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Bill Hicks - Remembering a Smartass A troop of Boy Scouts stood in a line along the San Andreas Fault and watched the sun set behind Los Angeles. Each Scout whispered a final goodbye to the world capital of entertainment consumerism, picked up his crowbar, and went to work. When it was over, all that was left was a smooth, tranquil body of water called Arizona Bay... Such was the fantasy of Bill Hicks, a comedian from Texas whose stand-up routine was like the attack of a barracuda - swift, ferocious, precise, and guaranteed to leave a mark. Hicks trumpeted nonconformity as he lashed out at the government, religion, the entertainment industry, corporate America, and the ignorant masses who allow themselves to get "fat and stupid" while watching shows like "Cops" and "Who's the Boss?" He was a relentless iconoclast who's been described best as a stand-up philosopher. Hicks saw LA - or "Hell A," as he called it - as a symbol of all that is wrong with our fast-food society. "I used to love calling LA while I lived in New York," he says on Arizona Bay. "What are y'all doing? Talking to TV producers, huh? Bummer. Me? I'm reading a book. Yeah, we're thinking back East." The sooner that "turd city" was flushed into the Pacific, Hicks believed, the better. But Los Angeles outlived Bill Hicks. Hicks died of pancreatic cancer on February 26, 1994, just when his sixteen-year career of almost total anonymity was starting to get noticed. He had been on the HBO Young Comedians Special and they loved him in England, but the show that got him noticed - the one that sent his name howling through the press - was a seven-minute segment on the Letterman show that fifteen million people weren't allowed to see. He was the first act to be censored from the Ed Sullivan theatre since Elvis. It wasn't his hips that made the producers cringe. It was his material, which, they said, crossed the line. He called to pro-lifers to "lock arms and block cemeteries" to see how devoted they were to the concept. He proposed a new TV show entitled, "Let's Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus." He pointed out the fact that we "commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus by telling our children a giant bunny rabbit left chocolate eggs in the night... I wonder why we're fucked up as a race?" But Hicks was just calling them as he saw them - all in a day's work, really. He was a master at waving the painfully obvious like a club in the face of America, then moving on to his most off-the-wall, crude, and below-the-belt imagery. On Rant in E-Minor, he depicts Rush Limbaugh lying naked in a bathtub while the Reagan administration pees all over him just to get him hard, and in the end it takes Barbara Bush dropping a turd into his mouth to give his "little piggly-wiggly dick" half an erection. But after all that, Hicks could go off about politics, race, religion, sex, and the media with sharp criticism and intellectual fervor. He was a reader, after all. As a kid, he spent nights alone in his room with a book in hand and a pillow tied around his head with a belt to block out the rest of the world. He always brought a book to the dinner table. By the time he was fifteen, he was sneaking out of his house in the night to play Houston's Comedy Workshop with Sam Kinison. There, most of his material made fun of his ultra-right-wing parents. His humor later took on larger issues like government, religion, conformity, and the media. "I knew Billy Clinton became one of the boys," Hicks says after his assault on the Republicans, "when he bombed Iraq.... He launched twenty-two missiles against Baghdad in retaliation for the alleged assassination attempt on George Bush, which failed. We killed six innocent people launching twenty-two three million-dollar-apiece missiles - um, I think that's overdoing it, if you ask me. I think we should have just embarrassed the Iraqis, and here's how we could have done it: We should have assassinated Bush. "But there's no hope in Clinton," he continues. "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?' "Just what my agenda is." Hicks certainly wouldn't be short on material if he were alive today. He believed that people should find their own answers to their questions about the universe, not accept what the powers that be fed them. He said that if we all have a third eye with which to view the wonder of our universe, watching television was like spraying black paint all over it. In his drinking days, Hicks would get so disgusted with everything he'd just fall on the stage floor and shout, "You fucking morons!" Of course, that often sent people to the door. "Go back to the herd, moron," Hicks would say. "Oh, don't worry, folks," he says on Rant in E-Minor after a long diatribe about the universal consciousness, the beauty of our world, our oneness of being, and our spiritual connection with the living god within each and every one of us. "There are dick jokes on the way." That's why rock bands like Radiohead and Tool admired Hicks so much - like themselves, he was a unique individual playing to an audience brought up on mass consumption. Radiohead dedicated their second album to his memory, and Tool's Aenima pays homage to Hicks' philosophies. Inside the album jacket is a painting of Tool's vocalist, Maynard Keenan, having prosthetic limbs attended to by Hicks in a doctor's coat. The caption reads: "Bill Hicks - another dead hero." Hicks realized that legalizing hallucinogenic drugs would be dangerous to the economy - how could we build nuclear weapons once we realized how beautiful nature is? - but he strongly recommended the experience to his audience. During his own trips, and there were many of them, Hicks reportedly complained to his friends of sharp pains in his left side. He said that when he died, the doctors would find a golden cross upside down somewhere in one of his organs. In the end, it was a malignant tumor in his pancreas that killed him less than five months after his ill-fated Letterman spot. By then he had put out two albums, Dangerous and Relentless. In 1997, Arizona Bay and Rant in E-Minor were released along with new versions of the previous two. Hicks never got to finish the book he was writing. Although they're not too easy to find, Hicks' albums are well worth the effort to obtain. And maybe, just maybe, if we all listen to them and think about it really hard, we'll be able to tap into the universal consciousness he so strongly believed in and send LA into the ocean. Figuratively, of course. And maybe this time Bill Hicks will get the last laugh. -Jay P. |
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