Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

The point of the show for the comics was to make money to finance their relocation to LA, but with Hicks’ parents agreeing to finance his move to Hollywood, and Epstein having already left for California, the point of the show was really for Sam to make enough money to finance his relocation. Financially it was a disaster. Sam lost in the thousands of dollars, much of which he had borrowed.

Despite the fact that Argus Hamilton had been on The Tonight Show, hardly anybody in Houston knew who he was. So he wasn’t much of a draw. Plus, nobody wanted to pay a premium ticket price to see the comics they could see any night of the week at the Annex for pennies on the dollar.

The show worked out great for Hicks, though. Hamilton took a liking to Bill, and since Hamilton was dating Mitzi Shore, the owner of the Comedy Store in LA, Bill now had an “in” at the Store. Located right on the Sunset Strip, at that time the Store was Mecca, the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat all rolled into one. And Hamilton was not only going to help get Bill fast-tracked at the Store, but he was Bill’s line on getting an audition for an HBO Young Comedians Special.

Kevin Booth

During Bill’s second year of high school, one of our friends – probably Brent Ballard – “discovered” Eric Johnson. There was this skinny kid who was a fucking wizard guitar player that we had to see. A few weeks later, he was playing at a place called Fitzgerald’s. We piled into the Stressmobile. We had to see him.

This was another nightclub. I have no idea how we were even getting into these clubs: Houston, Texas, in the late Seventies was just a different place. The drinking age was only 18 and to say there was lax enforcement was an overstatement. We didn’t have fake IDs or anything. Probably because we thought we could get in, we got in.

Mindblowing? It was like the second coming. This wasn’t a guitar player, this guy was a fucking messiah; he was like nothing we had ever seen or heard before. He was technical as all hell but he had melody. And he was fast. Blazing fast.

Bill used to call Johnson’s playing “whittling.” He was describing the sound you made when trying to use your mouth to duplicate the sound of Eric playing super-fast: “Whittle – ittle – ittle – ittle,” etc. On a more subversive level it was Bill having a fun stab at his redneck heritage. Whittling was stereotypical southern. A knife. Some wood. The banjo player on the porch in Deliverance, he was probably also a good whittler. Bill was trying to endow the term with a bit more sophistication.

From that first night on, we would see Eric Johnson any time we could. Bill, Dave DeBesse, Brent Ballard and I, that was the core group. If Eric was playing five nights a week, we would go see him five nights a week. It also became a Maginot Line, with Johnsons Eric and Robert on either side. David Johndrow, he was with the latter. We were in the camp that worshipped the skinny white kid with the skinny tie.

Even though Bill was the only one who sat comfortably on both sides of the barrier, he was also the one in the Eric Johnson race – who could turn themself into Eric Johnson the most and the fastest – with Brent Ballard. It affected the way they got their hair cut, the shirts they wore, the shoes they wore, the skinny tie, the vest. Everything.

One night we went early to try to talk to Eric before a show at Fitzgerald’s. We had this image of Johnson as a major rock star. We thought, “He must have an army of roadies. He’s such a good musician, he must be famous and rich.” We just didn’t understand. But we went behind the club to the parking lot where we saw this waifish pixie of a man get out of a van, then we watched him have to carry his own amplifier up the long stairway at the back of the stage. Lesson number one.

Still, we approached him; we were super-excited and Bill was leading the charge. “We come to every one of your shows.” We came on fast and hard. It freaked him out. He was a very private person. What were we thinking? Actually, I know exactly what we were thinking. We thought he would be warm and appreciative: “You’re at all my shows? Oh wow. Thanks.” Maybe he would ask us if we wanted to go eat and we would have this connection. No. Lesson number two.

After that incident we would still sit right up in the front at his shows, looking up at him. Rapt. Especially Bill; his slack-jawed awe was a few orders of magnitude more intense than the rest of ours. Johnson would look down and occasionally catch sight of us. Often you could see a slightly nervous look break out across his face. I think he was amazed we could sit through it over and over again.

Eric Johnson wasn’t just a guitarist, he was influential to Bill for another important reason; specifically, he was also heavily into meditation and mysticism. He didn’t just dabble either – veggie diet, drug-free lifestyle, everything. Like Bill, he didn’t touch a drop of drink. So in Johnson, Bill thought he had a kindred spirit. And if non-western approaches to spiritual enlightenment also meant Bill might become equally as bad-ass a guitar player, all the better.

Plus, Johnson was this super-scrawny guy but he always had the super-hot women around him. Always. So it was confirmation of the equation: good musician = hot babes.

Even cooler was the fact that he wasn’t fawning over girls in return. It was our first glimpse into the “proper” way of handling physically attractive girls; specifically not acting like you’re too into them. When you’re young you tend to think girls want guys that pay tons of attention to them. Then you see the weird, skinny artist guy surrounded by hot chicks and he’s not doing that. “Oh man. He’s indifferent towards her. And for some reason she wants him even more. Wow. How weird? I don’t get it.”

Bill was also a bit of a prodigy on guitar. He had the hand-eye coordination so, once he got serious, it wasn’t long before he could also play blazingly fast. But speed was just speed. Bill lacked musicianship at that point. To most people it sounded cool, cramming dozens of notes into a couple of seconds. But to someone who really understood music, it just sounded like dozens of notes crammed into a couple of seconds.

For a birthday party, Laurie Mango actually arranged to have Eric Johnson play at her house. Bill was super-excited because Eric Johnson was going to play at his girlfriend’s house. It was like a double helping of “fuck yes” with a side of “yippee” sauce. Until Bill and Laurie broke up. After that, Bill just assumed that the whole thing would be called off. Laurie was just doing it because Bill wanted it. Or so he thought. When she went through with it, to Bill it was obvious she was just doing it as a dig at him.

He was probably still welcome to go, but that’s not who Bill was. Out of principle, even if that principle was just spite, no way, no day he was going to go. It was the love of his young life and his favorite musician in the world, but Bill was too stubborn. We boycotted.

Then he had to hear all of his friends talking about it. Even the guys who were, like, “Eric Johnson is crappy. I’m into the Grateful Dead” talked about how great it was. If Laurie wanted a dig at Bill, it had worked.

Years later, when Bill started drinking, he lost some – not all, but some – of his taste for the antiseptic. Suddenly Bill was way more into the Rolling Stones. Mick and Keith in, Eric out. Bill gets fucked up, he likes music of people who get fucked up, and not the elfin magic of a clean-living mystic. But at some point during his heavy drinking days, Bill (doing comedy, obviously) actually opened a show for Eric. Bill got fucked up and told Eric that if he would just eat meat, maybe a hamburger, and drink a beer, then he could write a hit.

Bill never opened for Eric again.

Well before Laurie, I tried hard to help Bill score, or even just meet girls. But he refused to take part in the juvenile ploys we cooked up. The origins of this go back to before I was ever a friend of Bill, but we used to have dinner parties, the whole point of which was to get girls to come over to my house. Not just any girls, but girls we thought might have sex at the end of the night. It sounds a little sleazy, but it wasn’t like these girls were ridiculously easy lays. They couldn’t have been: we didn’t get laid that much.

My parents were always out of town; and we had a great house for entertaining. All we needed were the guests. So we were constantly hitting on girls who didn’t go to our school. With girls from a different high school, you could make yourself out to be whoever you wanted. Put differently: it made it much easier to lie.

Later, when Bill and I started hanging out and he was continually asking, “God, how can I get pussy? How can I meet women?” I was telling him: “Dude, you have got to come to one of these dinner parties.” His response was always the same: “No, I’m not interested in meeting these girls and getting them drunk. I’m not interested in your other friends. The whole concept of trying to get a girl drunk to have sex with her is wrong.” Bill saw it as tricking a girl into having sex.

Then, of course when I ran into Bill the next Monday at school the first word out of his mouth was always: “So?” And, provided I’d got laid, I’d tell him.

Bill’s later periods of overindulgence in alcohol (and drugs, for that matter) might make it hard to believe, but during this time Bill made fun of teenage drinking. Drinking in general. And smoking. He and Dwight had their own private code phrase -“WDPS,” short for “Why do people smoke” – to confirm to each other how superior they were in the way they lived. We were just trying to point out to him that, well, if you wanted to get some pussy, it really helped your cause to get girls drunk. It was part of the recipe, and that’s just the way it was.

Of course, with so much peer pressure, eventually he caved. Sweet Jesus, it’s a miracle. He wasn’t going to start drinking, not yet anyway, but he would come to a dinner party.

Originally, it was just, “Hey, show up.” He wouldn’t have it, saying, “No, it’s too weird. I don’t drink and I don’t want to get sucked into this big, long evening with your friends.” So, he was never a normal dinner guest, but he found a way to participate. We had to make a joke out of it. For me, it was funny. “Ha-ha” funny. For my other, “cooler” friends, it was less humorous and more: “Why is Kevin dicking around with this goofy guy?” But Bill created a character named “Happy.” Happy was somewhere between Jerry Lewis and Charlie – Flowers for Algernon Charlie. Mix that with a few hundred gallons of caffeine, and that’ll put you in Happy’s head.

Bill, or Happy, couldn’t just be there, hanging out when the guests arrived. There had to be an entrance and a show. Bill needed to perform. It was all in the timing. We would actually sit there and chart out everything. At precisely 19:30, I call Bill’s house. I let the phone ring exactly once and hang up. At precisely 19:42 Bill arrives at my house, and waits in the bushes at the north-east corner of the lot.

While Bill was bicycling across the neighborhood to my house, we were setting the table. “Yeah, we have this friend. He goes by the name ‘Happy.’ He’s kind of, oh, ‘special.’ He’s kind of ‘different.'” The girls would be asking, “What? Is he retarded? What do you mean?” “No, you’ll see.”

At some point in the charade, when the girls seemed sufficiently intrigued, I would usually go up to my bedroom and open the window to signal Bill, then I’d go back downstairs and, after just a long enough pause for it to seem that the two events might be unrelated, “Bing-bong-bing-bong-bing-bong.” The doorbell. Right on cue. “Uhp, there’s Happy.” We open the door and this super-manic teen ‘tard comes bouncing into the house. “Hi, I’m Happy. Hi. Hi. Hi.”

The character was so hopeful, but also tragic. And at its core, it was just another ploy. We were scheming to make the girls think that there was this other level of depth to us because we were caring for this person with special needs, trying to paint it so it looked like we were more interested in making sure this person had a place to spend his Saturday nights than we were in getting laid. The exact opposite was true. And, of course, this was supposed to get us laid.

Sometimes Bill, as Happy, would come and eat, but he never stayed the whole night. Right before it got to the heavy drinking portion of the evening he would usually disappear. About that time the character of Happy would start to wear thin. Bill knew it, too. “Yeah, I gotta go.” And he’d go. The girls would make their false protests. “No, Happy. Stay.” Then the next day they’d ask: “How’s Happy? Is he okay?” You’d like to think that we got our comeuppance for this. In fact, the whole thing only turned Bill on even more.

But “Happy” kind of ran its course. It was putting Bill in social situations, but its questionable aphrodisiac effects certainly weren’t getting him any closer to getting laid. It might even have been hindering the efforts of everyone else.

For us to go out and act cool -“Look how muscular we are” or “Look how cool our car is” – that was never going to work for us. I was driving a station wagon. Bill had no car. Bill was emulating Woody Allen in his comedy, why not emulate him in his social life as well? Allen was not just Bill’s role model; we all adopted him as our anti-hero. He gave us our instruction manual for how to pick up women. The goal, quite simply, was to be the biggest nerd, the biggest dweeb you could be, yet still interact with other people. The right woman, the one who also thought jocks were losers and being arty was cool: she would get it.

There was even this one girl, who hooked up with both Bill and, later, David Johndrow. She was a complete knock-off of Diane Keaton. Straight out of Annie Hall. Coincidence? Maybe. We watched a lot of Woody Allen movies. This girl actually ended up being David’s girlfriend. I remember David saying on multiple occasions, “Well, I’m just glad Bill and her never slept together.” He’d always say that. I’d go, “Uh, yeah. Right, David.” Bite my tongue. Apparently she had told David that she never slept with Bill. Bill told me different.

Guys will believe things because they want to, and being a sucker can make you cynical in a hurry. There’s a balance between being a cold and callous womanizer who uses girls like a commodity and someone who can be genuine. Despite what his stage persona intimated, and for all of our clumsy attempts at teenage mating, Bill almost always tried to tip the scales in favor of being the latter. But he was not someone who was opposed to a one-night stand either.

Watching Bill interact with women in his mid to late teens really was like watching a Woody Allen movie as he would try to impress girls who were way out of his league. I don’t think it was any consolation to Bill for him to know how well he was emulating one of his comedie idols. Except it wasn’t funny. Sure, at the time it was a little funny, in the way that any teen misfortune of a friend is funny because it happened to them and not to you. But Bill was just clumsy with girls.

I don’t think he had any, any, luck with girls until his junior year of high school. God knows we tried to get the boy laid. He tried, too. He would talk to girls, but he’d be doing these goofy routines that were long and involved and predicated on the girls playing along. The bowl haircut, pale skin and gawky figure didn’t do anything to help.

As uncomfortable as Bill was in a nightclub, he was totally comfortable in the comedy club. He belonged, despite the fact that his choice of lifestyle was 180 degrees from the rest of the comics doing sets at the Comedy Workshop. During his senior year he was doing a couple of shows a week at the club. Sometimes fewer, usually more. One or two weekends a month I was coming back to Houston from The University of Texas in Austin. It’s about three hours west of Houston down Highway 290. Piece of cake. We would get together and play as Stress. And he’d have a gig. Just about every time I came back, Bill was doing a show. And every time the crowd was just a little bit bigger.

Bill got along with the other comics. He might have been a kid by age but not by his comedy. For that they respected him. But he couldn’t hang out. He was still in high school, and even if he hadn’t been they were just at a different speed than Bill.

At 18, Bill went to LA to be a comedian. Novel? No. It’s a cliché. The busloads of teenagers who turn up in Hollywood to “make it?” Bill was now one of those. But, given where he came from, Bill was being incredibly daring and bold. The Midwesterners, those people were desperate. What were their other options? Stay in Dubuque, Iowa, and serve Blizzards at the local Dairy Queen. Bill came from a background where he had everything to lose.

For the middle-to-upper-class kids at Stratford, it wasn’t a question of “if “ you were going to college. The question was “where” you were going to college. It was just what you did. It was why we lived in Nottingham Forest in the first place. Our fathers went to college. Got a job. Worked for the company. Bought a house. Birth. School. Work. Death. It was the sure bet. Low risk. High reward. Bill set off without a net.

When most of his classmates went to college, Bill went to Los Angeles to be a comedian. It still amazes me to say that, and not just for the courage it took. The point can’t be made clear enough: Bill wanted to be a rock star. It wasn’t like he ever wanted to make a choice between comedy and music. He never saw himself as having made that choice. Throughout his life – Stress, Marble Head Johnson, Arizona Bay – Bill loved making music as much as he loved doing comedy.

Rock stars were his idols. For a while he fancied himself a Sinatra of sorts. And when he did material about drugs, he didn’t build jokes around Timothy Leary but instead glorified Keith Richards. When Bill was doing his last series of shows, he came out on stage playing air guitar and lip-synching to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” He was not long for this world and he was still using a rock ‘n’ roll pantomime to introduce himself to the audience. Bill fucking loved rock ‘n’ roll.

But the world forces people to be practical and out of necessity Bill had to move something to the forefront. Two, maybe three, things pushed Bill in the direction of comedy.

First, during his junior year of high school, Bill brought a booking agent over to my house to see Stress play. It was an uncomfortable scene, trying to explain to my parents what a middle-aged man was doing in our house. He booked bands into the Whiskey River, a local rock club in Houston. With his mustache and oversized Seventies hair he looked the part. If he hadn’t been standing in the Booth family living room, he could have been up for the lead in the sequel to Behind the Green Door.

We gave some vague explanation of what was going on. It was lost on my parents: “Well, Kevin is going to college next year.”

We played our set for him. He was less than impressed. We were a novelty because we were young. Hanson twenty years too soon. Bill and I were both quite baby-faced. We could have passed for 12. Combined. That was also the appeal. “Hey this guy is only 15. Listen to how fast he can play guitar.” That was going to be the gist of it, but Bill and I had already had a brief conversation about the wisdom of being pigeonholed as kid rockers.