Another faculty member of the Sunday School told Mrs. Hicks that her son thought Bill’s comedy was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Bill’s first show; Bill’s first rave review.
In the fall of 1976, Bill and Dwight were starting as freshmen at Stratford High School. Stratford was a shit-brown brick building with a mod-deco facade. And the near-windowless exterior made it look more like the kind of place where you would have line-up and lock-down than you would take roll. It was somewhere between eyesore and oddity. It hadn’t produced any poet laureates. It produced country music star Clint Black.
Right about the time Bill and Dwight were supposed to start high school, they also got a shot at what could have been the biggest gig of their lives … or the worst. While, over time, the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon has morphed into a parade of has-beens, back in those days it was a fixture of Americana: Elvis, John Lennon and Sinatra all made appearances. Plus, it was raising money for kids with muscular dystrophy.
The way the telethon works, there is a national show supported by dozens if not hundreds of smaller, regional shows all running concurrently. During the broadcast, the network cuts back and forth from the national to the regional shows. In Houston, this was being held in a restaurant, and the restaurant needed to book acts for the entire forty-eight hours of the telethon.
Frantic to fill the time slots, the telethon’s bookers called all of the agencies around town asking, “Who do you have? What can you give us?” Universal Talent called Bill and Dwight asking how much time they could do. They had their normal set of about a half hour, and they had the play. Beverly at Universal told them: “We have three hours we need to fill.” Bill replied: “We can fill it all.”
“Our idea was that it was going to broadcast on TV,” says Slade. “In reality, maybe it was going to be on in the background of the local show.” They had no idea even what kind of gig it was. It didn’t matter. When they went to their parents to ask permission, they got turned down flat.
Bill spent the bulk of his freshman year working on comedy by using his classmates as his audience. One teacher tried a creative solution to curtail Bill’s interrupting of class: she offered him the first five minutes of class. That time was his to get it out of his system. The rest was hers for teaching. Giving Bill the Sudetenland. Bad idea.
Mary recalls, “One of the teachers called me and asked me if I could help her get her class back from Bill. She said, ‘I told him he could have five minutes while I was checking the roll,’ and she said, ‘I can’t get it back.’ I said, ‘That’s your problem, you shouldn’t have let him get up there.'”
At lunch Bill and Dwight would resume their tag team activities by terrorizing the lunchroom. It was a low-paying gig, but it was a guaranteed booking five days a week. It was proto-guerilla theater. They would perform fake fights, do outrageous character pieces, flip tables and chairs. It was adolescent lunacy. And it was non-stop.
This would continue in track, at the end of the school day. Dwight and Bill would be jogging around the oval. Bill would inch in front of Dwight, slow, then bend over. An oblivious Dwight would unwillingly nail Bill in the ass from behind. Mime sodomy. During the fall, this went on in front of the football team. The team would be practising on the field; Dwight and Bill would be doing their schtick on the track encircling that field. They were performing for their friends on the football team, the people they knew who thought they were funny; but they were also pissing off some of the upperclassmen. It was bad enough that the comedie kids were getting attention in the lunchroom, but carrying it out to the sports arena – that was just showing them up.
“It was almost like doing antics in front of an ape in the zoo. They were initially just confused, then they would want to kill and beat and hit,” says Slade. “I remember seeing them once look at each other and nod and take off running after us. It was terrifying because these were very large Texas football players.”
Late in their freshman year, Dwight handed Bill a book by Ruth Montgomery called A World Beyond. The light went on. Dwight had had a very intense dream about death, and something in the book spoke very specifically to him about what had happened. When Bill read the book, he was similarly blown away. Destiny, fate, choosing your life; the way Montgomery wrote about these things Bill found very comforting. Bill and Dwight spent hours together talking about these concerns. Hours and hours. Southern Baptist tenets, those were his parents’ beliefs. Other spiritual avenues were opening up to Bill.
The Beatles had made the Maharishi a hipster-household name in the late Sixties, but by 1975 he had become mainstream, appearing on the 13 October cover of Time magazine with the teaser: “Meditation: The Answer to all Your Problems?” Still, it was a bit of a coup when Bill got his parents to allow him to attend a transcendental meditation retreat over the Thanksgiving weekend of his sophomore year. While largely a secular celebration, Thanksgiving is one of the top two family-centric holidays in America. For Bill to be able to leave the Hicks family to hang out with strangers (save Dwight), and do things that his parents not only didn’t fully understand but also didn’t subscribe to belief-wise, was astounding.
It’s no less amazing that Bill and Dwight (this time with Dwight’s older brother Kevin) gained permission to attend a second retreat over Christmas break. It was not only longer – a full week instead of a holiday weekend – it was right as families are about to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. If the Thanksgiving retreat was a coup, the Christmas one was a minor miracle.
It wasn’t the last bit of karmic kismet the pair had in store. During the following semester of school, in April the Houston Chronicle ran a feature on a new comedy club in town. This was it. This was the answer. Prior to this, Dwight had been combing the want ads for “Entertainer” under “E", or “C” for Comedians. Obviously there was nothing available for 14-year-old stand-ups. As he describes it, “It was just stupid.” Now they had an outlet. About a week after seeing the feature in the Chronicle, Dwight and Bill sneaked out of their houses and were standing on the stage of the Comedy Workshop, performing their material in front of a paying adult audience. But it was just a little too late. Dwight had known for months that at the end of the school year his family would be moving to Oregon.
“It was intoxicating,” as Slade recalls, “but there was this horror because here we are and we are really clicking, but we knew I have to leave.”
They were also found out by their parents and grounded for the rest of their adolescence.
Kevin Booth
Who am I? Well, I’ll give you an idea. The last few months I’ve been doing a one-man show – like a lot of comics these days are doing one-man shows, and I am no exception … The theme of the one-man show is about my life growing up, as I did, in a happy, healthy and loving family. And it’s called “Let’s Spend Half a Minute with Bill.” And uh … Well, hell, it’s such a short show I can do it for you right now:
“Good evening, everybody. Mommy never beat me. And Daddy never fucked me. Goodnight.”
I don’t know if the show will be able to relate with dysfunctional America, but that’s the way I was raised. Sorry. No bone to pick. Supported me in everything I did.
– Bill Hicks
It’s true. Bill’s parents supported him. When Bill wanted to be a musician, his parents dropped $1000 buying him a Fender Stratocaster guitar and an amplifier to go with it.
When Bill decided he wanted to move to LA after high school and pursue a career in comedy instead of going to college, his parents agreed to pay rent on his apartment in the San Fernando Valley. They even bought him a Chevette so he had a car to get around in.
Certainly Bill didn’t mean the bit about his parents to be taken literally. The strand of Baptist fundamentalism that wanted to take everything literally was antithetical to the core of Bill’s identity and everything he ever preached. Still, things were a lot less black-and-white when it came to the doctrine’s notion of the “happy, healthy, loving”