The point of the show for the comics was to make money to finance their relocation to LA, but with Hicks’ parents agreeing to finance his move to Hollywood, and Epstein having already left for California, the point of the show was really for Sam to make enough money to finance his relocation. Financially it was a disaster. Sam lost in the thousands of dollars, much of which he had borrowed.
Despite the fact that Argus Hamilton had been on The Tonight Show, hardly anybody in Houston knew who he was. So he wasn’t much of a draw. Plus, nobody wanted to pay a premium ticket price to see the comics they could see any night of the week at the Annex for pennies on the dollar.
The show worked out great for Hicks, though. Hamilton took a liking to Bill, and since Hamilton was dating Mitzi Shore, the owner of the Comedy Store in LA, Bill now had an “in” at the Store. Located right on the Sunset Strip, at that time the Store was Mecca, the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat all rolled into one. And Hamilton was not only going to help get Bill fast-tracked at the Store, but he was Bill’s line on getting an audition for an HBO Young Comedians Special.
Kevin Booth
During Bill’s second year of high school, one of our friends – probably Brent Ballard – “discovered” Eric Johnson. There was this skinny kid who was a fucking wizard guitar player that we had to see. A few weeks later, he was playing at a place called Fitzgerald’s. We piled into the Stressmobile. We had to see him.
This was another nightclub. I have no idea how we were even getting into these clubs: Houston, Texas, in the late Seventies was just a different place. The drinking age was only 18 and to say there was lax enforcement was an overstatement. We didn’t have fake IDs or anything. Probably because we thought we could get in, we got in.
Mindblowing? It was like the second coming. This wasn’t a guitar player, this guy was a fucking messiah; he was like nothing we had ever seen or heard before. He was technical as all hell but he had melody. And he was fast. Blazing fast.
Bill used to call Johnson’s playing “whittling.” He was describing the sound you made when trying to use your mouth to duplicate the sound of Eric playing super-fast: “Whittle – ittle – ittle – ittle,” etc. On a more subversive level it was Bill having a fun stab at his redneck heritage. Whittling was stereotypical southern. A knife. Some wood. The banjo player on the porch in Deliverance, he was probably also a good whittler. Bill was trying to endow the term with a bit more sophistication.
From that first night on, we would see Eric Johnson any time we could. Bill, Dave DeBesse, Brent Ballard and I, that was the core group. If Eric was playing five nights a week, we would go see him five nights a week. It also became a Maginot Line, with Johnsons Eric and Robert on either side. David Johndrow, he was with the latter. We were in the camp that worshipped the skinny white kid with the skinny tie.
Even though Bill was the only one who sat comfortably on both sides of the barrier, he was also the one in the Eric Johnson race – who could turn themself into Eric Johnson the most and the fastest – with Brent Ballard. It affected the way they got their hair cut, the shirts they wore, the shoes they wore, the skinny tie, the vest. Everything.
One night we went early to try to talk to Eric before a show at Fitzgerald’s. We had this image of Johnson as a major rock star. We thought, “He must have an army of roadies. He’s such a good musician, he must be famous and rich.” We just didn’t understand. But we went behind the club to the parking lot where we saw this waifish pixie of a man get out of a van, then we watched him have to carry his own amplifier up the long stairway at the back of the stage. Lesson number one.
Still, we approached him; we were super-excited and Bill was leading the charge. “We come to every one of your shows.” We came on fast and hard. It freaked him out. He was a very private person. What were we thinking? Actually, I know exactly what we were thinking. We thought he would be warm and appreciative: “You’re at all my shows? Oh wow. Thanks.” Maybe he would ask us if we wanted to go eat and we would have this connection. No. Lesson number two.
After that incident we would still sit right up in the front at his shows, looking up at him. Rapt. Especially Bill; his slack-jawed awe was a few orders of magnitude more intense than the rest of ours. Johnson would look down and occasionally catch sight of us. Often you could see a slightly nervous look break out across his face. I think he was amazed we could sit through it over and over again.
Eric Johnson wasn’t just a guitarist, he was influential to Bill for another important reason; specifically, he was also heavily into meditation and mysticism. He didn’t just dabble either – veggie diet, drug-free lifestyle, everything. Like Bill, he didn’t touch a drop of drink. So in Johnson, Bill thought he had a kindred spirit. And if non-western approaches to spiritual enlightenment also meant Bill might become equally as bad-ass a guitar player, all the better.
Plus, Johnson was this super-scrawny guy but he always had the super-hot women around him. Always. So it was confirmation of the equation: good musician = hot babes.
Even cooler was the fact that he wasn’t fawning over girls in return. It was our first glimpse into the “proper” way of handling physically attractive girls; specifically not acting like you’re too into them. When you’re young you tend to think girls want guys that pay tons of attention to them. Then you see the weird, skinny artist guy surrounded by hot chicks and he’s not doing that. “Oh man. He’s indifferent towards her. And for some reason she wants him even more. Wow. How weird? I don’t get it.”
Bill was also a bit of a prodigy on guitar. He had the hand-eye coordination so, once he got serious, it wasn’t long before he could also play blazingly fast. But speed was just speed. Bill lacked musicianship at that point. To most people it sounded cool, cramming dozens of notes into a couple of seconds. But to someone who really understood music, it just sounded like dozens of notes crammed into a couple of seconds.
For a birthday party, Laurie Mango actually arranged to have Eric Johnson play at her house. Bill was super-excited because Eric Johnson was going to play at his girlfriend’s house. It was like a double helping of “fuck yes” with a side of “yippee” sauce. Until Bill and Laurie broke up. After that, Bill just assumed that the whole thing would be called off. Laurie was just doing it because Bill wanted it. Or so he thought. When she went through with it, to Bill it was obvious she was just doing it as a dig at him.
He was probably still welcome to go, but that’s not who Bill was. Out of principle, even if that principle was just spite, no way, no day he was going to go. It was the love of his young life and his favorite musician in the world, but Bill was too stubborn. We boycotted.
Then he had to hear all of his friends talking about it. Even the guys who were, like, “Eric Johnson is crappy. I’m into the Grateful Dead” talked about how great it was. If Laurie wanted a dig at Bill, it had worked.
Years later, when Bill started drinking, he lost some – not all, but some – of his taste for the antiseptic. Suddenly Bill was way more into the Rolling Stones. Mick and Keith in, Eric out. Bill gets fucked up, he likes music of people who get fucked up, and not the elfin magic of a clean-living mystic. But at some point during his heavy drinking days, Bill (doing comedy, obviously) actually opened a show for Eric. Bill got fucked up and told Eric that if he would just eat meat, maybe a hamburger, and drink a beer, then he could write a hit.
Bill never opened for Eric again.
Well before Laurie, I tried hard to help Bill score, or even just meet girls. But he refused to take part in the juvenile ploys we cooked up. The origins of this go back to before I was ever a friend of Bill, but we used to have dinner parties, the whole point