FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘Bulba’: The terrible CIA sitcom pilot that starred a young Bill Hicks
10.20.2016
03:30 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
The 1980s were a miserable decade for standup comedy—based on the incredible success of men like Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams, all of whom had an originating identity as standups, comedy saw a “boom” which really translated into bars across America labeling just about anything a “COMEDY SHOWCASE,” attracting MOR hacks everywhere to divert audiences with their “hilarious” Jack Nicholson impressions or their hackneyed thoughts about the packaging of airline peanuts. It was a decade defined by people such as Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, talented men but none of them ever likely to, say, question the Reagan administration’s Central America policy.

Which brings us to Bill Hicks, one of the few comedic heroes that the 1980s produced. Hicks was a bumptious standup comedian out of Texas, one of few comedians of that era who could truly be said to owe Lenny Bruce a debt. He talked about the benefits of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms onstage, railed against the implacable conformity of Americans, and once put down a heckler by saying, “Hitler had the right idea; he was just an underachiever!” In a decade in which development execs constantly lusted after some debased version of the “edgy,” Hicks was the real deal. He sadly died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32, a tragic fate that has cemented his status as a countercultural icon ever since.

One of the events that caused Hicks to adopt a rather jaundiced view of Hollywood was his involvement in an idiotic spoof of the CIA called Bulba. A pilot episode of the show was filmed for ABC in 1981, but it was never picked up—for very good reasons. The show centered on the goofy goings-on at the U.S. embassy in Bulba, a fictional island near India, and the show absolutely reeks of the anti-establishment ethos typified by Stripes and M*A*S*H, but sadly it isn’t funny. At all. Hicks plays “Phil,” a bumbling Marine whose identifying trait is that he isn’t wearing pants.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
10.20.2016
03:30 pm
|
Bill Hicks’ ‘Arizona Bay’: With unreleased material—and without the terrible music
11.24.2015
08:05 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
In 1997, when Rykodisc gave wide commercial release to the work of the deceased comic visionary/cosmic truth-seeker Bill Hicks, two of those releases heavily featured his guitar playing as well as his comedy. This was in accordance with Hicks’ expressed wishes, and the albums were in fact completed and mixed before Hicks’ passing. Those two albums, Rant in E Minor and Arizona Bay, included some of the most brutal material Hicks ever performed. They were completed after he was diagnosed with the cancer that claimed his life at the age of 32, and they are accordingly unsparing in their vitriol. And it was in vitriol that Hicks singularly excelled.

Just one problem, though: Hicks’ guitar playing was, at best, middling amateur psych noodling. It’s not a problem on Rant, where the guitar work mostly drifts dreamily in and out of the stand-up material like trippy segues, and if you don’t know Hicks, the body of work collected on that CD is an excellent place to start. But on Arizona Bay? The music was a terrible, Dunning-Krugerish miscalculation that just flat out WRECKED the album. Lengthy passages of comedy were entirely buried under too-loud guitar wank, rendering some of Hicks’ best stand-up work completely inaudible.

The album, insofar as it could be heard, was dark. The title refers to a hypothetical body of water that will be left behind someday after the San Andreas Fault submerges California and Baja. Not that Arizona’s such a fucking prize, but there are plenty of people who can relate to really, really hating L.A.:

That’s right, when L.A. falls in the fucking ocean and is flushed away, all it will leave is Arizona Bay.

In recent months, the record label/streaming platform/production company Comedy Dynamics (a worthy channel to add if you have a Roku device, seriously) have been working to make the complete recorded works of Bill Hicks available to the public (we told you all about it back in April), and the latest drop in that bucket is the forthcoming digital reissue of Arizona Bay, with loads of additional tracks and, most crucially, no music. Last week, the AV Club released one of the additional tracks, “No Smoking On Airplanes (But They Allow Children).”
 

 
And Comedy Dynamics have been kind enough to allow DM to bring you a never before heard version of one of Hicks’ most oft-quoted bits, “Marketing and Advertising.” This is his infamous call for everyone in the publicity industry to commit suicide. Like I said, the album is really, really dark. (I feel I should note here the irony that I might not have heard much of Hicks’ work as early as I did if not for the efforts of Ryko’s marketing department.)
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Bill Hicks’ Seldom Seen ‘Ninja Bachelor Party’
Everything ever recorded of Bill Hicks—EVER—to be released in 2015

Posted by Ron Kretsch
|
11.24.2015
08:05 am
|
Everything ever recorded of Bill Hicks—EVER—to be released in 2015
04.24.2015
09:05 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
The premature death of Bill Hicks was one of the greatest tragedies to ever befall American comedy. His hilarious and unabashedly angry attacks on conservatism, complacency, and stupidity made him a cult figure in his lifetime, but cancer claimed him in early 1994, just as he was poised to achieve real fame, so we never got to see him continue maturing into the gifted comedic truth-seeker he seemed bound to become, a legitimate heir to Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Like any tortured genius type worth discussing, Hicks was full of contradictions—he criticized the alcohol industry for peddling poison, but he took a perverse and boastful pride in his own cigarette consumption. He embraced a deeply moral we-are-all-as-one-in-the-cosmos philosophy, yet he sometimes took a sadistic glee in dehumanizing the rural underclass (as a conservative-raised southerner himself, he gets a pass on that). And though he constantly torpedoed commercial opportunists, he himself was seeking career visibility, and paradoxically, purity, in a milieu that necessitated rather a lot of commercial engagement. His career wasn’t helped, either, by his willingness to derail a performance to attack his audience, or even just a single member thereof, though that shit was every bit as golden as his prepared material. Behold:
 

 
If you’re skeptical of Hicks’ counterculture bona fides, consider that one of his most infamous bits was a call-to-action for the entire advertising industry to commit suicide.
 

 
A 1997 drop of CD releases on the Rykodisc label kept Hicks’ memory and work alive while introducing him to those who missed out. Four were issued in the first batch, the excellent Dangerous and Relentless, which were reissues of albums released during Hicks’ lifetime, and Arizona Bay and Rant in E Minor, which Hicks completed and mixed, but were only released posthumously. Those latter two feature Hicks’ guitar playing layered in with his standup, to deeply mixed effect—there are significant portions of Arizona Bay where Hicks’ words are rendered maddeningly inaudible by his psych guitar efforts, while Rant is the Hicks album to get if you can only get one. It was recorded after his cancer diagnosis, and is unparalleled in its bitterness and audacity—as though cancer were vitriol and he was trying to purge himself— and good GOD, it is funny as hell. The bit about Rush Limbaugh in the bathtub alone could have made Hicks a legend.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Kretsch
|
04.24.2015
09:05 am
|
Comedians on psychedelic drugs


 
If you just want the tl;dr, feel free to skip to the bottom of this post where comedians George Carlin, Joe Rogan, Doug Stanhope, Bill Hicks and Duncan Trussell are heard discussing their experiences with psychedelic drugs. I won’t be offended.

There was a period of my life when I was in my 20s where I had no idea what to do next. I’d been in Los Angeles pitching TV show ideas around, without success, and had moved back to New York in an effort to shake things up and change my luck, but that was even worse. I was depressed and confused basically about what direction my career and life should take, working in a shitty job I hated and… things just sucked.

It was at this point fate intervened and presented me with a gram vial of DMT. Why not? It was a message in a bottle from God, I rationalized, as I went through that gram, and then a second, and about, I dunno, perhaps 45 grams of mushrooms in the coming two months. I could smoke DMT four times a day, easily. That probably seems just a little bit excessive, I realize, but I still held down a job even if I was carrying on a schizophrenic dialogue with my spirit guide, a wise-cracking raven with a voice like Eddie Murphy.

Just kidding. No, I’m not going to get into any of my “tripping stories” or anything like that (plenty of those—not mine—over at Erowid Vaults) but I will say that it did inspire me to change my act basically, like George Carlin talks about in his section of this video. Within a few months of my “psychedelic period”—this was in the mid-90s—the possibility the Internet seemed to offer as a place for my particular talents to prosper was becoming apparent to me and I started trying to get Disinformation off the ground.

I agree with Terence McKenna: If you go to your grave without having pierced the veil with psychedelics, it’s like dying a virgin. Yeah, I maybe went a lil’ ‘round the bend for a couple of months, but like the gentlemen in the video below, no regrets:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
04.10.2014
04:30 pm
|
Bill Hicks: ‘Relentless’ from 1992
11.25.2011
06:26 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
It’s Friday. Here’s Bill Hicks. Relentless. Recorded at the Just For Laughs Festival in 1992.

Sad to think Mr Hicks would have been only 50 this December. How things have changed since his death in 1994. A damned shame, as we could do with someone like him now.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
11.25.2011
06:26 pm
|
Bill Hicks’ Seldom Seen ‘Ninja Bachelor Party’
01.04.2011
08:58 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
He was the best comedian of his generation, and seventeen years after his untimely death, Bill Hicks is still greatly missed. It’s hard to believe he would have only been fifty this year, which is not old when compared to some of the aged reptiles who hold power in politics, the media and banking. But we were lucky to have had his talents for the short time we did.

Ninja Bachelor Party was written, co-directed and co-produced by Hicks and Kevin Booth, and shot over ten days in Texas for $5,000 in 1990, as a parody of martial arts movies. It isn’t his best work, and falls apart here and there, mainly because Hicks and co. allegedly didn’t take the filming too seriously. Even so, it does have enough to make it that little bit special. And no, there is no bachelor party.
 

 
Part deux of ‘Ninja Bachelor Party’ after the jump…
 
With thanks to William Baird
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
01.04.2011
08:58 pm
|
‘American: The Bill Hicks Story’ kicks off Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles
09.08.2010
05:12 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Not a lot of notice for this one, but some of my fellow Los Angelenos will be happy to hear that the new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story will be getting its Los Angeles premiere tomorrow night.

With exclusive interviews from the people who knew Hicks intimately, filmmakers Paul Thomas and Matt Harlock boldly recreate scenes throughout the comedian’s life using a stunning new form of photo-animation that Esquire called “brilliant and beguiling,” allowing the audience to be immersed in Bill’s world as he moves from Houston to Los Angeles, where he achieved his first level of success at the famed Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip. (His name is still featured on the Comedy Store’s wall of fame.) Hicks would go onto to make his mark not only in the LA comedy community, but nationally as well, appearing on “Late Night with Letterman” eleven times, as well as two of his own HBO specials.

His life and career, which promised even more to come, was tragically cut short when he was diagnosed at age 32 with pancreatic cancer and died in 1994 within a matter of months. Known as a comedian in the vein of Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl who wasn’t afraid to tackle “big ideas” on politics, religion and even the meaning of life in a stand-up comedy routine, Hicks started with a cult following, first through word-of-mouth, bootlegs and VHS, and is now tipping into a much wider mainstream following.

The filmmakers comment: “Although Bill was a superstar outside America, the challenging nature of his material meant he never got the chance to be seen unedited by mainstream US audiences, but since the rise of Jon Stewart and ‘The Daily Show,’ Stephen Colbert and Lewis Black, the landscape has changed. Considered by many in the comedy community to be one of the most important stand-ups America ever produced, this firebrand comic’s freethinking message of acceptance and hope is more relevant in today’s world than ever. Above all though, his is the human story of an artist who had to overcome great obstacles, personal and professional, to try and make the world a better place. As such, its for everyone.”

 

 
The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles, Wed., Sept, 8th, 8:00 pm at the Civic Center F. Deaton Auditorium, at corner of 1st and Main St., (i.e., across from City Hall in downtown L.A.)

You can get tickets here

Via Tina Dupuy/Fishbowl LA

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.08.2010
05:12 pm
|