having this hush-hush conversation. To anyone watching, it must have looked like we were doing a drug deal. But we were talking about the stage show for our band, Stress, the one that didn’t even exist yet. Bill already had arena-sized ideas: “We’ll have this one song where we do the explosion thing, and one of the guys will jump out on stage with a fifty-foot papier-maché penis that starts coming over the audience. And the girls …”
Right then Bill’s mom walked into the kitchen. “Who’s your friend, Bill?” Bill’s response was less happy, healthy or loving than I ever could have ever expected.
“Godammit, Mom, I fucking hate your guts.” He stormed out of the kitchen. I was left standing there. Just me and Mary Hicks. “Uh, hi. I’m Kevin Booth.” Thanks, Bill.
His mom’s response was as surreal as it was calm, as in her heavy southern drawl she asked, “Do you want some pineapple, Kevin?” Did she not hear what I just heard? I said no thanks to the pineapple.
My lasting image of Bill’s dad, Jim Hicks, is a lot more pedestrian but no less ridiculous. The neighborhood association where we lived, Nottingham Forest, would award “Yard of the Month” to the spot with the nicest yard. Bill’s dad won the honor frequently enough that Jim could have landscaped in a home for the accompanying sign: it was almost a permanent fixture.
Jim proudly displayed the fuck out of that thing. Tending to the yard – that’s how I will always remember Jim. Outside at the break of dawn; Saturday and Sunday mornings; sporting his black socks and sock garters while mowing the lawn or clipping the hedges. Bill made endless fun of his dad for that, and for other aspects of his character Bill found embarrassing; but he also had deep respect for his father’s work ethic. Still, when Bill started to set foot on the stage it was open season and many of Bill’s characters were just variations on the theme of Jim.
One of my bands wrote a song about Jim years later, called “Yard of the Month.” Jim Hicks was like no other father I had ever met. He wasn’t just Bill’s father. Sometimes it was like he was your father, too.
Anytime anyone went to Bill’s house, they had to get past Jim, who was always doing that classic “father” pose Bill often mimicked on stage – right arm cocked behind his head, lips pressed forward sternly, eyes squinting and laden with seriousness. Bill would coach you that when you entered the house, go straight to his room. Just go past his dad. Ignore. Just keep going. He could do it. His friends couldn’t.
“Where you goin', son?” Jim would start with a heavy southern drawl to match his wife’s – the one that almost made “Bill” into a two-syllable word. The question was like gravity: you couldn’t ignore it. You were now getting cross-examined by Jim. How you were doing in school, how your parents were, etc.
Bill loved his parents, and they loved him. But they were Baptists. Specifically, Southern Baptists. In Texas we have First Baptists, Second Baptists and Southern Baptists. I know Baptists who don’t know the differences between the subsets, but the Hicks were so Baptist that the differences made a difference to them.
My earliest recollections of Bill are in the lunchroom where he used to “perform” on an almost daily basis with his classmate Dwight Slade. For example, they did this one bit in the school cafeteria where Dwight put some raisins into a spoon, and Bill was going to give the raisins to some lucky girl as a gift. Off Bill flew with havoc following. He was running over tables, tripping over chairs, crashing into people. Trays of food and milk were flying into the air. All the while Bill was doing everything necessary to keep the raisins in the spoon. As the commotion grew so did the gathering crowd, as people were trying to see what the big deal was. Well, the “big deal” turned out to be that Bill was presenting a spoonful of raisins to a completely unimpressed young lady. It didn’t really win over the audience, either.
But it’s a perfect image of who Bill was at that age. It was more important to make a lasting impression than to make a good first impression. He could have said something nice to that girl, and been done with it. Maybe compliment her. But no, there had to be a clumsy production to make sure she didn’t forget.
It was also somewhat standard fare of Bill’s formative years with Dwight. Here you had these two little punk-ass kids coming in and trying to be funny by acting weird and wacky. In reality, though, everyone thought they were losers. In fact, they were considered more than just losers. The difference between them and the regular losers was that they were also extroverts. Most of the geekier people in junior high and high school tended to withdraw into themselves. Not Bill and Dwight. They seemed actively to enjoy seeing how strange they could behave in front of people to rile them up.
Still, as a personality, I was drawn to Bill. We talked one day during lunch. Then a couple of days later during track practice I went up to say “hi” again. And before I knew it, we were hanging out together seemingly all the time. Lunch, track, after school. In fact, it was track that helped us become rock stars. “Rock stars” is obviously overstating it, given our modest success in high school as musicians. But track certainly wasn’t exercise; an exercise in convenience, perhaps.
While it was a year-round sport, track was really just another way for the football team to train together in the spring. In Texas there were rules limiting the amount of time high-school football teams could spend practising. Those limits were usually exhausted during the season in the fall. Across the state, shrewd and smarmy coaches alike would sign the entire football team up for track in the spring, football’s off-season. Voilà. They were no longer the “football” team. Rules averted.
So Bill and I were technically running track; however, track was the last class of the school day. And, in the spring, the coaches were generally only concerned with the football players. That meant we were actually doing one of two things. If there was no roll call, Bill and I would leave school, go to my house, and play music. If there was going to be a roll call at the end of class, we would go to sleep on the pole vault mats.
There were advantages to track. Being out there amongst the jocks gave Bill opportunities aplenty to make fun of them. And, of course, when he and Dwight would do these ridiculously stupid things right in people’s faces, it only made people want to inflict bodily harm on them that much more.
There were more than a few incidents when Bill got chased. He and I once did an interview with New Yorker theater critic John Lahr where I talked about one of these incidents. Bill was sitting right next to me as I finished by saying, “They caught Bill and Dwight and beat the shit out of them.”
Bill interrupted me. He was adamant: “No, Kevin, they never caught us. They never caught us and they never beat us.” It wasn’t nit-picking; it was important to Bill that the truth be known. And the truth is, for a guy who looked so thoroughly unathletic, Bill was a damned fast runner at that time. Damned fast. They chased. They didn’t catch.
Bill ran in several track meets before giving it up; and again it wasn’t that he wasn’t good, he just stopped caring. He got more into music; he stopped caring about sports, stopped running track, stopped playing baseball. Sports had definite objectives – score runs, cross the finish line first, etc. Music gave you more latitude. Here’s three minutes of nothing, fill it however you want. Ready? Go! That was clearly more in line with Bill’s ethic.
My parents thought Bill was a terrible influence on my life. I’m sure Bill’s parents thought the same about me, but Bill was actually one of the best things ever to happen to me; and at that point in my life, Bill kept me out of trouble. I don’t think one of our earliest attempts to put a band together, however, would do anything to prove either set of parents wrong. It was born out of misguided anger – inexcusably misguided anger.
We had already been “playing” as Stress when Dwight had a teen crush on a girl, Mila Goldstein, reciprocated. She was, as you might suspect with that name, Jewish. The informal flirtation fell apart and, burned by young love gone wrong, we fought fire with fire by writing a handful of songs. Specifically, songs that made fun of Jews.
We temporarily” changed the band name for the occasion, calling ourselves Joe Arab and the Nazis.
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