Bill Hicks producer Jeff Rougvie
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Bill Hicks is considered by many inside and out of the comedy world as one of the greatest standup comedians who ever lived. Hicks started performing standup at the age of 19 and was immediately recognized as a dangerous comedian who attacked such sacred cows as the American dream, hypocritical beliefs and traditional attitudes to the point where two Vietnam veterans broke his leg after a show. Sadly just when Hicks was hitting his stride he died at age 32 of pancreatic cancer.

Much of Hicks’ legacy has been preserved over the years but little of it has been released commercially. That all changed in the last couple of years when Rykodisc released the CD Salvation which was recorded in Britain and the new DVD Sane Man which is an hour-long, early-career performance recorded in 1989 in Austin, Texas.

I got a chance to talk to Jeff Rougvie who is the producer of all of the recently released Hicks material.

Buy the Bill Hicks Salvation CD and Sane Man DVD

Daniel Robert Epstein: Tell me about the two Bill Hicks projects that just got released.

Jeff Rougvie: The album, Salvation, is a double live CD from a show he did at Oxford in England. We also just released a DVD called Sane Man, which is the first full-length show of Bill’s that was filmed. There was a bunch of extra stuff from his early years in Houston and Austin, Texas.

DRE: That’s great, I have a bootleg from a few years ago that has his last appearance on a public access show. Is that on the DVD?

JR: No, the DVD is more like the early years. All the extras are from before 1989. The main program on Sane Man is a show that was filmed in Austin in 1989 by Bill and some friends that was designed to be a pilot for getting Bill an HBO comedy special. Ironically, after they shot it but before they edited it, Bill did get an HBO special. That ended up being a half hour HBO special that they filmed in Chicago. So this ended up getting distributed around Austin and sold by mail order but its never been released on DVD before. One of Bill’s friends who was involved in making it, went back and made an extended version of it. It was originally edited to be an hour so now it’s like 80 minutes.

DRE: Did you know Bill?

JR: I didn’t know Bill personally. I was a fan of Bill’s when he was still alive and I had been working really hard to track down the two CD’s that he had released in his lifetime. I found one of them but they were mostly sold at his shows and I always missed him whenever he’d come through Minneapolis where I was living at the time. Then while I was working on a project with an agent in New York who represented Bootsy Collins, he mentioned he represented Hicks as well. Bill had died about a year earlier so that’s when the relationship started.

DRE: Who did you deal with from his family when putting together these two projects?

JR: His Mom. Bill left behind a lot of material and before died, he had recorded two albums worth of stuff that hadn’t come out. Like a lot of comedians, Bill recorded everything he did. So we’ve been going through vaults of material that Bill had saved over the years. The Salvation CD is something that was recorded by a British company and they have just been sitting on it. People had tapes of it but no one was sure who had the original. We found out that they had an uncut version so we put it out.

DRE: What’s Bill’s mom like?

JR: She’s great. Unfortunately I think Bill’s mom has gotten some bad press because Bill did some jokes about her that people believe. Bill was a very truthful comic but there’s exaggeration in comedy. She’s very much into bringing Bill’s material to as many people as possible and is very concerned about the quality of everything that comes out. She’s very involved in every aspect of every release.

DRE: What were the hoops you had to jump through to create these two projects?

JR: Salvation was just a matter of finding out who owned it and working out a deal. Bill was represented by a management company at the time so there was some back and forth there in sorting out the deal. Also sound wise it’s tough with comedy because even though you’re getting a really good direct recording from the microphone, they move around a lot and the volume changes. We had a really great mastering engineer who did hundreds and hundreds of edits. Since Bill was really a comedian’s comedian once you start cutting these things apart you don’t get the effect of Bill weaving his magic. So we really left it intact.

DRE: How is it keeping the flame alive for someone who is considered one of, if not, the greatest standup comedian of all time?

JR: I’m honored. I always loved his stuff so it is amazing when I come across something new. Things like this provide a lot of insight into what an incredible mind he had. The material is still so relevant because he’s doing jokes about the first President Bush and the war in Iraq. Bill’s overall message is that we all need to be focused on what’s really important and not get distracted by all the bullshit in the air.

DRE: On the CD and DVD are there routines that even hardcore Hicks fans haven’t heard?

JR: There’s some, particularly on Sane Man because it covers a period before Bill recorded his first comedy album.

DRE: Since he recorded Salvation in Oxford, how did foreign audiences react to him?

JR: Bill was a big personality in England and by comparison relatively unknown in the US. They took to him in a way that the United States hadn’t. I think that is partially because the truth sometimes doesn’t go down as easily in the US. Bill played big rooms there and did lots of press.

DRE: How has Bill’s work been selling?

JR: It’s great. Last year we did the first Bill Hicks DVD [Bill Hicks Live - Satirist, Social Critic, Stand-Up Comedian] and that outsold any of the previous CD releases. There’s a whole new group of people who had heard about Bill and never bought a CD or are just hearing about him for the first time who are picking it up. But it seems like it never stops with Bill because even when we don’t have a new release there’ll be a five page article in Esquire or something that just comes out of the blue because people are discovering him all the time.

DRE: How much more material is out there to be collected?

JR: There’s always more. As I said, Bill recorded pretty much every show he did and the quality is all over the place. Typically it sounds like he’d set up the recorder and then he’d walk onstage. Then when it was over he’d turn it off. Therefore there was nobody there watching the sound levels. There are hours and hours of stuff that we’re going through methodically to find the best stuff and release it.

DRE: Are you working on anything else Bill related right now?

JR: There is more stuff in the works so we will have more Bill Hicks releases in late 2007.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/+Bill+Hicks+producer+Jeff+Rougvie/