Bill Hicks: 1961 – 1994
I had heard of but never actually heard Bill Hicks until I moved to Austin, Texas, apropos enough. You soon find he permeates the Austin cultural landscape, and rightly so. Texans are a strange breed. To the consternation of my California cynics, I found the people there to be the friendliest I’d ever encountered in America and Austin the coolest place I’ve ever lived (as the QT Fest shows). And Texans are a fiercely independent lot, for bad or good (just do things their way y’all and we’ll get along jes’ fine). I accepted Texas for what it was and got along just fine. Although I did warn my skeptical Cali friends that George Bush Junior was a’coming…
Hicks was a perfect metaphor for that passionate rage against the machine and his honest outrage at the country’s moral and spiritual hypocricies is what made him a threat to the established media system. He was the first comic banned from CBS after all. Yet even after his sad, untimely death of pancreatic cancer at age 32, he has become even more iconic and influential…On the 15th anniversary of his passing to the Third Eye In The Sky, ladies and gents, the Bruce Lee of comedy, the late great Bill Hicks — from his very last, rare live performance:
