Last week the film American: The Bill Hicks Story opened in select theaters in the US and on slightly iffy torrents around the web. As my home town of London was the city that arguably loved him most I’m optimistic that there will be a cinema showing it. Which is more than can be said for Chris, who now lives in his home town of Valdosta, Georgia and where, seemingly, hardly anyone has heard of him. When I find the cinema I will plan my visit with the sort of methodical zeal usually reserved for concerts by my favourite bands. Because even seventeen years since his death, Bill Hicks deserves some fucking respect. 

For two years in the mid-nineties I produced an in-flight radio comedy show for British Airways. (For those under the age of twenty-five, in-flight radio meant ten channels of endlessly looping movie-length audio shows that were immediately rendered redundant the moment Boeing put screens in the back of their headrests.) This meant that every month I crafted a two-hour master class in humour, in which stars from Eddie Izzard to Dudley Moore talked about their favourite comedians. Every time they name-checked someone, I would get hold of the relevant CD or cassette and find a clip to illustrate their point. The result? A pointlessly thorough knowledge of the routines of Al Read and Albert Brooks, and a swearing supersense which allowed me to spot any and all bad language from the soundwave on the screen. Eight hours of comedy, five days a week, for two years. There wasn’t a joke I hadn’t heard or a set up to which I didn’t know the punch line, and following one particularly mirthless trip to a London comedy club in which I sat nodding approval at the gags rather than laughing, I quit. 

I say this not because I think it is particularly remarkable – it isn’t – but because I hope it provides some context and validation for this next statement: Bill Hicks was the greatest comedian ever. The funniest, most exciting, most incendiary, most thought provoking, most moving, most thrilling, most how-ever-the-fuck-you-want-to-measure-it comedian that ever picked up a microphone.  

He wasn’t a seer, or a visionary, a political genius or even a psychotropic warrior as some of the more effusive hagiographies would have it, but in the exacting science and precise art of writing and telling jokes he has never been bettered.  

Often labelled a ‘rock ‘n’ roll comedian’, his influence can be found on the classic triple album Aenima by Tool, and in the dedication on Radiohead’s The Bends. And he died young, shortly after Kurt Cobain and whilst the world’s eyes were still on Seattle. I made a programme about that coincidence a few years back – check out the start of it here: 

Now, many other comedians have been labelled rock ‘n’ roll of course. Lenny Bruce was, and then he stopped being any good. Which isn’t massively rock ‘n’ roll. Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson were too, but then Rik started playing a Tory MP and it became clear that they’d gone MOR. Good lord, even Newman and Baddiel were described as rock ‘n’ roll. Posh kids twatting about in an arena isn’t rock ‘n’ roll. Just ask Pink Floyd.

But Bill Hicks was rock ‘n’ roll. Not because of the material about drink and drugs, the regular references to Hendrix or dying too young. Bill Hicks was rock ‘n’ roll because his recordings are the only ones as constantly exhilarating to listen to as your favourite band’s albums. He was rock ‘n’ roll because people are still doing elements of his act to this very day, just as bands are still covering The Stones when needing to quickly win over a hostile crowd.  

Not that anyone nowadays tries and directly steal Hicks’ material, but if you see a comedian getting morally intense, pausing to let the discomfort cloak the crowd and then puncturing the tension with a gag – that’s Bill right there. If you hear someone confronting an established taboo whilst ensuring that there’s a punch line every thirty seconds, that’s Bill. If you find you’re being entertained and educated – well, chances are that’s Bill too.

If however you see someone stealing his act wholesale, you’re watching Dennis Leary. And nobody will ever, ever, make a film about his life.

I live in Valdosta, Georgia, birthplace of American comic genius Bill Hicks, whom readers of Live Fast, Die Young will know is a hero of both mine and Joe’s. With the new Hicks movie opening in America this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about him (proper blog to follow); I’ve even tried to find the address of his first house.

Which reminded me this morning of a similar wild goose chase a few years back, in search of Gram Parsons’ childhood home in Winter Haven, Florida. For reasons which are now lost in the fog of red wine and deadlines that was the final edit for the book, this weird episode didn’t make it into the final chapter. Luckily we have this ‘lost’ footage, which we offer to you now by way of free bonus content. Fans or fanatics? You decide.