The Lost Bill Hicks Liner Notes
I recently discovered these liner notes in an old computer. Originally, this essay was intended to accompany Rant In E Minor, the last Bill Hicks release he oversaw before passing away from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Doubtless Bill would be chagrined to learn how much larger in death he’s become than he was at the end of his 32 years. This piece was written shortly after Bill’s death, while the sting of his passing was still with those of us who loved him off as well as on stage, and long before he became the posterchild of disaffected grunge-lovers and the cognoscenti. Ultimately Rykodisc decided to pursue “a different design direction” (as I recall it), and there was no room left for the liner notes.
I’ve cleaned up the grammar, but otherwise, they’re just as written in the mid-’90s.
Bill Hicks
Rant in E Minor
You’re holding the last work of Bill Hicks, comic.
It’s not only the final record Bill personally oversaw with the intention of a public release – it’s his farewell and the way he wanted to say goodbye.
During the interval between this newest album, and the last, Relentless, a couple of things happened that bear mentioning: First, Bill died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 32. Second, legions of sycophants, groupies, wannabes, bloodsuckers and money-grabbers have suddenly embraced him as their posterboy, a martyr for the ‘90s who could make you laugh.
They did not know Bill, but he knew them. He saw through them to the bone, whether their rings were on their pinkies or through an eyebrow. Bill gives special attention to those deserving individuals on this disc, and God help them. Hicks had a number of vices in his short life — of which he spoke often and fondly –but hypocrisy was not one of them.
Many of the same people who pronounced Bill too edgy and self-destructive while he was alive now want to cozy up to his memory. They all want a little piece of Bill – to say that yep, he sure was a comic genius, and it’s a dirty rotten shame you didn’t know him like they did.
They knew nothing of Bill. But who did?
Not the showbiz insiders who heard cash registers chime whenever his name was mentioned, but could never figure out how to tame the savagery in his social commentary enough to position Hicks in the right sitcom. That, of course, is where all good comedians go when they run out of ideas or decide to cash in rather than cultivate an original opinion and express it uniquely. Bill Hicks’ mind was too subversive, too independent to be straitjacketed into some vapid half-hour product for mass consumption.
Musicians too, especially those on the vanguard of the current alternative scene, like to call Bill one of their own, and their claim resonates with some legitimacy. Hicks spoke passionately about disaffection, dislocation and the other demons that continue to plague America’s youth. He was also an unabashed music lover and talented enough in his own right to add (in collaboration with longtime Hicks producer Kevin Booth) musical counterpoint to the tracks on Rant In E Minor.
What may of them never knew is that offstage, Bill was most often anonymous and contemplative or, in his early days, partying his ass off. Out of the spotlight, Hicks was an affable fellow who read serious books and harbored a genuine desire to see the face of God revealed. Great music inspired him, and in turn, his comedy inspired numerous contemporaries in the rock world. But unlike some of his nihilistic counterparts in music, Hicks believed seeking personal solutions was at least as important as railing against society’s shortcomings in public.
It was his own journey, he’d say, nothing he’d necessarily recommend to anyone else. Yet, in his short time, he did more exploring than most men twice his age. This guy who loved to sleep in found himself nonetheless up at all hours wrestling with an idea because his mind wouldn’t shut up and let him doze off.
Comedians on the club circuit who crossed paths with Bill also own a place in the Rubik’s cube of his personality. Hick’s place in the pantheon of comics will be debated in green rooms across the country until all the deli trays are empty and some new face gets stuck with the tab. They’ll argue about what he contributed, who he was influenced by and who stole from him. While he was around, they marveled and how Bill’s mind worked and debated his ideas incessantly. They could mimic him, but they couldn’t match him.
Only a few understood that what made Bill’s routines kill was the degree of personal integrity he invested in every bit. And once you fell in with that notion, the only remaining choice was to either be yourself – which, by definition, wouldn’t be Bill – or admit that you were a simple jester; a teller of jokes, a latter-day vaudevillian. Which is not to say you couldn’t be rich and famous and have a TV show with your name on it.
In the dewy shadows of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning In America” campaign, comedy clubs sprouted like mushrooms, and Bill Hicks worked nearly every one of them during the 1980s. Apparently born without a modesty gene, Hicks frightened some people with his unflinching frankness on stage. Hicks made his bosses crazy by driving paying customers out into the night with harangues about audiences sleepwalking through life (long before The Matrix did the same). Those same club managers would then see Bill’s darkness dissipate like a freak thunderstorm. As his clouds lifted, the show tightened, and he’d lure passersby into the venue until nearly every empty seat was refilled. No matter his mood, Hicks’ material was always unique. Friends and family routinely blushed to hear some bit of their lives transmuted into comedy, while the ‘80s bowheads and their frat-rat boyfriends grumbled that Hicks had no fag jokes, no wife jokes, or wicked impressions of foreign-born convenience store clerks.
Had he wanted, Bill could have composed a set of such material in his sleep and walked away wealthy. Instead he chose the path recorded here, and as always, Hicks’ words cut because they carry the weight of conviction.
When he flays open a victim like Billy Ray Cyrus, Rush Limbaugh or even Jay Leno, Hicks is totally in the moment, up to his eyeballs in righteous indignation. People loved his integrity. They admired that, in a world where beliefs are only as firm as poll numbers suggest they ought to be, someone was actually up in front of them speaking his mind. Further, Hicks required that his audiences think, and they returned his high estimation of them with adulation. He is the only artist I’ve ever seen whose crowds aspired to be worthy of a performer, rather than the other way around.
Listen now to what Bill wanted you to hear. It is by turns insightful and filthy, harrowing and hilarious. Hicks gathers all of humanity’s most provocative images and rubs our collective noses in them. Sure, Hicks drops the “F” bomb like Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs. But alongside the expletives is as much heartfelt spirituality as a half-dozen houses of worship export on a high holy day. Rant in E Minor skitters through the strata of social ills like an Uzi at a skeet shoot, exploding every myth in sight. This is the last document of the public Bill Hicks, and it will leave you breathless.
“I feel especially good about this record,” says producer Kevin Booth. “Every one of them has killer material, but this is the one that I think captures Bill at the intensity you’d experience at a live show. The others give you Bill at a level of 7 or 8. This is Bill on 10, hitting on a cylinders.”
Doubtless some will claim that Hicks goes to too far here. He lampoons the Pope. He lambastes flag-lovers and his anatomical references are straight out of sixth-grade gym class. He asserts that we are all slaves of mass media and a market economy kept stupid, slothful and intoxicated by power mongers whose motives only start at sinister.
In a world uncomfortable with irreverence, Bill did more than suggest the emperor had no clothes. He most pointed bits blew up skirts and depantsed the rest of us until everyone involved stood psychically naked facing each other. Ultimately, with no beepers, bumper stickers, or gangwear to sort us according to tribe, Bill mused that we might be brothers and sisters after all.
And in a world where entire economies depend on making someone the enemy, Hicks often went overboard to demonstrate how infinitesimal the differences between us really are. No wonder many people found him threatening.
But can you go too far with an idea? And how free is a society if we hold the stars and stripes sacrosanct, but have no tolerance for the freedoms (freedom of speech, for example) that the flag represents? Consider that, after you’ve let Bill do his job as a comedian one more time.
And know that Bill Hicks remains an elusive person upon whom his fans project that which they want to see. To some, he was a brilliant social satirist; to others, he was simply a foul-mouthed juvenile. Both contain a germ of truth. But whether you think of him as comedy’s answer to Kurt Cobain or the funniest person never to attain household name status, know that the closest you’ll ever get to knowing Bill Hicks is on the disc enclosed here.
That should be close enough. And it gives Bill the last word. He’d like that.
Kevin Phinney
October 1996
