Bill Hicks interviews and features

[luke]

the last interview with the great bill hicks

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nice one - I've seen it before but it's worth seeing again

[luke]

its weird watching it, because everything he says is still so valid today

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Bill Hicks - The First Rock n Roll Comic
This was a pretty interesting documentary from BBC Radio 2 that was broadcast last year (Aug 21st). If you're a fan of his stuff you'll not be disappointed.

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Russell Crowe to play Hicks?

"I have another project based on the life of comedian Bill Hicks, which is going from treatment to draft stage with Kiwi writer Mark Staufer." It is understood he is considering playing the main role of Hicks — a controversial and brilliant American comedian who battled drug and alcohol abuse before dying from cancer at 32.

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I wonder how he would work in the role, but there's no doubt that a film of his life could be great if it's done well.

[nekokate]

Oh, no! I think Russell Crowe is a prick. I don't want him to play the God that is Bill Hicks

[faceless]

yeah, he is a bawbag for sure - and he's too chunky and too old to play Hicks. He'd need to lose weight, shrink a few inches and get plastic surgery to be even get near to being convincing!

[nekokate]

You know who I'd love to see play Bill Hicks? Jon Stewart.

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hmmm, I'm just trying to imagine him doing Hicks' act - he might actually be able, though to do it as good as fans would require is going to be hard.

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the trailer for the upcoming movie...

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American: The Bill Hicks Story
Gavin Dahl
Mar 16, 2010

When Bill Hicks found out he was dying of pancreatic cancer in 1993, his stand-up comedy material had never been more focused. The powerful new documentary about who the man really was, American: The Bill Hicks Story presents some of his hardest-hitting quotes on opposition to the military, drug prohibition, advertising and money. Even better, the film offers never-before-seen personal moments from his childhood to his teens to his psychedelic trips to sold-out auditoriums in England.

Considering Hicks had so much to say, and his following has only grown since his death, it was not an easy task for directors Paul Thomas and Steve Harlock to eulogize him without leaving things out. But other than going a little easy on Bush and Reagan and scrubbing some of Hicks' raunchiest material, the snippets of his stand-up are quite representative of his work. He was shocking, but beyond shock value. He was proud to be an American, but upset about the direction the country was going.

What really makes the film successful is the method the directors employed, working with the Hicks family to assemble hundreds of photos and recording over 100 hours of new interviews with 10 key players in the edgy comedian's life. Harlock and Thomas rarely show the narrators, dodging formal documentary conventions by pairing audio with cropped photos set in motion in three dimensions, creating an unusual form of animation.

The result is a package of exciting virtual re-enactments of him sneaking out of his house to go to the Comedy Workshop as a teen, visiting other dimensions while tripping on magic mushrooms and even hanging out in his first apartment in Los Angeles. The only drawback to the photo-animation technique is losing track of which voice belongs to which narrator. A second viewing would be necessary to identify which voices belongs to his teenage partners in crime Dwight Slade and Kevin Booth, photographer David Johndrow, fellow comedians and members of his family.

Recounting his early influences like Woody Allen and his development into one of the Texas Outlaw comics, as well as his battle with alcoholism and his relentless drive to be bold, the filmmakers offer an intimate look into his life behind-the-scenes. By the end, you feel like you know him, like you're on a first-name basis with the guy.

Bill was way faster than his audiences, and most fans agree he was too good to make it into the American mainstream. Appearing on Letterman more than a dozen times, and shooting a few HBO specials, he still performed what he called "flying saucer tours." "Like UFOs," he would tell audiences, "I too have been appearing in small Southern towns in front of handfuls of hillbillies."

Bill railed against anti-intellectualism, promising, "This is called logic. It won't hurtcha, it will set you free." He called the mainstream media a propaganda machine, insisting, "Don't you ever forget, you're free to do what we tell you." He warned of the viciousness of profit, shouting, "It's all about money, not freedom, okay? Try going somewhere without money." He worried about future generations, asking "When did mediocrity and banality become good for the children?"

But it wasn't until he broke out in Britain that Bill became fully confident. And that success is part of what led the directors to the project. After the screening they said they strived to help reserve him his "rightful spot on the cultural timeline." Bill's brother Steve said during the Q&A that the family is in possession of 150 hours of unreleased video and 200 hours of unreleased audio.

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A Brit on the side: Why American comic Bill Hicks felt most at home in the UK
Bill Hicks is a byword for acerbic brilliance in the UK – but he couldn't buy a laugh in his native America. On the eve of a new documentary about the maverick comedian, Peter Watts asks: what makes us love him so?
Sunday, 25 April 2010
independent.co.uk

Bill Hicks was, in many ways, the consummate American. The iconoclastic comedian was born in Georgia and lived in Texas, Los Angeles and New York. He smoked like the Marlboro Man, swore like Richard Nixon, joked like Lenny Bruce, died young like Jimmy Dean and dressed like Johnny Cash. But despite a 16-year career that included a dozen appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, Hicks' career took off only when he came to Britain in 1991. And even now, 16 years after his death from cancer in February 1994, it is Brits who are keeping Hicks' legacy alive. Why do the British celebrate this quintessentially American comedian so intently? And how did he get so popular in the first place?

A film about Hicks is released next month. It's called American and, naturally enough, it was made by two Brits, Paul Thomas and Matt Harlock. Harlock's story stands for many. "I came across Bill at university in the early 1990s, when people were discussing this sensation who had ripped up Edinburgh," he says. "He was a key figure for the student community. On the 10th anniversary of his death, I started putting on Bill Hicks events in London, and lots of people came along."

Hicks' success was partly about timing. He was born in 1961 into a bookish Southern Baptist family and developed an interest in comedy after seeing Woody Allen films on TV. He began doing stand-up at 15 and gigged all over the States thereafter, surviving a bout of drink and drug abuse and never quite breaking into the mainstream – until the Montreal Comedy Festival in 1991. There, Hicks went down a storm and was spotted by Channel 4, which was televising the event after a resurgence of interest in stand-up in the UK. Clive Anderson, the presenter of the channel's popular improv show Whose Line is it Anyway?, went to see Hicks for himself.

"Chris Bould, a director, was making this TV special," Anderson recalls now. "So I watched [Hicks'] set in Montreal and straight away saw that he was a very impressive performer, and a massive presence. He did stuff about politics, war, religion and cancer and could knock your socks off with the power of his delivery. It's not that he didn't have jokes – he did have laugh lines at regular spaces. But he was all about striking an attitude."

Although Anderson's semi-apologetic, ultra-English style was far removed from Hicks' forthright freewheeling rants about drugs and religion, the two got on well. "He was a nice guy. If he liked a joke you made, he wouldn't just laugh, he'd applaud," says Anderson. "It was a charming gesture that didn't quite fit in with his aggressive stance."

By the time Anderson interviewed Hicks on his chat-show Clive Anderson Talks Back in 1992, Hicks' fame had spread thanks to Bould's hour-long Relentless special and sold-out shows at the Queen's Theatre in London.

At the same time, Hicks was having a considerable impact on a younger generation thanks to his regular appearances in the rock press. The writer and DJ Andrew Collins was at New Musical Express when the magazine opened a new front by putting the comedian Vic Reeves on the cover in 1990. "The idea of comedy being the new rock'n'roll was rife, and it held a lot of water," says Collins. "They toured like bands, they had groupies and some of them were quite good-looking. I remember seeing Hicks in the West End. He was a revelation, and he came on [the stage] to the Rolling Stones, so his positioning within rock'n'roll was deliberate and significant. His cassettes circulated around the office, and once Relentless had been on TV, we felt vindicated. Hicks' reputation was built on Relentless. He was so different, so diffident, so frightening, and so dark. He was rock'n'roll without trying, and without it being a pose. This was a long way from Dave Baddiel wearing a hooded top."

Terry Staunton, also a writer at NME, recalls: "The 1980s promise of alternative comedy never delivered. With the exception of Alexei Sayle, the whole Comic Strip crowd embraced the mainstream, and the few political comedians there were tended to be a little one-note. Hicks was the voice of rebellion, and it was a breath of fresh air for us at the NME – who were brought up on articulate and politically motivated musicians such as Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello and Jerry Dammers – to have someone on our doorstep who could be relied upon to give a good interview."

Two weeks before the NME put Reeves on the cover, it did the same to a dynamic new American band called Nirvana. By 1992, the US invasion of English rock was in full flow and a succession of visceral Yank bands were lumped together under the term "grunge". Hicks, an angry American comedian with a love of rock, was perfectly poised to take advantage of English students' new obsessions.

It helped that Hicks was an extraordinary performer. "He was certainly more challenging than [US rockers] Soundgarden," jokes Collins. "He was mature beyond his years,' adds Anderson. "He had that confidence of somebody who had been around for years – which he had, as he'd run away from home to perform at comedy clubs when he was 16."

Harlock expands on this point. "He appeared here just as he was fully formed. Nowadays, people are aware of comedians at a much earlier stage, but he arrived out of nowhere as a complete package. He'd already done the work and dealt with the problems he needed to surmount."

Hicks once said, "People in the UK share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn't share with itself. They have a sense of irony, which America doesn't have, seeing as it's being run by fundamentalists who take things literally." But this is an oversimplification. After all, there are few things the British like more than jokes about America, especially when they are told by Americans, making Hicks' routines less difficult for English ears. As Dan Hind, the (English) editor of Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, a compilation of Hicks' writing, says, "It's an easy sell. Hicks said he was Chomsky with dick jokes, and the British are much happier reading Chomsky than the British equivalent. You can experience that thrill of thinking 'Isn't America terrible?' without having to consider the parallels or our own relationship with American culture.

"A lot of Hicks' comedy was based on a hate-hate relationship with Southern, white working-class or rural culture. He loathed it. And if you imagine a British comic ripping the hell out of the British white working-class, it would be difficult to stomach. I don't imagine that those who enjoy him having a go at rednecks would be anywhere near as comfortable if he was doing the same to our equivalent."

Paul Thomas notes also the simple logistical difficulties of breaking America. "The size of the country is crucial," he says. "In the UK, if somebody makes a splash in Edinburgh, you hear about them in London, but America is so vast, everything is held together by television and if it isn't up there on that screen on prime-time you won't hear about them, even if they are huge in New York."

Hicks himself thought TV went some way towards explaining why he didn't have the same cultural impact at home. "Bill's brother Steve asked Bill why he hadn't kicked off in the US in the way he had here," says Harlock. "And Bill said it was simple: it was because his material was played on prime-time British TV unedited in a full-length set, whereas in America he was given only five minutes on late-night TV, he wasn't allowed to swear and there were other restrictions."

(Famously, his final routine – his 12th appearance – on Letterman, in 1993, was pulled, as network executives found it too offensive. The set, which included an attack on pro- lifers, was finally shown by Letterman last year, when the chat-show host apologised to Hicks' mother for the routine being banned.)

"It wasn't a cultural difference," adds Harlock, "it's just that in the UK we were given full access to who he was. It wasn't to do with our supposed more sophisticated sense of humour or that we 'get' irony, it was to do with the fact that he was able to do his thing in unrestricted surroundings. It came back to the way advertisers and commercial channels have to work, and Bill had a lot to say about advertising. It ended up affecting him directly."

Understandably, Hicks became a keen Anglophile. Before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 1993, he considered moving to England, and even made a pilot "chat-show" for Channel 4. "He spent his last few weeks re-reading Lord of the Rings," says Hind. "There's a lot of piss-taking in his stand-up about England – coming to Hobbitland – but it was informed by a deep love for some aspects of our national culture."

Harlock wonders whether this ultimately would have spelt the end of Hicks' special relationship with the UK. "He had a razor-sharp view of the world, and he used that to scrutinise where he was from, and that would have been the case wherever he ended up. Bill had talked about moving here and you can imagine that, before long, he'd have turned his beam to English society. Maybe we wouldn't have liked him so much if he'd been here a couple of years and started to tear us apart." n

'American: The Bill Hicks Story' (15) is released on 14 May

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Still gagging for Saint Bill
Funny man on the edge: Bill Hicks in a still from American. On stage he railed against what he saw as the ignorance and small-mindedness of rural AmericaFunny man on the edge: Bill Hicks in a still from American. On stage he railed against what he saw as the ignorance and small-mindedness of rural America
DONALD CLARKE
irishtimes.com
May 10 2010

Sixteen years after his death, the cult of Bill Hicks is as strong as ever, and now two British film-makers have made a documentary about America's most outspoken comedian

WHAT WOULD Bill Hicks have made of his current canonisation? It is now 16 years since the American comedian died of pancreatic cancer, but he has remained impressively ubiquitous in the interim. Angrier young comics cite his influence. His tirades against American foreign policy are replayed to comment upon the nation’s continuing experiments in inter-continental bellicosity. Hicks’s routines – furious, righteous, unrelenting – have become holy texts for a new generation of politically tuned-in comedy fans.

Now, two British film-makers, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, offer the faithful a documentary entitled American: The Bill Hicks Story . Featuring lengthy interviews with family and friends, the picture explains how an ordinary kid from Houston, Texas, the son of conservative Christians, managed to become one of the most influential entertainers of his era.

“He worked hard,” Harlock, an experienced TV director, suggests. “John Lahr from the New Yorker had interesting things to say about him in a famous profile. For years, he had done 300 nights a year and, as a result, he had that ability to be masterful with an audience. He had a confidence that you only get from playing thousands of gigs.”

Employing snippets of animation and featuring (too much) strumming from Hicks’s former musical collaborators, the film goes into great detail about the conflicts between the comedian’s values and those of his parents. It is interesting that his mother, an articulate and formidable character, was willing to participate in the making of the film. After all, much of Hicks’s early material poked fun at flyover-state Americans and their rigid Christian beliefs.

“I had sent her a tape of a tribute to Bill I organised on the 10th anniversary of his death,” Harlock explains. “Mary is the hub of the story. Immediately you meet her you notice her tenacity and strength of mind. She is proud of the fact that she raised three kids, all of whom made their own way in the world. I think Bill and she had the same arguments that all parents and children have – about religion and politics. The difference was he turned them into comedy.”

The sometime tensions between Bill and his folks – they were close chums again by the time of his death – helped generate material that makes even some liberal fans uneasy. Following his recovery from a serious booze problem in 1989, Hicks, up to then barely a cult, embarked on the series of international tours that secured his reputation. Cigarette pointing from a permanently clenched fist, he railed against what he saw as the ignorance and small-mindedness of rural America. British audiences cheered at his impersonation of supposedly moronic working-class yanks. Shouldn’t these gross caricatures of ordinary people make us feel a little bit uneasy (in the wrong way)?

“That is one way of looking at it,” Thomas says, slightly cautiously. “Yes. It’s a lot easier to laugh at somebody from afar. He often talked about moving to Britain and he might have pointed out our foibles. But it’s not the same. America has so much greater influence on the world that it must count as a genuine target.”

FAIR ENOUGH. Hicks’s attacks on US foreign policy and the nation’s futile drug wars were driven by sound research and a sure sense of purpose. It was the snide attitude towards the nation’s citizens that occasionally seemed unnecessarily mean-spirited. Observe, for instance, the routine, replayed in the film, during which he ridicules a waitress for wondering why he was reading a book. I would understand if the poor, hard-working woman gobbed in his trifle next time he came in.

“It is very important to say that he didn’t shy away from confronting those audiences,” Harlock points out. “He didn’t just sit in New York or LA and deliver these routines. He went touring in the Deep South. A lot of his working life was spent in places like Oklahoma or wherever.

“There’s a famous clip where he tells an audience he hates Kenny Rogers and they go wild. It’s important to say that he was not pillorying people; he was pillorying an attitude: a lack of curiosity about the world. And, of course, extreme views are always more entertaining than grey areas.”

At any rate, Hicks filled a void that, acerbic comics such as George Carlin noted, had existed since the death of Lenny Bruce in 1966. Richard Pryor was almost as angry (and a lot funnier), but he didn’t devote quite so much time to the nuts and bolts of the political system. Like Bruce and Pryor, Hicks had to battle his way through substance addiction before finding his true voice. Of course, a history of boozing and drug-taking will only spur the development of a posthumous cult. Harlock and Thomas, perhaps surprisingly, buy into the notion that partying was an element of the creative process.

“Bill had his own troubles battling between knowledge and his restrictive upbringing. He got involved with a bunch of guys who got drunk and blitzed every night. That was all to free up his mind. But he rapidly realised that he just wasn’t himself any more.”

THE FILM-MAKERS relate that, though Hicks is still disproportionately more popular in the UK and Europe than at home, the US audiences for their film have been wildly enthusiastic. He is slowly, belatedly, becoming a prophet in his own land.

So, what would he have made of the canonisation? Well, one routine, quoted in the film, about rock music as death cult suggests that he rather bought into the idea of creative self-destruction. Then again, he wouldn’t have enjoyed the concomitant sentimentality one little bit.

One thing is for sure. He’d have got at least 20 minutes of fiery material from the strange phenomenon.

OLD JOKES THAT STILL RING TRUE

Hicks on Iraq and the war on drugs (The Bush he was referring to was George Bush Sr)

I’m so sick of arming the world, then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We’re like the bullies of the world, y’know. We’re like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheep-herder’s feet.

“‘Pick it up.’
“‘I don’t wanna pick it up, Mister, you’ll shoot me.’
“‘Pick up the gun.’
“‘Mister, I don’t want no trouble. I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about 10 rolls a week of that stuff. I ain’t looking for no trouble, Mister.’
“‘Pick up the gun.’ (He picks it up. There are three shots.)
“‘You all saw him – he had a gun.’”

“You know we armed Iraq. I wondered about that too, you know. During the Persian Gulf war, those intelligence reports would come out: ‘Iraq: incredible weapons – incredible weapons.’
“‘How do you know that?’
“‘Uh, well . . . we looked at the receipts. But as soon as that cheque clears, we’re goin’ in. What time’s the bank open? Eight? We’re going in at nine.’”

“George Bush says we’re losing the war on drugs. You know what that implies? There’s a war going, and people on drugs are winning it. What does that tell you about drugs? Some smart, creative people on that side: they’re winning a war, and they’re fucked up! A lot of you don’t even know you’re fighting, do you? You’re sitting there going ‘Fuck, I’m watching Saturday Night live.’ (Drags joint) ‘Are we winning? I feel like my flank is covered. Honey, bring me a beer, we got a war to win!’”

“How about a positive LSD story? Would that be newsworthy? Just once, to hear what it’s all about: ‘Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death. Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves . . . Here’s Tom with the weather.’”

“People often ask me where I stand politically. It’s not that I disagree with Bush’s economic policy or his foreign policy, it’s that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth. Little to the left.”

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More Bill Hicks material unearthed
New footage coming on CD and DVD
chortle.co.uk

Rare early footage of Bill Hicks performing in the early Eighties is to be released later this year. The major new package of two CDs and two DVDs also includes the little-seen short film Ninja Bachelor Party, which he made with fellow comic Kevin Booth, and a download card containing his original song Lo-Fi Troubadour.

The previously unreleased material includes an audio recording of a performance in San Ramon, California, and ‘bootleg’ video of him in Austin, Texas, both of which were found in Hicks’s archives. "Bill Hicks: The Essential Collection" also includes interview footage with the self-proclaimed ‘Chomsky with dick jokes’ and a gallery of pictures from his personal archives. It will be released on October 4, priced £17.99 on the Ryko label. The release will come just a week after the acclaimed documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story is also released on DVD.