Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

He made a short-lived hobby of trying to find successful comedians who had monosyllabic first and last names. He couldn’t come up with any besides Bob Hope. Bill even gave serious consideration to legally changing his name. Obviously he stuck with it, but his dissatisfaction never left him.

In late 1991, Bill was at friend Stephen Doster’s house in Austin. Nirvana had just started to make it big and Bill insisted on taking Doster, a well-respected local guitar player, singer-songwriter, and producer, to local institution Waterloo Records to buy him both the band’s albums, Bleach and Nevermind, then drive around town listening to them.

That was cool with Doster. First, though, he had to take his toddler son, Django, out for a walk. They headed down to the hike-and-bike trail along Town Lake and they walked. Bill says, “So, Stephen. You named the kid Django?” Django: named after guitarist Django Reinhardt.

“Yeah, that’s his middle name, but it’s what everyone calls him,” says Doster.

“Of course, you know what’s going to happen,” Bill baits him.

“What do you mean? Nothing’s going to happen to him.”

“Surely you, of all people, know what’s going to happen,” says Bill.

“No, Bill. What do you mean? What are you trying to say?” Doster asks. What, is he destined to suffer a disfigured hand in a fire accident à la his namesake? That’s not nice. Bill is just confusing his friend.

“His dad is a songwriter. His mom is a photographer. You named him Django. Surely you know what is going to happen to him?”

“What’s going to happen to him?” Doster isn’t sure where this is going and is more than a little perplexed. Then Bill grabs Doster around the neck with his hands – friendly, not hostile – and says, “He’s going to get sucked and fucked more by the time he’s 17 years old than you and I ever did in our goddamn lives.”

Bill the reductionist had figured it all out: cool name equals hot ass. His experience was the opposite. Redneck name equals not much ass at all. Jim and Mary Hicks, Bill’s parents, should have just called him “Cletus". In addition to the distinctly redneck name, Bill also had the misfortune of being born into a devout Southern Baptist family. With about sixteen million practising patrons, Southern Baptists constitute the largest fundamentalist denomination in the United States. And as fundamentalists they believe the authors of the Bible were inspired by God, making the Bible inerrant. That makes it easy to read: take everything literally.

Convenient for people without any imagination, but it also leads to some bizarre beliefs. Many Southern Baptists really do believe it is a sin to dance. The movie Footloose wasn’t just pulled from the dregs of a Hollywood executive’s brain. Some, not all, but some Baptist theologians maintain that dance is a social form of sexuality. So no go.

When Bill was growing from boy to teen in the Seventies, the Southern Baptists Convention was becoming even more extreme in its beliefs. There was an internal conflict in the church between moderates and fundamentalists, and the liberal factions lost. So, the church then began issuing statements on topics like the submissive role of women and criticizing feminist organizations. It issued a series of prayer guides to help save the non-Christians and lead them to salvation.

Despite his persistent protests and weak attempts to weasel out of it, every Sunday morning Bill was required to go to church. No exceptions. This is the doctrine he was fed; these are the beliefs he was expected to buy into. If every philosophy presupposed a sociology, then it’s not hard to see how a reactionary teen looking to get enlightened as much as he was looking to get laid, might have a field day with a religion to which the phrase “figuratively speaking” was meaningless.

Bill’s parents claimed they weren’t particularly religious; but every Sunday, there the Hicks were in the congregation. According to his mother Mary, “We just knew to go and went.”

Unfortunately for Bill, church took place on Sunday morning and Saturday night was the best time to catch late-night comedy. NBC had Saturday Night Live. Other networks would program movies late, and later still. Bill was usually up until 2 a.m. watching TV in his room. To him this was the kind of studying that mattered. An 8 a.m. wake-up call for church, though, didn’t exactly jive with his preferred sleep schedule.

Like any well-evolved creature Bill had to adapt. He tried resisting entirely, but when that failed, as it invariably did, he would make do. After services Bill would skip Sunday School and go nap in the church library.

Bill’s dad, Jim, worked in management for General Motors. He even wore the big GM ring, sporting it like he was a proud graduate of General Motors University. The company odyssey of the South sent Jim to Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, before affording the Hicks family an extended stay in Houston, Texas. The Hicks family bought a two-story hybrid of a colonial and a box in a slice of suburbia called Nottingham Forest, where an olio of shade trees sheltered both sides of the street. It was somewhere between upper-middle and lower upper-class America. The only danger was the boredom.

From the outside it all looked very Norman Rockwell: an immaculately kept house with a pristine lawn (Hicks mythology has it that Jim would measure the cut of the grass with a ruler) in a desirable zip code; 2.3 kids (well, three if you want to get technical – a brother Steve and a sister Lynn, both older); one dog named Sam, another named Chico. But, the veneer of the happy family wasn’t so thick as to be opaque.

As one of Bill’s childhood friends recalled, “There were pictures of Bill with Steve and his sister, and I’d ask, ‘Bill you’ve got a sister? You never told me you had a sister.’

“He was curt, responding, ‘I don’t have a sister.’

‘"Well, who is this?’

‘"Just some person that was in the house.'” Clearly something was rotten in the state of Denmark. Suburban Houston, too.

As a by-product of this household Bill spent a ridiculous amount of time in his room. It was a sanctuary where he could isolate himself from the foreign world of his parents and inculcate his friends to the virtues of sanity, reason and rock ‘n’ roll music. Camped in the permanent mess of his bed he listened to everything from Leadbelly to Led Zeppelin while he typed out one-liners.

His brother, Steve, recalls: “He used to write jokes and slide them under my bedroom door. And I would critique them and give them back … I didn’t even know what it all meant, he just said he was in his room writing all of this stuff.”

He was naturally gifted at almost everything. As a junior high football player, Bill’s speed and strength made him a natural at running back. He was even more gifted as a baseball player – amazingly so. Little League games are just six innings long; each team needs to get three outs in its half inning. That’s eighteen outs. With his wicked curveball and his gangly delivery, Bill regularly accounted for fifteen of those with strike-outs when he was on the mound. That’s so unheard of at that level it’s gaudy.

It was strange, though, that for all of his natural athleticism, Bill didn’t enjoy interacting with direct sunlight, preferring the bright but artificial light of the indoors. Bill and the sun didn’t see eye to eye. As a rule, he kept the blinds in his room drawn. The truth is, Bill probably saw as much sun on the small black-and-white TV in his room as in the sky outside. He wasn’t a shut-in, latch-key kid, but his room was his refuge from his family. He would stay up and watch The Tonight Show. He would read, he would write, and he would listen to records. Everything you needed in order to divine the make-up of a young Bill Hicks, you could get by watching him in his native habitat. Muddy Waters on the stereo, dog-eared copy of The Hobbit on the bed, posters of Jimi Hendrix and Woody Allen papering the walls.

That was Bill’s yin and yang right there – Jimi and Woody. Bill gave the credit to Allen, more than anyone, for inspiring him to get into comedy. He was 13 or 14 when he first saw Allen in the movie What’s New, Pussycat? Later in life Bill himself gave conflicting accounts of that seminal moment. In fact, as Bill got older, the age at which he claimed Allen first infected his life got younger. In an interview Bill gave in the last month of his life, he said that he was 12 and that movie was Casino Royale.

Either the next day or the following summer – again, he gave multiple accounts – Bill was in a bookstore and picked up a copy of Without Feathers. Years later he confessed to an interviewer he couldn’t even explain the affinity. “I’m not Jewish. I’m not short. I’m not a schlemel.”

A pre-teen Bill had just seen Allen in Casino Royale about the time he met one Dwight Slade. It was in the summer of 1974, when they were both between the 6th and 7th grades at Spring Forest Junior High. They were playing touch football with mutual friends. Dwight recalled simply, “He was odd-looking. Very odd-looking.” With jet-black hair, black eyes, and vaguely Asian-looking features, Bill’s appearance was not what you would expect for someone with such an authentically Southern genetic make-up.

Bill had become enamored with Woody Allen’s character of Dr. Noah in Casino Royale. It was the basis for the goofy impersonations he was doing at the time. The physical humor was something that Dwight not only instantly understood, but could match Bill in doing. The two became fast friends and developed a relationship that was part collaborative and part competitive. Recalls Slade: “We would mutually crack each other up, but we also had a sort of sibling rivalry as to who could make our friends laugh more.

“I don’t remember the specific moment, but he told me: ‘We ought to be comedians. We ought to be a comedy team.’ I said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That was my dream when I was a kid. But when he said that I thought, ‘Well, finally here’s a guy that speaks my language.’ He goes, ‘We should be comics. I’ve written some jokes.’ I went over to his house and he showed me. Here’s a guy who thinks like me, I thought. And for Bill I think there was even more of a sense that, ‘Oh my God, I’m not the only crazy person here. I’m not the only person that wants to do something out of the norm.'”

Corny as it sounds, the two developed a really sweet friendship. For example, Dwight’s Boy Scout meetings took place at St. John Vianney Catholic Church, whose grounds ran right up to the Hicks’ backyard fence. During breaks in the Boy Scouting, Dwight would go over to Bill’s and throw a rock up at Bill’s window to get his attention. Bill would open the window and they would talk.

By the time Bill got to high school, despite his natural physical gifts he had all but left sports behind. He stopped playing football; he stopped playing baseball. He kept running track in the 9th grade, then in the first part of the 10th grade. But that was it. Slade explains, “It wasn’t because Bill didn’t like athletics, but he hated what it was becoming in high school.”

High-school sports were like a religion in Texas. High-school football was a religion in Texas. Stadia across the state turned small-town communities into congregations of a sort. Texans from Snook to Shiner easily spent more time on Friday nights in the fall watching the local kids run around the gridiron than they ever spent listening to sermons on Sundays. It was a ratio of about three to one. And Stratford High School didn’t just win, it won state championships. Okay, a state championship during Bill’s junior year (“State in ’78” was the rallying cry); but still, for a 17-year-old kid in Texas, being part of a state championship team would endow you with near god-like status. Stratford’s football team was fairly exceptional. The star running back, Craig James, later started for the New England Patriot team that played in Super Bowl XX. And Stratford standout Chuck Thomas was the back-up center for the San Francisco 49ers team that won Super Bowls XXIII and XXIV.

This is the environment Bill grew up in. If he had wanted it, Bill could easily have been part of the privileged jockocracy. He had all the physical tools needed to be a star athlete. Coolness, popularity, cheerleaders – if Bill had kept playing football and baseball, he could have had access to all the things that make high school a nontraumatic experience for a teen. But he opted out, and that’s where Bill spent the “best years of his life” – a common moniker for that four-year high-school slice of American life.

On the outside. That’s where he belonged. Bill was a misfit, both within his family and, with few exceptions, amongst his peers. He didn’t drink, and couldn’t understand why people did. He wasn’t social and he didn’t go to high-school parties (“keggers”). He liked to read. He was obsessed with Huckleberry Finn, The Hardy Boys and The Hobbit. Mystery and adventure were clearly his favorites.

Bill wasn’t a loser, but high school is pretty binary: either you’re cool or you aren’t. Bill wasn’t in the cool clique. But he had friends and, even though he valued his privacy and being left alone, he wasn’t a loner. Most importantly he had Dwight and, once in high-school, Kevin Booth, a neighborhood kid in the class one year ahead of Bill and Dwight.

It was serendipitous that Bill hadn’t dropped out of sports completely during his freshman year at Stratford because it was in track that both Bill and Dwight first formed a relationship with co-conspirator-to-be Kevin Booth. They were on the track for practice – well, they were out there in their track clothes, but not doing much practising – when Booth approached the pair to say hi. “What’s up? I’m the guy you met yesterday at lunch.”

With the two similarly subversive minds of Dwight and Kevin, Bill would begin dabbling in the two activities that would occupy the rest of his life – music and comedy.

That day on the track with Kevin, Bill and Dwight started talking about putting a band together. They had outlandish ideas about what they wanted to do – “We need to have a big stage show with lights and smoke and we want to have bombs going off and lights and big speakers.”

“I told them, ‘Okay, I know how we can do that,'” Booth remembers. “They were thinking I was full of shit, but I said, ‘Why don’t you guys come over to my house tonight and we’ll get started.'” In Booth they had stumbled across someone with the technical know-how to pull off their oversized designs. They took Booth up on his offer and that night they began their journey to rock stardom. But there was a slight hitch: they didn’t have musical instruments; nor did they have the ability to play instruments.

They called themselves Stress. It was perfect. It sounded punk rock. More importantly, it was monosyllabic and ended with two s’s. That sounds a bit arbitrary, but it turned out to be an unintentional asset. Every child of the Seventies in America knew the phrase: “You wanted the best, you got the best! The hottest band in the land, Kiss.” It was the band’s stage introduction on the multi-platinum-selling Kiss Alive! Dwight and Bill were big Kiss fans. Huge.

It was hard not to be. In the mid-Seventies Kiss were omnipresent.

One day the guys were talking about making smoke bombs for their stage show. Kevin, of course, chimed in: “I know how to make smoke bombs.” He went out and got some dry ice, then they all convened at Dwight’s. They sat in his room in a little circle around a bucket. Kevin poured some water on the dry ice in the bucket. The teens watched this tiny stream of smoke frothing up from the bucket while they listened to Kiss records and talked about how they were going to be bigger than Kiss and have a bigger stage show than Kiss. Bill and Dwight held flashlights, pointed them into the smoke and waved them back and forth. They understood the theater of rock, but they weren’t even community theater of rock.

But now they were Stress, it was like joining Kiss vicariously. All they had to do was substitute the one word. “You wanted the best, you got the best! The hottest band in the land, Stress.” Bill and Dwight would pass each other in the halls of school and greet each other with that rock ‘n’ roll catchphrase intra. It was plug and play hype. They started taking pictures of themselves in their best rock star poses and circulating the pictures at school. Never mind that they didn’t have things like songs or proper instruments. They had pictures. That made it real.

One day Bill was called into the vice principal’s office. Bill looked down at the table in the room and saw the word “Stress” carved into it, complete with the Kiss lightning bolt s’s. Graffiti was a pretty solid accomplishment for a band that hadn’t actually played in front of anybody.

Stress became almost a daily activity for Bill, Dwight, Kevin and miscellaneous other friends who floated in and out of the still-amorphous band. Bruce Salmon, Mike Groner, Steve Fluke, John Terry, all had stints of varying length as members of Stress. Basically, all it took was showing up some afternoon to play at least once. That earned you a place in the lore of Stress genealogy.

Salmon wasn’t just a frequent participant early on, but was a co-founder. His older brother had been in bands with Kevin’s older brother, and between Kevin and Bruce, they offered an invaluable asset to the fledgling band: Kevin could borrow a bass guitar from his brother; Bruce knew how to play it.

Still, initially it was a band by committee. Who wants to play what? Bill had an acoustic guitar that, depending on how you looked at it, had either a couple of strings missing or had a couple of strings. Sometimes Dwight sang, sometimes he played bass. Kevin played a plastic garbage can for a drum. They miked up everything as best they could to achieve maximum distortion, and proceeded to make noise. Again, their aspirations were way beyond their abilities, but that didn’t deter them.