On last week’s episode of Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, rock legend Billy Idol shared a story about his old friend, Sam Kinison, punching his guitarist at a live show. According to Idol, he was hanging out onstage with Kinison when the incident occurred. At one point, the singer was standing between two women Kinison had with him, who were dressed like Las Vegas showgirls, and as he puts it, he was “playing around” with them. What that entailed, he didn’t make clear, but it was enough to prompt Kinison to hit somebody.
This isn’t the first time Idol’s told the story; he actually included it in his 2014 autobiography, Dancing With Myself, and threw in some additional details. As Idol explains, Kinison was performing at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, and Idol and his band were supporting him as he did his rendition of “Wild Thing” (Idol had appeared in the music video in 1988). For his part, Idol said that he wasn’t doing anything “particularly suggestive” with the girls in question, but Kinison, being “paranoid and jealous,” suspected that he was, and lost his cool. Kinison supposedly wasn’t able to get to Idol for some reason, so he went after his guitarist, Mark Younger-Smith, who was playing right next to him, instead.
The situation was also previously addressed by Sabrina Stephan, who was one of the girls Idol was standing between that night. In a 2007 interview with Las Vegas Weekly, Stephan said, “Sam wanted to pop Billy Idol in the mouth because he groped my sister onstage. Sam saw it, and he flew off the handle. Billy somehow got offstage and disappeared.” In her version, the punch happened at a later show. “Billy’s sidekick didn’t know what happened, and, you know, Billy was gone,” Stephan continued. “When this sidekick got onstage, Sam walked over to him and popped the sidekick in the mouth. It was like, ‘Why did you do that? It wasn’t him!’ ‘I don’t care; I just had to hit somebody!’ Literally cold-cocked him. We rewound the tape and kept watching it and watching it.”
Kinison’s brother, Bill, shared his own recollection of things in that same article, saying, “We had Sabrina and Malika [Souiri, Sam’s future wife] out there, and as [Idol] walked out, he—I don’t know how to put this—sticked his fingers in both of them. Soon as the gig was over, Billy took right off.” From there, Sam apparently told his brother, “Second show, I’m going to beat his ass onstage.” Idol didn’t show up, but from what Bill remembered, an associate of his named Art did. “Sam leans over to Art and goes, ‘Where’s Billy at? When you see him, give him this.’ Right on beat, he just nails him. Just hits him right in the mouth. Art goes down, and Sam turns around, never missing a beat, ‘Wild Thing!’ The crowd is going nuts because they’ve just seen Sam deck a guy, and he’s also doing ‘Wild Thing.’”
At the end of the day, it’s still a little unclear who Kinison targeted and why, but the one thing everyone agrees on is that somebody who had something to do with Idol got knocked out by Kinison that night.
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