Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution
Written by Bill Hick's lifelong friend, producer, and co-creator, Kevin Booth offers the inside story into the man who was only along for the ride for a tragically short time, yet left an indelible mark on comedy enthusiasts and freethinkers everywhere.Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution offers a rare fly-on-the-wall insight into the life of one of Britain's most loved US comedians. Adored in the UK for his unique style of savage, hilarious comedy, the one person who knew him inside and out tells of a man whose life was just as impassioned and off-the-wall as his comedy.Even back at High School, in Houston, Texas, Kevin was Bill's co-conspirator, as they sneaked out of Bill's strict Baptist home at night, and headed for the Comedy Workshop, where at the age of fourteen, Bill was going down a storm.They virtually shared every experience – from magic mushrooms to girls, but it was their music and their vision of comedy, which bound them so closely together. Kevin produced, engineered and performed on many of Bill's recordings, and it is largely due to him, that so much of Bill's comedy is readily available on CD and video.Michael Bertin, a hugely talented author from Austin, Texas, is co-writing Kevin's fly-on-the-wall biography of Bill Hicks.
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BILL HICKS
AGENT OF EVOLUTION
KEVIN BOOTH AND MICHAEL BERTIN
Contents
Kevin Booth
Tripping was very ritualistic for us. It was something we’d prepare for. Meditation. Fasting. Flotation tanks. We even had meals prepared for the comedown, and usually had instruments set up as well so we could play music together to ride out the end of the trip. We weren’t just taking psychedelic drugs and running around like crazy people.
It almost always involved us going to my family’s ranch near Fredericksburg, Texas. It was 70 sprawling acres of hill country, pocked with enormous live oak trees. There was a 2600-square-foot tract home with a garden and an orchard. Out back was the pond. The reflection of the sun setting over the water made even the monochromatic Texas heat come alive with intense color.
Parts of Bill’s routines weren’t comedy or jokes: they were directives. When he was talking about mushrooms and he said, “Go to nature. They are sacred,” he wasn’t kidding. Tripping would allow Bill to commune with nature.
Bill, David Johndrow and I went out to the ranch to trip. We planned and timed everything out. Shrooms were sacred, but they weren’t the only thing on the menu. This time we were taking acid. We timed when we dropped so that we would start tripping right as the sun was setting. Once we were tripping, full-on tree-vibrating star-dripping wigging out, we each often had a separate sense of what the others were doing. There would be times when something bad was happening to one of us, and one of the others would just appear. We’d come together and work through it. Then we would have times when we all went out and drifted off on separate paths, only to reconvene at some unspoken spot hours later.
At one point on this particular trip I came across Bill as he was looking pensive and distraught. He was in the yard all by himself, walking in circles. And he was gradually wearing a groove into the grass. I heard him muttering to himself over and over, “What is this thing? Goddammit, what is this thing?” He just kept circling and muttering, circling and muttering. “What is this thing?”
I asked him: “Bill, what are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, dude. There’s just this thing. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got this thing in me.” Bill was pointing to his side, right where his pancreas is, as he was saying this. “I’ve got this thing inside me,” he said. “It needs to come out. It’s like an upside-down cross inside of my body. It needs to come out.”
Right when he said that – the “upside-down cross” bit – I broke out laughing. Sometimes everything seems funny when you are tripping your nuts off, unless, of course, something is distressing you; and this was obviously distressing Bill.
Fuck. Too late. It sent Bill off.
“Oh, fucking forget it,” he fired back, and then, visibly agitated, he stormed off into the woods.
I followed him. “No, I wasn’t trying to make fun of you, Bill. What’s up? What’s wrong?” This was my friend. We were tripping but, shit, he was trying to tell me something important. It got fucked in translation. Drugs can do that.
I tried to assure him I wanted to understand what he was talking about, but he was not going to risk being laughed at again. “Forget it. Nothing,” Bill said. I put up a few more weak protests. He brushed them off. And that was that.
That was the summer of 1982, more than a full decade before Bill died of pancreatic cancer.
“I’m not from the States, I’m from Texas.”
– Bill Hicks
As a kid in grade school, Bill Hicks was a phenomenal athlete. He was strong, fast, agile. Anyone who ever saw Bill perform stand-up comedy in later years would have a hard time imagining this. With a cigarette dangling off his bottom lip, he’d tell his signature joke about smoking: perusing the front rows of the audience, he’d find someone with a lit cigarette and ask them how much they smoked.
“A pack a day…?” He’d take a drag of his cigarette and inhale like his life depended on that tar-laden cancer stick. “Pussy. I go through two lighters a day.”
Bill wasn’t exactly a posterboy for athletic prowess. Doubters wouldn’t be alone in their skepticism that Bill could ever have run anything but his mouth. A fellow comedian from his Houston hometown who accompanied Bill to New York City for an early Letterman appearance recalls seeing him in the hotel: “He took off his shirt and he didn’t have a muscle in his entire upper torso. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was completely slack. Utter lack of definition. Just zero. It almost had a morgueish quality to it in retrospect.”
Dwight Slade, Bill’s friend and comedy partner in the formative stage of his career, was in San Francisco in 1991 to perform on the bill with Bill at the Punch Line. The two comedians made an appearance on Alex Bennet’s radio show where Bill presented the host with an old 8x10 promo photo of the pair taken when they were just starting out. Bennet looked at the picture and remarked, “Dwight, you look exactly the same. Bill, what happened to you?”
