All rights belong to their respective owners. Digitally remastered and AI Full HD 1080 Upscaled. R.I.P. Sam, (1953–1992)
Tag: Wild Thing
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Sam Kinison “Wild Thing” on MTV New Year’s Eve (1988)
Live performance of “Wild Thing” by Sam Kinison on MTV New Years Eve ’88 with host Downtown Julie Brown.
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Sam Kinison: The Last Laugh
By Laurel Fishman
Originally printed in Rip
October 1992One 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.
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Tribute: Sam Kinison (1953-1992)
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.”
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An Appreciation: Kinison’s Unfinished Howl
By Lawrence Christon
Times Staff Writer
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Monday, April 13, 1992His 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.
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Second-Chance Sam
By Joe Rhodes
Frequent Contributor To TV Times
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Sunday, November 17, 1991Sam Kinison has been sent to his corner, away from the main set of the new Fox network sitcom “Charlie Hoover,” isolated from the rest of the cast and most of the crew.
Tim Matheson, Kinison’s co-star, is in the midst of an elaborate set, surrounded by extras and scenery: slot machines, miniskirted waitresses, crap tables, all the details necessary to evoke the ambience of an Atlantic City casino.
Kinison, in his trademark beret and long coat, is standing barely 30 feet away, but he might as well be in another world. His area, brightly lighted and painted entirely in blue, is roped off from the casino set and his only clear view of the other actors is via a monitor. Kinison looks strangely disembodied surrounded by all that blue, the lone resident of a monochromatic universe.
“Every time they say, ‘OK, time to change sets,’ I always start to move along with everybody else,” Kinison says, waiting patiently for his cue. “And then I realize, hey, I’m not going anywhere. They may be changing sets but I’m stuck right here in Blue World.”
Which, all in all, is not a bad metaphor for Kinison’s career. It’s been 10 years since he first roared into Los Angeles, the howling stand-up from hell. He has, for the last decade, been the comedy equivalent of a Scud missile, loud, messy and you could never be sure just exactly when he’d explode.
Kinison, a former road-show evangelist, and his act embodied his conversion to the wild side of life. Designed to provoke, it served him well. He was criticized for bashing women, bashing gays, bashing Christianity. And every criticism brought in more paying customers.
His personal life did nothing to soften his on-stage image. There were drugs, alcohol abuse, danger and debauchery on a grand scale. He hung out with the heavy-metal crowd, acting more like a rock star than a comedian.
“It was fun to be at the China Club and be up there jamming with Slash or Joe Walsh and John Entwistle (of The Who), and I’d be a liar to say I didn’t love it, that it wasn’t my high school dream, ’cause it was,” Kinison says. “But there comes a point where you say, I’ve done enough of this. I want to move on to something else.
“I mean it was great to be the rock comic, the shock comic. But after you’ve played Giants Stadium with Bon Jovi in front of 82,000 people, after you’ve done the “Wild Thing” video with Jessica Hahn and every rock band from hell, you’re not gonna top that. And I’m on the other side of 35 now, so it’s time.”
Which is why Kinison, who’s 37 to be exact, is standing on this blue stage, pursuing that most mainstream of comedy goals, a network sitcom. “I want to show people that there’s a side of myself other than just the outrageous comedian,” Kinison says. “I hope this shows that I can do family entertainment, that my comedy doesn’t just depend on vulgarity.”
In “Charlie Hoover,” Kinison plays Matheson’s 12-inch-tall alter ego, the inner voice who’s always urging him, as Kinison explains “to not go to work, to call that girl, to run away. I’m his pleasure center.”
Kinison’s scenes are shot with a special-effects camera that allows his 12-inch image, shot against the blue background, to be inserted, live, into the master shots. Kinison and Matheson rehearse face to face and then, when its time to shoot, return to their respective sets, able to see each other only through occasional glances at the monitors.
“It really doesn’t feel that difficult to me because I’m used to performing by myself when I do stand-up,” Kinison says. “But (the producers) seem to think it’s really hard. Don’t tell ’em. Let ’em think I’m bustin’ my ass.”
Kinison seems genuinely grateful that Fox took a chance on him, considering his longstanding reputation as a less than reliable performer. “I think a lot of ’em were wondering if I was up to it and I was kind of wondering myself. It was like, ‘Gee, I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew here.’”
But instead of hating the long hours and the morning calls, Kinison has found himself invigorated by having a steady job. “I kind of needed this, I think,” he says. “I needed something to turn the nights back into the days.”
Image considerations aside, Kinison was getting plenty of clues that he needed to slow down. He was forced into rehab programs to deal with his substance abuse problems. His younger brother, Kevin, committed suicide in 1988; last summer his girlfriend was raped by his bodyguard while Kinison, allegedly passed out drunk, slept in the other room.
“Yeah, those were pretty sobering experiences,” Kinison said, quietly, his demeanor as far from his raging stage persona as it could be. “Those are things that can either destroy you or, if you survive them, make you stronger. Those are hard things for anyone to get through, especially people with the title of comedian.
“I’m just glad I made the transition from when I could have overdosed or when I could have fallen asleep at the wheel and run off a cliff or something. It’s good to have survived those years.
“I don’t hear anything screaming in here any more,” Kinison says, pointing to his heart. “I’m just happy to be here. I’m just happy to have the chance.”
“Charlie Hoover” airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on Fox.