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Title: Bill Hicks must be better represented somewhere else.
Review: ARIZONA BAY is my first exposure to the late comedian, and has enough comedy to convince me that any of his other albums is better.The comic momentum here runs out midway and the final Elvis impersonation is like every other Elvis impersonation, and I don't know why it's there. More bewildering is the music. Performers like Joe Frank have used incidental music extremely well as a backdrop to their monologues, while those like Babs Gonzales, the Beat poets and Frank Zappa have brought music into their storytelling. ARIZONA BAY's sonic wallpaper and scene shift music could have been worse than the sincere, smooth-jazz strummings. But once it's on this music stays on. Not only does it run uninterrupted for too long, it persists (loudly) over the next comedy routine. If it's intended to counterpoint Hicks's acid wit, its effect is to drown the humor out. Too loud for ambience, too present to be anything but distraction.
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