Telling the truth and exposing the lies - nobody did it better than the legendary Bill Hicks. He wasn't about comedy, he was about something far more important than that, writes Brian Boyd
The wall of the Comedy Store in Los Angeles contains the signatures of all the acts that have played there. It takes you an age to find what you're looking for. Robin Williams . . . Jay Leno . . . Richard Pryor . . . Roseanne . . . David Letterman . . . and eventually there it is, a simple, stark autograph: Bill Hicks.
It was inside the stygian gloom of this still-rollicking joint that the fresh-faced young Texan made his real début. The 17-year-old had taken a taxi from the airport to here, 8433 Sunset Boulevard, in 1980. "I'm here to be a comic," he announced to the guy on the door. Minutes later, he took to the stage with his suitcase still in his hand. But Bill Hicks had deceived the guy on the door.
A comic was what those other names on the wall were. Hicks was a preacher-prophet-philosopher. It just took a few years to figure out.
Some 17 picaresque years letter and Hicks is playing for eight million people not 80. He's about to make his 12th appearance on The Late Show With Letterman. "Folks, this is my final live performance," he tells the Network audience, "don't get me wrong, I've loved every moment of my 17 years of total anonymity. But I'm quitting because I finally got my own TV show, it's called Let's Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus - then we're going to do an M.C. Hammer/Vanilla Ice special.
"Do you know what's really bugging me these days? These pro-lifers. They just look it, don't they, they look like they exude joie de vivre. If you're so pro-life, do me a favour: don't lock arms and block medical clinics, lock arms and block cemeteries . . . Why do Christians wear crosses around their necks? Nice sentiment, but do you think when Jesus comes back, he's really gonna want to look at a cross?"
Tame material by Hicks's standards but hours before the show went out that night, CBS rang him to tell him his slot had been pulled because it contained too many "hot spots". Hicks had become the first performer since Elvis Presley to have his performance banned by CBS.
Over his next few club dates, Hicks performed his Letterman set verbatim to rapturous applause. He followed it up by explaining the context and adding: "I was censored because the Letterman show felt you - the audience - are too stupid to hear material that might have ideas associated with it rather than: 'Boy, food on aeroplanes sucks, doesn't it?' or any number of other stupid, banal, trite, puerile jokes. The networks kowtow to the special interest groups and a couple of deranged motherf**king people who hear the word 'Jesus' and think immediately you're making fun of Jesus. What I made fun of was a double standard that exists in this country. They think you're too stupid to see that. Meanwhile they hawk their beer commercials, alcohol - the number two killing drug in this country - into your living rooms."
Five months later Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer. Of the many tributes to him, one would have raised a wry smile. A South Bank Show special contained a moving testimony from David Letterman, the man who had washed his hands of Hicks. Another came from Jay Leno, a man who Hicks described in his set as "just another whore at the capitalist gang-bang" (because Leno, a multi-millionaire, advertised products for money).
Denis Leary didn't show his face. Leary and Hicks were always wrongly bracketed together as transgressive comedians. Hicks, though, always felt Leary was lifting his material. "I smoke because I need the tar to fill up the black holes in my soul. I would stop smoking but I don't want to become a whinin' f**kin' maggot like most non-smokers," was a Hicks line; on his No Cure For Cancer album, Leary did a very similar routine.
As a private joke, Hicks would sign into hotels under the name of Otis Blackwell - Blackwell was the author of some of Elvis Presley's biggest hits. It was all about getting famous on the back of someone else's material.
Hicks knew the score, and constantly referred to Leary as "the Donovan to my Dylan".
Not that it mattered so much to Hicks - he was on a mission. He had long since giving up "chugging jokes" and towards the end of his life was quoting Noam Chomsky - "The responsibility of the intellectual is to tell the truth and expose lies". Unlike most intellectuals though, Hicks could make you laugh while he was doing it. The received wisdom about this exceptional human being was that he was "confrontational and conversational", someone who ranted as opposed to doing schtik. Which is fine if you think Jim Carrey is a comedy genius.
Hicks had no fear or favour. He was in London when George Bush lost the presidential election to Bill Clinton. "It must have been a Secret Service plot to have me over here," he mused, "because if I had been back home, Bush's eardrums would have shattered from me shrieking with laughter." Clinton was no friend either: "He's a liar and a murderer," Hicks announced soon after his election. Talking about Clinton's raid on Iraq in 1993 (in response to an alleged Iraqi assassination attempt on Bush senior), he said: "Clinton launched 22 Cruise missiles against Baghdad in response to the alleged assassination attempt. As a result, six innocent people in Baghdad were dead and the US had spent upwards of $66 million. What we should have done was to get rid of Bush ourselves . . . and that way there would have been no loss of innocent life."
Born in 1961 and brought up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, Hicks began writing jokes when he was eight. At 10 he persuaded his parents to buy him a small black-and-white TV set so he could watch the comic turns every night on the Tonight With Johnny Carson show. Aged 12, he would use a screwdriver to prise the storm screen off his window, climb out on the roof, jump down to the ground and go into Houston to do open-mic spots at the local comedy club - he would disguise his absence by putting a stack of records on a turntable that would repeatedly play.
Because the local comedy club served alcohol, he had to wait outside until it was his turn on stage. His material, for a 12-year-old, was a sure sign: "My dad worked in a mortuary, but he was fired. He was accused of having an intimate relationship with a corpse. The family was shocked - we all knew it was purely platonic."
When he arrived in Los Angeles to turn professional, he was somewhat of an anomaly in that he didn't drink, smoke or take drugs. He was soon a past master at all three. He was particularly fond of his psilocybin ("magic") mushrooms: "Here is my point about drugs, about alcohol, about pornography and smoking and everything else," he once memorably said. "What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, say, think, who I f**k, what I take into my body - as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet. I'm a harmless guy, a believer in love and truth, anti-war, a believer in freedom of expression. And for those of you out there who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about this, I'll answer it for you: It's None Of Your F**kin' Business. Take that to the bank, cash it and take it on a vacation out of everybody's life."
IN AN interview with me, he spoke about what pushed him on in his quest. "I want to expose the lies and deflate the hypocrisy. I am appalled at the anti-drug movement in my country. I am appalled by the fact that they can transmit a 'Just Say No' anti-drugs advertisement on our television screens and then follow it up with an advertisement for Budweiser beer. I am equally appalled by our totalitarian government which has consistently lied to us about everything from the JFK assassination to selling arms to Iraq."
This burning moral righteousness may have seen him marginalised in his own country, but on this side of the Atlantic he was embraced as the guy who said "wait a minute" as the consensus formed. His Edinburgh Festival shows in 1990 are now the stuff of legend, as indeed is his Dublin show at the Tivoli Theatre in 1992.
By then, the drugs and drink had gone. "Yes, I'm drinking water tonight. It's amazing how your life can change. Tonight: water. Four years ago: opium." When he later announced he had given up cigarettes, bizarrely audiences would boo him: "What is this? Don't boo me for giving up cigarettes. This isn't like Dylan going electric. The smoking material was about freedom of choice. That was the real routine. C'mon subtext fans".
On a tour in Australia in 1993, he felt sharp pains down the left side of his body. He was diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer. He was at his peak: the Letterman episode of the same year had re-energised his sense of outrage, a lengthy New Yorker profile by John Lahr followed the debacle, Channel 4 had screened two of his live shows to rapturous response, publishing companies and film studios were queuing up to meet him . . . and Letterman had invited him back on the show. Lenny Bruce's producer, Jon Magnusson, had written of him: "He has the moral courage to deal with the important issues of the time without fear of media, corporate, political or quasi-religious censorship or disapproval". He died in February 1994.
The first biography has just been published - American Scream - The Bill Hicks Story by the New York comedy critic, Cynthia True. Despite its many flaws, it remains essential reading if only because of its subject matter. You really need to listen to the live recordings though - Relentless, Dangerous, Arizona Bay and his masterpiece, Rant In E Minor - for a palpable sense of this extraordinary man.
Listen to him as he dances around the stage pulling all the threads of his narrative together. "All I'm trying to do, folks, is rid the world of all these fevered egos that are tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we can imagine."
• American Scream by Cynthia True is published by Sidgwick and Jackson (£9.99 sterling). Relentless, Dangerous, Arizona Bay and Rant In E Minor are on the Rykodisc label. Website: www.billhicks.com