Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. Kevin Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ amount of time high-school football teams could spend practising. Those limits were usually exhausted during the season in the fall. Across the state, shrewd and smarmy coaches alike would sign the entire football team up for track in the spring, football’s off-season. Voilà. They were no longer the “football” team. Rules averted.

      So Bill and I were technically running track; however, track was the last class of the school day. And, in the spring, the coaches were generally only concerned with the football players. That meant we were actually doing one of two things. If there was no roll call, Bill and I would leave school, go to my house, and play music. If there was going to be a roll call at the end of class, we would go to sleep on the pole vault mats.

      There were advantages to track. Being out there amongst the jocks gave Bill opportunities aplenty to make fun of them. And, of course, when he and Dwight would do these ridiculously stupid things right in people’s faces, it only made people want to inflict bodily harm on them that much more.

      There were more than a few incidents when Bill got chased. He and I once did an interview with New Yorker theater critic John Lahr where I talked about one of these incidents. Bill was sitting right next to me as I finished by saying, “They caught Bill and Dwight and beat the shit out of them.”

      Bill interrupted me. He was adamant: “No, Kevin, they never caught us. They never caught us and they never beat us.” It wasn’t nit-picking; it was important to Bill that the truth be known. And the truth is, for a guy who looked so thoroughly unathletic, Bill was a damned fast runner at that time. Damned fast. They chased. They didn’t catch.

      Bill ran in several track meets before giving it up; and again it wasn’t that he wasn’t good, he just stopped caring. He got more into music; he stopped caring about sports, stopped running track, stopped playing baseball. Sports had definite objectives – score runs, cross the finish line first, etc. Music gave you more latitude. Here’s three minutes of nothing, fill it however you want. Ready? Go! That was clearly more in line with Bill’s ethic.

      My parents thought Bill was a terrible influence on my life. I’m sure Bill’s parents thought the same about me, but Bill was actually one of the best things ever to happen to me; and at that point in my life, Bill kept me out of trouble. I don’t think one of our earliest attempts to put a band together, however, would do anything to prove either set of parents wrong. It was born out of misguided anger – inexcusably misguided anger.

      We had already been “playing” as Stress when Dwight had a teen crush on a girl, Mila Goldstein, reciprocated. She was, as you might suspect with that name, Jewish. The informal flirtation fell apart and, burned by young love gone wrong, we fought fire with fire by writing a handful of songs. Specifically, songs that made fun of Jews.

      We temporarily” changed the band name for the occasion, calling ourselves Joe Arab and the Nazis.

      In hindsight it was clearly not the brightest of ideas. In fact, maybe it was the dumbest. Despite how much, prima facie, it looks to the contrary, it wasn’t anti-semitic.

      It wasn’t anything more than teen angst. Hell, we didn’t even know what it meant to be anti-semitic. This was long before the History Channel was pumped into every house in America. There weren’t daily documentaries on Hitler and World War II running 24/7 on TV. We weren’t very attentive students, either. Plus, think about it: blue, poo, you, shoe, do, dew, screw … it rhymes with everything. Given our amateurish creative skills, that only served to help.

      We just didn’t know – clearly a by-product of our padded suburban upbringing. If Mila had been Italian, we probably would have called ourselves Giuseppe Franco and the Fascists, without knowing what it meant to be fascist. We were kids. Dwight was hurt. We saw our friend suffering. It was a catharsis. That’s all.

      We may have been stupid (sorry Mila), but we weren’t that stupid. Only half the reason for putting a band together in the first place was a desire to make music. Less than half: everything always came back around to us trying to find ways to meet girls. Never mind that we were borrowing instruments we couldn’t even play from siblings and friends. We had stage props. We had photos. And we had a good line of bullshit (“Yeah, we’re in a band”). That was enough to make it real. And being a teenage musician, that was a way to meet girls and impress them before you even had to open your mouth. Even better, write a song for a girl. That would get you in her pants, conditional on meeting her, of course.

      Bill was smitten with a girl named Tammy Blue and he came up with this song for her called “Moment of Ecstasy.” He told her to come over to my house so we could play a private gig for her. Bill transformed himself into a rock star for the occasion. We might have been standing in the study of my suburban home, but Bill was playing a rock show to a stadium crowd. And there isn’t a bridge long enough to link the gap between what was happening in Bill’s head and what was happening in my house. My drum? The bottom of a plastic trash can. Dwight had a bass I had borrowed from my brother. Bruce was playing an acoustic guitar that had a couple of strings still intact. We dropped a mic into it and ran it through the same amplifier as the drum.

      Then we played Bill’s song, which was a really charming number about cuming on a girl’s face.

       Our moment of ecstasy I see you laying next to me And I know it’s gonna be right. Cause I’ve got it hot,I’ve got it hot. And you’re not gonna get by Cause I’ll becummin’ in your eye. Cummin’ in your face. Baby it ain’t no disgrace I’m gonna let it rip all over your lip Gonna be cum in your face Cum, cum, cum in your face.

      It’s funny because Bill was such an innocent guy with no sexual experience. None. Yet here he was, singing ridiculously nasty lyrics. Everything about Stress was rinky-dink at that point, but it was what we had. It was a doctrine Bill never abandoned. What tools do you have? That was Bill’s only question. What do you have? You have a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Fine. What can you play on a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Pick it up and find out.

      It was a very simple choice for Bill: do you want to sit around doing nothing while waiting for someone to give you some better equipment (or money, or whatever resources) so you can do things how you think they are supposed to be done? Or do you want to use what you have and start right now?

      To Bill it was an easy choice. Start. Do it now. All you have is a trash can? Then turn the damn thing over and start banging on it. Now it’s a drum and you’re making music. That spirit and that attitude were infectious. Soon Bill and I were checking out books from the library trying to figure out how to make gunpowder so we could have real smoke bombs to go with our fake band. God, if we weren’t a fire hazard we sure looked like one. We made as much (if not more) smoke as noise. I even got my mom involved and she helped make a sign for the band. I cut out the letters S-T-R-E-S-S (yes, they were lightning-bolt s’s) from cardboard and wrapped them in tinfoil, while my mom poked holes in the letters and threaded Christmas lights through them.

      That’s why it was so much fun to be around Bill. He didn’t wait for people to give him permission to do what he wanted. He stayed that way through his whole life. When we were older and still struggling, he never waited; he was happy to cobble together whatever resources he could. He never wanted to waste time. It’s like he knew he only had a limited amount of it.

      The state of Texas allows you to get a driver’s license before the legal minimum age of 16 if your family can demonstrate that the child not having one would somehow cause a hardship for the family. Because my family had a ranch, somehow this allowed me to get such a “hardship” driver’s license. It was complete bullshit, but it meant I had a car, a blue and white LTD station wagon with fake wood paneling.

      Bill СКАЧАТЬ