Tag: Andrew Dice Clay

An Appreciation: Kinison’s Unfinished Howl

By Lawrence Christon
Times Staff Writer
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Monday, April 13, 1992

His piercing anger, protest now will never know a resolution we can share

None of the TV anchors knew quite what to make of Sam Kinison when news of his death came over the wire early Saturday morning. “The loud comedian,” most of them called him, struggling to make do with a meaninglessly vague adjective, then running a silent interview clip in which, with brushed shoulder-length blond hair and faintly rubicund face, he looked like an amiable Friar Tuck dispensing words of comfort and reassurance to his unseen listener.

If anything, Kinison was a manifestation of acute discomfort, and that’s why he’s remembered, even if TV’s public memory is shrouded with incomprehension.

The circumstance of his death–a head-on auto collision with an allegedly drunk driver speeding along the wrong side of a highway double line–may well have made the news on the strength of its spectacular brutality regardless of who the victim was. Obviously, Kinison made the top of the hour because he was a celebrity of sorts, a famous comedian, a show-biz person. But there’s more. While it’s saddening to see any career cut down before its arc has been completed, Kinison represents unfinished business, a piercing howl of anger and protest that now will never know a resolution we can share.

There’s no denying he was a base figure. Sam Kinison came along in the mid-’80s as a shock trooper of the American subconscious. On top, we had the sunny Reagan presidency and its fond avuncular approval of the get-rich-quick ethos–BMWs and lucrative paper chases for insiders and the thirtysomething crowd, and “Morning in America” promises for the rest of the electorate left holding its hand out. Hidden underneath, we had the palpable beginning of what now festers in abundance: urban rot, virulent racial and ethnic division, sexual rage, the dumbing-down of the young, the relentless commercial manipulation of our modern social coin–the public image.

Kinison planted his squat legs like a fierce troll by a bridge, skewed his face into a florid rage, and screamed. That was his act. There was no pretense of comedic refinement, of structure and build and the bait-and-switch line that is comedy’s stock in trade. A Sam Kinison joke didn’t hit the media wire and zip through the country like one of Johnny Carson’s political zingers. It was usually crude, misogynistic, homophobic or wrongheaded–for a while he was the most aggressively misinformed comedian of his generation when it came to understanding AIDS.

Nor was his fury particularly new. “Network’s” irate Howard Beale galvanized the country in 1977 with the line, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” In the ’60s, what else could you hear first in Jimi Hendrix’s rhythmically twisted “Star-Spangled Banner” but dizzying distress? In the ’50s, Allen Ginsberg delivered “Howl” and William Burroughs gave us the precursor to the primal scream–the sensation of waking up in the morning with thick petroleum jelly smeared on your lips.

But Kinison was a creature of the ’80s’ excesses and frustrations. His alcohol and drug habit were common knowledge, and he tried to do what the other prevailing wild things did. He made record albums (“Louder Than Hell” and “Have You Seen Me Lately?”). He made a stab at the movies (Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School” and the aborted “Atuk”). He appeared on TV’s “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night With David Letterman” and was an MTV regular. He also played Tim Matheson’s conscience on Fox-TV’s “Charlie Hoover.”

But he really wasn’t cut out for anything other than live performance (he was driving to a gig when he was killed), and his wrestling with Jessica Hahn on his “Wild Thing” video seemed a damning symbol of the visible degradation some people will endure to achieve celebrity. Watching that video, you couldn’t tell if he was making a statement or if he was trying to see how far he could fall.

Comedians are the shrewdest judges of each other’s talent. It’s telling that none of his peers begrudged him his success. “He’s honest,” you’d hear them say. Or, “You may not like his material, but it comes out of a core of real conviction.” The comic they name as his ostensible colleague but de facto opposite, the figure they generally disdain as a phony, is Andrew Dice Clay.

Kinison was the unhappy son of an impoverished Pentecostal minister in Peoria, Ill., and for a while became a minister himself before he married (at 21) and divorced (at 25), and then gave up the calling (“I was getting too hip for the room,” he told an interviewer). He married and divorced yet again. Years later, one of his brothers committed suicide. His spiritual and sexual pain formed an underlying emotional truth that carried him a lot farther into his audience’s sixth sense than did his actual comment. There are times when it all gets to be too much, when there’s nothing to do but scream. For that, he was the man of the hour.

It’s impossible to tell now if Kinison would ever have been able to get out of the shockmeister ’80s, when he made this statement: “I’m so tired of men who’re afraid to hurt women’s feelings. Then you turn on the tube and you watch somebody like Roseanne Barr or Joan Rivers who just slam men: ‘Men are jerks . . . losers’ and we’re supposed to stand around and act like women are perfect.” It needed to be said then, but cannot with good conscience be said now, not after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearing. And where that primal scream once seemed tonic and even cathartic, now it would only unnerve us as we make our way through the white noise of everyday anxiety and urban terror.

Who can tell? He was capable of enlightenment, and maybe his new marriage might have brought him the peace he never knew. But the violence of his end is particularly haunting: a troubled man meeting a senseless, smoldering end on a strip of desert highway under a half-moon. His was a peculiarly American story.

April 13, 1992
Friends Shocked by Violent Death of Mellower Kinison

By Amy Wallace
Times Staff Writer
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Sunday, April 12, 1992

The shock comedian was sobering up, associates say. A teen-ager is held in the collision

They were the kind of kids to whom comedian Sam Kinison’s bellowing stage persona was often said to appeal–two young men, in their late teens, driving fast in an old pick-up on a Friday night.

Their 1974 Chevrolet truck reportedly was filled with beer cans as they tore down U.S. Highway 95, swerving into oncoming traffic near the California-Nevada border. Moments after hitting Kinison’s Pontiac Trans-Am head-on, fatally injuring the comedian and knocking his new wife unconscious, one of the teen-agers had only this to say, according to witnesses: “God! Look at my truck!”

On Saturday, Kinison’s friends said they could not believe how he had died. The 38-year-old comedian, who made his reputation as a hard-drinking, loudmouthed wild man, had just returned from his Hawaii honeymoon with Malika, the 26-year-old Las Vegas dancer he had married a week ago today. He was settling down, friends said, sobering up and trying to “come into the mainstream.”

“I can’t accept it. Especially the fact that he was not doing anything wrong,” said comedian Richard Belzer, an old friend, who noted that Kinison was on his way to work–a sold-out show in Laughlin, Nev.–when he died. “He was going to a job. His wife was in the car. It wasn’t a drug overdose. It wasn’t self-indulgence. He was living a clean life.”

Immediately after the crash, which occurred near Needles at about 7:30 p.m., Kinison at first appeared fine, said friends who watched the crash from a second car and reported that beer cans from the pickup were strewn across the highway. With what appeared to be only cuts on his lips and forehead, he wrenched himself free from his mangled vehicle, lying down only after friends begged him to.

“He said: ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,’ ” said Carl LaBove, Kinison’s best friend and longtime opening act, who held the comedian’s bleeding head in his hands. Kinison paused, as if listening to a voice that LaBove could not hear.

“But why?” asked Kinison, a former Pentecostal preacher. It sounded, LaBove said, as if “he was having a conversation, talking to somebody else. He was talking upstairs. Then I heard him go, ‘OK, OK, OK.’ The last ‘OK’ was so soft and at peace. . . . Whatever voice was talking to him gave him the right answer and he just relaxed with it. He said it so sweet, like he was talking to someone he loved.”

Kinison died at the scene from internal injuries, according to authorities. An autopsy is planned.

Police did not release the name of the Las Vegas teen-ager who was driving the pickup truck, but California Highway Patrol dispatcher Tine Schmitt said the youth had been taken to Juvenile Hall in San Bernardino, where he was being held on suspicion of felony manslaughter.

Schmitt said the driver sustained moderate injuries and his passenger, also a juvenile, was more seriously hurt. Malika Kinison was in serious condition Saturday at Needles Desert Community Hospital.

Those in Kinison’s entourage speculated that the youths had been drinking. Majid Khoury, Kinison’s personal assistant, said there was beer in the back of the truck and in its cab. “It was all over the place,” Majid said. The CHP refused to discuss whether the two teen-agers were drunk or whether they had been given blood-alcohol tests.

Friends described Kinison as a warm man, generous to a fault–a description that seemed at odds with his brazen brand of humor. Especially in the early years of his career, the rotund comic was the king of shock comedy–vulgar, vitriolic and ear-splittingly loud. To many, he was downright offensive.

Where other comedians joked about sex, Kinison screamed about carnal relations among lepers and homosexual necrophilia. Other favorite targets included televangelists, women and Andrew Dice Clay, the abrasive comedian to whom Kinison hated being compared. He even had a few jokes about driving under the influence.

On Kinison’s 1988 album “Have You Seen Me Lately?” he defended drunk driving this way: “How else are we gonna get our cars home?”

But even Kinison’s critics admitted that he was much more than another gross-out comedian. At his best, he was a biting social commentator. The son of a preacher from Peoria, Ill., Kinison was particularly brilliant, many said, at dissecting religious hypocrisy.

In a riff on fallen televangelist Jim Bakker, Kinison imagined Judas, sitting in heaven, saying: “Maybe I’ll get a reprieve.” Jesus, meanwhile, “was goin’ through the Bible sayin’, ‘Where did I say: “Build a water slide?”‘”

Mitzi Shore, owner of the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the club where Kinison’s act first caught fire, said: “Sam was a healer, a comedy innovator, a brilliance. To hear his tirades in the main room on his special night were moments in comedy that will never be repeated. Wherever Sam is now, he is resting and we will dearly never, never forget.”

Belzer called his friend “one of the best comedians of his age. Beneath the rebel was a man with a real heart who had something to say about religion and politics. A lot of the audience went (to his shows) to see the wild man. But they came away having done a double-take on certain issues.”

Rodney Dangerfield, another longtime buddy of Kinison, agreed.

“It’s a big loss to people who want to laugh,” said Dangerfield, who had featured Kinison in his 1986 movie “Back to School.”

In recent years, some said, Kinison’s act had gotten tamer. Instead of the homeless, he aimed his razor-wit at Vice President Dan Quayle, who he said was greeted at Cabinet meetings by the chorus: “Hey, Dan’s here. Anyone want anything from Burger King?” After the gay and lesbian community took him to task for his jokes about AIDS, Kinison publicly repented, calling himself “insensitive” and promising to no longer make light of the AIDS epidemic.

In his personal life, too, Kinison–who once described his past cocaine use as being so heavy he used a garden hose to inhale–had mellowed as well.

Kinison, who starred in the Fox comedy series called “Charlie Hoover,” had been negotiating with the television network to do a variety show and was expecting to sign a two-movie deal next week, said Bill Kinison, his brother and manager. He said the comedian was looking forward to getting off the road for awhile, leaving the reckless lifestyle behind and spending more time with his family and friends.

“We had taken a turn in the career that we had been wanting to take,” Bill Kinison said. “He knew he couldn’t live on the road forever.”

A week ago, before a small gathering of friends at the Candlelight Chapel in Las Vegas, he and Malika had formalized their five-year relationship–marrying at 2 a.m. on the birthday of Kinison’s late father.

“He said it would be a tribute, and an easy day to remember,” said Florence Troutman, Kinison’s publicist. Dressed in a tuxedo and red bow tie, Kinison wept, Troutman said, as he recited his vows. “He was very happy.”

Kinison and his wife spent last week at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the Kona Coast, arriving back in Los Angeles early Friday. Kinison, who had been on a back-breaking road tour for much of the last year, had a sold-out show scheduled that night at the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino. He was, friends said, revived and ready to work.

At midday, the Kinisons headed east, the lead car of a two-car caravan–Kinison’s brother, his personal assistant Khoury and LaBove followed in the van that also carried Kinison’s dog, a Lhasa apso named Russo. Three miles north of Needles, LaBove was startled awake in the back seat.

“I heard Bill saying: ‘Watch out for that guy, Sam. That guy’s in your lane,’ ” LaBove said. “Then I heard Bill scream, ‘Watch him, Sam! Watch him!’ Then I heard the most horrendous crash.”

The van skidded to a stop, LaBove said. Bill Kinison ran to check on his brother and, thinking that he was merely shaken, turned his attention to the driver of the pickup truck. The teen-ager was out of the cab, surveying his crushed windshield and seemingly uninterested in the human damage that had been done, LaBove said.

“He said: ‘God! Look at my truck!’ And Bill said: ‘You think you’ve got problems now, you don’t know who you hit,’ ” LaBove said. “He was thinking Sam was going to get out of the car yelling. He thought Sam was OK.”

April 12, 1992
Comedy Review: Kinison Turns the Volume Down Slightly

By Mark Chalon Smith
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Monday, July 29, 1991

ANAHEIM – What with the stupid macho posturing of Andrew Dice Clay and the bombastic assaults of shock-radio’s Howard Stern, these days Sam Kinison might seem an afterthought, almost quaint.

OK, quaint is probably too soft a word for the loudest of the loud, the original foul-mouth who’s offended just about everybody, especially women and homosexuals, along his screaming way. But the competition is heavy for entertainers with attitudes engaging in public one-upsmanship. So much anger, so much noise.

For a while there, Kinison complained that a lot of guys were stealing his act, but now he has backed off some, giving in to the inevitable. Even his approach has changed a bit: ever since Kinison publicly kicked cocaine and other nasty habits a couple of years ago, he has moved away slightly from the provocations that made him infamous.

The Kinison that showed up at the Celebrity Theatre Friday night wasn’t someone you would want in polite company, not by a mile, but some of his more personal attacks came across as half-baked, close to self-parody.

He even closed the gig with a plea to men to be more responsible in the bedroom with women. Blatantly facetious, of course, but the crowd of mostly guys didn’t like it anyway. They came to hear Kinison spit out one misanthropic, misogynistic blast after another–any hint of niceness was met with raucous boos that, at one point, even seemed to surprise the burly comedian.

A familiar barrage against homosexuals, in which Kinison goes on and on about their sexual practices, did get him going, bringing out what his critics say is his hateful essence. The audience, many obviously fueled by booze and the two heavy metal bands that opened the show, loved that riff. As usual, it all seemed pointless, only giving Kinison the opportunity to toss out a spate of vulgar images.

The most effective part of the one-hour performance, the part that indicated he may be veering more from the personal to the political, was a segment of his takes on the Persian Gulf War. It was hardly mainstream or conservative but was more controlled and more accessible than his other material.

Although he used the war for some redneck breast-beating over U.S. military superiority, Kinison also pointed out how one-sided, and almost bullying, the confrontation was. “It was like we had an army of Rich Littles doing an impression of the war,” he said. “Let me tell you, Col. Sanders could’ve won this war.”

He then turned to the actual hardware, especially the over-estimated firepower of the Iraqis. “What about that Scud missile? I didn’t know K-mart was a weapons dealer–shoot it out of your car then turn on CNN to see where it landed.”

The war’s aftermath and the United States’ approach to the Kurds also inspired Kinison. “I heard that eight of them died by getting hit in the head with the relief boxes we dropped on them. Can you believe that, man? I fell off the couch on that one.”

As for the quick victory, Kinison had a simple explanation: fear of Bob Hope. “Our troops were worried, man, that Hope would show up with his usual has-been celebrities like Jamie Farr and Ann Jillian. Man, they didn’t want to sit through that.”

Kinison returned to his old form shortly after, working an overly long bit on the homeless that was creepy and unfunny. He reduced the problem to an issue of laziness, suggesting that all bums be taken out and shot.

Here’s the only printable joke in the bunch: “I bought two homes just to (tee) the homeless off!!”

It sounded just like something Howard Stern would say.

July 29, 1991
Comedy Review: Comic Kinison Still Far From Being Family Fare

By Glenn Doggrell
ASSISTANT SAN DIEGO COUNTY ARTS EDITOR
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Friday, December 28, 1990

SAN DIEGO — Sam Kinison will not be replacing Walt Disney as a staple in family entertainment for a while.

At least not until he quits graphically describing what he considers disgusting homosexual habits.

Or graphically describing sexual acts. Or graphically describing the male anatomy.

Playing to about 500 people Tuesday night in the main ballroom at the Hilton Hotel on Mission Bay–the first of a two-night run–Kinison, sporting a new beard, wore a black bandanna with white skulls to hold back his long hair and asked for understanding from his die-hard fans in the crowd as he makes the transition to family entertainment. In fact, he said, his HBO special, scheduled to appear in March, will even be called “The Sam Kinison Family Entertainment Hour.”

But, you have to ask, what family? The Manson family, maybe. Certainly not the Partridge family.

Kinison aims to shock. He’s not the funniest comedian; he’s often vulgar. To some, that’s cathartic. He does command your attention.

Kinison’s current audience generally is considered to be 18- to 25-year-old males, but Tuesday’s crowd included a generous mix of fans, including his mother (who loved the act), bikers, women in designer dresses, construction workers, collegiate types and professionals. And several hardcore fans who had come to PAAAAAARTY!!! and hear Kinison vent his rage on:

* Elton John: Unprintable.
* Homosexuals: Unprintable.
* Rap musicians: Unprintable.

But what can be aired here are Kinison’s thoughts on Dan Quayle–or as Kinison prefers to put it, the best assassination insurance George Bush could have. Kinison describes Quayle at a Cabinet meeting:

“Hey, Dan’s here. Anyone want anything from Burger King?”

“If he was ever president,” Kinison continued, “we’d have to give him that ride through Dallas.”

The rotund, 37-year-old comedian would also like to entertain the troops in Operation Desert Shield.

“It’s a natural. These guys are 18 to 25 years old. Do they want to see Bob Hope without any women? I DON’T THINK SO!!!

Kinison’s humor is fueled by rage, a sense of pent-up frustration at life’s injustices toward Kinison, as perceived by Kinison. He looks around and doesn’t like some of the things he sees. He rails at these demons with bellows and shouts.

The atmosphere was not what you would expect at the Hilton. The stately ballroom had been transformed into a huge, smoke-filled bar with loud rock music drowning out conversations at the cabaret seating before the show.

Kinison liberally doused his routine with four-letter words and gestures. A high, hoarse laugh often interrupted his rage.

Three silver rings filled his right hand as he constantly paced the stage. The 57-minute act flew by.

His fans raged and shouted with him. Say it again, Sam! Even when Kinison verbally attacked a man on crutches, a heckler, the crowd loved it.

Kinison also took aim at fellow shock comic Andrew Dice Clay: “That retard in Fonzie’s jacket.” He then explained that Dice, as he calls him, didn’t have the sense not to discuss X-rated material on a show that kids were watching. “WHAT AN IDIOT! WHAT A JACKASS!” Kinison concluded.

Kinison doesn’t help his family image when he talks about sex and aphrodisiacs, either.

Or when he talks about drugs.

“There should be a law that says you can smoke a fatty when you’re driving. Pot makes you a more considerate driver. You wave people past. You let them cut in front of you.”

Or his former cocaine use at parties:

“I didn’t get a straw, I got a garden hose.”

But this act is a start toward a tamer Kinison. The homeless, the hungry and AIDS victims–all former Kinison targets–were spared Tuesday night. And women as sexual objects–at one time a large part of the act–only got a light dusting toward the show’s end.

But still, Kinison has a ways to go before his show is one EVERY MOTHER COULD LOVE!!!

December 28, 1990
Hate-Mongers Are a Sad Chapter in the History of Comedy

By Randy Lewis
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Sunday, April 22, 1990

The most important comedians have always been those who helped knock down the social, racial, economic and/or cultural barriers that keep people apart.

In the ’30s, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers made sure that society’s little tramps didn’t get steamrolled in America’s desperate quest for the better life. Though they worked from greatly different vantage points, Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby contributed during the 1960s to the condemnation of culturally ingrained racism. And Woody Allen has built a career on giving hope to nerds throughout the world.

Along the way, comedians often have assumed the role that the sage assigned to journalists–“to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”

Unfortunately, some new-generation descendants of the greats have begun to worship the tools some of their forefathers used–stinging insults, graphic language, sexually explicit situations–without understanding the job for which those tools were employed. I refer to two of the today’s hottest stand-up comics, performers who have reached rock ‘n’ roll-star status capable of filling huge concert halls and arenas: Sam Kinison and Andrew (Dice) Clay.

Each is scheduled to play Orange County this week: Kinison in a club date at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach and Clay at the 18,765-capacity Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa. (Sam usually does larger facilities, but he booked this one himself, reportedly to help pay his considerable alimony bills.)

Both have captured the attention (I would have said “imagination,” but that’s far too complimentary) of the MTV-generation audience. Both appeal primarily to teen-aged males–no surprise, considering the heavily misogynist content of both their acts. If I were a woman and a date took me to see either of these wild boors, I’d ask for his money back–then hail a cab.

Though I’m at a loss to explain the popularity of either, Clay is the bigger mystery. (By the way, if you’re looking for lots of examples of their “jokes” here, forget it. The amount of each man’s material that can be quoted in a family newspaper probably weighs less than a stegosaurus’s brain.)

With Kinison, it’s easier to identify (if not identify with) the primal catharsis in some of his routines. On his first album, there was an underlying sense of true frustration at the hypocrisy he experienced in the life he led as a preacher before turning his back on the church and becoming the antichrist of stand-up.

Also, Kinison, unlike Clay, knows how to structure a joke that is created out of a unique (albeit generally base) perspective. And Kinison knows how to deliver a punch line.

One old routine about how difficult Jesus might have found it to explain his Crucifixion and Resurrection to a wife displayed originality, intellect and absurd juxtaposition of the real and the far-fetched. Sound comic principals, all.

But since then, Kinison has been caught up in his own fame: He spends nearly as much time on his latest album responding to Rolling Stone comments about his reputed wild lifestyle as he does creating “new” material. And that consists of inflaming racist attitudes toward Iranians, gays, women, the physically disabled and just about anyone in the world who’s not Sam Kinison.

Dice Clay, however, doesn’t even have that much going for him. How he has so quickly become a national phenomenon is a mystery that ranks up there with how TV execs ever thought Pat Sajak would one day unseat Johnny Carson.

If there’s more than meets the eye to Clay’s act–a leather-jacketed New Yawk street thug who brags about every bizarre twist on intercourse he knows–I can’t find it. Clay substitutes unbridled repugnance for viewpoint, odious epithets for insight. He’s as funny as a gang rape, as clever as a midnight mugging.

Lenny Bruce showed that comedy can be tough, brutal and sometimes even ugly in skewering the objects of his scorn. But those targets were small-mindedness, bigotry and hate–traits that Clay and Kinison would rather lionize. Their loathsome attacks on women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and others aren’t pointed or thought-provoking. They are simply imbecilic. Perhaps Clay doesn’t make jokes about the chronically stupid because they would hit too close to home.

If there’s any rationalization for Clay’s moronic-punk persona, it could only be that he really is a brilliant performance artist whose very presence exposes how easily America can fall in line behind a crude, unthinking, spectacularly unfunny delinquent.

Could it be that both are so hugely popular for the simple reason that they accurately reflect, and give voice to, the values of their audience? That a young generation bred on the senseless brutality of slasher movies like “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” have become (to borrow Hunter S. Thompson’s pet phrase) a nation of swine?

Is it possible that, because celebrity worship has been elevated to the rank of religious experience, we have surrendered the ability to think critically when in the presence of a “star”? Otherwise, why would audiences grant not just their approval but their delight at attitudes and behavior that, if expressed by a child or a stranger at the supermarket, they would greet with the back of a hand?

More disturbing yet is the realization is that Kinison and Clay, because they are at the top of the stand-up comedy heap right now if only in terms of their ticket-selling potential, undoubtedly are spawning dozens, maybe hundreds of imitators who are dying to step into their dung-encrusted jackboots.

Remember the scene in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” when a question–how does one respond to neo-Nazis–pops up at a posh party of left-wing intellectuals? “We should go down there,” Woody suggests, “get some bricks and some baseball bats and really explain things to them.” When one haughty woman opines: “Really biting satire is always better than physical force,” Woody retorts: “No, physical force is always better with Nazis.”

But the best course of action simply may be the one you’d take with bratty children who misbehave just for the attention they can draw: ignore them and hope–no, pray–they’ll go away.

April 22, 1990
The Man Who Would Be King of Metal

By Patrick Goldstein
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Sunday, March 18, 1990

Could Sam Kinison be rock’s new head-banger hero?

The heavy-metal comic, who boasts “I can play guitar at least as well as (Guns N Roses guitarist) Slash, is hoping to cross-over from comedy to rock audiences with his new album, “Leader of the Banned.” Due March 27 from Warner Bros. Records, “Banned” features an entire side of thundering metal, including new versions of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen,” Cheap Trick’s “Gonna Raise Hell” and the Rolling Stone’s “Under My Thumb,” which will be the first single.

Now touring the Midwest with his comedy show, Kinison says he’s trying to put together an all-star band “who could go out with me and maybe even open for Motley Crue on their tour.” The Crue, who have cleaned up their act, would be a perfect match for Kinison, who says he has “cut out the booze” and is attending AA meetings.

It’s hard to say whether he’s more proud of his sobriety or his new album, which features such hotshots as Poison’s CC De Ville, Guns N Roses’ Slash, Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryam, Whitesnake bassist Rudy Sarzo, Dweezil Zappa and rock vet Leslie West.

“Listen, I’ve been playing guitar since I was 15,” Kinison said. “I’m not intimidated by these guys. I may not be as good as CC De Ville, but it’s not like I’m William Shatner doing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”

But is rock radio ready for Kinison? “I haven’t heard the record yet, but if the songs are good, we’ll play ’em,” said KLOS-FM program director Carey Curelop. “He certainly won’t be penalized because he’s a comedian. Eddie Murphy had a big hit–he wasn’t treated like a novelty artist. So if Sam’s serious about making a good rock record, we’ll treat him seriously.”

Kinison said his video for “Under My Thumb” is set in a courtroom, with a tentative cast featuring Ozzy Osbourne as the judge, Paul Williams as Kinison’s attorney, “Married With Children’s” Dave Faustino as a defendant and a jury of 12 sexy dancers. “We have a bit where I put on these special X-ray glasses so I can look at the girls and see their lingerie,” Kinison explained. “We only cast dancers who were born after the Kennedy assassination. We tried to come up with everything that would shock MTV.”

When it comes to shock, Kinison is a master (though he’s covered his bets with the video channel by having Dweezil appear in his clip playing a guitar in the shape of MTV’s logo). His last album was so incendiary that Warners put two warning stickers on the jacket–and inserted an AIDS awareness pamphlet because gay activists were so outraged by Kinison’s jokes about AIDS. This time around “Banned” is “being treated like a regular release,” said Warners publicity chief, Bob Merlis. “There’s no firestorm of controversy that I’ve heard of.”

In fact, Warners let Kinison design his own warning sticker, which will read: “Pan Am 103: The Truth Must Be Known. Explicit Language and Material: Parental Advisory.”

Kinison says Warners only added its warning stickers and AIDS pamphlet to his previous album under pressure. “I feel I really got singled out last time,” he complained. “They put so many stickers on my last album that you couldn’t even see my (expletive) face! Comedy isn’t a pack of cigarettes. It doesn’t need a surgeon general’s report on it. I always get blamed for being a (jerk). But play Andrew Dice Clay’s record and tell me who the gay-basher is.”

With arch-rival Clay now performing rock music in his concert act too, relations between the two contenders for the title of King of the Metal Comics have soured considerably.

“We get along about as well as Poison and Warrant,” said Kinison, referring to a pair of feuding rock bands. “Dice is the Morton Downey Jr. of comedy–his career is gonna burn up like Larry Storch. I think he saw me do my act and said, ‘Duh, I’ll put on the leather jacket and insult everybody,’ as if no one would notice he was ripping off my (expletive) jokes! Now he’s even closing his shows with an all-star jam, except no all-stars ever show up!

“When he reads I might do four or five songs with a rock band, he’ll probably do it too. I’m surprised I haven’t seen him come out wearing a long coat and a beret already.”

March 18, 1990