Rev. Du Rite (1981)

I found this one at 2nd Time Around in 1999, buried amongst the ninety-nine cent and twenty-nine cent albums that nobody seemed to want, and that they couldn't even give away. Their "comedy" section was buried among these unwanted slabs of wax. The cover drawing, I assume, is tied in with Marty Feldman's 1981 film In God We Tru$t.

Despie the rather abrupt splices in the opening, side one starts out promising, with familiar-sounding bits about neighborhood girls, the hillbilly calling cadence, and his father with the X-ray vision. But when it gets to the title track, the speed of the tape mastering is way out of hand, and too fast-sounding (wasn't someone monitioring this?). The same thing happens with the closer, "Boobs", a rather experimental courtroom-drama bit.

Sandwiched between those two is a great bit about watching dogs get stuck end-to-end, and watching circus elephants "letting it all hang out". Following that is a bit of a guy who needs to go to the pay-toilet, but doesn't have a nickel, and trying to beg one from a kid, and then the kid's dad, but then it's too late!!!

Side two sounds like it's pretty much from one set, but very muffled-sounding all the way through. There's no energy in any of the bits, which seem to not go anywhere, save for the last bit (shades of Lenny Bruce), about a jealous guy interrogating his wife about a mysterious book of matches, the toilet seat being left up, and at the end tells her that she can leave if she doesn't like it: "Wait, where are you going? You can't leave!". Cuts abruptly to audience clapping, and a fast fade-out.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that this album won the Grammy that year for Best Comedy Album. I really don't see how!

Supernigger (1983)

The worst. The absolute worst. This one was obviously slapped together to cash in on the release of Superman III , hence the cover art and the title (how'd they get away with that one, anyway? They should have known he'd sworn off using that word!). I only have the cassette of this (bought at 2nd Time Around), with just the back-cover drawing of Richard as a pimp, touching down in a big ol' white pimp-wagon Caddy.

This one has cuts from Craps (After Hours) and what seems like bits from Black Ben The Blacksmith and The Wizard Of Comedy. The main offender is the editing at the end of the title cut; just when the excited white person happily cries out "It's Super Nigger!", the recording cuts off into laughs, and then onto the next segment.

Nothing "new" or interesting on this one, no rhyme or reason, just a slab of wax to cash in on with.

Richard Pryor Live! (1983)

I found this one, still sealed, at Golden Oldies in October of 2010. This was the final Laff release, and--oddly enough--completes my collection. By the cover graphics, it's trying to look like an official release (shades of Here And Now), but the cover drawing of Richard keeps it in the amateur section.

This one is a bizarre cross between repackage and ripoff. The first half of each album side contains material from previous albums, while at the same time, presenting material from a release also titled Richard Pryor Live! , an album on the exploito label Phoenix 10. I've seen it around, with a poorly-processed head shot of Richard on the front cover, and was also released as a picture disc.

Side one kicks of with "Black Ben The Blacksmith/Prison Play" (uh-gain!), only this time, the tape source sounds really flat here. The remaining eleven minutes come from the other Live! album, coming from the Troubadour. Richard's fire-and-brimstone preacher is here, with the ever-hilarious tale about eatin' a sammich "in the year nineteen-twunny-naaaaahhnnn!" (though there is a funny variation where the preacher is trying to hit on one of the ladies who comes up to be healed!). There's also a good bit about a lineup at the police station, with a car thief who has every excuse in the book about why he was caught stealing a car. The last bits are about war movies, and movie stars going to the bathroom. No differences in these performances.

Side two consists mostly of side two from The Wizard Of Comedy, all the way up through "Country & Western Show". The last seven minutes are from P.J.'s, and here's where it gets weird---the bits pick up just where we left them on side one! He tells of the game about "who can poo-poo in their pants the most", but then it goes into the same bits from before about movies stars in the bathroom, war movies, and then the submarine routine. Even though it's two different recordings from two different venues, it's jarring to hear the same routines almost back to back.

This was Laff's final Richard Pryor release, and it's not too hard to see why. Two years later, the label itself would be history.

Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966-1974) [2005]

I came across this one by accident at Circuit City in November of 2005, and I didn't even know it was out. I picked it up and was amazed that not only did it consist of a lot of early stuff, but was endorsed by Richard himself. The 2-CD set went to the cash-register with me.

It's divided into two distinct halves: the early, experimental years of 1966-68, and the "street humor" years of 1971-74, where he finally sheds off his old skin and became the Richard Pryor we all knew and loved.

Disc One opens with Richard at the hungry i in San Francisco, sounding like any ordinary standup comedian of the times, relating safe, sanitized tales of growing up in Peoria, but the audience seems to be merely tolerating him. Then the set veers between sets recorded at P.J.'s and the Troubadour, but this time in vastly sound-improved and unedited routines that came from some of the Laff albums. And then some of them were different versions altogether, making them a real treat. It was great to hear "Hank's Place" unedited, which is a revelation; he gets a major round of applause when he does his imitation of Black Irma, which was well-deserved. Plus, his classic fire-and-brimstone preacher bit, and the old-timer relating tales whilst forgetting directions to Highway 16.

Disc Two consists mostly of Craps (After Hours) , which was a little disappointing (I would have preferred more unreleased stuff), but the sound is a lot cleaner here, and a major improvement, even for something that was poorly recorded to begin with. Then it has the "Wattstax" monolouge, uncut and unedited, which has some great bits throughout it. My favorite part is an alternate version of "Super Nigger", especially the part where Supe takes his sweet time choosing what kind of crime-fighting gear he's going to wear that day while disaster is happening.

The real piece of treasure for me was "Street Corner Wino" (recorded at The Comedy STore in 1973), in which the street wino has a conversation with one of the local hoods, who tells him the story of how he robbed and beat up a white farmer guy looking for some easy tail in the alley. It's so outrageously hilarious that it's easily the funniest thing Richard ever laid down on tape. I won't give away any of the story here...you have to hear it to believe it.

On December 1st, I e-mailed Richard, wishing him a happy birthday, telling him about the new CD, and thanking him for all of the great laughs I had listening to his albums and watching his movies over the last 25 years. I like to think that he got it and read it, but I guess I'll never know. He left us nine days later.

Fonzarelli The Great

April or so of 1984, Bryant Elementary School, in the second grade. We had an assembly in the gymnasium that afternoon. We perked up a bit when we heard it was going to be a "magic" show, so that was something to look forward to.

After a few words from the principal, the magician came on. No corny tux or top hat or anything on this guy, just a simple suit, and he did the usual tricks for us, which was interesting.

The one thing that I remember happening was that he blew up a couple of those long, tube-like balloons, and put them up to his mouth: "Mick Jagger"' he said, and then sang, "Gonna miss you...".

Hilarious. Then, he challenged someone to come up onto the stage and take part in a balloon "sword" duel. My best friend at the time, Mitchell Campbell, got up out of the audience and was on stage. The magician handed him the "sword" and asked, "Do you have any last words?". Mitchell answered, "Your mama!". Big laugh from the crowd. They did a sword-fight routine for a while, which was hilarious.

Anyway, it was a great show, and before we knew it, it was over, and we were back in class, talking and laughing about the show. Then the teacher told us all who it was: she said the name Henry Winkler, and all of a sudden I realized that that was The Fonz who had given the magic show! We didn't recognize him without the leather jacket, and I should have recognized him from the movie Night Shift, which was on cable TV quite regularly, but didn't.

He pulled a really big one on us with that one!

He would have been 20 today

Just into the summer of 1990, at my friend James' house, the mama kitty there, Taboo, had just given birth to a litter of kittens in his closet. This was not the first time a cat had had kittens not far from him; a few years before that, one cat had had her kittens in his very bed, with the slimy newborn baby kittens squirming about at his feet, which woke him up!

Among the kittens was a male cat, black with salt-and-pepper stripes all over his body, and a diamond shape over his shoulderblades. He was James' favorite, and would sleep with him at night when the kitten got a little older. When it came time to find the kittens a new home, I was also taken with the little striped one, so I took him home, and named him Alvin.

And that's where he stayed with us for the rest of his life. As he grew older, he really hated being picked up and held; he'd growl at you when you did it, and then hiss when he wasn't let go soon enough. But he loved chicken, and was always there when some fresh, hot fried chicken was brought home from the grocery store, or out of the deep fryer. He could never get enough of that.

He also loved biscuits. Whether they came out of the oven, or from the store, he ate 'em up. We found that out once when we had left some biscuits on the kitchen table overnight, a a few of them had been knocked over onto the floor, and had some little bites missing from them. We never had any mice in the house when he was there, but he always seemed to be on patrol for them, poised not far from the rear bedroom door, waiting for something to scurry by.

He wasn't a mere pet, but really my little buddy, always there when I needed him, or when I wanted to pet or play with him...when he was in the mood, that is.

The years went by, and all of a sudden he was celebrating his fifteenth birthday. I knew he wasn't going to be around forever, but looking back at all the things that had happened in those intervening years, it was like he had. But by then, he was getting skinny, wandering in circles around the house and was drinking and peeing excessively...but he still loved his chicken!

A futile trip to the vet showed that he was shutting down internally, little by little, and he wasn't going to be around much longer. It wasn't easy news; I knew it was so as I laid him on the steel examination table, but I knew I'd feel better that I tried to save him in the end.

On July 20th, the next day, after noon had passed, Alvin quietly left us. After I got home from work, I had to dig a hole in the backyard and put my little buddy in the ground. It was the hardest thing I had ever had to do at that point. It was hard to get on with things for a while, because you always expected him to come around the corner any minute, and then you realized he wasn't.

Happy 20th birthday to Alvin. We still miss you.

Don't touch that dial!

What I really miss are the local TV channels that were independently run. A lot of them in and around town have long since been bought and sold by the movie studios that turned them into little networks of their own. Eventually, a lot of those ended up being resounding failures, and are no longer in existence, with just bare little skeletons of what once was left on the old channel number.

But for a long time, a typical day on one of the channels was pure heaven. In fact, KSTW-11 in Tacoma was a longtime favorite. In the mornings there would be your typical cartoon shows, some reruns after those, a few game shows; then, The One O'Clock Movie, another two hours of cartoons, three hours of sitcoms, the 8 O'Clock movie, the local news, and then it was off to bed!

They had some great shows on that channel in the afternoon. As a pre-schooler, in the afternoon, I would see Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? followed by The Munsters and All In The Family. Later on, I'd see What's Happening!!!, WKRP In Cincinnati, Sanford And Son, Taxi, and M*A*S*H before the movie came on. After the 10 O'Clock News was Barney Miller and Benny Hill, but those were on a little too late for me.

Forget TV Land, this channel had it all! Eventually, it was bought by Viacom to become the UPI Network. KTZZ (which used to have cool cartoons like Heathcliff and Inspector Gadget and local shows like The Spud Goodman Show) became the WB. The less said, the better. KCPQ-13 became the local FOX network, but they somehow always stayed true to what they once were, and always kept the local news at 10 P.M.

Another favorite channel back then was WTBS, shortly to drop the "W". That was another great channel that showed great cartoons and reruns, plus a lot of obscure and long-forgotten movies; the first place I would see some of my favorites, and for some, the only time I ever would. That's where I first saw Willard and its sequel, Ben, not to mention Frogs and Devil Dog: The Hound Of Hell. Over time, the movies and reruns they showed got a lot more tame and unimaginitive, and TBS eventually became just another pay-TV channel. Like a lot of them did, including the USA Network, which once showed Night Flight and USA Up All Night, with loads of cheesy, no-budget sex-comedy movies.

Small wonder why TV has long since lost its charm for me.

K-Tel Hell

One obscure little aspect of music lying around the house were some of those album collections of the hit songs of the day, compiled and packaged and even hawked on TV by your friends at K-Tel and Ronco. We had a half-dozen or so of those things, and sometimes they were played all the way through, or just a few select cuts were played with any regularity.

Some of the album covers were entertaining or funny, sometimes (in the case of one album) with a sticker promising KC and Andy Gibb POSTERS!--INSIDE!.

Some songs were great, some were utter garbage, and some were just plain embarrassing (and I'm speaking of the turn of the '70s into the '80s). Like, for every good song by Elton John or Linda Ronstadt, there would be cuts by KC and the Sunshine Band or Rick Dees. I seem to remember the first time hearing Black Sabbath anywhere was from a collection called Power Rock, and sure enough, there was "Paranoid" on it.

As the years went on, the song selection on these records could be interesting. One was called Rock 80, with new cuts by Cheap Trick, the Ramones, The Pretenders, Gary Numan and others. There was another called Radio Active, with new hits by the Police, the Who, Genesis and others of the new MTV era.

There were a few compilations with songs that were just fun to listen to, mostly from the Ronco label, some of them even endorsed by Don Kirshner himself (...wow!). I began to hear songs like Dr. Hook's "The Cover Of The Rolling Stone" and "Wildwood Weed" by Jim Stafford, each containing references that I was way too young to understand, but just hearing the voices on the records was hilarious enough. Thanks to this kind of upbringing, I knew about Cheech & Chong and Hudson & Landry as much as I did about Ernie & Bert!

One favorite of my sister's was Don Kirshner presents FUN ROCK, which featured mostly a lot of top-40 hits from the bubblegum period of the early '70s, but she liked it a lot. It had stuff from Ray Stevens, Sam The Sham, the Archies, the Lemon Pipers, and the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Pure corn, in retrospect, but it grew on me, and it was fine enough for someone who wasn't even in school yet.

One day, my sister was at school, but the record player was on that morning, and I recognized "Winchester Cathedral" from what I thought was FUN ROCK playing. When it ended, I knew that "Woolly Bully" was coming up next, right? No. It was another K-Tel album playing, one called Best of Britain, which I hadn't heard yet.

And what song came on after that...?

"I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE! AND I BRING YOU...!"

Holy shit! I though Satan himself was behind me in the living room, bellowing at me...but, no, it was Arthur Brown with the song "Fire", which frightened the life out of me, and then excited me. I had never heard such a frantic mix of menacing vocals and organ before, but I loved it as soon as it was over, and couldn't wait to hear it again. Later on, on the same album side, I got to hear cuts by the Kinks and the Zombies that would also make a strong impression on me.

But there was one song on another collection that never did, and one that I really, really hated. It was "Playground In My Mind" by Clint Holmes, with that nauseating chorus in the song that goes "My name is Michael, I got a nickel...". You know the rest (I sure wish I could forget it). I would literally leave the room whenever I heard the song playing.

So, for every good song, there was a really bad one.

But, the seed had been sown.

Night Flight

In late 1983 or so, we discovered another cool music-video show on the USA Network called Night Flight. It was a four-hour show that featured music videos, state-of-the-art/computer animation, clips from old and new movies, old and sometimes very obscure cartoons and film shorts, standup comedy routines, music-video countdowns, and classic and obscure music videos and concert films.

And, very often, this was typical of just one night's show. Sometimes, there'd be a sort of "theme" night; like, say, drugs. They would intertwine standup comedy routines about cocaine and smoking grass with an old silent-comedy film about the evils of doing cocaine (in the middle of one such film, they dubbed in the song "Footloose" when the main guys were shooting the stuff into their veins and dancing like madmen).

Another staple of the show was the 1936 classic "Reefer Madness", with always a short clip of it shown somewhere during the course of the show. That, and clips of W.C. Fields, The Three Stooges and very obscure Looney Tunes shorts were pasted in there as well (that's where I first saw the infamous clip of Porky Pig slamming his thumb with a hammer and stammering "Son of a b-b-bi-bi-bi!"). Another theme was the latest in clay animation, where they showed John Fogerty's "Vanz Kant Danz", Frank Zappa's "Inca Roads", a clip from Fantasia, and other arty new-wave videos with the latest in animation and claymation.

In a way, "Night Flight" was what MTV should have been. Music, plus comedy and cartoons and wacky films and God knows what else that would fit into the pot. A lot of people remember the show as a sort of "MTV for stoners", which wouldn't be far from the truth.

The music videos were always great. One night, they had a "Tribute To Pink Floyd", showing some new videos from The Final Cut, which I had never seen anywhere else, and then capped it off with a couple of segments from Live At Pompeii, which I had never even knew about. I remember being totally blown away by that. Just the four guys, playing in an ancient, empty Roman amphitheater. Whoaaa...!

Another night, they showed clips from a Black Sabbath concert from 1978, and another night, recent clips from a Ten Years After reunion concert at the Marquee in 1983, which was bitchin'. They would also show films such as The Doors Are Open and the Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil.

Another thing on the show that made me a devout fan were the music videos from the German music show Beat Club , primarily from 1967 to about 1973; some in black-and-white, some in color, and some of them in lysergic mind-melting color. Knowing a lot about music from that era, even back then, it was amazing to see videos from bands I knew about, but never saw in action. A handful I remember seeing were by Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Canned Heat, Yes, the Who, the Small Faces (before I knew who they were), very young Bee Gees, and "This Wheel's On Fire" by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity. I've been a fan and collector of footage from that show ever since.

I think this was more than half the reason we got this thing called a Video Cassette Recorder in mid-1984, in order to record a bunch of stuff from Night Flight. After all, that's among some of the earliest stuff we recorded on it. We caught a cool Frank Zappa special that he had compiled especially for the show in 1987. Still have that on tape, as well as some other parts of shows we taped in the mid-'80s.

Like all great things, it continued over the years, but grew shorter and shorter and less interesting as time went on. I think they ran out of cool stuff to show, or out of ideas, and the show wasn't as interesting as it once was. The last time I remember seeing the show anywhere was New Year's Eve of 1995, on a local channel that was carrying the sad remains of it, but at least with two gems to behold: a short film called "Suspicious Circumstances", and the classic Lenny Bruce animated short "Thank You Mask Man".

Pop Clips (1980)

Back in 1980, when I was four, we were the only ones on the block with a new thing called Cable TV. A lot of the neighbors would want to come over to watch TV shows they couldn't get anywhere else, or movies, or just see things with better reception than at home. One of the cable channels was called Nickelodeon, which I frequently tuned into in the mornings, as they had a two-hour sort of poor man's Sesame Street type of show, called Pinwheel.

Later on in the week or maybe on the weekend, at around 9:30 PM, there was a music-video show called Pop Clips, and Dad used to let me stay up to watch it with him. My sister would either be in her room, or at a friend's house overnight, but my Dad and I would see videos from the newer bands of the day, or old favorites still going strong.

Among the videos I remember seeing were "Love Stinks" by the J. Geils Band, "Do You Remember Rock & Roll Radio?" by the Ramones, "Play The Game" by Queen, "Fish Heads" by Barnes & Barnes, plus cuts by newer bands like Cheap Trick, the Police, the Knack and the Shoes. One particular favorite was "One Step Beyond" by a nutty bunch of guys called Madness, with a bunch of funny-looking guys doing all kinds of hilarious dances throughout the song. We would just crack up watching this one! I would get to brag to my sister the next morning about all the cool videos I got to see.

I don't remember how long the show was on, but it was interesting and fun to watch, and--yes--it was the precursor to MTV. One other thing that amazed me about the show later was finding out that it was created by Mike Nesmith of The Monkees.

After the show was over, as was the channel's broadcasting day, there was a clip of a mime-type character would wave goodbye and then turn out a light, with the Nickelodeon logo across the bottom of the screen. I didn't know what a nickelodeon was at that time, so I assumed that it was the name of the guy onscreen, and maybe that he was the channel's mascot.