Arizona Bay Extended

The premise holding this set together is simple spite: an earthquake drops California into the Pacific Ocean, wiping out Los Angeles and leaving the coastline at Arizona Bay. Between the apocalyptic daydreams, Bill Hicks takes aim at consumer culture, urging anyone working in advertising or marketing to end their lives on the spot.

The performance was recorded at the Laff Stop in Austin, Texas, in late 1992, during a run where Hicks was beginning to suffer from undiagnosed pancreatic cancer. After the shows, he and producer Kevin Booth spent months in an Austin studio recording ambient guitar and synth cues to intercut with the comedy. When Rykodisc released that version posthumously in 1997, three years after Hicks died at age 32, critics and listeners were divided over whether the soundtrack added atmosphere or simply got in the way.

Comedy Dynamics put out this unadorned release in 2015, removing the musical score entirely and expanding the set to over an hour. The restored audio adds back routines cut from the original album, including an eight-minute crowd interaction with an older patron named Charlie Hodge, rants against anti-smoking restrictions, and riffs on Basic Instinct alongside Hicks’s regular detours into religion and the Gulf War.