border he made the mistake of disclosing the identity of his traveling companion to the authorities. The State of California is fairly protective and restrictive on plants and animals entering the state. No ferret for Bill. Bill turned around, drove back up Interstate 10 a few miles to the rest stop inside the Arizona border. He proceeded to nap and loiter for eight hours. Long enough to assure a shift change at the agricultural inspection station on the California side of the border. Bill stashed Neil in a dirty sock, buried it in his dirty laundry, and said nothing as he drove through the checkpoint station.

The guy who arrived in LA four hours later to see Dwight was completely different from the one who had left LA several months before. The tip-off might have been the all-black wardrobe, but the change was one of more than just clothes. According to Slade, “It was almost as if you were watching your big brother come back from college. He left the varsity athlete star and he came back hippie who’s smoking grass.”

It was an accurate description, if a bit off in the details, as marijuana was the one drug Bill didn’t care for. “Well, this person has taken a giant leap in his own evolution and it certainly doesn’t include me. It kind of hurt my feelings but at the same time I had enough respect for him to know it was a step he needed to take. He seemed to communicate that too,” says Slade.

Dwight knew Bill was coming back to move out, but he had established his own life in Bill’s absence. He was going to school, and was taking a playwriting class. The class instructor was so impressed with Dwight’s work that he decided to produce a one-act play Dwight had written. That was occupying most of his spring.

Bill spent the next two months in LA not doing much. LA was the best place in the world to be busy all day doing nothing. He read, smoked, slept, hung out at the Store with his roommate (Dwight, not the ferret). He had a couple of showcases to hang around for. He saw Richard Pryor perform on the Strip, the one “true master” of stand-up, as Bill thought of him.

Bill was also putting together a personal catalogue of his work with Dwight, his past partner to that point. He was collecting and curating himself. Bill wanted to chronicle all of the characters he and Dwight had ever created and preserve them in a less ephemeral format than just mutual recollection. Dwight had an 8mm camera they had played with before. They sat down with pen and paper and brainstormed all the people they had ever invented in the name of comedy.

Although Dwight had continued to build his own life in his friend’s absence, still Bill’s departure affected him, as he concedes: “The reason I moved down there was to finish a project with Bill, so once he left, I was only there for another three or four months.”

In mid-May of 1983, Bill packed up the Chevette and made the 1400-mile journey back to Houston where he promptly made a stab at starting a more practical life. He moved in with Laurie … at her parents’ house.

Moving back to live with your own parents after leaving to go to school or start a career was usually a sign of failure and humiliation; either that or it made you the ultimate mama’s boy. Moving in with someone else’s parents, especially your girlfriend’s, was so unusual that there were no social stereotypes even to attach to it. It was just strange, but Bill got along well with Laurie’s parents.

That summer, Bill enrolled in classes at the University of Houston. Also known affectionately by the locals as “Cougar High,” U of H was not the most academically rigorous institution. Bill had a couple of standard jokes he told about his foray into college life: “I just couldn’t make it up for that eight o’clock class … And I was in night school.” He studied philosophy: “I found out it all meant nothing and I left.”

Bill and academia just didn’t make a good couple. But he had his comedy career.

Until he quit, that is. In 1983, at the ripe old age of 21, Bill retired from stand-up.

Bill’s first Last Show Ever was at the Comedy Workshop in Austin. By showtime, he was exceptionally drunk. Even by his standards. He got up on stage and started to rant. He was talking about how he wasn’t going to end up like Lenny Bruce. He wasn’t going to end up in a bathtub dead from a drug overdose. He was screaming at the audience. It stopped being comedy about thirty seconds into it.

One woman in the audience kept calling out to the stage, “We love you, Bill. We love you. Don’t go.” He yelled back at her to get her own life.

Mercifully some of Bill’s friends got up and spared the audience. Spared Bill. Dave DeBesse was among the mercy killers. “I’m fairly certain I wasn’t alone in doing it, because it wasn’t anything quite that heroic, but I know along with some other people I went up and took him offstage.”

On stage Bill was enraged and outraged. He was angry at the audience for needing him to tell them what to think. He was fed up with trying to enlighten them, yelling at them for being lemmings, for not thinking for themselves. Offstage Bill was contrite. “I remember taking him back to the green room. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m sorry.’ He was apologizing for the set, which wasn’t even a set. It feels like he was on stage a really long time, but I’m sure he wasn’t.”

The retirement didn’t last long. More than a month, less than two. Considering that Bill would “quit” comedy dozens of times over the course of his career, it was actually fairly impressive. His other attempts to get out of stand-up usually lasted just a day or two.

Kevin Booth