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Bill Hicks article in today's Guardian

Started by butnut, February 14, 2004, 11:38:37 AM

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butnut

Right here

And it looks like a new book's coming out

QuoteLast laugh    
                   
                                                   He was sceptical, scatological, struggling for success on his own terms. Then suddenly life changed for comedian Bill Hicks: his work was being taken seriously - and, at 31, he was dying. Ten years on, John Lahr pays tribute                
               
                                 Saturday  February  14, 2004
The Guardian                
               
                           


No joke: Bill Hicks
 
 My New Yorker profile of Bill Hicks, The Goat Boy Rises, sat unpublished at the magazine for nearly four months. Hicks's ban from the David Letterman show and his subsequent 31-page letter to me explaining what had happened provided the impetus to get the profile into print straight away. It appeared on November 1, 1993.

"The phones are ringing off the hook, the offers are pouring in, and all because of you," Hicks wrote to me the following week, signing himself "Willy Hicks"."It's almost as though I've been lifted out of a 10-year rut and placed in a position where the offers finally match my long-held and deeply cherished creative aspirations... Somehow, people are listening in a new light. Somehow the possibilities (creatively) seem limitless."  

Rereading Hicks's letter now, 10 years later, the parenthesis in the last sentence hit me like a punch to the heart. Hicks was suddenly, to his amazement, no longer perceived as "a joke blower", the kind of pandering stand-up he hated.

In the two months after publication of the New Yorker piece, seven publishers approached him about writing a book; the Nation asked him to write a column; Robert De Niro met him to discuss the possibility of recording his comedy on his Tribeca label; and Channel 4, with Tiger Aspect, green-lighted Hicks's Counts Of The Netherworld ("Channel 4 wants our first show to somehow tie in with their celebration of the birth of democracy 2,000 years ago," Hicks wrote to me. "Democracy may have been born then, I just can't wait till it starts speaking and walking").  The creative possibilities may have seemed limitless to Hicks but, even as he was writing me letters about "the hoopla" and his newfound calm ("I'm very grateful for it"), he knew that he was dying.  

In June, touring Australia with the comedian Steven Wright, Hicks had begun to complain to his manager and girlfriend, Colleen McGarr, about horrible indigestion. He hadn't had a physical exam in 10 years, so when they returned, later in the month, to West Palm Beach for a week's engagement at the Comedy Corner, McGarr booked him a check-up.

On June 15, his first night at the Comedy Corner, Hicks came off stage clutching his side. "The physical had been set up for the following Thursday," McGarr recalls, "but when I took a look at him, I said, 'We gotta get you in tomorrow'." Hicks was 31.

Because of his relative youth, the doctor, William Donovan, seemed convinced the swelling on his side was a gall bladder problem. He sent Hicks for an ultrasound. "The ultrasound guy said, 'We have to get him over to the hospital. We have to do a biopsy because this isn't gall bladder'," McGarr says. "They looked very grim."  

On the night of his liver biopsy, Hicks slept at the Good Samaritan hospital. "He was really digging it," McGarr says. "I was going out to get him his favourite treats: grilled-cheese sandwiches and soup. It was like an enforced rest after all the touring. He was kind of chipper."  At five the next morning, Donovan phoned her. "Colleen, it's the worst news possible," he said. "You've got to get down here now. We have to talk to him." In person, Donovan told McGarr that Hicks had pancreatic cancer; he had only about three months to live.

At 7.30am, they went in to see Hicks, and Donovan told him that he had stage-four pancreatic cancer and that there was very little that could be done about it. At first poleaxed by the news - "He looked like he'd been shot," Donovan is reported as saying in Cynthia True's American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story - Hicks finally said, "What's the battleplan?"  

What had to be decided, Donovan explained, was how Hicks wanted to live the time he had left. Aggressive treatment would leave him mostly incapacitated. Since Hicks felt "at the peak of his powers", according to McGarr, a compromise treatment was arranged, so that he could continue to write and perform. "There was no crying, no going nuts," McGarr says. "It was really, really calm. He'd known for a while, I'm sure, that something was wrong. I mean, people don't have indigestion for six months."  

The following Monday, Hicks started chemotherapy. A network of doctors around the country was set up so that Hicks could get treatment wherever he happened to be touring. Hicks responded well to the therapy. "No one knew about his illness," McGarr says. "The only people who knew were my business partner, Duncan Strauss, and Bill's immediate family. Nobody else. We didn't tell anyone. That was also Bill's decision. He had a lot to do - he was finishing the record, Arizona Bay, and he had a ton of gigs." She adds, "He wanted the work to get out without the taint of any sentimentality."  

In the months that remained to him, by all accounts, Hicks seemed to inhabit the world in a different way. Instead of scourging it, he beheld it. "Things became a lot more meaningful than he'd ever given them credit for," says McGarr, who saw him "growing on a spiritual level". "Flowers. The beach. He started swimming in the ocean for the first time, splashing around like a dolphin, which is not really Hicks-like - at the beach, when he was dragged there, he was always the guy dressed head-to-toe in black."  

Hicks referred to his cancer as a "wake-up call". Where, in the past, Hicks had styled himself as an outlaw on stage and a loner off it, now he sought out people and engaged them. His spirit and his wardrobe started to lighten. "He was astounded by how much love came around him as a result of this," McGarr says. "He realised that people really did care about him and that he didn't have to be alone."

For a time, he moved into McGarr's West Palm Beach apartment, and he "began to take some actual joy" in domestic life. "This is a guy who had been on the road for about 15 years," McGarr says. "He's used to eating crap - spaghetti sauce out of a jar. 'I need you to get me some ragu,' he'd say. I'm like, 'We don't have jarred spaghetti sauce in this house, we have homemade.' Fun stuff like that. It was a revelation to him."  

Before returning to Little Rock, Arkansas, for his birthday - December 16 - and for Christmas with his family, Hicks celebrated his own unofficial Yuletime with McGarr in Florida. They bought a tree and decorated it with homemade ornaments. Hicks drew a reindeer on a card and tied it to the front bough of the tree. He told McGarr to open it. "Will you marry me?" it said. The question was academic. By late December, according to McGarr, Hicks was "really, really bad".  

"On a work level, everything was done," she says. "He had recorded Arizona Bay, performed his last sold-out set at Igby's in Los Angeles on November 17, pitched the TV show at Channel 4." In just four months, Hicks had acquired what had eluded him for 15 years - a receptive American audience.

But on a physical level he was now fading. Nonetheless, after Christmas, he insisted on meeting McGarr in Las Vegas to watch Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles in concert. "I almost passed out, he looked so bad," McGarr recalls. The day after the Sinatra show, they flew back to West Palm Beach. The doctors wanted to admit Hicks to the hospital; he refused to go. "Things got very tense," says McGarr, who had to enlist the help of hospice nurses and Hicks's mother, Mary.  

On January 5, 1994 - against McGarr's wishes - Hicks did the eight o'clock show at Caroline's Comedy Club in New York. In her attempt to prevent Hicks from doing the gig, McGarr rang Donovan. "Colleen, Bill is ready to die. He just won't lie down," Donovan told her. She hung up on him. Hicks was about 30 minutes into his set when he looked up over the microphone and scanned the crowd. "Colleen, are you out there?" he said.  

From the back of the room, McGarr called out, "Bill, I'm right here."  

"I can't do this any more," he said.  

McGarr rushed to the side of the stage. Hicks glanced over at her, paused, then put the mic back in its stand and stepped into the wings. It was his last performance.  

On January 26, McGarr put Hicks on a plane to Little Rock. "Bill always wanted to die with his parents at their house in Little Rock," she says. "He wanted the circle complete - that was very important to him. Because he had been so estranged, he wanted everything back."

On Valentine's Day, after making a few calls to old friends, Hicks announced that he was finished with speaking. Although he hardly uttered another word, except to ask for water, he paced his room, according to his mother, almost every night. On February 26, at 11.20pm, Hicks died with his parents at his bedside. His radiant comic light had burned for 32 years, two months and 10 days.  

When a great comedian dies, the culture loses a little of its flavour. The world rolls on, of course, but without the comedian both to witness and illuminate the deliria of the moment. In Hicks's case, the loss is even more piquant, given that the American public discovered him largely after he'd departed it.

"This is the material, by the way, that's kept me virtually   anonymous in America," Hicks joked in his last complete set, after a detour into philosophy. "You know, no one fucking knows me. No one gives a fuck. Meanwhile, they're draining the Pacific and putting up bench seats for Carrot Top's next Showtime special. Carrot Top: for people who didn't get Gallagher." He continued, "Gallagher! Only America could produce a comic who ends his show by destroying food with a sledgehammer. Gee, I wonder why we're hated the world over."

At the end of the set - in an inspired moment that was captured on film - Hicks came back on stage for his encore with a large paper bag, from which he extracted a watermelon. He put it on a stool, grabbed the microphone, raised it high above his head and brought it down on the side of the stool. He'd missed the melon but hit the target. The audience howled.

As Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name blared over the loudspeakers - "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" - Hicks shouted in unison with the lead singer: "Motherfucker!!!!!!" Hicks made his exit, flipping the finger wildly with both hands to the room, to the world, to the cosmic order that his jokes frequently invoked.  

The revenge that Hicks took with laughter - his almost infantile glee at getting even for the credulity of the republic ("You're a moron!" "You suck Satan's cock!" he frequently yelled to the idiots in his mind and in the audience) - marked him as the genuine comic article. "Listen to my message, not the words," he told his mother.

Composed in equal parts of scepticism, scatology and spirituality, Hicks's humour gave off a very special acrid perfume. "Pro-lifers murdering people," Hicks heehawed. "It's irony on a base level, but I like it. It's a hoot. It's a fuckin' hoot. That's what fundamentalism breeds, though - no irony."

To the spellbound and the spellbinders, he bequeathed a heritage of roaring disgust. If he wanted to force the public to descry a corrupt society, he also wanted it to descry the low standard of commercial US comedy, which raised laughs but not thoughts and, in his eyes, hawked "fucking beer commercials" while leaving the public "without any kind of social fucking awareness".  

The white heat of Hicks's fulminations was meant, in part, to purify comedy itself - a notion explicitly stated in a film script he developed in the last year of his life, which told the story of a serial killer who murders hack comics.

"I loved those who gave their lives to find the perfect laugh, the real laugh, the gut laugh, the healing laugh. For love, I killed those comedians," the murderer explains when he's finally caught. Hicks wanted to play the serial killer; his act was part of the same search-and-destroy mission.  

Hicks came of age when the sitcom showcase was king. At a time when the romance of the road was over for American comedians, and the goal was to get a development deal - your own show and a big payday - Hicks returned comedy to its essential atmosphere of challenge and unpredictability.

In a riff about Tonight Show host Jay Leno doing Dorito commercials ("What a fucking whore!"), Hicks said, "Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call. For ever. End of story. You're another fuckin' corporate shill... Everything you say is suspect, everything that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink."  

As the Letterman incident and his reaction to it dramatised, Hicks was as hungry as the next   comedian for mainstream success, but only on his own terms. He was not prepared to sacrifice the emotional integrity of his material for popularity. "There's dick jokes on the way," he'd say to his listeners when he raised ideas that flummoxed them, then he'd put on his cracker accent: " 'This guy better have a big-veined purple dick joke to pull himself out of this comedy hole'."

As a comedian, he was never soft and cuddly. For the first-class members of the next generation of US comedians, such as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, the purity of Hicks's comic quest was inspirational. "Hicks was one of the guys fighting the good fight," says Stewart, who considered Hicks a legendary figure and who worked with him a couple of times on the road. "He was the guy you looked to. He wasn't trying to be mediocre; he wasn't trying to satisfy some need for fame; he wasn't trying to get a sitcom; he was trying to be expert. Hicks was an adult among children."  

Among the daring lessons that Hicks's comedy taught Stewart and other comedians of the next generation was "to walk the room" - if Hicks didn't think that the room was worthy of him, he would "walk it"; that is, drive his comedy further than even he might normally think of doing. "The audience's apathy spurred him on," says Stewart.  

As a performer, Hicks was not short on soul or on charisma. In front of the paying customers, he was powerful, unpredictable and thrilling. "He was bigger than the room," Stewart says. A great comedian is by definition inimitable. Nonetheless, since Hicks's death, and even before it, American comedians such as Denis Leary have made a good living reworking his lines and faking his badass attitude.

The indicators of posthumous longevity for Hicks are good. A biography has been published; Hicks's record sales are bullish; in a recent TV documentary about censorship, for which Hicks's expletives were deleted, his name was added to the shortlist of comic martyrs.  

Since Hicks's death, history has caught up with his comedy. In the early 1990s, he was already talking about Iraq and the first President Bush. "If Bush had died there," he said, in a bit about why we should kill Bush ourselves instead of launching 22 Cruise missiles at Baghdad in response to his alleged attempted assassination, "there would have been no loss of innocent life."  

A dream is something you wake up from. It is compelling and significant that the final words on Hicks's last record, Rant In E-Minor, are a prayer: "Lift me up out of this illusion, Lord. Heal my perception, so that I may know only reality."

Hicks mocked society's enchanters - advertisers, TV networks, rock'n'roll icons, religious fanatics, politicians - with the sure knowledge that, as in all fairy tales, only the disenchanted are free. He made that show of freedom by turns terrifying, exhilarating and hilarious. He was what only a great comedian can be for any age: an enemy of boundaries, a disturber of the peace, a bringer of insight and of joy, a comic distillation of his own rampaging spirit.

Hicks on stage

"When did sex become a bad thing? Did I miss a meeting? Playboy - pornography - causes sexual thoughts. Penthouse - pornography - causes sexual thoughts. You know what causes sexual thoughts when it's all said and done? Let's cut to the chase; I'm tired of the debate, OK? I'll clear it up for ya mmm right fucking now. Here's what causes sexual thoughts... having a dick. End of story. I can speak for every guy here tonight, aaaand, OK I will. In the course of our day ANYTHING can cause a sexual fucking thought. You can be on a train, and it's rocking kinda nice. Pants are a little tight. Oh my God, I've got a woody! I got a woody on the El train. What are we gonna do, ban public transportation? I find it ironic that people who are against sexual thoughts are generally these fundamentalist Christians who also believe you should be fruitful and multiply. It seems like they would support sexual thoughts, you know, perhaps even have a centrefold in the Bible. Miss Deuteronomy. Turn offs: floods, locusts, smokers. I actually did that joke in Alabama, right. These three rednecks met me after the show, man. 'Hey, buddy! Come here. Hey, Mr Comedian! Come here. Hey, buddy, we're Christians, we don't like what you said.' I said, 'Then forgive me.' It seemed so obvious. You know? But we've gotta have an enemy, man. I'm tired of enemies; I'll be honest with you. I'm sick of enemies. I got no fucking enemies, K? K. It's a strange world; I don't know what we choose, why we choose the things we do as a collective. You ever wondered that? You know what I mean, the fact that we live in a world where John Lennon was murdered, yet Milli Vanilli walks the fucking planet. You know? Bad choice. Just from me to you, it wasn't a good one. But isn't that weird, we always kill the guys who try to help us. Isn't that strange, that we let the little demons run amok, always? John Lennon: murdered. John Kennedy: murdered. Martin Luther King: murdered. Gandhi: murdered. Jesus: murdered. Reagan... wounded. You know. Bad fucking choice."
At the Vic theatre, Chicago, November 1990  

"I'm so sick of arming the world and then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of 'em. We're like the bullies of the world, you know. We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane... throwing the pistol at the sheep herder's feet:  

'Pick it up.'  

'I don't wanna pick it up, mister; you'll shoot me.'  

'Pick up the gun.'  

'Mister, I don't want no trouble, huh. I just came down town here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about 10 rolls a week of that stuff. I ain't looking for no trouble, mister.'  

'Pick up the gun.' (Three gunshots)  

'You all saw him. He had a gun.' "
At the Dominion theatre, London, November 1992  

© John Lahr, 2004.  

· This is an edited version of John Lahr's introduction to Love All The People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, by Bill Hicks. The book is published as a paperback original by Constable at £12.99. To order a copy for the special price of £10.99, plus UK p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.