31 Years...

 

The two Tool songs written about Bill Hicks - faroutmagazine.co.uk

In the world of 1990s comedy, Bill Hicks was in his own world. Outside of being funny whenever he got up onstage, he had more than a few good points about the music scene, from the devil still owning all the excellent music to most of the most incredible acts in the world being high out of their mind when they wrote their classic hits. He may have called it as he saw it, but Tool were paying close attention to what he had to say.

Around the same time that Hicks was blossoming as a comic, Tool was hard at work turning metal inside out. After coming off of their debut assault Undertow, Aenema was where they started to spread out a little bit more, incorporating progressive elements into their music, like shifting time signatures and existential musings on society.

Although the band were avid fans of Hicks, they shoehorned some of his material into their songs, writing both the title track and the closer ‘Third Eye’ based on his comedy routines. While Hicks’ original routine had to do with California falling into the ocean and damaging the yuppies with oceanfront homes, Maynard James Keenan plays off of the same idea as he screams, “LEARN TO SWIM”. 

READ FULL ARTICLE - faroutmagazine.co.uk

Yardbarker: The 25 greatest stand-up comedians of all time

 

Bill Hicks' humor was extremely dark, like his bit where he told people in marketing to kill themselves, which in our current social media age feels ahead of its time. He only lived to age 32, struck down in his prime by pancreatic cancer. But before that he made 11 appearances on Letterman's shows, opened for the band Tool and experimented with every drug known to man, which led to telling "positive drug stories" on stage. For the record, there's no truth to the rumor that he's really Alex Jones.

SOURCE: Yardbreaker

Ireland: Tullamore fundraiser to pay tribute to legendary comedian Bill Hicks

 

An annual tribute to the late comedy legend Bill Hicks will take place this Friday (February 25), upstairs in Fergies Bar, Market Square, Tullamore. The event will raise money for Family Carers Ireland.

Hicks, who grew up in Texas, is regarded as one of the greatest stand-ups of all time. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1994, aged just 32, but his original and darkly hilarious social commentary continues to attract an audience.

Johnny Keenan, Offaly promoter of comedy, spoken word, music and song, has being spreading the good word of Hicks since he undertook the promotion of 'A Public Members Bill' in 2014.

Tickets are €15 and can be bought from the Family Carers Ireland office on Market Square, Tullamore. Doors will open at 8pm, and the show will start at 8.30pm.

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Paul Rudd rocks Bill Hicks shirt on SNL

On the May 18th 2019 episode of SNL know fan Paul Rudd  paid homage to Bill by wearing a shirt graced by Bill's face. This may be the only time Bill has ever actually appeared on SNL.

Full episode (shirt appears at 51:10) - https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/may-18-paul-rudd/3957862

Revelations: Variations - OUT NOW!

On 11/29/1992 at the end of a very successful sold out tour of the UK, Bill performed in London at the Dominion Theatre to a raucous, enthusiastic capacity crowd. This performance became his last recorded special, Revelations, which many consider to be Bill in peak form. When Revelations was originally broadcast on TV and subsequently released on DVD and LP the length of those was one hour and 13 minutes long, being edited to that more time-slot friendly length. But, the actual show that Bill performed that night was an epic, running just under two hours long. Now for the first time the entire audio of the show is being released as Bill performed it that night ......... All 43 missing minutes!!!!

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Available worldwide October 26, 2018

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Just for Laughs - 1990

In April 1993, celebrated comedian Bill Hicks performed at Universal Two in Fitzroy as part of the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Now, exactly 25 years later photographer Stuart DeSilva reveals these never before seen images in his new exhibition 'Bill Hicks Unpublished'.
Taken less than a year before Bill's untimely death, Stuart's photographs are a stunning and revealing time-capsule of the comic genius during his first and only tour of Australia.
The exhibition features over 30 different, unpublished prints available to purchase in very limited edition.

Opening reception Thursday April 5th, 6-9pm (exhibition continues until April 15)
Vs. Gallery, 1 Vere St, Richmond.


www.vsgallery.com.au

Bill Hicks Birthday Celebration!

https://www.facebook.com/events/149548749015366/

Thinking Out Loud: Maynard James Keenan on religion, jiu-jitsu and Bill Hicks

What's really on the Tool and Puscifer frontman's mind?

In our regular feature Thinking Out Loud, we find out what's going on in the minds of the great and good. This week, we peek inside the brain of Tool and Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan....

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"Bill Hicks' ideas really resonated with us. We were resonating similar concepts. Unity is the philosophical centre. Evolution. Change. Internally and externally. Individually and globally. That's pretty much the gist of his comedy no matter what he was talking about – music, porno, smoking. Whatever it was, it came back to the idea of unity and evolution. Evolving ideas."

~ 

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Rant in E-Minor: Variations - & Bill Hicks: A Life in Comedy

Following on from the unedited release of the Arizona Bay album comes Rant in E-Minor: Variations, an uncut presentation of one of the sets used in the creation of Bill's seminal Rant in E-Minor album. Originally aired on Sirius XM radio on April 1st and released for purchase today!

Along with the broadcast of Rant in E-Minor: Variations on April 1st, Sirius XM produced an hour long exclusive audio documentary called Bill Hicks: A Life in Comedy, presented by Ron Bennington and featuring interviews with Dave Attell, Judah Friedlander, Bob Saget, Barry Crimmins, Tom Rhodes, Ron White, Paul Provenza and Margaret Cho.

“Bill Hicks is one of the most important comedic voices of our generation, and his jokes and indictments seem as relevant and important today as they ever did,” said Jack Vaughn, Senior Vice President, Comedy Programming, SiriusXM. “We’re really excited to be able to have our listeners be the first to hear this amazing uncut show.”

Several clips of the audio documentary can be heard on Sound Cloud.

Rant in E-Minor: Variations now available in MP3, CD and Vinyl from -

Amazon

Google Play

iTunes

Bill Hicks, Legend and Legacy: An Interview with Steve Hicks

From the December 17th 2015 Indie Bohemians' Podcast -

Earlier this week (December 16) was Bill Hicks' birthday and Ron was lucky enough to have a chat with Bill's brother, Steve Hicks. Steve and the Hicks family still operate and maintain Bill's catalog and body of work. Ron and Steve discuss how that has been for the family, why they continue to do it and its significance. Steve also shares stories about Bill from childhood, his experiences with Kinky Friedman's entourage, the reissue of Arizona Bay, what went on concerning rumors of a Bill Hicks movie, and more! (Whoa, that sounded way too marketing-esque)
Also, Angie Dorin rocks a Monkey Minute and Ron discusses Holiday music he actually likes.

"I heckled Bill Hicks and lived" - No Passouts

So. Son. Tell me. What have you done with your life? Huh? Lemme hear it. What have you done? No – don’t tell me. I can guess. What is it? Something selfless – the very model of altruistic, new age thought and action. Artesian wells in a struggling, underdeveloped African nation. Am I right? Unceasing lobbying of grimy politicians and vested interest corporations to wake up to the increasing horrors of global warming? A year spent throwing yourself in front of Japanese whalers? Tell me! What did you do? What have you done?

I heckled Bill Hicks.

Oh, yeah, and guess what: all my views are my own because somewhere, I’m reasonably convinced, I have the vague semblance of a spine. Pffft. Twitter. Twitter. Just a few lines to let your prospective new followers (ugh – right?) know you’re worth that all important thumb press. ‘Middle-aged sad lefty from Stoke with fondness for real ale’ was never going to be a stand out, let me assure you. But ‘Heckled Bill Hicks and lived’ is surely one of those wayward claims only open to the few. And so, for five years, it’s awkwardly sat there as my Twitter ‘come on in’ sign.

‘Heckled Bill Hicks and lived.’ Quite a claim…

READ THE FULL ARTICLE - www.wordsandguitars.co.uk

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BILL!

December 16, 1961

ARIZONA BAY: EXTENDED - OUT NOW!

Comedy Dynamics has released an extended version of Bill Hicks: Arizona Bay on iTunes, Google Play, and all other digital retailers and streaming sites.

This is Bill Hicks' portrait of life on the beach after the "big one" drops California into the Pacific Ocean. This extended version is a raw and uncut show that comprised the original Arizona Bay album. Now fully-restored, much longer, and without music, hear Arizona Bay like an audience did when it was first recorded and revel in Hicks' genius once more.

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Bill Hicks: do the legendary comic's jokes still stand up?

To comedy fans the standup legend’s death at the age of 32 was every bit as significant as those of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain. As his classic Arizona Bay is rereleased, does Hicks still have something important – and hilarious – to say?

In 1993, when Bill Hicks recorded Arizona Bay, he was at the peak of his powers. He had taken the UK by storm, performing two sell-out nationwide tours the previous year alone. He had experienced the dubious honour of being censored by CBS for a routine on the David Letterman show, only to subsequently rework that routine into a hit HBO special. He was the subject of a lengthy profile in the New Yorker which cast him as a unique voice in America, an outlaw in the culture. Within six months he’d be dead, at the age of 32.

The pancreatic cancer that took Hicks’s life had already been diagnosed before he finished Arizona Bay, an hour-long album that was originally released posthumously in 1997 and gets an expanded rerelease on Friday. In the valedictory statement he released shortly before his death, Hicks writes of how the diagnosis seemed “one of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable”. He continued: “I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realising my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. Why me!?”

For those of us who were fans of Hicks during his lifetime, his death was as definitive as that of John Lennon or Kurt Cobain. In one of those memories whose value lies in reminding you how much of an idiot you are, I passed up the chance to see Hicks on his Relentless tour in ’92. To make it worse, I did so because I’d just paid to see Dennis Leary perform his No Cure For Cancer show, a routine that is widely held to be a straight rip of Hicks’s material. No problem, I reasoned, he’d be back again soon enough. He wasn’t, and what was left were the cassettes of Hicks’s shows, recorded off late-night TV, committed to memory and, on occasion, adopted as maxims for living.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE - The Guardian

Ranking All 18 Discs of Bill Hicks: The Complete Collection

The release of Bill Hicks: The Complete Collection in September represents the absolute final word on the subject of the late comic. The 18 disc set, charmingly boxed up to look like a pack of cigarettes, brings together his standup albums, televised specials, and a wealth of bootleg recordings that provides a comprehensive look at his evolution as a comedian. You can see and hear his confidence grow as his material became more pointed, political and brilliant.

While it is surely instructive for fans to tackle this set in chronological order so you can follow the arc of his career from his days at the Comix Annex in Houston, Texas to performing at 1200 capacity theaters in the U.K., for the newbie, you might give up after watching his nervous, youthful set filmed in 1981. With that in mind, we offer up our ranking of the 18 discs found in this collection, from the best to the worst, as a way for you fresh fans to dive into this trove of audio and visual comedy. All the better to appreciate just how good Hicks could be and then flesh out the story with the rest.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE - Paste Magazine

COMEDIANS DRESS UP AS COMEDIANS AT THE KESSLER THIS HALLOWEEN

Artwork by Aaron Aryanpur

The Kessler will bring Phyllis Diller, Bill Hicks and Andy Kaufman back to the stage this Halloween by having their souls inhabit the bodies of comedians Saffron Herndon, Clint Werth and Dan Danzy for their "Homage Nation" comedy show.

Stand-up comedians may be alone on a stage in a physical sense, but spiritually speaking, they are never by themselves.

They are constantly swarmed by the spirits of the comedians who inspired them. Sometimes it's an unknown name who convinced a club owner to give them five minutes in the spotlight. For most it's a famous great who broke new boundaries with his material or style and pushed them to elevate their material from simple jokes to a well-crafted set.

Comedian Clint Werth cites comedy legend Bill Hicks as one such name.

"He was the first stand-up comedian I really got into," Werth says. "I grew up not that far from where he did, in super-conservative College Station, where I was pretty sure I was crazy. But then a friend of the family who was going to Texas A&M gave me some Bill Hicks tapes and some Dungeons and Dragons books when I was 12 years old, I guess because he realized I was a weirdo. Anyway, it was the first time I ever heard someone say the things I had always been thinking. It was a bummer to find out that he had died less than a year before I discovered him."

The Kessler has a special show on Halloween night designed to let the spirits of these and other legendary comedians come back from the dead and play on a stage again through the living bodies of some of Dallas' best comedians. The Kessler's "Homage Nation" show at 8 p.m. Saturday will feature performances by Werth, Katy Evans, Saffron Herndon, Silas Coursón, Alex Axon, Billy McFarland and Dan Danzy paying homage to comedy greats such as Hicks, Minnie Pearl, Phyllis Diller George Carlin, Janeane Garofalo, Mitch Hedberg and Andy Kaufman, respectively. Comedian Josh Johnson will host the show as himself, presumably so there's no unnecessary confusion.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE - Dallas Observer

Paste Magazine: 10 Jokes that Prove Bill Hicks was the Best Comic of His Time

Out tomorrow, Bill Hicks: The Complete Collection features every album and special the comedian ever released, along with more than ten hours of previously unreleased material and a photo book, spread out across 12 CDs and 6 DVDs. There’s no denying Hicks’s talent now, but it took American audiences a while to catch on in the early 1990s. Hicks defied classification because he was an entirely different sort of comic. He elevated stand-up comedy with his long think-piece jokes that pushed away from uproarious punch lines and instead approached life’s more frustrating developments with a philosophical air tinged with humor.

Hicks wasn’t afraid to call bullshit on many a problem arising in the political, cultural or social arenas. Talking about the injustice of John Lennon’s murder when Barry Manilow lived on suffocating the world with his sound, Hicks said, “If you’re going to kill someone, have some fucking taste.” It’s a stance that would be hard to imagine any comic taking today, least of which because the media fallout would be so intense. He was more than an irreverent comic, though; he was himself a deep thinker attuned to the inane and insane. If he pushed buttons, he did so in order to awaken people to the world around them.

In many ways, Hicks’s comedy had a prescient quality. Talking about everything from the news cycles on CNN Headline News to mounting anti-intellectualism, he covered topics that still ring pertinent today. The names in his jokes may have changed, but the issues haven’t. One can easily imagine him attacking Miley Cyrus instead of Debbie Gibson, Donald Trump instead of George Bush.

Here are ten jokes that prove Bill Hicks was the best stand-up comic of his time, and an eerily farsighted one, too. They don’t make comics like him anymore.

READ MORE - www.pastemagazine.com