When most of his classmates went to college, Bill went to Los Angeles to be a comedian. It still amazes me to say that, and not just for the courage it took. The point can’t be made clear enough: Bill wanted to be a rock star. It wasn’t like he ever wanted to make a choice between comedy and music. He never saw himself as having made that choice. Throughout his life – Stress, Marble Head Johnson, Arizona Bay – Bill loved making music as much as he loved doing comedy.
Rock stars were his idols. For a while he fancied himself a Sinatra of sorts. And when he did material about drugs, he didn’t build jokes around Timothy Leary but instead glorified Keith Richards. When Bill was doing his last series of shows, he came out on stage playing air guitar and lip-synching to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” He was not long for this world and he was still using a rock ‘n’ roll pantomime to introduce himself to the audience. Bill fucking loved rock ‘n’ roll.
But the world forces people to be practical and out of necessity Bill had to move something to the forefront. Two, maybe three, things pushed Bill in the direction of comedy.
First, during his junior year of high school, Bill brought a booking agent over to my house to see Stress play. It was an uncomfortable scene, trying to explain to my parents what a middle-aged man was doing in our house. He booked bands into the Whiskey River, a local rock club in Houston. With his mustache and oversized Seventies hair he looked the part. If he hadn’t been standing in the Booth family living room, he could have been up for the lead in the sequel to Behind the Green Door.
We gave some vague explanation of what was going on. It was lost on my parents: “Well, Kevin is going to college next year.”
We played our set for him. He was less than impressed. We were a novelty because we were young. Hanson twenty years too soon. Bill and I were both quite baby-faced. We could have passed for 12. Combined. That was also the appeal. “Hey this guy is only 15. Listen to how fast he can play guitar.” That was going to be the gist of it, but Bill and I had already had a brief conversation about the wisdom of being pigeonholed as kid rockers.
Me: “Man, that’s not going to last long.” Bill: “Yeah, that’ll work for about two years.”
The booking agent told us we needed to play more popular songs, suggesting we learn “My Sharona” and some other hits that were popular that month. It’s all anyone ever said: “You gotta do covers before you can be in an original band.” That used to bum Bill out. “No, we want to be original right off the bat.”
It was a defeat for Bill. He was hanging a lot more on Stress than Charles Lloyd and I were at this point. Charles was going to college. I was going to college. Without anything to keep us in Houston and keep us in Stress, those two things weren’t going to change.
In addition to this lesson, Bill really was an exceptional comedian. Even at the age of 17. No doubt about it. And, as much as I loved making music with my friend, the truth is Bill was fifty times the comedian that he was musician. He belonged on stage, but he was better off telling jokes.
I went to college. Bill stayed in Houston for his senior year. I returned to Houston regularly so we could still jam together. We were still Stress if only in name. When we weren’t playing music, we were working on film ideas. We had a super-8 camera and we used to concoct scenes. It was very Steve McQueen. We’d block out the shot – usually doing an action scene where we would line the stairwell with mattresses and have some sort of fall or body slam – then “shoot” it. Point the camera and … “Action!”
Oh, there was no film in the camera. We couldn’t afford it.
We also watched the TV show Soap religiously. Bill loved Soap. It was appointment television.
That summer, Bill stayed indoors at all costs. It’s like he was a space alien – like direct sunlight wasn’t good for him. He could only survive in dark, air-conditioned environments. The whole summer consisted of a handful of activities: eat, sleep, play guitar, watch movies, watch Soap. The only difference was that now the episodes of Soap were reruns. It didn’t matter to Bill. He was still parked in front of the TV every Tuesday night. In reality, though, he was just biding his time until he headed out west.
The thinking was: Kevin goes back to college, Bill goes to LA, and in a year or so, when we both get things going, we’ll get the band back together. Exactly how and where that would happen was never addressed.
Bill’s parents agreed to finance his comedy career as long as he would also go to college. So he signed up at LA Community College for a martial arts class. The first day – and Bill was going in there with some experience of the basic moves from previous instruction – the instructor lines them up and has them facing off. The whole class is filled with kids wanting to be in gangs: tatted-up kids with shaved heads in the days before every kid had a shaved head and a tattoo. And it was a lot more scary and dangerous than it is today where half the kids are copping to some gangsta-rap fantasy lifestyle they saw on an MTV video. These kids were the real shit.
So Bill had to face off with one of these kids. The first thing, the first day, the guy punches Bill right in the nose. Didn’t break it, but gave him a nice bloody face. It was all too perfectly Bill. There would be something that he was going to get into, and he was excited about the class. He had his hopes up about how good this was going to be, put a lot of energy into it, then the very second he shows up to get started something goes horribly wrong and he bails out immediately.
It’s rare for kids to be like this, and I didn’t know anyone else at that age who could be so self-deprecating. “I’m goofy-looking.” “I don’t fit in.” He called me up to tell me about it. “Oh my God, Kevin, I got my ass kicked by this guy.” And he was laughing at himself.
Bill had that kind of vulnerability, and it allowed him to capture people’s hearts. It wasn’t contrived or synthetic. Even towards his later days, you still had the feeling when he was on stage that if you yelled something from the audience, even though he might have the perfect comeback and put you in your place, or even explode and start screaming expletives at you, it really would hurt his feelings, because he was always trying to open up his heart to people. It takes a lot more of a man and a lot more of a warrior to stand before people in that way – have an open heart, and put yourself at risk.
When Bill arrived in Los Angeles, September 1980, he took a cab from the airport straight to the Comedy Store. Since he was a naive hick, he might as well play the part. He walked in with his suitcase still in hand and asked Andy Huggins, the comedian minding the store during the day, “When do I go on?” He played the part all the way through his audition for HBO that evening, bringing his suitcase on stage.
Bill didn’t get the HBO special, but he got the attention of Mitzi, who instantly liked him and started giving him regular spots.
His parents paid for the one-bedroom apartment, he rented in the Valley. He had a bed, a TV, a tape-deck, and not much else. He had a small support group with Steve Epstein and Riley Barber, but Bill spent a lot of time by himself: reading, going for long walks in Griffith Park and along Mulholland Drive. He also wrote tons of letters to friends. He didn’t even have a phone.
Sam Kinison finally turned up in LA about four months after Bill. When he got to town, he didn’t get stage time from Mitzi, he got a door job. He had debts from the “Lam” show and he was staying on Epstein’s floor. He asked to borrow $1000 from Bill. Sam thought he’d be flush. Bill balked. Sam went off on him.
A couple of nights later, as Bill was walking down the street, Sam pulled up alongside him in his car and went off. “You’re out here because I put you on that show I lost eight thousand bucks on.” He berated Bill because Mitzi liked Bill more,