American: The Bill Hicks Story Page #2

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We were raised Southern Baptist

and had to go to church every single Sunday.

It was just a strict household.

"You do this. You do that."

The one thing

I always wanted to get straight,

cos a lot of times it talks about, "The Hickses

were raised fundamentalist Christian.

"No, we were raised Southern Baptist

and that's much worse. "

And he's right, really.

That's just the way we lived then.

But hopefully what you're taught there

teaches you the spiritual,

and I don't mean religion.

I mean the basics of how to live a life.

So when I was 17, he was 10.

I was like, "Get me out of this house.

I want out. "

And off I went to college.

I rebelled. Steve, in his fashion, rebelled.

And Bill rebelled too.

Stand-up comedy was not on

the map in the '70s, for kids to want to be.

But we were very determined

and so we started to do

this very much guerilla-theatre type

of comedy amongst our friends.

This group of people's just standing around,

and you appear,

and you do an outrageous sketch

and then you disappear.

What the hell was that?

And, of course, once they got wind of it,

they wouldn't let us alone.

"Are you guys gonna do your thing?"

After school we would go over to his house

and we would plan them and write them

and they were like gigs to us.

And it wasn't lost upon us, the fact

that we already knew what we wanted in life.

This was what we were going to do.

You had to sacrifice your family,

your relationship with girls,

your popularity at school.

We were sacrificing everything for this.

And there was nowhere to do our craft.

There was no open mics.

There was nothing in 1970s Houston, Texas.

As a backdrop to all this

is how we met Kevin Booth.

Bill and I just thought

that Kevin was hilarious,

just cos he was this technical genius

who could build things and blow things up.

I was known

as the instigator and a facilitator.

You know, if you had an idea for something,

I would go out and figure out how to build it.

You know, the fact that he was able

to get his parents' RV and hook up a generator

and then set up speakers and play rock'n'roll

to the Spartanaires

as they were practising their routines.

That just was like classic Kevin.

Because of this ranch,

I was able to get what's called

a hardship driver's licence when I was 14

without even like taking any lessons.

I just thought the two of them were hilarious.

It was like a new breed of person.

They did all this weird stuff,

and I guess we just started talking

about music all the time.

We wanted to be rock stars,

thinking like this was gonna be our way

to break out of suburbia.

Bill was like, "Let's go look

at these guitars downtown. "

I'd never driven downtown before,

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