Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

Comedy was something Bill did in parallel to music. The two weren’t mutually exclusive: he loved both, and he invested hours of time working on both. Bill and Dwight were already spending much of their after-school time hanging out, but in the 7th grade, joke writing was still a solo activity for Bill. By the time the summer of 1975 rolled around, things began to change. Bill and Dwight were listening to sets by comedians – Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin – taped from the late-night talk shows with a hand-held audio recorder.

They were also developing more characters; better imitations of their goofy parents. Then, a couple of months into 8th grade, Dwight’s brother got his hands on a copy of Woody Allen doing stand-up in his nightclub routine. Big deal? In the mid-Seventies it was. This was like finding a copy of the Zapruder film. This was cooler than being made a general in the Kiss Army.

And it’s what really brought them together not just as friends with similar interests and tastes, but as a comedy team. “It was our first writing of jokes together,” Slade recalls. “Most of them were his, and I mostly just tagged on to them in the beginning. I was writing my own, but Bill was way ahead of me. My jokes were really simplistic and idiotic, to be honest. It wasn’t until then – and it’s so ridiculous to talk in these terms – but it wasn’t until 8th grade that I started to mature in my joke writing.”

Bill and Dwight also started working on their own play, Death. It was highly derivative of Woody Allen’s play Death Knocks (not to be confused with the Allen play of the same name, Death, that would become the loose basis of his movie Shadows and Fog). They tried out for the 8th grade talent show. Woody Allen, however, apparently wasn’t good enough for an 8th grade talent show. And as his apostles, Bill and Dwight weren’t either. They failed the audition. “Inspired” as it might have been by Allen, the play was not without its own originality and humor. Thirty years later, Slade half-jokes, “I’m still bitter.”

There was a silver lining. The Spring Forest Junior High drama teacher asked them to perform their play for the speech class. They happily obliged. In front of the willing audience, Bill and Dwight were stellar. They got real laughs, real applause. They were now as encouraged as they had been dejected after the rejection from the talent show. Their intuition that they were good at this – at writing, at creating, at getting laughs – was correct.

By that time Bill and Dwight (performing under the stage names of Mel and Hal – their middle names) had a fair amount of material: three monologues of about fifteen minutes each, plus the play. They had already put together a half-hour tape of their best stuff and sent it to local agents in hopes of having someone do the legwork of getting them gigs, and also gaining some legitimacy. As it was, they weren’t doing so great by themselves.

They still had some hard lessons to learn. Later that month Bill and Dwight saw an ad in the Houston Chronicle for open auditions for the Easter Seals Telethon in April. They were still keeping their ambitions clandestine, and couldn’t ask their parents for rides. So they took their bikes across town. Drenched from the effort, with the aid of Houston’s humidity – like a natural sauna 365 days a year – they arrived at the local school for the deaf where the auditions were being held.

Trying to cool off and stay calm, they did about ten minutes for the judges. Mel and Hal were told they were great writers. They got a “we’ll let you know.” For artistic teens, this was doubly hellish: in their budding social lives they were getting, “let’s just be friends” from the ladies; in their budding careers they were getting the showbiz equivalent. Mel and Hal never heard back from the Easter Seals folks. Neither did Bill and Dwight, for that matter.

On the upside, Bill and Dwight had done their first stand-up gig together.

They soon came across another ad in the paper: an open audition for a restaurant that put on live entertainers. Again, they took their bikes to the restaurant. They ended up in a room in front of five or six adults – restaurant and nightclub owners – who, in Slade’s words, “laughed their asses off.” Not because two kids showed up, but because of the comedy the kids did. These adults, with no obligations to like them, loved them. Bill and Dwight knew one thing: even if they weren’t getting work, they were getting laughs. They had a good solid six minutes of material.

They had also got themselves hooked up with Universal Talent. When Dwight and Bill started looking for agents, they didn’t even know what a headshot was. It’s not the kind of thing a 14-year-old should know for any particular reason, but it was indicative of the gap between what they were and what they wanted to be. Even the most basic facts about the business of entertainment as a business were beyond them.

Add this ignorance to the fact that they were essentially sneaking around behind their parents’ backs, and it’s all the more miraculous that they even dared to endeavor this endeavor. They had to call around studios looking for a photographer. When they were able to lowball someone to a price they could afford, they still had to ride their bikes (again) miles across town to the get the shots taken. On top of that, Bill was having to pilfer sweaters from his dad so that he could wear something presentable in the pictures. Finally, when the contact sheets arrived at Bill’s house for review, Mary Hicks opened the package before Bill could intercept the mail. That caused another row in the house. One: what the heck were the pictures for? Two: why the heck was Bill wearing his father’s sweater in them?

A meeting at Universal Talent? That was another 20-mile bike ride across town. Two hours on two wheels for about two minutes in the offices. Beverly the assistant told the sweat-drenched duo, “We’ll give you a call.” Nothing was easy. At least they were staying fit.

That summer, 1976, Bill attended camp. Church camp, actually. Somewhere out in West Texas. There he did his first solo stand-up gig. “I was absolutely terrified,” he confessed years later. “Not the least reason was that it was a church camp and a lot of the guys who I had been watching were like nightclub comics and Richard Pryor, so obviously I had to edit on my feet a little bit. I felt like I had made a huge mistake and I should have been in the ‘Kumbaya’ chorus that went up before me.” But after the show Hicks was accosted by more than one of his peers wanting to know how he had the courage to get up and do that in front of people.

“I don’t remember the exact thing that got the first laugh. I know I had, like, fourteen minutes of material, and, like, seven minutes of it was stolen, or someone else’s, like, Woody Allen material which nobody in Baptist West Texas country would ever be able to trace.”

Bill didn’t tell his parents but it wasn’t like he could keep it a secret. He did have the camp, staff and all, as an audience. One of the jokes he told was: “Ladies and gentleman, I had a rough upbringing. I was breast-fed … On falsies.”

Mary Hicks found out about Bill’s stand-up performance from one of the other ladies at Sunday School. Mary then went to the church’s assistant pastor to get more details. The pastor told Mary, “You might want to look at how you raised him.” Clearly Bill was correct in thinking no one there would ever be able to source his material. (Allen’s actual line: “I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood; I was breast-fed through falsies.”)

Another faculty member of the Sunday School told Mrs. Hicks that her son thought Bill’s comedy was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Bill’s first show; Bill’s first rave review.

In the fall of 1976, Bill and Dwight were starting as freshmen at Stratford High School. Stratford was a shit-brown brick building with a mod-deco facade. And the near-windowless exterior made it look more like the kind of place where you would have line-up and lock-down than you would take roll. It was somewhere between eyesore and oddity. It hadn’t produced any poet laureates. It produced country music star Clint Black.

Right about the time Bill and Dwight were supposed to start high school, they also got a shot at what could have been the biggest gig of their lives … or the worst. While, over time, the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon has morphed into a parade of has-beens, back in those days it was a fixture of Americana: Elvis, John Lennon and Sinatra all made appearances. Plus, it was raising money for kids with muscular dystrophy.

The way the telethon works, there is a national show supported by dozens if not hundreds of smaller, regional shows all running concurrently. During the broadcast, the network cuts back and forth from the national to the regional shows. In Houston, this was being held in a restaurant, and the restaurant needed to book acts for the entire forty-eight hours of the telethon.

Frantic to fill the time slots, the telethon’s bookers called all of the agencies around town asking, “Who do you have? What can you give us?” Universal Talent called Bill and Dwight asking how much time they could do. They had their normal set of about a half hour, and they had the play. Beverly at Universal told them: “We have three hours we need to fill.” Bill replied: “We can fill it all.”

“Our idea was that it was going to broadcast on TV,” says Slade. “In reality, maybe it was going to be on in the background of the local show.” They had no idea even what kind of gig it was. It didn’t matter. When they went to their parents to ask permission, they got turned down flat.

Bill spent the bulk of his freshman year working on comedy by using his classmates as his audience. One teacher tried a creative solution to curtail Bill’s interrupting of class: she offered him the first five minutes of class. That time was his to get it out of his system. The rest was hers for teaching. Giving Bill the Sudetenland. Bad idea.

Mary recalls, “One of the teachers called me and asked me if I could help her get her class back from Bill. She said, ‘I told him he could have five minutes while I was checking the roll,’ and she said, ‘I can’t get it back.’ I said, ‘That’s your problem, you shouldn’t have let him get up there.'”

At lunch Bill and Dwight would resume their tag team activities by terrorizing the lunchroom. It was a low-paying gig, but it was a guaranteed booking five days a week. It was proto-guerilla theater. They would perform fake fights, do outrageous character pieces, flip tables and chairs. It was adolescent lunacy. And it was non-stop.

This would continue in track, at the end of the school day. Dwight and Bill would be jogging around the oval. Bill would inch in front of Dwight, slow, then bend over. An oblivious Dwight would unwillingly nail Bill in the ass from behind. Mime sodomy. During the fall, this went on in front of the football team. The team would be practising on the field; Dwight and Bill would be doing their schtick on the track encircling that field. They were performing for their friends on the football team, the people they knew who thought they were funny; but they were also pissing off some of the upperclassmen. It was bad enough that the comedie kids were getting attention in the lunchroom, but carrying it out to the sports arena – that was just showing them up.

“It was almost like doing antics in front of an ape in the zoo. They were initially just confused, then they would want to kill and beat and hit,” says Slade. “I remember seeing them once look at each other and nod and take off running after us. It was terrifying because these were very large Texas football players.”

Late in their freshman year, Dwight handed Bill a book by Ruth Montgomery called A World Beyond. The light went on. Dwight had had a very intense dream about death, and something in the book spoke very specifically to him about what had happened. When Bill read the book, he was similarly blown away. Destiny, fate, choosing your life; the way Montgomery wrote about these things Bill found very comforting. Bill and Dwight spent hours together talking about these concerns. Hours and hours. Southern Baptist tenets, those were his parents’ beliefs. Other spiritual avenues were opening up to Bill.

The Beatles had made the Maharishi a hipster-household name in the late Sixties, but by 1975 he had become mainstream, appearing on the 13 October cover of Time magazine with the teaser: “Meditation: The Answer to all Your Problems?” Still, it was a bit of a coup when Bill got his parents to allow him to attend a transcendental meditation retreat over the Thanksgiving weekend of his sophomore year. While largely a secular celebration, Thanksgiving is one of the top two family-centric holidays in America. For Bill to be able to leave the Hicks family to hang out with strangers (save Dwight), and do things that his parents not only didn’t fully understand but also didn’t subscribe to belief-wise, was astounding.

It’s no less amazing that Bill and Dwight (this time with Dwight’s older brother Kevin) gained permission to attend a second retreat over Christmas break. It was not only longer – a full week instead of a holiday weekend – it was right as families are about to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. If the Thanksgiving retreat was a coup, the Christmas one was a minor miracle.

It wasn’t the last bit of karmic kismet the pair had in store. During the following semester of school, in April the Houston Chronicle ran a feature on a new comedy club in town. This was it. This was the answer. Prior to this, Dwight had been combing the want ads for “Entertainer” under “E", or “C” for Comedians. Obviously there was nothing available for 14-year-old stand-ups. As he describes it, “It was just stupid.” Now they had an outlet. About a week after seeing the feature in the Chronicle, Dwight and Bill sneaked out of their houses and were standing on the stage of the Comedy Workshop, performing their material in front of a paying adult audience. But it was just a little too late. Dwight had known for months that at the end of the school year his family would be moving to Oregon.

“It was intoxicating,” as Slade recalls, “but there was this horror because here we are and we are really clicking, but we knew I have to leave.”

They were also found out by their parents and grounded for the rest of their adolescence.

Kevin Booth

Who am I? Well, I’ll give you an idea. The last few months I’ve been doing a one-man show – like a lot of comics these days are doing one-man shows, and I am no exception … The theme of the one-man show is about my life growing up, as I did, in a happy, healthy and loving family. And it’s called “Let’s Spend Half a Minute with Bill.” And uh … Well, hell, it’s such a short show I can do it for you right now:

“Good evening, everybody. Mommy never beat me. And Daddy never fucked me. Goodnight.”

I don’t know if the show will be able to relate with dysfunctional America, but that’s the way I was raised. Sorry. No bone to pick. Supported me in everything I did.

– Bill Hicks

It’s true. Bill’s parents supported him. When Bill wanted to be a musician, his parents dropped $1000 buying him a Fender Stratocaster guitar and an amplifier to go with it.

When Bill decided he wanted to move to LA after high school and pursue a career in comedy instead of going to college, his parents agreed to pay rent on his apartment in the San Fernando Valley. They even bought him a Chevette so he had a car to get around in.

Certainly Bill didn’t mean the bit about his parents to be taken literally. The strand of Baptist fundamentalism that wanted to take everything literally was antithetical to the core of Bill’s identity and everything he ever preached. Still, things were a lot less black-and-white when it came to the doctrine’s notion of the “happy, healthy, loving” family.

I remember the first time I met Bill’s mom. Bill and I were standing in the kitchen of his house, having this hush-hush conversation. To anyone watching, it must have looked like we were doing a drug deal. But we were talking about the stage show for our band, Stress, the one that didn’t even exist yet. Bill already had arena-sized ideas: “We’ll have this one song where we do the explosion thing, and one of the guys will jump out on stage with a fifty-foot papier-maché penis that starts coming over the audience. And the girls …”

Right then Bill’s mom walked into the kitchen. “Who’s your friend, Bill?” Bill’s response was less happy, healthy or loving than I ever could have ever expected.

“Godammit, Mom, I fucking hate your guts.” He stormed out of the kitchen. I was left standing there. Just me and Mary Hicks. “Uh, hi. I’m Kevin Booth.” Thanks, Bill.

His mom’s response was as surreal as it was calm, as in her heavy southern drawl she asked, “Do you want some pineapple, Kevin?” Did she not hear what I just heard? I said no thanks to the pineapple.

My lasting image of Bill’s dad, Jim Hicks, is a lot more pedestrian but no less ridiculous. The neighborhood association where we lived, Nottingham Forest, would award “Yard of the Month” to the spot with the nicest yard. Bill’s dad won the honor frequently enough that Jim could have landscaped in a home for the accompanying sign: it was almost a permanent fixture.

Jim proudly displayed the fuck out of that thing. Tending to the yard – that’s how I will always remember Jim. Outside at the break of dawn; Saturday and Sunday mornings; sporting his black socks and sock garters while mowing the lawn or clipping the hedges. Bill made endless fun of his dad for that, and for other aspects of his character Bill found embarrassing; but he also had deep respect for his father’s work ethic. Still, when Bill started to set foot on the stage it was open season and many of Bill’s characters were just variations on the theme of Jim.

One of my bands wrote a song about Jim years later, called “Yard of the Month.” Jim Hicks was like no other father I had ever met. He wasn’t just Bill’s father. Sometimes it was like he was your father, too.

Anytime anyone went to Bill’s house, they had to get past Jim, who was always doing that classic “father” pose Bill often mimicked on stage – right arm cocked behind his head, lips pressed forward sternly, eyes squinting and laden with seriousness. Bill would coach you that when you entered the house, go straight to his room. Just go past his dad. Ignore. Just keep going. He could do it. His friends couldn’t.