Listen to What Bill Hibbler Has To Say When He Answered the Heroes Question "When Was The Lowest Point In Your Life and How Did You Change Your Life Path To One Of Victory Over the Obstacles You Were Facing at That Time?"
Bill Hibbler: Well, I started out at 15. I was doing the guitar thing. What I saw then is in order to do my job; I had to get backstage. I had to get through security. It’s kind of like a salesman that has to get past the secretary or the receptionist. You know… the gatekeepers. It was really kind of similar.
I would walk up at first and I would try to explain, “Well, I’m here and I’ve got these guitars.”
A lot of times I was asked by the band to be there, but somebody would mess up. My name wouldn’t be on the guest list. The security guys could care less. It was like, “Whatever. Your name is not on the list.”
So I observed that that wasn’t working. I was just going up trying to explain my situation. Going to all these shows, I would watch the stage door. I would see a road manager or someone come along and sometimes these people would have their backstage pass on and sometimes they wouldn’t.
I saw many people without a pass. Some guy with a briefcase covered in backstage passes from other shows would come walking in and he wouldn’t stop and try to explain. He would just walk in the door like he owns the place. It’s his production. He belongs there.
Those people were usually British. If the security guard questioned them, they were just kind of like, “What are you talking about?” They just looked at them like, “Of course I belong here.” I wasn’t consciously aware of it but I began to model those people. I went out and got my briefcase and I covered it with stickers. I didn’t have a bunch of backstage passes yet so I covered it with guitar manufacturer’s stickers.
I was a good mimic. I could do the British accent as well as the Brits could. That became the deal. I remember the first time I tried it. I just walked up and walked in the door.
Nobody asked me anything. If they would ask, it was, “Hey. Hello. Where do you think you’re going?”
I would just say “I’m going to the dressing room.” “Well, where’s your pass?” “I don’t know. I left it on the bus”, and I would just keep walking and they would sort of shrug and say, “Okay,” and let me go. I’ve even had arguments with them. It was like, “Alright mate.
I’m going to leave. When the band comes and they’re looking for their guitars, then you tell them that you didn’t let the guitars come in because I didn’t have a pass, alright?” Then you start to walk away and they’re like, “Oh, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Go ahead, go inside. You’re okay. That was my early experience with learning to model other people.
However, that was not the lowest point in my life. That’s how I began to overcome obstacles.
What happened when I went backstage to those shows is I saw this guy, the road manager. I was fascinated. He’s like the manager of the band on tour. He’s running the show. That’s what I wanted to be, but, I had no idea how to do that. There was no internet or anything then. It was hard to find any kind of role models.
I realized what I really needed to be doing is working with local bands and just getting more experience and working my way up. I was afraid to do that. I dropped out of college after six weeks. I was an accounting major. That would have been a horrible mistake.
I was managing a stereo store and I was good at it. I had accumulated a lot of stuff. I had two big stereos and I had a Betamax, which was a big deal then, but I wasn’t making a lot of money.
So I couldn’t do that and pay my bills and keep all my stuff. So, what happened is, and I don’t want to go through the whole story but I ended up with a really nasty drug habit. This was late seventies up to about 1980. I’d discovered cocaine.
That just knocked me on my butt. I ended up pawning everything I owned.
It was all gone. I used to have like seven or eight vintage guitars, gone. Stereos all that stuff gone. I had this huge stack of pawn slips. That was all I had left. I came to the point where I had been served an eviction notice from my apartment. The power was turned off. I was about to be homeless.
A friend of mine that was a drummer in a band came by. I’d worked for his band when I was in high school. He offered me a job going on the road with his new band. Up until that point, I wouldn’t have taken it. I would have wanted to but I couldn’t afford to do that.
So, I had to learn the hard way, and I had nothing to lose at this point.
I just had my clothes. I put some things in storage and I eventually lost that because I couldn’t pay the storage bill, but I became willing. That was the key, becoming willing.
I didn’t have to worry about cocaine right then because if you don’t have any money, you don’t have any cocaine.
That was definitely the lowest point. I was physically in bad shape. I had lost everything. I was really beaten down, but suddenly an opportunity presented itself. Within probably a year of that happening, I was road managing Humble Pie.
I had met the guys when I was doing the guitar thing before. I just became fearless. I went to every show and I just made myself known. I didn’t really know exactly what I was doing but I was just everywhere. So I just increased the odds.
You could listen to the whole story and say, “Well, I was in the right place at the right time.”
It was like I was everywhere and I was willing to do whatever it took. Whatever I needed to do, “Okay, fine.”
I ended up doing that and basically living out a dream. Now the alcohol and drug thing continued to interfere, especially alcohol which I wasn’t drinking before then. I discovered alcohol. It took me until 1989 to finally get sober. I discovered AA. I discovered that there was a group of people that had been there.
Again, I was just learning from their experience. I haven’t had a drink or done any drugs since then, 1989.
Again, that was when I discovered that you can’t always do it yourself. There’s strength in numbers. It wasn’t people preaching to you “Don’t drink.” It was just people saying, “Well, this is what I did.”
I’ve tried to teach people to model what’s worked for me. I don’t want to preach to people what to do. I am just, “Here’s my experience.”