Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. Kevin Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ station wagon the Stressmobile. He just had a way of making everything seem special. When you were doing things with him, you felt like you were part of some secret club.

      From then on, whatever I happened to be driving, it was called the Stressmobile. Along those same lines, in the Stressmobile we used to go on what Bill termed “Nipple Tours.” Nipple Tours were just us engaging in harmless teen stalking. It wasn’t actually stalking, and it really was harmless, but looking back … it could easily have been made to look sketchy if lawyers had ever got involved.

      We’d pile into the car with the Stratford school directory, and look up the addresses of girls we had crushes on. Then we’d do a drive-by. We’d just cruise by the house. That’s all. We went from house to house with the bizarre hope that we would see the girl or find out something – what, I have no idea, as 99.8 per cent of the time we saw absolutely nothing except the front of a house. Surprise.

      On the rare occasion we saw someone, we’d pretend it was coincidence. We just happened to be heading down that street doing, uh, something. It was a form of cruising. The cool kids cruised up and down a central drag; we cruised by girls’ houses.

      For a while we did our Nipple Tours in my family’s thirty-foot-long motorhome. My parents had given it to me to drive to school, like it was a normal car. There was another girl, Tracy Scovell. She was really hot but she had some scars on her face from where she had been bitten by a dog when she was young. The mark was not only a social hindrance but earned her the nickname of Tracy Scar-veil. Bill had a big crush on her. So after Stress got going and we were actually becoming competent musicians, we had all of our equipment – amps, guitars, etc. – in the motorhome, which happened to be outfitted with a generator.

      One day we set up our amplifiers and a PA in the motorhome, then pointed everything out the window. When we pulled up in front of Tracy’s house Bill took the microphone: “Tracy Scovell … this concert is for you.” Then he let it rip. Don’t know if she was even there to hear it. Surprisingly the cops didn’t show up and tell us to stop disturbing the peace.

      The band’s first big stroke of luck came when a friend of ours, Steve Fluke, broke both of his arms in a rope swing accident. Fluke was a better guitar player than anyone else we were hanging out with, but he just didn’t fit in. He was younger, but more importantly he was very “Stairway to Heaven” and we wanted to be “God Save the Queen.” However, Steve did have generous parents who had bought him a sweet-ass Les Paul guitar and an expensive amplifier to go with it.

      Don’t ever let it be said that Bill wasn’t opportunistic. The day after Fluke broke both of his arms, Bill and I were over at Fluke’s house pretending we felt bad about his accident. After expressing our supposed sympathies, we turned to our more concrete interests. “Hey, man, since you can’t play guitar for a while, can we just borrow this for a couple of days?” Bill asked. “We feel really bad. We’ll come back and visit you tomorrow.”

      We ended up leaving with his guitar and his amplifier (this was before Bill’s parents had bought him his rig); and not coming back to visit the following day. Nine months later Fluke turns up at my place raising a stink: “Dude, I want my guitar back.” Bill is going, “Oh shit, this isn’t mine. Is it?”

      I don’t think Steve Fluke was unique in being involuntarily generous to us. Looking back, we would use people. We would act like we liked people just so we could use their equipment. We would beg and borrow just to get what we wanted.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ