Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

“Where you goin', son?” Jim would start with a heavy southern drawl to match his wife’s – the one that almost made “Bill” into a two-syllable word. The question was like gravity: you couldn’t ignore it. You were now getting cross-examined by Jim. How you were doing in school, how your parents were, etc.

Bill loved his parents, and they loved him. But they were Baptists. Specifically, Southern Baptists. In Texas we have First Baptists, Second Baptists and Southern Baptists. I know Baptists who don’t know the differences between the subsets, but the Hicks were so Baptist that the differences made a difference to them.

My earliest recollections of Bill are in the lunchroom where he used to “perform” on an almost daily basis with his classmate Dwight Slade. For example, they did this one bit in the school cafeteria where Dwight put some raisins into a spoon, and Bill was going to give the raisins to some lucky girl as a gift. Off Bill flew with havoc following. He was running over tables, tripping over chairs, crashing into people. Trays of food and milk were flying into the air. All the while Bill was doing everything necessary to keep the raisins in the spoon. As the commotion grew so did the gathering crowd, as people were trying to see what the big deal was. Well, the “big deal” turned out to be that Bill was presenting a spoonful of raisins to a completely unimpressed young lady. It didn’t really win over the audience, either.

But it’s a perfect image of who Bill was at that age. It was more important to make a lasting impression than to make a good first impression. He could have said something nice to that girl, and been done with it. Maybe compliment her. But no, there had to be a clumsy production to make sure she didn’t forget.

It was also somewhat standard fare of Bill’s formative years with Dwight. Here you had these two little punk-ass kids coming in and trying to be funny by acting weird and wacky. In reality, though, everyone thought they were losers. In fact, they were considered more than just losers. The difference between them and the regular losers was that they were also extroverts. Most of the geekier people in junior high and high school tended to withdraw into themselves. Not Bill and Dwight. They seemed actively to enjoy seeing how strange they could behave in front of people to rile them up.

Still, as a personality, I was drawn to Bill. We talked one day during lunch. Then a couple of days later during track practice I went up to say “hi” again. And before I knew it, we were hanging out together seemingly all the time. Lunch, track, after school. In fact, it was track that helped us become rock stars. “Rock stars” is obviously overstating it, given our modest success in high school as musicians. But track certainly wasn’t exercise; an exercise in convenience, perhaps.

While it was a year-round sport, track was really just another way for the football team to train together in the spring. In Texas there were rules limiting the amount of time high-school football teams could spend practising. Those limits were usually exhausted during the season in the fall. Across the state, shrewd and smarmy coaches alike would sign the entire football team up for track in the spring, football’s off-season. Voilà. They were no longer the “football” team. Rules averted.

So Bill and I were technically running track; however, track was the last class of the school day. And, in the spring, the coaches were generally only concerned with the football players. That meant we were actually doing one of two things. If there was no roll call, Bill and I would leave school, go to my house, and play music. If there was going to be a roll call at the end of class, we would go to sleep on the pole vault mats.

There were advantages to track. Being out there amongst the jocks gave Bill opportunities aplenty to make fun of them. And, of course, when he and Dwight would do these ridiculously stupid things right in people’s faces, it only made people want to inflict bodily harm on them that much more.

There were more than a few incidents when Bill got chased. He and I once did an interview with New Yorker theater critic John Lahr where I talked about one of these incidents. Bill was sitting right next to me as I finished by saying, “They caught Bill and Dwight and beat the shit out of them.”

Bill interrupted me. He was adamant: “No, Kevin, they never caught us. They never caught us and they never beat us.” It wasn’t nit-picking; it was important to Bill that the truth be known. And the truth is, for a guy who looked so thoroughly unathletic, Bill was a damned fast runner at that time. Damned fast. They chased. They didn’t catch.

Bill ran in several track meets before giving it up; and again it wasn’t that he wasn’t good, he just stopped caring. He got more into music; he stopped caring about sports, stopped running track, stopped playing baseball. Sports had definite objectives – score runs, cross the finish line first, etc. Music gave you more latitude. Here’s three minutes of nothing, fill it however you want. Ready? Go! That was clearly more in line with Bill’s ethic.

My parents thought Bill was a terrible influence on my life. I’m sure Bill’s parents thought the same about me, but Bill was actually one of the best things ever to happen to me; and at that point in my life, Bill kept me out of trouble. I don’t think one of our earliest attempts to put a band together, however, would do anything to prove either set of parents wrong. It was born out of misguided anger – inexcusably misguided anger.

We had already been “playing” as Stress when Dwight had a teen crush on a girl, Mila Goldstein, reciprocated. She was, as you might suspect with that name, Jewish. The informal flirtation fell apart and, burned by young love gone wrong, we fought fire with fire by writing a handful of songs. Specifically, songs that made fun of Jews.

We temporarily” changed the band name for the occasion, calling ourselves Joe Arab and the Nazis.

In hindsight it was clearly not the brightest of ideas. In fact, maybe it was the dumbest. Despite how much, prima facie, it looks to the contrary, it wasn’t anti-semitic.

It wasn’t anything more than teen angst. Hell, we didn’t even know what it meant to be anti-semitic. This was long before the History Channel was pumped into every house in America. There weren’t daily documentaries on Hitler and World War II running 24/7 on TV. We weren’t very attentive students, either. Plus, think about it: blue, poo, you, shoe, do, dew, screw … it rhymes with everything. Given our amateurish creative skills, that only served to help.

We just didn’t know – clearly a by-product of our padded suburban upbringing. If Mila had been Italian, we probably would have called ourselves Giuseppe Franco and the Fascists, without knowing what it meant to be fascist. We were kids. Dwight was hurt. We saw our friend suffering. It was a catharsis. That’s all.

We may have been stupid (sorry Mila), but we weren’t that stupid. Only half the reason for putting a band together in the first place was a desire to make music. Less than half: everything always came back around to us trying to find ways to meet girls. Never mind that we were borrowing instruments we couldn’t even play from siblings and friends. We had stage props. We had photos. And we had a good line of bullshit (“Yeah, we’re in a band”). That was enough to make it real. And being a teenage musician, that was a way to meet girls and impress them before you even had to open your mouth. Even better, write a song for a girl. That would get you in her pants, conditional on meeting her, of course.

Bill was smitten with a girl named Tammy Blue and he came up with this song for her called “Moment of Ecstasy.” He told her to come over to my house so we could play a private gig for her. Bill transformed himself into a rock star for the occasion. We might have been standing in the study of my suburban home, but Bill was playing a rock show to a stadium crowd. And there isn’t a bridge long enough to link the gap between what was happening in Bill’s head and what was happening in my house. My drum? The bottom of a plastic trash can. Dwight had a bass I had borrowed from my brother. Bruce was playing an acoustic guitar that had a couple of strings still intact. We dropped a mic into it and ran it through the same amplifier as the drum.

Then we played Bill’s song, which was a really charming number about cuming on a girl’s face.

Our moment of ecstasy I see you laying next to me And I know it’s gonna be right. Cause I’ve got it hot,I’ve got it hot. And you’re not gonna get by Cause I’ll becummin’ in your eye. Cummin’ in your face. Baby it ain’t no disgrace I’m gonna let it rip all over your lip Gonna be cum in your face Cum, cum, cum in your face.

It’s funny because Bill was such an innocent guy with no sexual experience. None. Yet here he was, singing ridiculously nasty lyrics. Everything about Stress was rinky-dink at that point, but it was what we had. It was a doctrine Bill never abandoned. What tools do you have? That was Bill’s only question. What do you have? You have a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Fine. What can you play on a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Pick it up and find out.

It was a very simple choice for Bill: do you want to sit around doing nothing while waiting for someone to give you some better equipment (or money, or whatever resources) so you can do things how you think they are supposed to be done? Or do you want to use what you have and start right now?

To Bill it was an easy choice. Start. Do it now. All you have is a trash can? Then turn the damn thing over and start banging on it. Now it’s a drum and you’re making music. That spirit and that attitude were infectious. Soon Bill and I were checking out books from the library trying to figure out how to make gunpowder so we could have real smoke bombs to go with our fake band. God, if we weren’t a fire hazard we sure looked like one. We made as much (if not more) smoke as noise. I even got my mom involved and she helped make a sign for the band. I cut out the letters S-T-R-E-S-S (yes, they were lightning-bolt s’s) from cardboard and wrapped them in tinfoil, while my mom poked holes in the letters and threaded Christmas lights through them.

That’s why it was so much fun to be around Bill. He didn’t wait for people to give him permission to do what he wanted. He stayed that way through his whole life. When we were older and still struggling, he never waited; he was happy to cobble together whatever resources he could. He never wanted to waste time. It’s like he knew he only had a limited amount of it.

The state of Texas allows you to get a driver’s license before the legal minimum age of 16 if your family can demonstrate that the child not having one would somehow cause a hardship for the family. Because my family had a ranch, somehow this allowed me to get such a “hardship” driver’s license. It was complete bullshit, but it meant I had a car, a blue and white LTD station wagon with fake wood paneling.

Bill had an uncanny gift of endowing ordinary things with special qualities simply by giving them catchphrase names. For example, he immediately started calling that station wagon the Stressmobile. He just had a way of making everything seem special. When you were doing things with him, you felt like you were part of some secret club.

From then on, whatever I happened to be driving, it was called the Stressmobile. Along those same lines, in the Stressmobile we used to go on what Bill termed “Nipple Tours.” Nipple Tours were just us engaging in harmless teen stalking. It wasn’t actually stalking, and it really was harmless, but looking back … it could easily have been made to look sketchy if lawyers had ever got involved.

We’d pile into the car with the Stratford school directory, and look up the addresses of girls we had crushes on. Then we’d do a drive-by. We’d just cruise by the house. That’s all. We went from house to house with the bizarre hope that we would see the girl or find out something – what, I have no idea, as 99.8 per cent of the time we saw absolutely nothing except the front of a house. Surprise.

On the rare occasion we saw someone, we’d pretend it was coincidence. We just happened to be heading down that street doing, uh, something. It was a form of cruising. The cool kids cruised up and down a central drag; we cruised by girls’ houses.

For a while we did our Nipple Tours in my family’s thirty-foot-long motorhome. My parents had given it to me to drive to school, like it was a normal car. There was another girl, Tracy Scovell. She was really hot but she had some scars on her face from where she had been bitten by a dog when she was young. The mark was not only a social hindrance but earned her the nickname of Tracy Scar-veil. Bill had a big crush on her. So after Stress got going and we were actually becoming competent musicians, we had all of our equipment – amps, guitars, etc. – in the motorhome, which happened to be outfitted with a generator.

One day we set up our amplifiers and a PA in the motorhome, then pointed everything out the window. When we pulled up in front of Tracy’s house Bill took the microphone: “Tracy Scovell … this concert is for you.” Then he let it rip. Don’t know if she was even there to hear it. Surprisingly the cops didn’t show up and tell us to stop disturbing the peace.

The band’s first big stroke of luck came when a friend of ours, Steve Fluke, broke both of his arms in a rope swing accident. Fluke was a better guitar player than anyone else we were hanging out with, but he just didn’t fit in. He was younger, but more importantly he was very “Stairway to Heaven” and we wanted to be “God Save the Queen.” However, Steve did have generous parents who had bought him a sweet-ass Les Paul guitar and an expensive amplifier to go with it.

Don’t ever let it be said that Bill wasn’t opportunistic. The day after Fluke broke both of his arms, Bill and I were over at Fluke’s house pretending we felt bad about his accident. After expressing our supposed sympathies, we turned to our more concrete interests. “Hey, man, since you can’t play guitar for a while, can we just borrow this for a couple of days?” Bill asked. “We feel really bad. We’ll come back and visit you tomorrow.”

We ended up leaving with his guitar and his amplifier (this was before Bill’s parents had bought him his rig); and not coming back to visit the following day. Nine months later Fluke turns up at my place raising a stink: “Dude, I want my guitar back.” Bill is going, “Oh shit, this isn’t mine. Is it?”

I don’t think Steve Fluke was unique in being involuntarily generous to us. Looking back, we would use people. We would act like we liked people just so we could use their equipment. We would beg and borrow just to get what we wanted.

It wasn’t long before we started to get a little more serious. Stress was never a joke, but it was just something to do that we enjoyed until Bill forced the issue by getting his parents to buy him a guitar and amp. Suddenly he was asking, “Well, Kevin, what are you going to do?” There was that bass of my brother’s we had been using. My brother Curt had schizophrenia, and at this point he was in and out of mental hospitals and halfway houses, so I was often using his equipment without even asking him. It was there. He wasn’t. I became a bass player.

It’s funny how Bill’s different worlds collided, but it’s when he and I were headed downtown to shop for guitars that we passed the Comedy Workshop for the first time. Bill stared at it as we drove by, his head careening to hold as long a glimpse of it as possible. “That must be the place I read about in the paper,” he muttered to himself. “People get up on stage and do comedy.”

A high-school kid in Texas in the Seventies? I didn’t even really know what a comedian was outside of Bob Hope or maybe Johnny Carson. Weren’t comedians old guys who stood on a stage in leisure suits making “Take my wife … please” jokes? It was something we equated with our parents.

But suddenly it was a budding sport in Houston where people were getting up on stage in front of a room full of strangers and expressing their thoughts; hopefully getting some laughs in the process. Comedy wasn’t really on the radar back then. There just weren’t many comedy clubs around – probably LA and New York, maybe Chicago – and the fact that one popped up in Houston in 1978 was pretty incredible.

For Bill, opportunity was meeting preparation. The Comedy Workshop had an open mic night every Monday. You show up, put your name on a list and you can perform.

When Bill and Dwight heard that, they said to each other: “Okay, we gotta go try this.” Their friends, myself included, were right there encouraging them because people thought they were hilarious. They were too young to know they were too young to sign up for an open mic night at a comedy club. Bill and Dwight knew they could get laughs in front of their friends; and their friends in turn would tell them, “Man, you guys are really funny. You should do this in front of other people.” There comes a time when you have to jump that chasm.

I told my mom we were going to a music store. Bill told his mom we were going to the library. We went to the Comedy Workshop.

It was the middle of a school day. I can’t even remember why we weren’t in school. We weren’t skipping, but there we were at a comedy club. We knocked on the door. A comic by the name of Steve Epstein answered. Bill asked some basic questions: Can anyone do it? How do you sign up? Does it matter that I’m only 16?

Yes. You put your name on the list. Maybe, we’ll have to check.

Epstein gave Bill a “What It Takes to Be a Comedian”-type speech. Dedication to the art. Hard work. Sacrifices that, with a bowl haircut, it doesn’t look like you are ready to make. Blah blah blah. The irony is that for all Bill didn’t know, he probably knew almost as much as Epstein at that point, if not about the practice of comedy at least the theory. Bill was already well versed in Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Charlie Chaplin – people he had studied intensely and was already borrowing from.

But Epstein didn’t take Bill seriously at all. Why would he? He was just a kid of 16.

Monday, 10 April 1978: Dwight and Bill performed together at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. Bill again told his parents he was going to the library; Dwight told his an organ recital. I picked them up that night at the end of Bill’s street and off we went.

Oddly enough, Steve Epstein was the first comic to stand up that first night Bill and Dwight went to perform. They got themselves moved up as early as they could so as not to jeopardize their chances of lying to their parents and getting away with it in the future.