Love All the People (New Edition)
Page 40
Well, folks, I did longer than I was supposed to do. The reason is I always do long shows when I’m in Denver, cos I know for a fact there’s nothing else going on here. So, thank you very much. Good night. Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
Notes
Part 1: 1980-1991
Interview by Allan Johnson (14 September 1989)
1.
Dick Clark (b. 1929) presented American Bandstand on the ABC network between 1957 and 1987. He was long known as America’s Oldest Teenager’. To this day he retains his boyish good looks.
2.
A former Pentecostal Preacher, Sam Kinison (1953-92) featured on numerous cable comedy specials and guested regularly on Saturday Night Live. In the late eighties he performed with Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne. His comedy was marked by a relentless and sometimes disturbing honesty about sex, politics and religion. He died in a car accident in 1992.
Hicks was 17 years old when he started to work with Kinison and the other Texas Outlaws, Riley Barber and Carl LaBove.
‘Some people may think Sam Kinison’s in one place, but I know where he is: He’s upstairs; he’s next to God.’ Ozzy Osbourne.
3.
Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay (b. 1958) started his career as an actor and became a highly successful and controversial stand-up comedian in the late 80s. He starred in the family sitcom Bless This House in 1995.
Recorded Live at the Village Gate, NYC, and Caroline’s Seaport, NYC (1990)
4.
Released in 1990 as Dangerous; re-released in 1997 by Rykodisc.
5.
Homelessness rose sharply throughout the 1980s in New York City. In 1979 shelters housed just under 2,000 homeless single adults each night. By 1990 they were registering around 9,600. In the winter the figure sometimes exceeded 11,000 (Source: Coalition for the Homeless).
6.
Ronald Reagan won the 1980 Presidential election in a campaign that drew on the thoughtless verities of Hollywood patriotism. In his two terms he worked hard to support corporate interests while attacking a supposedly elitist and out of touch liberal intelligentsia.
7.
Debbie Gibson’s (b. 1970) career highlights include ‘Only In My Dreams’, ‘Shake Your Love’ and ‘Lost in Your Eyes’.
8.
Tiffany (b. 1971) had number 1 hits in the US with ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ and ‘Could’ve Been’. Her career was launched by a series of promotional appearances at shopping malls. Discussing the mall appearances, her producer Brad Schmidt commented ‘It started out as a marketing tool and as a way to get her in front of people and it turned into a phenomenon.’
9.
Rick Astley was one of producer Pete Waterman’s most successful pop acts, enjoying success on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, ‘Together Forever’ and some other songs.
10.
Founded in 1978 by Bob Guccione of Penthouse fame, Omni published both science fiction and non-fiction about controversial, ‘cutting edge’, scientific topics, including psychedelia and UFOs. The magazine finally folded in 1996 after a brief incarnation as an online-only publication.
11.
After war service in the navy and a stint working in the oil business, George H. W. Bush (b. 1924) served in the US Congress from 1966. He was US Ambassador to the United Nations between 1971-73 and Head of the CIA between 1974-75. He served two terms as Vice President under Ronald Reagan where he took a particular interest in deregulation and ‘anti-drug programs’. In 1988 he was elected the 41st President of the United States. During his time as President, Bush successfully invaded Panama and removed Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. He was unsuccessful in his attempts to defeat drugs. His son has now declared a War on Terror as well.
George Senior’s own stand on terrorism was unambiguous; ‘On the surface, selling arms to a country that sponsors terrorism, of course, clearly, you’d have to argue it’s wrong, but it’s the exception sometimes that proves the rule.’
12.
The Partnership for a Drug-Free America first aired the ‘This is your brain on drugs’ commercial in 1987. The Partnership describes itself as having ‘deep roots in the advertising industry’ and was founded in 1986 with funds from the American Association of Advertising Agencies. It has tended to focus on illegal and untaxed drugs (whose producers and distributors are not heavy spenders on advertising) in its campaigns. It stopped accepting money from tobacco and alcohol companies in 1997 but continues to receive support from the pharmaceutical industry (source Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Website: www.fair.org).
13.
Jim Fixx (1932-1984) wrote The Complete Book of Running (1977) and Jim Fixx’s Second Book of Running (1980).
14.
At a demonstration in Dallas in 1984 Gregory Johnson doused a US flag in kerosene and set it on fire outside the City Hall. John was found guilty of ‘desecrating a sacred object’ under the Texas Penal Code and sentenced to one year in prison. His case went to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in June 1989 that Johnson’s actions were a form of symbolic speech and protected under the terms of the First Amendment to the Constitution. In the course of delivering the court’s verdict, Justice Brennan remarked; ‘If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.’
Recorded Live at the Vic Theatre, Chicago (November 1990)
15.
Released as One Night Stand in 1991, Laughing Stock Productions Ltd.
16.
A certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a collection of stand-up routines. The editors have decided to include all the main routines, so that the reader can see how the treatment of the same themes changes between 1990 and 1993.
17.
James Vance and Ray Belknap entered into a suicide pact in 1985. Belknap died at the scene while Vance died three years later. Their parents sued the heavy metal band Judas Priest, claiming that the subliminal message ‘do it’ in their song ‘Better By You, Better Than Me’ caused them to act as they did. In 1990 the judge in the case ruled in favor of the band. Incidentally he also stated that subliminal messages did not qualify as constitutionally protected speech.
18.
The US courts have spent many years trying to provide an adequate definition of obscenity, including Potter Stuart’s famous 1964 attempt, ‘I know it when I see it’. In the 1973 case, Miller v. California, the US Supreme Court ruled that a work would be considered obscene in law if it satisfied the following three conditions:
i.) ‘“the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest …’
ii.) ‘the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law . . .’
iii.) ‘the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.’
Live at the Funny Bone, Pittsburgh, PA (20 June 1991)
19.
Recorded Live at the Funny Bone, Pittsburgh, PA (20 June 1991). Released in 2002 as Flying Saucer Tour, Vol. 1 by Rykodisc.
20.
Emmanuel Lewis was a popular 1980s child actor best known for the character Webster in a popular TV show. Phyllis Diller is a veteran US comedienne.
21.
Jack Lalanne (b. 1914) is an important figure in the creation of the health and fitness movement. He is credited with the remark ‘Death would ruin my image.’
22.
A ‘stogie’ is slang for a cigar or cigarette.
23.
Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August, 1990. A US-led coalition backed by a UN mandate began a series of air strikes against Iraqi positions on 16 January. On 24 February coalition forces entered Southern Iraq. On 27 February President Bush declared Kuwait liberated. In around one hundred hours
the US military inflicted devastating casualties on the Iraqi military.
24.
Arsenio Hall is a popular US talk-show host and comedian.
25.
See especially Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drugs Trade (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003). First published in 1972, Lawrence Hill and Co. published a new edition in January 1991, six months before the Pittsburgh gig. Also notable in this context are Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: CIA, The Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories, 1998), Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), and most recently Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf (London: Verso, 2004).
26.
Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme (b. 1948) was an associate of Charles Manson. In September 1975 she attempted to murder the US President, Gerald Ford.
27.
Neil Bush, son of George Bush Senior, who was accused of real estate fraud in the early 1990s.
28.
Stuckeys is a chain of southern US roadside candy stores.
29.
US card game; British version is called ‘Find the Lady’.
Recorded at Laff Stop, Austin, Tx (14-17 December 1991)
30.
Released as Relentless in 1992; re-released in 1997, Rykodisc. An edited version broadcast on 2 January, 1992 on Channel Four.
31.
Clarence Thomas (b. 1948) is a Justice of the Supreme Court. In 1991, during his Senate confirmation hearings in October of that year, a former colleague of Thomas, Anita Hill, alleged that, ‘After a brief discussion of work he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid.’
32.
Paul Reubens (b. 1952) found huge success through his comic alter ego, Pee-Wee Herman. In July 1991 Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure in an adult cinema in Sarasota, Florida. Reubens continues to work as an actor, but Pee-Wee Herman has retired from show business.
33.
Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (b. 1932) is usually known as Ted or Teddy. Hicks is perhaps referring to him, for some reason.
34.
The 19 October 1987 edition of Newsweek ran a long, generally sympathetic article about then Vice-President Bush’s Presidential ambitions. The headline read ‘George Bush – Fighting the “Wimp” Factor’.
Bush never quite got over the word, and in 1991 he commented, ‘You’re talking to the “wimp”. You’re talking to the guy that had a cover of a national magazine, that I’ll never forgive, put that label on me.’
35.
A large number of UFO sightings were recorded in Fyffe in 1989 and 1990. The area is also notorious for unexplained cattle mutilations.
36.
The Joad family are the central characters in John Steinbeck’s novel of the Depression, The Grapes of Wrath.
37.
Arrested in July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty of murdering seventeen young men and boys in February 1992. Dahmer died in November 1994, killed by another inmate in a Wisconsin prison.
38.
Sharper Image is an outlet for innovative consumer goods.
39.
Released in 1991, Dollman told the story of Brick Bardo, a cop from the planet Arturus. Hicks might have watched it, who knows?
40.
In Christian terms heretical, Hicks’ identification of God, love, and the Universe recurs in mystical traditions of worship throughout the world. Interestingly it irritates fundamentalists and atheists in pretty much equal measure.
Part 2: 1992
Recorded Live at the Dominion Theatre, London (November 1992).
41.
Broadcast as Revelations early in 1993 on Channel Four Television.
42.
On 29 April 1992, three of the four officers caught on tape beating Rodney King were cleared on all charges, prompting three days of rioting.
43.
This joke re-emerged in the controversy surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, most noticeably in David Hare’s 2004 play, Stuff Happens.
44.
Hicks might be referring to the now notorious reports that Iraqi soldiers removed premature Kuwaiti babies from incubators and allowed them to die. In October 1990, the main source for the story, a 15-year-old girl Kuwaiti girl identified only as Nayirah, claimed that she had seen ‘hundreds’ of babies being killed in this way. In fact there were only a handful of incubators in the entire country. Nayirah herself was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States. After the war an Amnesty International investigation found ‘no reliable evidence’ for the story. For more on the propaganda build-up to the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq, see Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception (London: Constable and Robinson, 2003).
President Bush likened Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait with the Nazi blitzkrieg in Europe in the 1930s. The Western media enthusiastically took up the theme, likening Saddam Hussein with Hitler. By equating resistance to the war with appeasement of Hitler this approach helped secure and sustain public support.
45.
The British government was rocked by a scandal involving the illegal sale of arms in the years preceding the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. An official inquiry began in November 1992. In 1996 it concluded that parts of the UK state were indeed breaking their own arms embargo.
Recorded live at the Oxford Playhouse on 11 November 1992
46.
Released as Shock and Awe in 2003 by Invasion.
47.
For more on this, see G. Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
48.
The ‘Crips’ and the ‘Bloods’ are Los Angeles street gangs famous for a series of inter-gang conflicts in the late 1980s.
49.
Hicks is referring to the April 1992 general election. As in the US election of the same year, tax played an important part in the campaign strategy of the right-wing incumbent. It is not clear whether Labour lost because of fear of a ‘tax bombshell’ or more general doubts about their managerial competence.
50.
Earl Weaver is a baseball player and manager, who Bill may be confusing with Dennis Weaver – best known for long-running television series Gunsmoke and McCloud and, more recently, as the host of the Western Channel. He appeared dressed in a hat and cape and riding a horse.
Recorded Live at Laff Stop, Austin, TX (December 1992)
51.
Recorded between the 14-17 December 1991, released in 1992 as Relentless; re-released in 1997, Rykodisc.
52.
Martin Amis’ 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow, explores a similar idea at much greater length.
53.
George H.W. Bush lost the Presidential campaign to Bill Clinton in November 1992.
54.
Pat Buchanan (b. 1938) is a conservative politician and writer and former aide to President Richard Nixon. He served as White House Communications Director in the Reagan administration between 1985 and 1987. In December 1991, Buchanan challenged George H.W. Bush for the Republican Presidential nomination, receiving 3 million Republican votes on a protectionist ticket.
55.
Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy (1946-1989) was a prolific serial killer and rapist. He married Carol Ann Boone during his trial and received hundreds of letters from women claiming to be in love with him. In his last interview before execution, Bundy blamed pornography for his own and others’ violent hatred of women.
Al Bundy, played by Ed O’Neill, was the central character in the long-running TV sitcom, Married with Children.
Part 3: Early to Mid 1993
Bill Hicks: Comedy for the Head by Cree McCree (High Times April 1993)
56.
LA Weekly called Terence McKenna ‘the culture’s foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience’. The book referred to here is a collection of essays and interviews p
ublished in the same year as the High Times interview — The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess and the End of History (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993). His most famous book is Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (Rider: London, 1992). Hicks cites McKenna on more than one occasion in his later routines.