Comedian Sam Kinison, who died in a head-on collision in 1992 said to no one in particular: “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” But then there was a pause as if Kinison were listening to someone. Bill Kinison, Sam’s brother/manager and best friend shares the truth behind what really happened during Sam’s final moments.
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By Laurel Fishman
Originally printed in Rip
October 1992
One evening soon after Sam Kinison’s tragic death in a senseless auto accident, the marquees of every nightclub on the Sunset Strip blazed with farewell messages in memory of the fun loving evangelist-turned comedian. It was only right, as Sam lived to rock as mush as shock. His friends and confidantes, the rockers who performed, hung out and starred with him in his videos, will always remember Sam as a one-of-a-kind, truly individual and irreplaceable presence. The public Sam was outrageous, controversial, outspoken, loud and always larger than life. In private, the man who became an ordained minister at 18 revealed a more thoughtful, kind and playful side. He was gracious with his time and hospitality; a compassionate soul who was as ready to lend a sympathetic ear as he was to party with the heartiest.
Ozzy Osbourne drummer Randy Castillo, one of Sam’s closest musical buds, recently took some time to look on his adventures with the funnyman. It was Randy who shared Sam’s final days, his idyllic honeymoon in Kona, Hawaii. During that trip, the two became closer than ever, sipping tropical drinks and talking, says Randy, “about life and death. We has the time of our lives. I got the last photo of Sam ever, and it’s a really eerie picture. We had a villa overlooking the ocean, and he’s standing there as the sun’s going down. It’s a silhouette of him looking at his watch, almost as if to say, ‘There’s not a lot of time left.’” As the two watched the sun set, Sam told Randy, “This is heaven. This is where all your friends go when they die.”
“Those last days were like a gift, really magical,” Randy reflects. “We laughed and laid on the beach. I woke up one day when we were there, and he wasn’t around. He came back an hour later with the weirdest stuff – Addams Family cereal, a bunch of kids toys – just dumb things. He was like a little Santa Claus. Robin Williams described him perfectly at the services. He said, ‘Sam Kinison was the antichrist you wanted to cuddle.’ Everybody laughed. That’s the way Sam would have wanted it.”
Playing shows with Sam was a blast, Randy says. “He was such a magnet for people. You could have any rock star around him, and he’s be the center of attention. The guy knew how to work a room.”
Randy describes the off-stage Sam Kinison as a “gentle, beautiful, sharing, caring kind of guy.” He was so generous, Randy says, that “he would never let me pick up tabs. Never. Sometimes I’d have to sneak off and pay the waiter! He was big because he has a big heart, and his body had to contain all of it. I’m gonna miss him as long as I live. There’s a big, empty space only he could fill. Right now I think Sam’s in Hawaii, his favorite place, his version of heaven. Sam’s still on the stage, and he’s everybody up there!”
“Sam became a very dear friend to me while we were doing ‘Wild Thing,’” says ex-Poison guitarist C.C. DeVille, another of Sam’s friends. “I’ve always believed in God, but I was always confused about religion. Sam made sense when he’d talk about spirituality. He was such a sweet and gentle man.”
One of C.C.’s favorite Sam stories happened when Sam took him out to dinner once. “We went to Spago,” C.C. says. “In a restaurant like that there are, like, five forks and knives and a little spoon and a big spoon. I was very embarrassed because I didn’t know the order in which you pick up the cutlery to eat your meal. I was thinking, If I pick up the wrong one, people will think I’m an idiot. So I quietly go, ‘Sam, what fork do I use?’ He goes, ‘With the prices they charge here, you and use your hands! But,’ he continues, ‘You normally go from the outside in.’ Not only did he zap it to me, but he zapped it to the restaurant in true Kinison style!”
C.C.’s most treasured memory is the time Sam told him, “My father’s dead, and I have no choice. I can’t go see him. Your mother and father are still alive, and you have the opportunity to see them. Nothing lasts forever. While you have the time, grab it.”
“Sam was a mentor to me,” C.C. says. “There is no handbook on how to handle becoming famous, how to behave when suddenly people are treating you differently. Sam taught me to have a little class. When you’re in the public eye, people only get to see a certain side of you. With Sam, being a comic was the thinnest slice of a big pizza. He was intelligent. He’s make you think; he’d scare the shit out of you. It seems like someone put 500 years of wisdom in this man’s body. With us, it was like a senior/junior thing. I knew he loved me, but he knew I was learning from him.”
C.C. recalls how Sam could walk into a restaurant, and “everyone just became Sam and would yell ‘Hey, Sam!!’ The decibel level would be like the Los Angeles airport! Sam had that thing. He had an aura that got there 20 minutes before he did! We would jam at Spice [a nightclub in Hollywood] all the time, and Sam would intentionally go on out of tune, just to frustrate the other musicians! Sam was a great piano player too. He loved Paul McCartney, and no one could do Paul like Sam could. He’s sing and play and, I swear, something came over him.”
C.C. calls Sam a “genius comedian who raised issues. How he made humor of those issues was his genius. There was always a message. He would attack things other people wouldn’t, things other people were scared to talk about.”
“He’s with me now, I know it,” C. C. concludes. “I know Sam’s out there trying to guide me and make sure I do good. I love him. I will miss him dearly. I was just a kid, and he was the guy who taught me what fork to use!”
“Sam offended a lot of people,” says Ozzy Osbourne, the judge in Sam’s “Under My Thumb” video. “With entertainment, you’ll make people happy, and you’ll also make people pissed off. Sam Kinison was kinda like the Ozzy Osbourne of the comic world. He was nothing but a gentleman though. We had many good times. Sam was a man with a big heart. He was a teddy bear, a big naughty kid. I’d say, ‘Sam, c’mon, I’m not on welfare, let me buy a drink.’ But he’d say ‘No, no, no, I’ll get this.’ He’d never let me buy a drink. He was great, one of the guys, you know. But, boy, when he partied, he partied! I still can’t believe that he’s gone. It’s, ‘I’m gonna wake up in a minute. I’m dreaming this. ‘ But I have great memories.”
“Apparently when Sam had the accident, I heard he got out of the car and look up to the heavens and said, ‘I don’t want to die,’ and then just said, ‘Oh, okay,’ and laid down and died. It sounds crazy and will probably offend a lot of my fans, but I believe there’s a higher power. Some people may think Sam Kinison’s in one place, but I know where he is: He’s upstairs; he’s next to God.”
Fred Coury (ex-Cinderella drummer) and Stephen Pearcy (ex-Ratt singer), now playing together in a band called Taboo, worked with Sam live and on video. “Sam was the kind of guy you met and felt like you had known for a long time,” says Fred. “So much with Sam was so funny. It’s easier to say what wasn’t funny about the guy! One time we were playing at the Universal Amphitheater [in L.A.]. Joe Walsh was there, and all these people. We were doing this jam, everyone was getting into it, and Sam yells into the mic, ‘Everybody solo!’ There were, like, 12 guitar players, and they all started soloing at once. It was just the most ridiculous thing you ever heard in your life! It was terrible, but so funny that I started laughing so hard that I couldn’t play!”
“You could talk to Sam about anything, really, and even if his answer was a funny one, it would get the point across and make you feel better. He cared about people. No matter who it was, he’s take the time to say hello. I never, ever had a bad time with Sam. It’s an amazingly great loss; but to me, it seems like a friend who moved away that I won’t see. I just can’t think of him any other way. It really just wouldn’t be right if I did.”
Remembering Sam’s star-studded “Wild Thing” video shoot, Stephen says, “The guy was cracking jokes and rolling all over the floor with Jessica Hahn and making fun of the whole situation. Everybody was laughing. To have that many people under one roof – Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Warren DeMartini, Slash, Billy Idol, Dweezil – that was memorable. Sam’s the only person who could bring that many rock ‘n’ roll people together to have a party at a video!”
Dweezil Zappa shared a mutually supportive relationship with Sam. “I remember we were in Vancouver one time for a charity softball game,” he says. “Sam was the umpire. It was the celebrity team versus the charity supporters of the event, and we were winning the game by a bunch of points. Sam made continuous bogus calls so the other team could not only catch up to us, but beat us! You’d go up to bat, and he’s look at you and say, ‘You’re out!’ You couldn’t argue with him, ’cause he had the loudest mouth!”
“I got invited to do a show with him not long before his accident. I wasn’t able to do it, and it never occurred to me that I’d never see him again. You never know when you could lose a friend in your life. Sam was a sweetheart. At times, he had material that made people uncomfortable, but everyone has a choice to listen or not. Sam would be having a helluva time with the next couple of years in America, with the decline of civilization! He had a hysterical perspective on things, especially human nature.”
Lita Ford played last year’s New Year’s Eve show with Sam at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. “When Sam wasn’t cracking jokes, he was so incredibly nice,” she remembers. “That’s one thing that really surprised me when I met him. Some of his jokes were so rude, but he was warm, down-to-earth, caring, full of compliments. He did things that most people would never do. His brother told me he gave some poor people money once when he didn’t have the money himself.”
Lita was also impressed with how family-oriented Sam was. “That shows what kind of person he was,” she says. “He always traveled with his brother Bill. At the Aladdin, his mom was there too. His family was there the whole time.”
Lita was nervous about attending Sam’s memorial service, because she didn’t know what to expect. “There were cameras all over the place, and loads of people,” she says. “Everyone was trying to hold back their tears. Robin Williams gets up and says, ‘I know you’re all just waitin’ for that coffin to pop open and Sam to jump out ad go, “A-A-AOW!” ‘ Everyone started laughin’ and cryin’. It was a really funny, happy, warm, friendly sort of service, full of tears and laughter. Everybody joked and told personal experiences they’s had with Sam. When his sister sang some gospel music, it was really neat. Sam had a whole other side to him. He was a preacher from Oklahoma, and he was that rock ‘n’ roll bad boy.”
Rock ‘n’ roll bad boy, genius comedian, gentleman, mentor. A magnet, a sweetheart, a teddy bear, a big naughty kid. The antichrist that you wanted to cuddle. Take your pick. Sam Kinison was all of these , and so much, much more.
By Dennis McLellan
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, September 2, 1992
Colleagues remember shock comic’s off-stage kindness. But the tribute they’ll tape in Anaheim won’t be syrupy
Pacing the stage like the Pentecostal preacher he once was, Sam Kinison would work himself into a primal heat as he railed against homosexuals, AIDS victims, organized religion and one of the topics closest to his heart: Marriage.
“Oh, Oh-h-h -h-h! Marriage is hell-l-l-l-l!” the twice-divorced comic would scream.
With an infectious giggle and his signature banshee wail, Kinison soared into the public consciousness in the mid-’80s as the King of Shock Comedy. His detractors–and there were many–called him obscene, vitriolic and annoyingly loud. His fans–and they were legion–called him an innovator, a biting social commentator for whom no topic was taboo. Not the Crucifixion. Not sex. Not even necrophilia.
When the 38-year-old comedian was killed in a head-on collision on his way to a show in Laughlin, Nev., in April, media reports referred to the wild stage persona and the equally wild personal life of the man who joked that his cocaine use was once so heavy he used a garden hose to inhale.
But his friends, many of whom will be honoring the outlaw comic at a comedy tribute Thursday at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim, remember another Sam Kinison.
“The partying is legendary, but there also is a side of him that was very sweet and loving, and he was very good to a lot of people,” said Richard Belzer, who first met Kinison in 1980.
Scheduled to join Belzer on stage are Robin Williams, Rodney Dangerfield, Judy Tenuta, Carl LaBove, James Carrey and Pauly Shore. The show, which will include video clips of Kinison’s career, will be taped for a later TV broadcast on the Fox network.
Tenuta, the accordion-playing, self-anointed Love Goddess who met Kinison in a Denver comedy club in 1985, joked that “we used to hang out cruising for chicks together, Sam and I.”
“He was the most compassionate person I ever met in my life,” said LaBove, Kinison’s best friend and longtime opening act. “He was always there for me.”
But don’t expect a stream of sugary testimonials Thursday night. According to Belzer, “The tribute is going to be a life-affirming thing rather than maudlin.”
“There won’t be a lot of reminiscing,” said Bill Kinison, Sam’s brother and manager who is serving as executive producer of the show. “It will be kind of a ‘Heaven Can Wait’ type set with a lot of smoke and things like that. The story line is basically whether or not Sam makes it (to heaven).”
That seems an altogether fitting premise for a tribute to the outlaw comic with the hell-bound persona. Yet despite Sam’s penchant for the sacrilegious on stage, Kinison said, his brother never lost his own faith.
“He was a strong believer,” he said. “His unhappiness was with religion and never his commitment to God.” With a laugh, Kinison added, “I don’t know if you’re going to have a lot of Christians who are going to believe that.”
Proceeds from the tribute, according to Kinison, will go to his brother’s estate. At the time of Sam’s death, Kinison said, he was nearly $1 million in debt. “After he died and I looked at the estate I thought, ‘Well, if you can die a million in debt, you can say you enjoyed life.’ “
Kinison feels a comedy tribute is the kind his brother would have wanted. “And I think just about all the entertainers who are involved are involved because of the contribution he made. When I watched ‘Comic Relief’ this year, there was not only the (raw) language but the (controversial) viewpoints that you probably wouldn’t have seen on HBO or on television if it hadn’t been for Sam breaking down all the walls.”
Bill Kinison believes his brother belongs in the same camp as such boundary-stretching predecessors as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. “What he brought–and they also brought–is being totally honest on stage. Even to a fault. There’s a lot of people who would not have agreed with Sam’s views on things, but he was honest on stage about it.”
Tenuta agreed.
“He was dealing with his demons on stage,” she said. “It was really refreshing to see someone just sort of take issues by the horns and really go to the root of it. He was just very funny. And you never felt that there’s this structure of ‘joke,’ like it’s a newscast.”
Says LaBove: “Sam was the first guy to bring that kind of everyday anger, that stress you have in a car, in a marriage–all that stuff–and just blowing it out.”
LaBove remembers first meeting Kinison in Texas in 1979 when they both were starting out in stand-up at a legendary Houston club called the Comedy Workshop.
From the start, LaBove said, “Sam always had the stage presence because he had come from the ministry. Even when he didn’t have great ideas, he was always interesting.”
As for Kinison’s legendary use of drugs, LaBove said “he was repressed as a preacher’s kid and as a preacher he was someone people looked up to for spiritual guidance. He didn’t have a lot of opportunities to experiment. He started late in everything, so actually he was going through his teen-age years when he passed away.”
LaBove was riding in a van with Bill Kinison behind Sam’s car when the pickup driven by a teen-ager who had been drinking slammed into the comedian’s Pontiac Trans-Am. Malika, Sam’s longtime girlfriend and wife of less than a week, was knocked unconscious.
It was LaBove who held Kinison just before he died. At first, the comedian protested that he didn’t want to die. But as LaBove told The Times after the accident, Kinison paused as if listening to a voice from above. Then he said, “OK, OK, OK.” And then, softly and sweetly, he uttered a final “OK.”
“At the time I knew in my soul it was the moment of death,” said LaBove, adding that he has since found a sense of peace from hearing Kinison’s final words. “I’ve watched my father pass away and other people pass away, and there is a moment where it seems someone comes to get you or you see something and it really relaxes you. When Sam’s moment came, it seemed like Sam listened.”
LaBove said that preparing his six-minute portion of the tribute has been an emotional ordeal.
“As far as I’m concerned, everybody else is the stars of the show; I’m his best friend.’ I’m actually going to use this spot as my last public goodby to Sam.”
Speaking late last week, LaBove said that “at this point, I’ll either tell stories about a friendship the public didn’t see and tell those funny stories of things he did off stage–and actually just talking to him, just staring up. I want a powerful moment. He was a powerful friend.”
By Jane Wollman Rusoff
With additional reporting by A.J.S. Rayl and Jon Weiderhorn
Originally printed in Entertainment Weekly, No. 122
Friday, June 12, 1992
“That’s when you know you’re pretty f—ed up, when it makes sense to fall asleep… I was driving between Needles and Barstow… It’s about 120 miles of desert… It’s four in the morning, man… Hey, this is a pretty good time to go to sleep … (SCREAMS HYSTERICALLY) So I totaled this f—in’ car out, man!… I f—in’ totaled it! And it made SENSE at the time!…” — FROM THE “SAM KINISON FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT HOUR,” APRIL 4, 1991
IRONY OF IRONIES: On April 10, 1992, almost a year after delivering that routine on HBO, Sam Kinison was killed in a head-on collision on that same stretch of arid desert road between Needles and Barstow, Calif., the same haunted section of U.S. Highway 95 that opens Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A 5’8″, 275-pounder whose appetites matched his bulk, a kamikaze comic known for his piercing screams and full-bellow takes on sex, religion, and drugs, Kinison was heading for a stand-up gig in Laughlin, Nev., five days after marrying his third wife, Malika Souiri, 27. Eleven miles north of Needles, a pickup driven by an allegedly beer-drinking 17-year-old smashed into Kinison’s Pontiac, leaving Souiri unconscious and the 38-year old comedian dead.
The greatest irony of all: Everyone thought he’d die sooner. With his massive addiction to alcohol and drugs, Kinison had been pegged by his friends and even by himself for a John Belushi-style demise. He once joked with friends that he’s probably be found dead one day “with a couple of 16-year-old girls in a cheap motel with an ounce of blow and a scissors sticking out of my back.” That he should die just when he seemed to be chasing the demons from his life – not exactly clean and sober, according to the autopsy report, but closer than he’d come in years – simply made no sense. And still doesn’t. In the weeks since he died, Kinison’s friends and family have tried to come to some understanding of his death and life, especially of those last bound-for-hell years.
Analyzing Kinison, once a troubled, rebellious child and later a holy-rolling preacher, they see a study in light-and-dark contrasts. He was “a shy little huggy bear,” says guitarist Joe Walsh, and also a man who “loved turmoil – that’s what made him tick,” says comic Allan Stephan, who often toured with Kinison. He had reportedly led a Black Mass or two in his time, yet “Jesus was always near his heart,” according to former girlfriend (and Jim Bakker nemesis) Jessica Hahn. He compulsively beat up men and women, yet was so respectfully devoted to his mother, Marie, that their relationship “was almost Elvis-like,” according to Sam’s brother, Bill.
All of us are creatures of complexity, but in Kinison the contradictions ran to wild extremes. “Most people would go to the edge,” says his friend Robin Williams. “Sam would jump over it.”
This is the trajectory of his fall.
THE EARLY PART of his story is well known. Born in Peoria, Ill., the third son of four boys in a family of poor preachers, he was bred into anger – whether from his upbringing in poverty, to the devil, no one was ever able to determine fully. He worked as a Pentecostal evangelist from ages 18 to 25 but eventually found his true calling in comedy. Starting at a club in Houston and gravitating to the Los Angeles laugh circuit in 1981, Kinison got his break in 1985, when Rodney Dangerfield put him on his young Comedians HBO special and gave Kinison what he would later call “the six minutes that changed my life.”
By 1987 Kinison had sold 100,000 copies of his album Louder Than Hell, hosted Saturday Night Live, appeared in Dangerfield’s movie Back to School, befriended the likes of Jon Bon Jovi, Ted Nugent, and Howard Stern, and was pulling in as much as $50,000 per concert gig. His comedy style was unlike anything ever heard – or, in his case, unlike anything ever heard outside of a psych ward: Addressing himself to starving Ethiopians, he roared: This is sand. Nothing grows here. Know what it’s gonna be like in a hundred years? It’s gonna be sand! you live in a f–ing desert! We have deserts in America – we just don’t live in them! Why don’t you move to where the food is?
But at the same time Kinison was telling friends that he was having major problems dealing with success. “He didn’t know who to trust,” says Walsh. “All of a sudden everybody wanted to be his friend. One time he called, depressed and crying. He said, ‘Am I blowing it?’ Sam never quite believed in himself, and it tore him up.”
It was around this period that Kinison’s rage, never completely repressed but now stoked by cocaine, began to explode. A pummeling of comic Mark Goldstein in front of Kinison’s stand-up alma mater, the Comedy Store, forced owner Mitzi Shore to give Kinison an ultimatum: “I told him I didn’t want him around until he cleaned himself up. He left and I didn’t see him again for two years.”
His girlfriend at the time, comedian Tamayo Otsuki (Davis Rules), found life with Kinison too rough to take. “As a person, Sam was a complete screwup,” says Otsuki. “He had a nice, soft side, like a 5-year old boy. But he was heavily into drugs. I left him about 60 times during the two years we saw each other. He’d call and leave 50 messages on my machine in one day. I finally had to disconnect my phone and move. I had to disappear because he’d come to my house and break in. He broke the window, the door, my chairs. His ego was hurt. He said, ‘How can you leave Elvis?’”
Malika Souiri, the Las Vegas dancer he started seeing after Otsuki and who he eventually married, describes her relationship with Kinison as “up and down like a roller coaster. I stood up to Sam lots of times, and I think he respected that.” Comedian Carl LaBove isn’t quite as delicate. “It was one of those drag-down, knock-down, fight-it-out relationships,” he says. “Sam took his punches too – she’s a kick-ass girl.”
Early in 1988, Kinison’s career began to lose momentum. In February, United Artists sued him for essentially walking out of what would have been his first starring film: Atuk, a piece of fluff about an Eskimo that goes to New York. Although the case was settled out of court, word went around that Kinison was unreliable and impossible to work with. The powerful Creative Artists Agency had already dropped him as a client. Then in May Kinison was dealt a ravaging personal blow. His brother Kevin, 28, the baby of the family, shot himself to death in his parents’ house in Tulsa after suffering a nervous breakdown. Kinison was devastated and began thinking about suicide himself. “Till the day he died,” says Bill Kinison, “Sam was still moved to tears when he talked about Kevin.”
The comic’s 1988 concert tour took in less than previous year’s, but that didn’t stop Kinison from playing the prodigal. He was paying off a house in Malibu and renting a four-bedroom apartment in Hollywood Hills. He spent lavishly on clothing, mostly from H. Lorenzo’s on Sunset Strip. He ate at Spago, Dan Tana’s, and the Palm and often left 100 percent of the bill as a tip. “He was very extravagant,” says comedian Richard Belzer. “Every meal was a celebration.” Although he dieted on and off, Kinison was a binger by nature. Descending on Ben Frank’s one night in 1988 with Hahn, his occasional date at the time, Kinison ordered sausages, bacon, eggs, buttermilk pancakes, and biscuits. “The grease made the Exxon oil spill look mild,” says Hahn. “And after eating all that, he said, ‘I feel good – want some dessert?’”
And there were drugs. Always drugs. Kinison’s booze and cocaine intake, never stinting, now began to rival his food consumption. In fact, a rider in his performance contract required promoters to provide an oxygen tank backstage. Its purpose: to revive him between shows. Comic Doug Bady remembers seeing Kinison “sucking on and oxygen mask before a show. I wondered how was he ever going to get out there. He looked like he was going to fall asleep or pass out. But he would undergo a transformation almost, and by the time he got on stage, he was right on.”
Avoiding unconsciousness was also a big challenge at home. “He hated to sleep,” says Hahn. “He’d practically have to pass out first.” One of Kinison’s domestic goals was to stay up till the early morning hours to watch reruns of his favorite childhood series, The Fugitive. Among his prized possessions was a pair of bar tabs signed by the show’s star, David Janssen.
By 1990, Kinison was an outlaw. The mere rumble of his name meant trouble. His album Leader of the Banned was selling poorly, and MTV dropped his video from its rotation. HBO backed out of a projected special. On tour, he was so high one night, according to guitarist Randy Hansen, “The audience began throwing things at him and chanting ‘Refund! Refund! Refund! He was barely able to stand up.”
Weirdness was everywhere. In June 1990, a 320-pound man, who had met Kinison hours before, allegedly attacked Souiri, who by this time was living with Sam, while the comic was passed out upstairs. She fired off four shots from one of Kinison’s many guns. The ensuing rape trial resulted in a hung jury and the case was dismissed, but the incident helped Souiri come to a definite conclusion about her life with Kinison.
“The party was over,” she says. “I felt it was good for us to stop everything and start to live life to its fullest.” The two made a pact to go straight, and Kinison joined an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, where he befriended fellow member Ozzy Osbourne. In March 1990, Kinison began telling audiences he was no longer getting high.
The sad truth was that his new leaf stayed turned over for only a few months. After that, clean and sober was more of an image than a reality for Kinison. According to Randy Hansen, “Sam told me, ‘What’s important is that the audience believes I quit. Whether I’m doing drugs or not is none of their business. What I want them to know is that I don’t encourage anything…and that I try to be a role model.’ He wanted to get rid of that image of, ‘Yeah, let’s go get f–ed-up and party.’”
It’s said that even a fleeting exposure to the AA program can affect one’s life. So it was with Kinison. Though he was still drinking, his drug consumption went down, and he and Souiri slowly settled into a routine, non partying domestic life. The industry took notice. Kinison guest-starred on a Christmas episode of Fox’s Married…With Children in 1990, racking up the show’s highest ratings, and began negotiating for his own Fox series, Charlie Hoover.
But maintaining the new image wasn’t easy. In July 1991, Kinison missed an hour-long appearance on The Joan Rivers Show because he was too drunk to get our of New York City’s Plaza Hotel. Rivers admits she was furious but says, “Sam was devastated by it. He was upset because he thought he might lose his role in his series, which was to start in a few months. He really cared, for all the talk about his not giving a shit. He wanted the success. He was a pro and knew that a pro has to act in a certain manner.”
Charlie Hoover, a series of microscopic concept, featured Kinison as Tim Matheson’s 12-inch-high alter ego. Kinison didn’t put much stock in the show, but he showed up for work every day. And when it was canceled this February after a three-month run, Kinison had no regrets. He already has a few paths mapped out. On April 14, four days after he died, he was supposed to have signed with New Line Cinema, his first film contract since 1988; the two-movie deal called for a concert film and a comedy with either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rick Moranis. That same day, Kinison was scheduled to sign with Fox for a variety show, a comedy hour patterned after the old Jackie Gleason Show, with Sandra Bernhard as his possible co star. This was going to be a good year.
Kinison was in a celebratory mood on April 5, when he married Souiri at the Candlelight Chapel in Las Vegas. They honeymooned for two days in Hawaii. “It was the most relaxed I’d ever sen him,” says Souiri. “This time, it seemed like it was really coming together.”
Two days later, Sam and Malika set off for his gig in Laughlin, with brother Bill and other friends following in a van. Bill saw the pickup truck heading directly toward Kinison’s car. With a steep embankment on his right, Sam had no room to maneuver. Both vehicles went straight up in the air on collision and crashed back down. Majid Khoury, Kinison’s personal assistant, who was in the van, found Sam “lying on his side diagonally across the seat, facing Malika, as if covering her at the time of impact. He was trying to get up and saying, ‘I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. How come?’”
Then he lost consciousness and though CPR was attempted, Kinison lived only about three or four minutes after the accident. At the hospital, Souiri says, “I forced my way in to see Sam. I wanted to kiss him. But when I tried, blood came out of his mouth. I wanted something of him. I wanted anything on me – even his blood. It may sound sick, but I put some of his blood on my chest, over my heart.”
The death certificate states that Sam Kinison died of “multiple traumatic injuries.” The autopsy results, released May 27, showed signs of cocaine and prescription drugs in his system. The 17-year-old driver, who was allegedly drinking beer at the time of the accident, has been charged with vehicular manslaughter. A pretrial hearing was set for June 1.
In an interview last year, Kinison said that while his career was doing just fine, life was another story. “It seems to be one tragedy followed after another,” he said. “Just about the time you think life’s perfect, and you got it just the way you want it, something else comes up that breaks your heart, devastates you. And then you gotta get over that, and try to trust again, believe again, and set up for the next tragedy.”
Or, as he said on the highway between Needles and Barstow, “I don’t understand it.”
By David Wild
Originally printed in Rolling Stone, Issue 631
May 28th, 1992
“SAM KINISON was absolutely fearless,” says Robin Williams. “He was like a comedy combination of Chuck Yeager and Evel Kneivel. Most people go to the edge and then stop. Not Sam. He’d see the edge and then just keep going. And I think that scream he was famous for was just the sound he made on the way down.”
That love of the edge was the key to Kinison’s appeal. And his anguished primal scream was mote than a successful comic trademark; it was a rebel yell that shook both the sensitivities of the politically correct and the “just say no” proprieties of the Reaganites. At his best, the Pentecostal preacher turned slash-and-burn comedian managed to make bad taste somehow taste good. He may very well have paved the way for less gifted loudmouth comedians. But he was also, in the words of gonzo talk show host Howard Stern – a close friend and bad-boy conspirator – “the closest thing we has to our Lenny Bruce.” That voice was silenced on April 10th, when Kinison was killed at the age of thirty-eight in a car accident near Needles, California.
The son of a preacher man, Kinison was raised in East Peoria, Illinois, and while still a teenager found himself in the family business, spending a few years as a traveling preacher. But as an associate told ROLLING STONE in 1989, “God wasn’t big enough for Sam to hang out with.” Soon enough, Kinison found his true calling. By the early Eighties, his hyper-insensitive stand-up was drawing crowds at L.A.’s Comedy Store. His material included darkly comic observations on such topics as religion, starvation in Ethiopia and marriage (he was twice divorced). “I guess they’re tough jokes,” Kinison said in 1986. “But there’s lots of things you either laugh or cry at. And you just can’t cry.”
“There was no censor with Sam,” says Robin Williams, one of Kinison’s earliest supporters. “It was almost like he had nonstop Tourette’s syndrome. He couldn’t stop saying the things that everyone else might think but was afraid to say. I’ll never forget the time I saw him do five incredible minutes on the subject of sodomy and then a few minutes later had him introduce me to his mother. People sometimes forget how good he was and lump him in with Dice Clay, but Sam really had the stuff.”
“He’ll definitely be remembered,” says Rodney Dangerfield, another early booster, “because someone that funny and that wild you don’t forget.”
With his oversized Outlaws of Comedy entourage and his babushkaed Steven Tyler-meets-the-Muppets look, Kinison often seemed more like a rock star than a comedian. He packed large concert halls, sold hundreds of thousands of records, had a hit single with his version of “Wild Thing” and made the cover of ROLLING STONE in 1989. The video for “Wild Thing” showed Kinison cavorting with PTL scandal figure Jessica Hahn (with whom Kinison had a brief and stormy affair) and a cast of well-known hard rockers. Kinison embraced the hard-living, hard-rocking metal lifestyle and befriended many musicians. The members of Motley Crue released a statement that said, “If God didn’t have a sense of humor before, he does now.” Kinison was, according to many who knew him well, a warm, generous and at times childlike man with a spiritual streak. “He hated to even hear the word religion,” says Jessica Hahn, “but he was definitely a man who loved God. He had a cross inside the lining of that long coat he used to wear. It was no joke to him.”
Ironically, Kinison seemed to be cleaning up his act in the end. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, apologized to gay groups for some of his controversial AIDS material and appeared on the Fox sitcom Charlie Hoover in an attempt to prove he could behave professionally. And just five days before his death, he had married his longtime girlfriend Malika Souiri.
“Some people seem almost disappointed that Sam didn’t die from his excesses,” says Howard Stern. “Anyone who writes that guy off as the Fatty Arbuckle of the Eighties – some wild, partying maniac with zero talent – is just completely missing the point. He was a major talent with a brilliant comic mind. Sam’s bad night was a lot more interesting than just about anyone else’s best night.”
“I usually don’t like having comedians on my show,” says Stern, “because they’re for the most part just personas, one shtick line after another. Sam was totally different – he was utterly real. I think if Sam had fucked his own sister, he would have called me on the ait the very next day to talk about it. And he would have made it funny, too. That sort of honesty got Sam in trouble, but it was also what made him incredible to listen to.”
“Sam could always surprise you.” says Stern. “I remember one time he was on our show, and I’d gotten an earring, and he seemed to want one, too. I told him I’d go with him. And he said: ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that. My mother will kill me.’ I said, ‘You’re overweight, you’re and admitted alcoholic, you do all this cocaine, and you’re worried about what your mother will think of an earring?’ But he was dead serious.”
“I’ve never seen a stronger human being,” Stern says. “Anyone else would have been dead from the way Sam carried on. I remember when he called right after an AA meeting to tell me how cool it was. He was so proud of the one-month chip they’d given him. Then a month later he’d show up with a one-day chip. But he was real proud of that chip. That’s why this is all such an irony. I always thought Sam would come to his senses and say enough is enough. And according to him brother Bill, he’d come to that conclusion in the end. It’s hard to know what direction Sam would have gone in, but whatever happened to him, he would have gotten a few more great hours of stand-up out of it. And now we’ll never know.”
By: Times Staff and Wire Reports
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Monday, April 13, 1992
A private memorial service will be held for comedian Sam Kinison on Wednesday in Los Angeles, and Kinison will be buried in Tulsa, Okla., on Friday, his publicist said Sunday.
Kinison, killed Friday in a head-on crash in the California desert, will be buried near his mother’s home, said Bill Kinison, the late comic’s brother and manager.
Kinison, 38, was killed when a pickup truck carrying two teen-agers swerved into his lane and struck his car on U.S. Highway 95, authorities said.
His 26-year-old wife, Malika, suffered a concussion in the crash, which occurred near the California-Nevada border. She was transferred from Needles Desert Community Hospital to an undisclosed hospital in Los Angeles on Sunday–one week after she and Kinison had wed.
The passenger in the pickup, Glen Moren, 18, of Las Vegas was also released from the Needles hospital Sunday, the Associated Press reported. The truck’s driver, a Las Vegas 17-year-old, was being held at San Bernardino County Juvenile Hall on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, officials said.