BILL HICKS, Sunday Times, Sunday March 02, 1997

At the time of his death from pancreatic cancer three years ago, the American comic Bill Hicks was revolutionising stand-up comedy. A regular on David Letterman's television show at home, here he could sell out West End theatres. With a brooding, rock-star-like stage presence, Hicks was feted by comedians such as Rob Newman and Sean Hughes and sampled by the California agit-rock band Tool.

This week Rykodisc reissues the two albums Hicks made during his lifetime, Dangerous and Relentless, and also releases Arizona Bay and Rant in E Minor, both edited posthumously from the comedian's notes. Hicks's pervasive influence has, ironically, rendered the first pair
somewhat cliched, but the latter two offer stand-up new possibilities, a tantalising coda to a life cut tragically short at the age of 32.

Born in Georgia to strict baptist parents, but relocating to Texas at an early age, Hicks spent his youth sneaking out of his bedroom window to local comedy clubs, and was a touring comedian by the age of 18. He first came to prominence as one of the American "outlaw comics" of the mid-1980s, alongside Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay. When Hicks first played here in 1991, British comedy fans were already familiar with the fast-talking, chain-smoking East Coast speed rants of the New Yorker Dennis Leary, and much of the pair's
material overlapped. Leary, an efficient and ambitious method actor, approached the part of "hate comedian" as he would have Richard III or Willy Loman. Hicks, in contrast, believed in the role. But one set of pseudo-reactionary attacks on non-smokers, sexually unadventurous
women, teeny pop stars, drugged-up rockers and health-nut joggers seemed much the same as another to a virgin audience.

Hicks was given to philosophical pronouncements on the comic's role. The actual material on his first two albums rarely fulfils his theories. "The comic is a flame, like Shiva the Destroyer, toppling idols no matter what they are," he said. But Shiva would have had better targets to destroy than the harmless media nonentities, such as Debbie Gibson, Tiffany or George Michael, that Hicks wasted his talent taking pornographic potshots at on Dangerous. Much more honest and self-knowing is Hicks's description of himself as "Noam Chomsky
with dick jokes". He had pretensions towards being a radical social theorist, dealing in unpopular truths, but would always sacrifice them when the going got too tough for a crowd-pleasing vulgarism.

Hicks was diagnosed with cancer in June of 1993, and the best of his material dates from the last year of his life. It's as if he realised he had nothing to lose. He had already begun experimenting with the persona of "Goat Boy", a sleazy satyr that would possess him when he
needed to get down-and-dirty. In separating off this part of his personality, Hicks was able to sugar the pill of his more demanding material by still delivering the obscenities that comedy convention demanded, but without compromising his authorial voice.

Steven Saporta of Invasion Records describes his first encounter with the comic as "not unlike the first time I was rocked by Jim Morrison". Indeed, there are sections of Arizona Bay, with Hicks intoning his bible-belt preacher apocalyptica over a groundswell of drums and guitar, where he sounds like nothing so much as the Lizard King himself - but talking perfect sense rather than a load of sub-French expressionist nonsense. Comparing the United States's
sales of arms to poorer countries, on which it then wages war, to the crooked landowner in Shane who forces the farmer to pick up a gun so he can excuse shooting him, is chilling, horrifying and hilarious.

Hicks briefly fell victim to believing the comparisons with Jim Morrison and other icons of rock, coming on stage to the sound of Hendrix's Voodoo Chile, backlit with rising flames and dressed in black cowboy regalia. But in his closing year he started wearing less self-consciously dramatic colours, eliminated the hectoring egotism that characterised his earlier work and cut down his swear-word count. Channel 4's biography of Hicks, It's Just a Ride, included his friend the comedian Brett Butler saying Hicks didn't want to be Hendrix or Dylan, but Jesus. "Bill wanted to save us all."

Hicks enjoyed an uneasy relationship with religion. He hated the machinery of churches but frequently would break out of his routines into impassioned sermonising about his belief in a loving higher power. But a preacher without a pulpit achieves nothing, and Hicks usually found a way to dovetail his material into the Letterman programmers' requirements. It is to the show's eternal shame that they cut his final routine about government disinformation regarding
its handling of the Waco siege. Rant in E Minor, which includes the censored material, sees Hicks at his most politically controversial, and yet also at his funniest, his most impassioned.

Rant is mainly a brilliant deconstruction of America's political and social hypocrisy. Hicks saves his most acidic bile for comedians who compromise their artistic voice, not with "dick jokes", but by signing up for adverts. "Do a commercial and you're off the artistic roll call for ever. End of story. Another whore at the capitalist gang-bang."

The routine is Hicks in a nutshell. He ultimately came to be motivated, not by charting the everyday whimsy of the differences between cats and dogs, nor the contrived misanthropic anger of the other "outlaw" comics, but by a righteous disgust at the lack of integrity he saw everywhere around him. Sadly, perhaps, Hicks has saved us the embarrassment of watching him betray himself, as all great comedians inevitably seem to. But Rant in E Minor and Arizona
Bay suggest he could have become Shiva the Destroyer after all.