Stress became almost a daily activity for Bill, Dwight, Kevin and miscellaneous other friends who floated in and out of the still-amorphous band. Bruce Salmon, Mike Groner, Steve Fluke, John Terry, all had stints of varying length as members of Stress. Basically, all it took was showing up some afternoon to play at least once. That earned you a place in the lore of Stress genealogy.
Salmon wasn’t just a frequent participant early on, but was a co-founder. His older brother had been in bands with Kevin’s older brother, and between Kevin and Bruce, they offered an invaluable asset to the fledgling band: Kevin could borrow a bass guitar from his brother; Bruce knew how to play it.
Still, initially it was a band by committee. Who wants to play what? Bill had an acoustic guitar that, depending on how you looked at it, had either a couple of strings missing or had a couple of strings. Sometimes Dwight sang, sometimes he played bass. Kevin played a plastic garbage can for a drum. They miked up everything as best they could to achieve maximum distortion, and proceeded to make noise. Again, their aspirations were way beyond their abilities, but that didn’t deter them.
Comedy was something Bill did in parallel to music. The two weren’t mutually exclusive: he loved both, and he invested hours of time working on both. Bill and Dwight were already spending much of their after-school time hanging out, but in the 7th grade, joke writing was still a solo activity for Bill. By the time the summer of 1975 rolled around, things began to change. Bill and Dwight were listening to sets by comedians – Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin – taped from the late-night talk shows with a hand-held audio recorder.
They were also developing more characters; better imitations of their goofy parents. Then, a couple of months into 8th grade, Dwight’s brother got his hands on a copy of Woody Allen doing stand-up in his nightclub routine. Big deal? In the mid-Seventies it was. This was like finding a copy of the Zapruder film. This was cooler than being made a general in the Kiss Army.
And it’s what really brought them together not just as friends with similar interests and tastes, but as a comedy team. “It was our first writing of jokes together,” Slade recalls. “Most of them were his, and I mostly just tagged on to them in the beginning. I was writing my own, but Bill was way ahead of me. My jokes were really simplistic and idiotic, to be honest. It wasn’t until then – and it’s so ridiculous to talk in these terms – but it wasn’t until 8th grade that I started to mature in my joke writing.”
Bill and Dwight also started working on their own play, Death. It was highly derivative of Woody Allen’s play Death Knocks (not to be confused with the Allen play of the same name, Death, that would become the loose basis of his movie Shadows and Fog). They tried out for the 8th grade talent show. Woody Allen, however, apparently wasn’t good enough for an 8th grade talent show. And as his apostles, Bill and Dwight weren’t either. They failed the audition. “Inspired” as it might have been by Allen, the play was not without its own originality and humor. Thirty years later, Slade half-jokes, “I’m still bitter.”
There was a silver lining. The Spring Forest Junior High drama teacher asked them to perform their play for the speech class. They happily obliged. In front of the willing audience, Bill and Dwight were stellar. They got real laughs, real applause. They were now as encouraged as they had been dejected after the rejection from the talent show. Their intuition that they were good at this – at writing, at creating, at getting laughs – was correct.
By that time Bill and Dwight (performing under the stage names of Mel and Hal – their middle names) had a fair amount of material: three monologues of about fifteen minutes each, plus the play. They had already put together a half-hour tape of their best stuff and sent it to local agents in hopes of having someone do the legwork of getting them gigs, and also gaining some legitimacy. As it was, they weren’t doing so great by themselves.
They still had some hard lessons to learn. Later that month Bill and Dwight saw an ad in the Houston Chronicle for open auditions for the Easter Seals Telethon in April. They were still keeping their ambitions clandestine, and couldn’t ask their parents for rides. So they took their bikes across town. Drenched from the effort, with the aid of Houston’s humidity – like a natural sauna 365 days a year – they arrived at the local school for the deaf where the auditions were being held.
Trying to cool off and stay calm, they did about ten minutes for the judges. Mel and Hal were told they were great writers. They got a “we’ll let you know.” For artistic teens, this was doubly hellish: in their budding social lives they were getting, “let’s just be friends” from the ladies; in their budding careers they were getting the showbiz equivalent. Mel and Hal never heard back from the Easter Seals folks. Neither did Bill and Dwight, for that matter.
On the upside, Bill and Dwight had done their first stand-up gig together.
They soon came across another ad in the paper: an open audition for a restaurant that put on live entertainers. Again, they took their bikes to the restaurant. They ended up in a room in front of five or six adults – restaurant and nightclub owners – who, in Slade’s words, “laughed their asses off.” Not because two kids showed up, but because of the comedy the kids did. These adults, with no obligations to like them, loved them. Bill and Dwight knew one thing: even if they weren’t getting work, they were getting laughs. They had a good solid six minutes of material.
They had also got themselves hooked up with Universal Talent. When Dwight and Bill started looking for agents, they didn’t even know what a headshot was. It’s not the kind of thing a 14-year-old should know for any particular reason, but it was indicative of the gap between what they were and what they wanted to be. Even the most basic facts about the business of entertainment as a business were beyond them.
Add this ignorance to the fact that they were essentially sneaking around behind their parents’ backs, and it’s all the more miraculous that they even dared to endeavor this endeavor. They had to call around studios looking for a photographer. When they were able to lowball someone to a price they could afford, they still had to ride their bikes (again) miles across town to the get the shots taken. On top of that, Bill was having to pilfer sweaters from his dad so that he could wear something presentable in the pictures. Finally, when the contact sheets arrived at Bill’s house for review, Mary Hicks opened the package before Bill could intercept the mail. That caused another row in the house. One: what the heck were the pictures for? Two: why the heck was Bill wearing his father’s sweater in them?
A meeting at Universal Talent? That was another 20-mile bike ride across town. Two hours on two wheels for about two minutes in the offices. Beverly the assistant told the sweat-drenched duo, “We’ll give you a call.” Nothing was easy. At least they were staying fit.
That summer, 1976, Bill attended camp. Church camp, actually. Somewhere out in West Texas. There he did his first solo stand-up gig. “I was absolutely terrified,” he confessed years later. “Not the least reason was that it was a church camp and a lot of the guys who I had been watching were like nightclub comics and Richard Pryor, so obviously I had to edit on my feet a little bit. I felt like I had made a huge mistake and I should have been in the ‘Kumbaya’ chorus that went up before me.” But after the show Hicks was accosted by more than one of his peers wanting to know how he had the courage to get up and do that in front of people.
“I don’t remember the exact thing that got the first laugh. I know I had, like, fourteen minutes of material, and, like, seven minutes of it was stolen, or someone else’s, like, Woody Allen material which nobody in Baptist West Texas country would ever be able to trace.”
Bill didn’t tell his parents but it wasn’t like he could keep it a secret. He did have the camp, staff and all, as an audience. One of the jokes he told was: “Ladies and gentleman, I had a rough upbringing. I was breast-fed … On falsies.”
Mary Hicks found out about Bill’s stand-up performance from one of the other ladies at Sunday School. Mary then went to the church’s assistant pastor to get more details. The pastor told Mary, “You might want to look at how you raised him.” Clearly Bill was correct