Born William Melvin Hicks on 16 December 1961 in Valdosta, Georgia, he was given life and a name he was never ever able to live down. Bill hated his name. “Hate” is a strong word, but Bill hated his name. In the early years, he would step on stage and introduce himself, saying, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is William Melvin Hicks … Thanks, Dad.”
He made a short-lived hobby of trying to find successful comedians who had monosyllabic first and last names. He couldn’t come up with any besides Bob Hope. Bill even gave serious consideration to legally changing his name. Obviously he stuck with it, but his dissatisfaction never left him.
In late 1991, Bill was at friend Stephen Doster’s house in Austin. Nirvana had just started to make it big and Bill insisted on taking Doster, a well-respected local guitar player, singer-songwriter, and producer, to local institution Waterloo Records to buy him both the band’s albums, Bleach and Nevermind, then drive around town listening to them.
That was cool with Doster. First, though, he had to take his toddler son, Django, out for a walk. They headed down to the hike-and-bike trail along Town Lake and they walked. Bill says, “So, Stephen. You named the kid Django?” Django: named after guitarist Django Reinhardt.
“Yeah, that’s his middle name, but it’s what everyone calls him,” says Doster.
“Of course, you know what’s going to happen,” Bill baits him.
“What do you mean? Nothing’s going to happen to him.”
“Surely you, of all people, know what’s going to happen,” says Bill.
“No, Bill. What do you mean? What are you trying to say?” Doster asks. What, is he destined to suffer a disfigured hand in a fire accident à la his namesake? That’s not nice. Bill is just confusing his friend.
“His dad is a songwriter. His mom is a photographer. You named him Django. Surely you know what is going to happen to him?”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Doster isn’t sure where this is going and is more than a little perplexed. Then Bill grabs Doster around the neck with his hands – friendly, not hostile – and says, “He’s going to get sucked and fucked more by the time he’s 17 years old than you and I ever did in our goddamn lives.”
Bill the reductionist had figured it all out: cool name equals hot ass. His experience was the opposite. Redneck name equals not much ass at all. Jim and Mary Hicks, Bill’s parents, should have just called him “Cletus". In addition to the distinctly redneck name, Bill also had the misfortune of being born into a devout Southern Baptist family. With about sixteen million practising patrons, Southern Baptists constitute the largest fundamentalist denomination in the United States. And as fundamentalists they believe the authors of the Bible were inspired by God, making the Bible inerrant. That makes it easy to read: take everything literally.
Convenient for people without any imagination, but it also leads to some bizarre beliefs. Many Southern Baptists really do believe it is a sin to dance. The movie Footloose wasn’t just pulled from the dregs of a Hollywood executive’s brain. Some, not all, but some Baptist theologians maintain that dance is a social form of sexuality. So no go.
When Bill was growing from boy to teen in the Seventies, the Southern Baptists Convention was becoming even more extreme in its beliefs. There was an internal conflict in the church between moderates and fundamentalists, and the liberal factions lost. So, the church then began issuing statements on topics like the submissive role of women and criticizing feminist organizations. It issued a series of prayer guides to help save the non-Christians and lead them to salvation.
Despite his persistent protests and weak attempts to weasel out of it, every Sunday morning Bill was required to go to church. No exceptions. This is the doctrine he was fed; these are the beliefs he was expected to buy into. If every philosophy presupposed a sociology, then it’s not hard to see how a reactionary teen looking to get enlightened as much as he was looking to get laid, might have a field day with a religion to which the phrase “figuratively speaking” was meaningless.
Bill’s parents claimed they weren’t particularly religious; but every Sunday, there the Hicks were in the congregation. According to his mother Mary, “We just knew to go and went.”
Unfortunately for Bill, church took place on Sunday morning and Saturday night was the best time to catch late-night comedy. NBC had Saturday Night Live. Other networks would program movies late, and later still. Bill was usually up until 2 a.m. watching TV in his room. To him this was the kind of studying that mattered. An 8 a.m. wake-up call for church, though, didn’t exactly jive with his preferred sleep schedule.
Like any well-evolved creature Bill had to adapt. He tried resisting entirely, but when that failed, as it invariably did, he would make do. After services Bill would skip Sunday School and go nap in the church library.
Bill’s dad, Jim, worked in management for General Motors. He even wore the big GM ring, sporting it like he was a proud graduate of General Motors University. The company odyssey of the South sent Jim to Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, before affording the Hicks family an extended stay in Houston, Texas. The Hicks family bought a two-story hybrid of a colonial and a box in a slice of suburbia called Nottingham Forest, where an olio of shade trees sheltered both sides of the street. It was somewhere between upper-middle and lower upper-class America. The only danger was the boredom.
From the outside it all looked very Norman Rockwell: an immaculately kept house with a pristine lawn (Hicks mythology has it that Jim would measure the cut of the grass with a ruler) in a desirable zip code; 2.3 kids (well, three if you want to get technical – a brother Steve and a sister Lynn, both older); one dog named Sam, another named Chico. But, the veneer of the happy family wasn’t so thick as to be opaque.
As one of Bill’s childhood friends recalled, “There were pictures of Bill with Steve and his sister, and I’d ask, ‘Bill you’ve got a sister? You never told me you had a sister.’
“He was curt, responding, ‘I don’t have a sister.’
‘"Well, who is this?’
‘"Just some person that was in the house.'” Clearly something was rotten in the state of Denmark. Suburban Houston, too.
As a by-product of this household Bill spent a ridiculous amount of time in his room. It was a sanctuary where he could isolate himself from the foreign world of his parents and inculcate his friends to the virtues of sanity, reason and rock ‘n’ roll music. Camped in the permanent mess of his bed he listened to everything from Leadbelly to Led Zeppelin while he typed out one-liners.
His brother, Steve, recalls: “He used to write jokes and slide them under my bedroom door. And I would critique them and give them back … I didn’t even know what it all meant, he just said he was in his room writing all of this stuff.”
He was naturally gifted at almost everything. As a junior high football player, Bill’s speed and strength made him a natural at running back. He was even more gifted as a baseball player – amazingly so. Little League games are just six innings long; each team needs to get three outs in its half inning. That’s eighteen outs. With his wicked curveball and his gangly delivery, Bill regularly accounted for fifteen of those with strike-outs when he was on the mound. That’s so unheard of at that level it’s gaudy.
It was strange, though, that for all of his natural athleticism, Bill didn’t enjoy interacting with direct sunlight, preferring the bright but artificial light of the indoors. Bill and the sun didn’t see eye to eye. As a rule, he kept the blinds in his room drawn. The truth is, Bill probably saw as much sun on the small black-and-white TV in his room as in the sky outside. He wasn’t a shut-in, latch-key kid, but his room was his refuge from his family. He would stay up and watch The Tonight Show. He would read, he would write, and he would listen to records. Everything you needed in order to divine the make-up of a young Bill Hicks, you could get by watching him in his native habitat. Muddy Waters on the stereo, dog-eared copy of The Hobbit