earlier today this announced was made by Rykodisc ...
The Late Show with David Letterman has scheduled a telecast of the never-aired October 1, 1993 Bill Hicks appearance. The show was pre-taped Jan. 26th (with Bill's mom as a guest) and will air Friday, January 30th on your local CBS affiliate. We'd like to acknowledge and thank Bill's many fans and everyone who has had a hand in keeping Bill's comedy and philosophy alive. We hope everyone can tune in and experience what you may have missed or what you barely remember – Bill Hicks performing for a national audience on network television.
William Melvin Hicks was an American stand-up comedian.Finding moderate mainstream success in the late 1980s and early '90s, Hicks tended to balance heady discussion of religion, politics, philosophy and personal issues with more ribald material; he characterized his own performances as "Chomsky with dick jokes".
The British movie Human Traffic referred to him as the "late prophet Bill Hicks"...
that pretty much describes the man best I think.
In 1990, Hicks released his first album, Dangerous, performed on the HBO special One Night Stand, and performed at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London's West End in November. Hicks was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there throughout 1991. That year, he returned to the Just for Laughs festival and recorded his second album, Relentless.
Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the Marblehead Johnson album in 1992. In November, he toured the UK, where he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4. The show was in contrast with the harsh and brutally frank style he had developed in reaction to the many unwelcoming and often hostile audiences of America, and shows Hicks in a playful mood and at ease with his audience. He closed the show with "It's Just a Ride", one of his most famous and life-affirming philosophies. Later that year he recorded a stand-up performance that would become Live at Oxford Playhouse and Salvation. Hicks was voted "Hot Standup Comic" by Rolling Stone Magazine, and moved to Los Angeles in early 1993.
The progressive metal band Tool invited Hicks to open a number of concerts for them on their 1993 Lollapalooza appearances, where Hicks once famously asked the audience to look for a contact lens he'd lost. Thousands of people complied. Tool singer Maynard James Keenan so enjoyed this joke that he repeated it on a number of occasions. In 1996, Tool released their album Ænima which contains mentions of Hicks in the liner notes and on record. The track "Ænema" references Hicks's Arizona Bay philosophy and the closing track "Third Eye" contains samples from Hicks's Dangerous and Relentless albums. Experimental rock outfit Faith No More also quoted Bill Hicks in "Ricochet" from their King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime album, singing "It's always funny until someone gets hurt and then it's just hilarious". -wikiTotally Bill Hicks (1994)
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