BILL HICKS......Stand up Legend

BILL HICKS

THE ULTIMATE CULT STAND UP COMEDIAN

William Melvin "Bill" Hicks, (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994), was a controversial American stand-up comedian, satirist and social critic.

Comedian Richard Pryor figured largely as an inspiration and stand-up idol for Hicks, as did Woody Allen who also served strongly as a very early influence for a pre-teen Hicks. And although Hicks characterized his own performances as "Chomsky with dick jokes"[1], he is widely regarded as a comedian's comedian.

Early life

Born in Valdosta, Georgia, Bill was the son of Jim and Mary (Reese) Hicks, and had two elder siblings, Steve and Lynn. The family lived in Florida, Alabama, and New Jersey before settling in Houston, Texas when Bill was seven. Hicks has two school-age stories on the Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 album. He said he was raised in the Southern Baptist faith. He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen, and writing routines with his friend Dwight Slade. Worried about Bill's behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17, but the psychoanalyst could find little wrong with him. The therapist apparently joked that Bill's parents would probably benefit more from a few sessions than Bill himself.

In 1978, the Comedy Workshop opened in Houston, and friends Hicks, Slade, John S. and Kevin Booth started performing there. At first, Hicks was unable to drive to venues independently and was so young that he needed a special work permit to perform. He worked his way up to performing once every Tuesday night in the autumn of 1978, while still attending Stratford High School in Houston. He was well received and started developing his improvisational skills, although his act at the time was limited. Bill Hicks, Kevin Booth and Jay Leno reminisce about the Comedy Workshop years in the It's Just A Ride documentary.

1980s

In his senior year of high school, the Hicks family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, but after his graduation, in the spring of 1980, Bill moved to Los Angeles, California, and started performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, where Andrew Dice Clay, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Garry Shandling were also performing at the time. He briefly attended Los Angeles Community College, mentioning the unhappy experience on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1. He appeared in a pilot for the sitcom Bulba, before moving back to Houston in 1982. There, he formed the ACE Production Company (Absolute Creative Entertainment), which would later become Sacred Cow Productions, with David Johndrow and Kevin Booth, and worked at local Houston comedy clubs like The Comedy Workshop (as did Brett Butler). Hicks also attended the University of Houston for a short time.

In 1983, Hicks began drinking heavily while using a massive regimen of illicit substances, including LSD, psilocybin, cocaine, MDMA, poppy tea, diazepam, Quaaludes and methamphetamine, which may have influenced his increasingly disjointed and angry, at times even misanthropic ranting style on stage. He continued attacking the American dream, hypocritical beliefs, and traditional attitudes. During his first experience with alcohol, Hicks viciously attacked the audience in a drunken rage, after which, two Vietnam veterans took exception to his statements and sought him out after the show, breaking one of his legs and cracking one of his ribs.

Hicks's success steadily increased (along with his drug use), and in 1984 he got an appearance on the talkshow Late Night with David Letterman, which was engineered by Jay Leno. He made an impression on David Letterman and ended up doing eleven more appearances, presenting bowdlerized versions of his stage shows.

In 1986, Hicks found himself broke after spending all his money on various drugs, but his career received another upturn as he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special in 1987. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years he did about 300 performances a year. His reputation suffered from his drug use, however, and in 1988, he claimed to have quit everything, including alcohol. Hicks recounts his quitting of alcohol in the One Night Stand special and on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1. On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using drugs because "once you've been taken aboard a UFO, it's kind of hard to top that", although in his performances, he continued to extol the virtues of LSD, marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms. He fell back to cigarette smoking, a theme that would figure heavily in his performances from then on.

An infamous gig in Chicago during 1989, later released as the bootleg I'm Sorry, Folks, resulted in Hicks screaming possibly his most infamous quote, "Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever" to a heckler shouting "Free Bird" over and over. Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity, suggesting that it was not an anti-Semitic comment but rather an expression of his disgust with humanity in general. Hicks often veered between hope and love for the human race and utter hopelessness. In the same gig, he yelled at a female heckler, calling her a "drunk cunt" and demanding that she be removed: "Take her out! Take her fucking out! Take her to somewhere that's GOOD! Go see fucking Madonna, you fucking idiot piece of shit!"

In 1989 he released his first video, Sane Man. The same performance was re-issued seventeen years later, in 2006.

1990s

In 1990,he released his first album,Dangerous,did an HBO special,One Night
Stand, and performed at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London's West End in November. He was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there in 1991. That year, he also returned to the Just for Laughs festival and recorded his second album, Relentless.

Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the Marblehead Johnson album in 1992, the same year he met Colleen McGarr, who was to become his girlfriend and fiancée. In November of that year, he toured the UK. On that tour, he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4 in England and the standup performance that would become Live at Oxford Playhouse and Salvation. He was voted "Hot Standup Comic" by Rolling Stone Magazine, and moved to Los Angeles again in early 1993.

The progressive rock band Tool invited Hicks to open a number of concerts for them on their 1993 Lollapalooza appearances, where Hicks once famously asked the audience to look for a contact lens he'd lost. Thousands of people complied. Tool singer Maynard James Keenan so enjoyed this joke that he repeated it on a number of occasions. In 1996, Tool released their album Ænima which contains mentions of Hicks in the liner notes and on record. The track "Ænema" references Hicks's Arizona Bay philosophy and the closing track "Third Eye" contains samples from Hicks's Relentless CD.

In April 1993, while touring in Australia, he started complaining of pains in his side, and on June 16 of that year, he learned he had pancreatic cancer. He started receiving weekly chemotherapy, while still touring and also recording his album, Arizona Bay, with Kevin Booth. He was also working with comedian Fallon Woodland on a pilot episode of a new talk show, titled Counts of the Netherworld for Channel 4 at the time of his death. The budget and concept had been approved, and a pilot was filmed. The Counts of the Netherworld pilot was shown at the various Tenth Anniversary Tribute Night events around the world on February 26, 2004.

On October 1, 1993, Hicks was scheduled to appear on the David Letterman show for the twelfth time, but his entire performance was cut and prevented from broadcast--the only occasion, up to that point, on which a comedian's entire routine had been cut after recording. Both the show's producers and CBS denied responsibility. Hicks expressed his feelings of betrayal in a hand-written, 39-page letter to John Lahr of The New Yorker. Although Letterman later expressed regret at the way Hicks had been handled, he never appeared on the show again. The full account of this incident was featured in a New Yorker profile by Lahr. This profile was later published as a chapter in John Lahr's book, Light Fantastic.

Bill played the final show of his career at Caroline's in New York on January 6, 1994. Bill moved back to his parents' house in Little Rock, Arkansas shortly thereafter. He called his friends to say goodbye before he stopped speaking on February 14, and died in the presence of his parents at 11:20 p.m. on February 26, 1994 of pancreatic cancer. Bill was buried on the family plot in Leakesville, Mississippi.

The Arizona Bay album, as well as Rant in E-Minor, were released posthumously in 1997 on the Voices imprint of the Rykodisc label. Those two albums were licensed to the label by Bill's mother, Mary Hicks for the Arizona Bay Production Company. Dangerous and Relentless were also rereleased by Rykodisc on the same date.

Quotations

“ I was told when I grew up I could be anything I wanted: a fireman, a policeman, a doctor - even President, it seemed. And for the first time in the history of mankind, something new, called an astronaut. But like so many kids brought up on a steady diet of Westerns, I always wanted to be the avenging cowboy hero—that lone voice in the wilderness, fighting corruption and evil wherever I found it, and standing for freedom, truth and justice. And in my heart of hearts I still track the remnants of that dream wherever I go, in my endless ride into the setting sun. ”

"See, I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do. And if you don't think drugs have done good things for us, then do me a favor; go home tonight, take all your albums, all your tapes, all your CDs and burn 'em. Because you know what? The musicians who made all that great music that has enhanced your lives thoughout the years? Rrrrrreal fuckin' high on drugs. The Beatles were so high they even let Ringo sing a few songs."
"Boy, I tell you, politics does make for strange bedfellows. Saddam Hussein says in this quote, 'We have nothing against America. We just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the street like a soccer ball.' And I was thinking, that's so weird, 'cos... that's what I wanted to see. Wow, me and Hussein, we're like this (crosses fingers). Who woulda thunk it?"
"It's an insane world and I'm proud to be part of it."
"I don’t mean to sound bitter, cold or cruel, but I am. So that’s how it comes out."
"I left LA for England on the day of the LA Riots. I arrived eleven hours later and walked past a newsboard that said "LA Burns To Ground". Holy shit, did I leave a cigarette lit or something? Anyway, I had all these Brits come up to me and say "If it's any consolation the crime in Britain is terrible as well". I appreciate diplomacy, but this is Hobbiton and I'm Bilbo Hicks compared to the states. You can't tell with a British newspaper whether it's the main story or the comic section. I saw the front page of a newspaper there that read "Last night, a group of hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shaftesbury." I'd like to see these 'hooligans' up against the Bloods in LA."
"Ladies, if men could suck their own dicks you'd be here on your own tonight, staring at an empty stage."
"It's just a handful of people that run everything, and that's provable.... I have this feeling that whoever's elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail - blah, blah, blah - when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down... and it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll.... And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, 'Any questions?' ... [President]: 'Just what my agenda is.'"
"During the Gulf war I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops. I do not always choose wisely and yet, I am committed."
"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

Legacy

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, fellow comedians and comedy insiders voted Hicks amongst the "Top 20 Greatest Comedy Acts Ever" at #13. Likewise, in "Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time" (2004), Hicks was ranked at #19.

In March 2007 Channel 4 ran a poll, "The Top 100 Stand-Up Comedians of All Time," in which Hicks was voted #6.

Devotees of Hicks have incorporated his words, image and attitude into their own creations. Thanks to the technologies which enable audio sampling, fragments of Bill Hicks rants, diatribes, social criticisms and philosophies have found their way into many musical works. His influence on Tool is well documented, and the British band Radiohead's seminal 1995 album The Bends was dedicated to his memory (and to "Indigo").

Also the Welsh singer Jem wrote the song Just a Ride (the eighth track from her debut album Finally Woken released in 2004) inspired by the documentary It's Just a Ride.

The movie Human Traffic referred to him as the "late, great Bill Hicks," and showed that the main character, Jip, liked to watch a bit of Hicks's stand-up before going out for a night to "remind me not to take life too seriously". Hicks even appears in the comic book Preacher, in which he is an important influence on the protagonist, Rev. Jesse Custer. His opening voice-over to the 1991 Revelations live show is also quoted in Preacher's last issue.

In 2000, Brooklyn 'Punk-Folk' artist Ed Hamell 'Hamell on Trial' released two songs dedicated to Bill Hicks ("Bill Hicks (ascension)" and "Bill Hicks') on the album "Choochtown".

On February 25, 2004, British MP Stephen Pound tabled an early day motion titled "Anniversary of the Death of Bill Hicks" (EDM 678 of the 2003-04 session), the text of which was as follows:

That this House notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on 26th February 1994, at the age of 32; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.
In August 2004, a play called Bill Hicks: Slight Return premiered at the Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland. Written by Chas Early and Richard Hurst, the play features Bill Hicks (Chas Early) who returns from the dead to play one more show. The play has since been performed in Geel, Belgium and at the Leicester Comedy Festival. , as well as touring the UK.

In 2006, a last hour-long TV-Interview from late 1993, shot approximately four months before his death, was released by the producers on Google Video. It shows a notably thinning Hicks, explaining his ban on the Letterman Show, his perspective on the Waco massacre and various other topics to a live calling audience.