Oh Where, Oh Where Have You Gone, Billy Boy?

Ramon and I once met one of my heroes. Know that I don’t have too many heroes. Without heroes, nobody is going to let you down too far. I suppose I’d give you John Coltrane, the Buddha, and boom, you’ve pretty much arrived at the bottom of the list. But if pressed, I would have to go ahead and put Bill Hicks on there. Here’s another nugget of wisdom: I have a soft spot for stand-up comedy. It’s a love that has precious little payback. Most stand-up of the last twenty years has been abysmal to be perfectly honest. David Cross may be the best there is, and that’s a shame. I like David Cross, but he is a firm entrant in the comic/actor subset that seems to dominate contemporary stand-up. And he heads the pack of like-minded and marginally funny comics/actors. In this same semi-hipster pack are folks who always seem to leave me cold, folks like Brian Posehn, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswald, Zach Galafianakis, and others. I can’t imagine stand-up paying too well, so I understand the idea that acting is a way to split the difference between doing what you enjoy and sucking Satan’s pecker (classic Hicks line), but still, is this the future of stand-up? I hope not.

So anyway, anyone who grew up in the eighties, and watched as much TV as I did, will remember the spate of truly, truly shitty stand-up shows that were broadcast late on Saturday nights. I endured these shows for years, expressing my streak for masochism in a big fucking way, and the only thing I can honestly say I got from them was Bill Hicks. Sometimes patience is rewarded. He was just another featured performer one night. He did a bit about being the kid who threw a pencil into the eye of another kid in school. It wasn’t his best bit, but compared to the zombies that were sharing the stage that night, he was a revelation. He had the timing, the tone, and a physical presence that was simply absent from stand-up at the time (or since for that matter).

Eventually I got to see Bill Hicks perform live at the recently closed Laff Stop here in Houston. I have never laughed so hard in my life. It was like I finally found the block that filled a gaping hole in my mind. His material was offensive, edgy, intelligent, and totally fucking hilarious. I went back the next night with a friend, and from there was hooked.

One day, a few years later, Ramon called me up to tell me that he had contacted Hicks’ manager and had managed to arrange an interview with Hicks who was on his way through Houston. Being a KTRU DJ at the time, Ramon was able to make us sound like something more than the fanboy yokels we really were. As it turned out, Hicks was glad to be able to spend some time with people who weren’t the “butts in the seats” type of people he usually met on his eternal trip across America. He shared his story of spending the morning with Stevens and Pruett, the morning drive-time DJs that plied their sleazy trade on Houston radio in those days. He swore that day that his appearance on Rock 101 would be his last bullshit promotional stop ever. We didn’t know how true that was.

That we basically had no decent prepared questions seemed to be of no consequence, though Hicks constantly ribbed us with comments like, “so, when does the interview start,” hours into the interview itself.

We had no clue at the time, but Hicks was not only about to make his last drive-time appearance, he was also about to do his last show in his adopted hometown of Houston soon followed by his last shows ever. He had recently been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and he knew that this would be his final hurrah. So the man we sat with that day was a dying man, well aware of his fate. As sick as he had to have been feeling, he never let on. In fact, he was gregarious, polite, and extremely accommodating considering how idiotic we must have been.

It was at this interview that I learned of Hicks’ great love of music. I knew he was a fan; he opened all his shows with music. The first time I saw him, he came out to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. As the infamous riff played, he walked out, all in black, and played a lazy air guitar along with the tape. With one swipe across his neck the music stopped. He did the same thing another night with a Bob Dylan track, and both times the brief introduction was effective. During the interview, when I asked him what music he was into he told me that he was good friends with the guys from Tool and that he really dug their music. I knew them from their video that was getting a ton of MTV airplay at the time, but their vocalist was just too much for me. When he told us about Tool though, I figured I’d give them a chance. That chance didn’t come until years later when I was working at a non-profit. This lunatic friend of mine was a huge fan of Tool, and while I teased him mercilessly about his tastes in music (Tori Amos, Jellyfish, Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley), I also had to respect his passion. For that reason, and for the sake of Bill Hicks, I gave Tool a listen.

I have since gone back and forth about that band. For the most part I find them to be tedious and pompous in a bad way. I won’t lie, I have several of their albums, and I even still occasionally listen to them. The musicianship is generally rather high, and they can rock fairly hard when they aren’t going off on ten-minute wank-offs about daddy touching them in the wrong way and what have you. My biggest problem with them at the end of the day however is the apparent need they seem to feel for interminably boring bonus tracks and unbearably over-serious lyrics. That shit gets old real fast.

Enough of that, let’s get back to Bill Hicks.

Another thing that I learned upon meeting Hicks was that he was making a stab at mixing his own music in with the pre-recorded stand-up on his – at the time – forthcoming release. He had this idea, he told us, to change up the acrid, enraged ranting of his material with the more subdued and intimate sounds of his guitar playing. The problem was, his guitar playing was fairly awful. But again, his passion for his work overrides the fact that I don’t like the music he uses. I admire him for trying it even if it doesn’t work.

So the gist of this, I suppose, is that in the face of true passion, and true love of the things that are important to the people I love, I am often a sucker for getting wrapped up in their happiness. I have learned to love so many things because someone I care about feels so strongly about it.

And a funny thing about this is, that like love itself sometimes, these feelings can fade with time. I have a whole selection of Bjork CDs that I almost never listen to because I almost never talk to the guy who was so into her to begin with. Without his glowing praise, she is relegated back to the place I reserved for her before I met him. She falls back into her role as a talented oddity with a certain knack for inventive production, but ultimately someone who doesn’t do a whole lot for me, most of the time. Some of her stuff is really great; I just don’t think about it that often.

So, Ramon turned forty the other day. Congrats Ramon.

This is really not a milestone that is easy to absorb. And I should get ready because my day of reckoning is right around the corner. Next year the blade falls on my neck. So I find myself reflecting even more than I usually do on the way my life has wound over these four decades.

I was born into a working class family. My parents are college educated Midwesterners. My mother gave up her career in teaching to be a stay at home mom, a job that is very high on my list of most respected. My father worked for a machine tool company out of Cleveland, Ohio. His work brought our family over to Paris so he could work in their European headquarters and be closer to the rest of the world in which he would make a success of his professional life and a shambles of his family.

By the way, before I go any further. I’d like to just say that anyone thinking I was going to stray from what I do best, which is personal posts, ought not go past this point. It won’t get any less personal.

Okay, moving on.

I discovered very early that I was an extremely shy and sensitive kid. I noticed things others did not. I sensed sadness in people I never met simply by the way they carried themselves. This led to problems sometimes because crying for a total stranger is hard to explain. My family moved a lot as I was growing up. Being as shy as I was led to a certain unease about the way things were that I think has in no small way helped define my clear need for a general level of security. Meeting new kids every so often was always a total nightmare, and as I got older and learned the many ways in which people were bad to one another, things got even stickier.

By high school I was a kid who was dying for a way out. I hated being in Texas with every fiber of my being, and desperately wanted to get the fuck out of here. I learned about fighting, fear, rage, shame, and thankfully music.

And music was really the golden ticket. Through my love of music I have managed to weave a little blanket of security around myself that I will never remove. I have always been a dabbler in many things. Books, writing, art, sports, drugs, you name it, I’ve given it a shot at some point in my life. But music is the glue that has held it all together in a sense. There is a depth to appreciating music that I haven’t found in anything else save perhaps for film. But music is something more fundamental than film. It is part of our being. I live through my love of music.

In these almost forty years I have learned how to let go. I’ve had to. Most of what I have loved is gone in one way or another. Whether through attrition, death, dishonesty, or simple boredom, virtually all I have loved is lost, except music.

Dramatic? Sure it is.

As for my current family situation, my children are great to me, but my goal with them is to give them the tools to create their own life without having to need me. I want them to have the confidence that I can’t seem to hang on to for long, and to have the happiness that has eluded me in many ways. If they get the right tools, I have no doubt this will happen. With that, I will have done my job. But I don’t have the traditional all-encompassing myopic view of my children that we are suppose to all act like we have. Yes, they are my children and I will hold them above all other, but they are also individuals who need to function as such. I don’t want to ruin them by making the sort of mistakes clingy parents make in their efforts to shield their kids from harm. That level of protection is an impossible charge, and ultimately a destructive one.

I may not make it to forty. I may make it to eighty. Who knows? The way things are now, the transitional element of having a newborn and a four year old are monumental. There is no life in our home outside of the responsibilities this entails. But I know I will one day look back and miss these days, and the frustration and fears that I wade through today will fade just like the passions of my past, just like the memory of the faces that I swore to never forget, just like the shared love for music that meant so much to those who meant so much to me.