Oops! Rock icon Billy Idol, 70, admitted he accidentally pissed off legendary ’80s comedian Sam Kinison, and his guitarist paid the price!
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“I was friends with Sam Kinison,” Idol told Bill Maher on his Club Random Podcast. “So we went [to Las Vegas] to do a show with him… he had his rock band.” It was all light-hearted and fun at first, but things took a turn when Idol got cozy with the stand-up pro’s girlfriend.
“He had these two twins [Sabrina and Malika Souiri]… he ended up marrying one of them… but he was doing [his cover of] ‘Wild Thing’ and I got in between these two girls that he always had dressed up as Las Vegas showgirls,” Idol recalled.
“I was just kind of playing around because it’s not my song, you know, but he got upset and he punched my guitarist,” he laughed. “My guitarist was on the stage and he punched him.”
While Idol didn’t claim to retaliate, he did leave the venue and skip the second show of the night that he planned to attend. “We said f–k it.’ We even tried to leave Vegas,” Idol remembered. “Then we couldn’t leave because there wasn’t a plane… So we saw Frank Sinatra instead of doing the show with Sam, but it was fantastic because I wouldn’t have seen Frank Sinatra otherwise.”
It’s unclear whether the night tainted Idol’s friendship with Kinison, but Idol did appear in the celebrity-filled music video for Kinison’s infamous cover of The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” in 1989.
What Happened to Sam Kinison?
Kinison rose to fame in the mid-1980s for his high-energy stand-up style chock full of screaming and controversy. After appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live drew attention, his got a 1986 special on HBO. He went on to appear in films like Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield, and even got a GRAMMY Award nomination for his comedy album Have You Seen Me Lately? in 1988.
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Kinison died on April 10, 1992, at the age of 38 following a head-on car crash near Needles, California while driving to a stand-up performance in Nevada. According to reports, his Pontiac Trans Am was struck by a pickup truck driven by a 17-year-old who was intoxicated. Kinison’s wife, Malika Souiri, survived the crash with minor injuries.