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Bill Hicks Planned to Tour With One of the Biggest ’90s Rock Bands Before Tragedy Struck

The stand-up legend’s cancer diagnosis prevented what was sure to be a memorable collaboration

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On April 6, 1993, a relatively unknown rock band called Tool released its first full-length studio album, Undertow. Those of you who owned a physical copy of the record at some point may have noticed that one of the people listed as an inspiration in the liner notes was Bill Hicks. This is because the band’s lead singer, Maynard James Keenan, spent a lot of time listening to Hicks’s stand-up recordings while he was on the road the previous summer. “We sent him copies of the album,” Keenan recalled in his 2016 biography, A Perfect Union of Contrary Things. “He wrote back and thanked us for the music. I called him and pointed out that we’d mentioned him in the liner notes. He hadn’t noticed.”

The two kept in touch from there, and by the summer of 1993, they were discussing the possibility of collaborating. They were both excited about the idea, but weren’t sure what of the execution. Hicks opening for Tool on tour was one suggestion; having him perform stand-up in between songs was another thought. Then came the issue of how Tool’s audience would react to sitting through a comedian’s set, complimentary as they thought Hicks’s in-your-face material would be to the music. “We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we’d calm down a bunch of skinheads to listen to jokes,” Keenan said.

In August of that year, Tool reached the final stop on the Undertow tour, in Irwindale, California. They decided that it would be an ideal time to give their collaboration with Hicks a little test run and invited the comedian to join them on stage. Hicks introduced the band at that concert, and in doing so, told the crowd that he’d lost one of his contact lenses in the mosh pit. Despite their eagerness to see Tool, the fans in attendance obediently knelt down to help look for the missing lens.

Hicks’s enthusiasm for working with Tool waned in the winter of 1993, and is when Keenan sensed something was off. When the singer told Hicks that they had a tour coming up the following February and that he should come along, Hicks was hesitant to commit, even though he’d embraced the prospect just a few months earlier. Keenan would soon learn that this sudden shift in Hicks’s attitude was a result of his being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The pair continued to talk after that, and Hicks told Keenan, “Well, maybe if I can beat the unbeatable cancer, we can still do this show.” 

Unfortunately, that didn’t end up being the case, and Hicks succumbed to the disease the same month Tool was planning to go on tour with him. They later dedicated their 1996 album, Ænima, to Hicks, and sampled his voice on the song “Third Eye.” Take a listen below.

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