It wasn’t long before we started to get a little more serious. Stress was never a joke, but it was just something to do that we enjoyed until Bill forced the issue by getting his parents to buy him a guitar and amp. Suddenly he was asking, “Well, Kevin, what are you going to do?” There was that bass of my brother’s we had been using. My brother Curt had schizophrenia, and at this point he was in and out of mental hospitals and halfway houses, so I was often using his equipment without even asking him. It was there. He wasn’t. I became a bass player.
It’s funny how Bill’s different worlds collided, but it’s when he and I were headed downtown to shop for guitars that we passed the Comedy Workshop for the first time. Bill stared at it as we drove by, his head careening to hold as long a glimpse of it as possible. “That must be the place I read about in the paper,” he muttered to himself. “People get up on stage and do comedy.”
A high-school kid in Texas in the Seventies? I didn’t even really know what a comedian was outside of Bob Hope or maybe Johnny Carson. Weren’t comedians old guys who stood on a stage in leisure suits making “Take my wife … please” jokes? It was something we equated with our parents.
But suddenly it was a budding sport in Houston where people were getting up on stage in front of a room full of strangers and expressing their thoughts; hopefully getting some laughs in the process. Comedy wasn’t really on the radar back then. There just weren’t many comedy clubs around – probably LA and New York, maybe Chicago – and the fact that one popped up in Houston in 1978 was pretty incredible.
For Bill, opportunity was meeting preparation. The Comedy Workshop had an open mic night every Monday. You show up, put your name on a list and you can perform.
When Bill and Dwight heard that, they said to each other: “Okay, we gotta go try this.” Their friends, myself included, were right there encouraging them because people thought they were hilarious. They were too young to know they were too young to sign up for an open mic night at a comedy club. Bill and Dwight knew they could get laughs in front of their friends; and their friends in turn would tell them, “Man, you guys are really funny. You should do this in front of other people.” There comes a time when you have to jump that chasm.
I told my mom we were going to a music store. Bill told his mom we were going to the library. We went to the Comedy Workshop.
It was the middle of a school day. I can’t even remember why we weren’t in school. We weren’t skipping, but there we were at a comedy club. We knocked on the door. A comic by the name of Steve Epstein answered. Bill asked some basic questions: Can anyone do it? How do you sign up? Does it matter that I’m only 16?
Yes. You put your name on the list. Maybe, we’ll have to check.
Epstein gave Bill a “What It Takes to Be a Comedian”-type speech. Dedication to the art. Hard work. Sacrifices that, with a bowl haircut, it doesn’t look like you are ready to make. Blah blah blah. The irony is that for all Bill didn’t know, he probably knew almost as much as Epstein at that point, if not about the practice of comedy at least the theory. Bill was already well versed in Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Charlie Chaplin – people he had studied intensely and was already borrowing from.
But Epstein didn’t take Bill seriously at all. Why would he? He was just a kid of 16.
Monday, 10 April 1978: Dwight and Bill performed together at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. Bill again told his parents he was going to the library; Dwight told his an organ recital. I picked them up that night at the end of Bill’s street and off we went.
Oddly enough, Steve Epstein was the first comic to stand up that first night Bill and Dwight went to perform. They got themselves moved up as early as they could so as not to jeopardize their chances of lying to their parents and getting away with it in the future.
Bill and Dwight did about seven or eight minutes. They got laughs. Legitimate laughs. Some illegitimate or, more accurately, laughs that were a function of the novelty of it all. Here were kids who, legally, were too young even to be in the club (legal drinking age in Texas was 18 at the time), yet there they were. That these boys even had the balls to get up there and do this, wow! But certainly the audience had to be thinking, “Well, this is the first and last time we’ll see these kids.”
It wasn’t. Bill and Dwight had both been grounded after their first foray into the world of adult nightlife. So the next time and the next time, they sneaked out of their houses. Dwight did the classic pillows piled under the sheets to look like a body in bed, then left a note as to his whereabouts in case his parents checked.
It has become one of the more famous bits of Bill Hicks lore, that he used to sneak out of his house as a teen to go perform stand-up comedy in nightclubs. It’s true. I ran the getaway car. Aiding and abetting.
The side parking lot for the Catholic church my family attended, St. John Vianney, ran adjacent to the backyard fence of Bill’s house. I would drive over to the church, park behind Bill’s house, he would climb out his second-story window, scale down the back side of the house and off we would go. I had the hardship driver’s license, of course.
Even after Bill died, his parents were in denial about it. I remember getting into a fight with Jim about it when he said, “That window was double-bolted shut. It’s just not possible.” The lengths people will go to believe what they want.
Bill and Dwight performed together three times that spring. That summer, Dwight and his family moved to Oregon. It was something both teens had known about. Dwight’s dad told him the previous October – before either Bill or Dwight had even heard of the Comedy Workshop – that they would be moving at the end of the school year.
Bill did his first set at the Comedy Workshop sans Dwight before Dwight and his family left for Oregon. He didn’t tell Dwight about it, and he didn’t let me go to the show, either. Bill was very sensitive to the fact that I thought Dwight was funnier than he was. I did, and I thought Bill doing comedy depended entirely on Dwight.
When Dwight announced the previous fall that he was moving away it was a really depressing moment. We were going to lose him from the band, and it was the end of the whole comedy team. I could see Dwight doing comedy without Bill, but I could never envision Bill doing comedy without Dwight because I had seen Dwight do things that were side-split funny.
In speech class, Dwight would do this routine where he would make a cone out of a piece of paper and he would go, “Okay, is everyone ready for some fun … nel?” Then he would hold the funnel over his head and say, “A clown,” then he would hold it over his nose and say, “A Jew,” then he would hold it over his knee and say, “Gout.” Looking back it might not hold up, but for a bunch of teens in the mid-Seventies, Dwight was a cut above his peers. He was already a performer.
I still feel like it’s my job and my mission to tell people, “Look, Dwight was doing this stuff from day one with Bill. Dwight’s not doing a Bill Hicks impersonation. They came up with those bits together.” I still get defensive whenever anyone puts Dwight down.
But Bill took it a step further. He started talking about his parents, started talking about his (still hypothetical) girlfriend. He started talking about personal stuff. Bill also dissected bits that belonged jointly to the two of them. There were certain jokes that you thought, “Okay, this one they wrote together.” Bill went on to take the parts of those jokes he felt were his, and he really made them his own – particularly the stuff about his parents.
When the two of them were together it was the wacky, straight-man/funny-man, classic back-and-forth thing. When Bill got up there without a partner as a net, he tried to lose the innocent kid routine. He tried to be tougher. But at the same time, he became more sensitive to his looks. He hated the kid with the gap teeth, the bad bowl haircut, and the goofy mom-dressed clothes. Bill always was a well-spring of incongruities.
But it wasn’t like something monumental had happened. Sure, it was significant that Bill was now doing stand-up, but it wasn’t a genesis; it was just another point in the evolution. Bill still very