LITTLE ROCK — I was in Nashville, Tennessee, last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I’m not proud of it, I was hungry. And I’m alone, I’m eating and I’m reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me, “Tsk tsk tsk tsk. Hey, what you readin’ for?”
Is that like the weirdest ... question you’ve ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading for? Well ... you stumped me. Why do I read? Well ... I guess I read for a lot of reasons. The main one is so I don’t end up being a ... waffle waitress.
I’m writing this now because Ryko recently released Bill Hicks: The Essential Collection, a fourdisc ($39.98; two CDs, two DVDs) compilation that comprises some of his most familiar work and rarities, along with a copy of Ninja Bachelor Party, a low-budget short movie Hicks starred in, and a card with a code to download some of his surprisingly good music from the Internet.
There’s lots of great stuff in there, and even if you have all Hicks’ recordings (and there are a lot of them, most issued posthumously) or maybe especially if you have all of Hicks’ recordings, you might want to check it out. You probably haven’t seen Hicks’ short, hilarious cult film Ninja Bachelor Party or heard his music. It’s the sort of thing that people like me ought to let you guys know about.
But that’s really just the excuse. I’ve wanted to write this piece for a long time, probably since Hicks surprised me by dying in Little Rock in 1994. I didn’t even know he was sick. I didn’t know he was here. He was brutally young — 32 years old.
I was a fan. In the 16 years since his death, I’ve become more of a fan, or maybe more than a fan. There was something heroic about Hicks, and that makes it hard for me to write about him in any way that doesn’t come across as cloying or self-aggrandizing. The point isn’t how much I feel, the point is what he was.
And he was, well, something ... one of those beserkers who come along once every couple of generations, the kind of person we usually assassinate or institutionalize. Hicks belongs on a short list of 20th-century American comedians who deserve to be celebrated as important artists. People like Chaplin and Keaton, Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.
There are only so many ways to describe his comedy without getting into specifics, without etherizing the bits and pinning them to a mounting board.
But do that and you end up exhibiting just the corpse. These days it’s easy enough to Google up some YouTube clips. Hicks used the kind of language that nightclub comics use — he was profane and raw and often angry and probably subject to the self-indulgent excesses to which young people in a relatively free and affluent society have always been susceptible.
He was a bitterly funny man who probably made a lot of people mad in his short life, and I hope they’ve forgiven him. (Some of you will recognize that sentence as a paraphrase of one of Hicks’ most enduring jokes: “Hey buddy, we’re Christians and we don’t like what you said.” “Well, forgive me.”)
But he was more than that. Hicks was a man who, at some point along the way, suffered a revelation. He suddenly got what was happening behind the curtain, he pierced the veil of everydayness that covers over our “reality” and saw clean through to the truth.
That may sound like high praise for a stand-up comic most people (still) have never heard, but I believe it. Hicks got a taste of whatever radiant, perfect and eternal thing lurks out there beyond the matrix. His comedy, however outraged and outrageous it was, was graced by a kind of Gnostic insistence on the illusory nature of the world. While he engaged his audience on an intellectual level — he once described himself as “Noam Chomsky with ... jokes” — the real message of Bill Hicks was that we are more than more alike than different, that we are essentially one.
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are ... It’s just a ride, and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money, a choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.
Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
Hicks’ father was a General Motors executive and his mother was a teacher. He had two older siblings. They lived in Florida, Alabama and New Jersey before settling in Houston when Bill was 7 years old.
By the time he was 13, he was a veteran of open-mic nights. By 1978, he had become a regular performing member of the Houston Comedy Workshop, often appearing with his friend Dwight Slade. His parents moved to Little Rock when he was a senior in high school, but he stayed in Houston to finish up. After graduation in 1980, he moved to Los Angeles and embarked on a stand-up comedy career.
He quickly became a regular at Hollywood’s Comedy Store. He attended Los Angeles Community College. He was in a sitcom pilot, but it went nowhere. He moved to Austin in 1982 and back to Houston the next year.
He briefly attended the University of Houston and began refining his act, which developed a misanthropic, angry bent. He took all sorts of drugs, though not for completely recreational reasons. People who knew Hicks thought his drug use was part of larger experiment in mind expansion.
How about a positive LSD story? That would be newsworthy, don’t you think? Anybody think that? Just once, to hear a positive LSD story. “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’re the imagination of ourselves.
Here’s Tom with the weather.
He called himself “the Prince of Darkness” and occasionally assumed the sexually charged alter ego “Goatboy.” After one particularly hostile show, two Vietnam veterans attacked him and broke his leg.
Hicks’ career began to take off in 1984 when Jay Leno got him on Late Night With David Letterman. He’d make 11 appearances on Letterman’s show, though CBS required Hicks to censor himself.
His last appearance — a few months before he died — was taped but never aired because CBS Practices and Standards found the material “unsuitable.” Hicks was convinced this “lost set” was cut because of his disparaging references to pro-life groups. Ironically, it brought the comic more attention than any of his other appearances.
In 1988, Hicks moved to New York and stopped using drugs, including alcohol. Smoking remained his only vice — it became a linchpin of his act.
(And also of Denis Leary’s, a onetime friend with whom Hicks fell out because he thought he’d appropriated his persona and material. As Hicks told interviewer Doug Stern in 1993: “I have a scoop for you. I stole his [Leary’s] act. I camouflaged it with punch lines, and, to really throw people off, I did it before he did.”)
By 1989, Hicks was performing as many as 300 club shows a year. He did an HBO special, One Night Stand, in 1990; it was followed by Relentless in 1992. He was on the brink of breaking into the mainstream.
Then, in June 1993, Hicks was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He performed his final show on Jan. 6, 1994, before a tiny crowd at Caroline’s in New York.
He quietly moved back to his parents’ house in Little Rock to spend his final days surrounded by family. Hicks died Feb. 26, 1994.
At the memorial service, his brother Steve read a poem Hicks had written during his last days. It concluded: “I left in love, in laughter and in truth, and wherever truth, love, and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.”
Enlightenment, when and if it comes, rarely arrives as a thunderbolt, as a “road to Damascus” experience where, as William Burroughs wrote, we see the naked lunch on the end of every fork. Mostly it comes, if it does, in drips and drabs, a slow accretion of wisdom. We have to learn to look, to register the evidence of our senses and factor in the unreliability of the voices in our head. Most of us may get close to something like enlightenment only after decades of confusion.
And “genius” is a word we overuse because we’re lazy. It’s a handy superlative to reach for when we’re confronted with excellence or adeptness or some other example of the extraordinary abilities of human beings. But what actual genius may be is a kind of X-ray vision that allows the performer — the artist or the athlete — to see through the cluttering noise to the true nature of how things are.
A genius may not have enlightenment on tap. It may use him more often that he uses it, but he is able — at least sometimes — to see things that we don’t.
I don’t know whether this theory will stand up to scrutiny. I just made it up and it didn’t arrive in a flash fullformed. I’m no genius. I’m no Bill Hicks.
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Style, Pages 29 on 10/26/2010