Either the next day or the following summer – again, he gave multiple accounts – Bill was in a bookstore and picked up a copy of Without Feathers. Years later he confessed to an interviewer he couldn’t even explain the affinity. “I’m not Jewish. I’m not short. I’m not a schlemel.”
A pre-teen Bill had just seen Allen in Casino Royale about the time he met one Dwight Slade. It was in the summer of 1974, when they were both between the 6th and 7th grades at Spring Forest Junior High. They were playing touch football with mutual friends. Dwight recalled simply, “He was odd-looking. Very odd-looking.” With jet-black hair, black eyes, and vaguely Asian-looking features, Bill’s appearance was not what you would expect for someone with such an authentically Southern genetic make-up.
Bill had become enamored with Woody Allen’s character of Dr. Noah in Casino Royale. It was the basis for the goofy impersonations he was doing at the time. The physical humor was something that Dwight not only instantly understood, but could match Bill in doing. The two became fast friends and developed a relationship that was part collaborative and part competitive. Recalls Slade: “We would mutually crack each other up, but we also had a sort of sibling rivalry as to who could make our friends laugh more.
“I don’t remember the specific moment, but he told me: ‘We ought to be comedians. We ought to be a comedy team.’ I said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That was my dream when I was a kid. But when he said that I thought, ‘Well, finally here’s a guy that speaks my language.’ He goes, ‘We should be comics. I’ve written some jokes.’ I went over to his house and he showed me. Here’s a guy who thinks like me, I thought. And for Bill I think there was even more of a sense that, ‘Oh my God, I’m not the only crazy person here. I’m not the only person that wants to do something out of the norm.'”
Corny as it sounds, the two developed a really sweet friendship. For example, Dwight’s Boy Scout meetings took place at St. John Vianney Catholic Church, whose grounds ran right up to the Hicks’ backyard fence. During breaks in the Boy Scouting, Dwight would go over to Bill’s and throw a rock up at Bill’s window to get his attention. Bill would open the window and they would talk.
By the time Bill got to high school, despite his natural physical gifts he had all but left sports behind. He stopped playing football; he stopped playing baseball. He kept running track in the 9th grade, then in the first part of the 10th grade. But that was it. Slade explains, “It wasn’t because Bill didn’t like athletics, but he hated what it was becoming in high school.”
High-school sports were like a religion in Texas. High-school football was a religion in Texas. Stadia across the state turned small-town communities into congregations of a sort. Texans from Snook to Shiner easily spent more time on Friday nights in the fall watching the local kids run around the gridiron than they ever spent listening to sermons on Sundays. It was a ratio of about three to one. And Stratford High School didn’t just win, it won state championships. Okay, a state championship during Bill’s junior year (“State in ’78” was the rallying cry); but still, for a 17-year-old kid in Texas, being part of a state championship team would endow you with near god-like status. Stratford’s football team was fairly exceptional. The star running back, Craig James, later started for the New England Patriot team that played in Super Bowl XX. And Stratford standout Chuck Thomas was the back-up center for the San Francisco 49ers team that won Super Bowls XXIII and XXIV.
This is the environment Bill grew up in. If he had wanted it, Bill could easily have been part of the privileged jockocracy. He had all the physical tools needed to be a star athlete. Coolness, popularity, cheerleaders – if Bill had kept playing football and baseball, he could have had access to all the things that make high school a nontraumatic experience for a teen. But he opted out, and that’s where Bill spent the “best years of his life” – a common moniker for that four-year high-school slice of American life.
On the outside. That’s where he belonged. Bill was a misfit, both within his family and, with few exceptions, amongst his peers. He didn’t drink, and couldn’t understand why people did. He wasn’t social and he didn’t go to high-school parties (“keggers”). He liked to read. He was obsessed with Huckleberry Finn, The Hardy Boys and The Hobbit. Mystery and adventure were clearly his favorites.
Bill wasn’t a loser, but high school is pretty binary: either you’re cool or you aren’t. Bill wasn’t in the cool clique. But he had friends and, even though he valued his privacy and being left alone, he wasn’t a loner. Most importantly he had Dwight and, once in high-school, Kevin Booth, a neighborhood kid in the class one year ahead of Bill and Dwight.
It was serendipitous that Bill hadn’t dropped out of sports completely during his freshman year at Stratford because it was in track that both Bill and Dwight first formed a relationship with co-conspirator-to-be Kevin Booth. They were on the track for practice – well, they were out there in their track clothes, but not doing much practising – when Booth approached the pair to say hi. “What’s up? I’m the guy you met yesterday at lunch.”
With the two similarly subversive minds of Dwight and Kevin, Bill would begin dabbling in the two activities that would occupy the rest of his life – music and comedy.
That day on the track with Kevin, Bill and Dwight started talking about putting a band together. They had outlandish ideas about what they wanted to do – “We need to have a big stage show with lights and smoke and we want to have bombs going off and lights and big speakers.”
“I told them, ‘Okay, I know how we can do that,'” Booth remembers. “They were thinking I was full of shit, but I said, ‘Why don’t you guys come over to my house tonight and we’ll get started.'” In Booth they had stumbled across someone with the technical know-how to pull off their oversized designs. They took Booth up on his offer and that night they began their journey to rock stardom. But there was a slight hitch: they didn’t have musical instruments; nor did they have the ability to play instruments.
They called themselves Stress. It was perfect. It sounded punk rock. More importantly, it was monosyllabic and ended with two s’s. That sounds a bit arbitrary, but it turned out to be an unintentional asset. Every child of the Seventies in America knew the phrase: “You wanted the best, you got the best! The hottest band in the land, Kiss.” It was the band’s stage introduction on the multi-platinum-selling Kiss Alive! Dwight and Bill were big Kiss fans. Huge.
It was hard not to be. In the mid-Seventies Kiss were omnipresent.
One day the guys were talking about making smoke bombs for their stage show. Kevin, of course, chimed in: “I know how to make smoke bombs.” He went out and got some dry ice, then they all convened at Dwight’s. They sat in his room in a little circle around a bucket. Kevin poured some water on the dry ice in the bucket. The teens watched this tiny stream of smoke frothing up from the bucket while they listened to Kiss records and talked about how they were going to be bigger than Kiss and have a bigger stage show than Kiss. Bill and Dwight held flashlights, pointed them into the smoke and waved them back and forth. They understood the theater of rock, but they weren’t even community theater of rock.
But now they were Stress, it was like joining Kiss vicariously. All they had to do was substitute the one word. “You wanted the best, you got the best! The hottest band in the land, Stress.” Bill and Dwight would pass each other in the halls of school and greet each other with that rock ‘n’ roll catchphrase intra. It was plug and play hype. They started taking pictures of themselves in their best rock star poses and circulating the pictures at school. Never mind that they didn’t have things like songs or proper instruments. They had pictures. That made it real.
One day Bill was called into the vice principal’s office. Bill looked