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Richard Pryor, Timothy Leary, Beach Boys and more talk psychedelia on Canadian TV, 1968


Canadian DJs Fred Latremouille and Red Robinson on the ‘Let’s Go’ set, 1964 (via Tom Hawthorn)

The CBC television series Let’s Go, which grew out of a segment on Alex Trebek’s Music Hop, brought the music of the Sixties into Canadian houses. Along with US and UK imports—Jimi Hendrix, the Yardbirds, Country Joe & the Fish, Eric Burdon and the Animals, et al.—Let’s Go promoted Canadian acts such as the Poppy Family and the Guess Who.

Apart from a sitar performance of “Downtown,” there is hardly any music in this special episode from 1968, a report on the effects of the “psychedelic revolution” on the Vancouver scene. The camera crew talks to local hippies and peeks inside a head shop and a coffeehouse, but most of the broadcast consists of celebrities arguing for or against acid rock and its cultural appurtenances. Timothy Leary, sitting in a field, pleads the case for consciousness change; Frank Sinatra Jr., interviewed on the soundstage, rails against the heads for making the Kingston Trio uncool. The Everly Brothers and Ray Charles also weigh in on the LSD question, and Al Jardine, Mike Love and the Maharishi put in a word for TM.
 

 
The show’s editor must have been a fan of “Tutti Frutti,” because this episode serves up a cold plate of revenge from its author. At 16:32, a clip of Little Richard is expertly deployed, interrupting Pat Boone’s windy sermon on the destructive power of Beatles and Stones lyrics and flushing the crooner’s sorry ass down one of those single-gender toilets of which he is so fond:

Oh, I think it’s great. I love it. I’m talking about the music. I think it’s fantastic. Because I think a person is expressing what he feels. He’s not going by anything that is written on paper. This man is playing, he’s not playing just for money, he’s playing because his soul within is driving him to push, to let his feelings go out in music, and I believe that it’s one of the greatest things that ever happened to the field of entertainment—which, psychedelic music is rhythm and blues, of course.

Naturally, my favorite philosopher, Richard Pryor, seems to know more than all the rest of the showfolk combined. Let his wisdom unfold your mind like a thousand-petaled lotus.

Watch it, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.18.2018
09:41 am
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‘The Richard Pryor Show’: All four episodes of the short-lived series are online
09.24.2015
11:12 am
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Richard Pryor was famously ill-adapted to “popular” audiences. For example, he was originally slated to play Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles, but no studio would fund the film with him in the role, fearing his drug habits, erratic behavior and reputation would sink the film. Mel Brooks actually fought for Pryor, but admitted he understood studio hesitation when Pryor casually offered him a bump during a meeting (Brooks response? “Never before dinner, thanks.”). Regardless, Pryor’s acting and character work was always superb and inspired, as you can see from The Richard Pryor Show, which sadly flopped after just four episodes in 1977.

It’s an odd departure for Pryor of course—parodies and lighter sketches, but the show is funny, and slyly references his reputation from time to time. At the beginning of the third episode, Pryor’s “monologue” is “interrupted,” by an unseen suit who dubs him over with “network-approved” material, while Pryor gesticulates furiously on mute.There are stand-up segments of course, and interestingly, the live audience appears to be mostly black. The show was toast before it had a chance of course, running opposite ABC’s Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days during “family hour” on Tuesdays, but it remains a big part of TV history, making TV Guide’s 2013 “Cancelled Too Soon” list.

Episodes two, three and four.
 

 
Via Network Awesome

Posted by Amber Frost
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09.24.2015
11:12 am
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Richard Pryor’s long-forgotten Saturday morning kids’ show, ‘Pryor’s Place’
02.18.2015
06:31 pm
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Whenever I tell someone that notably foul-mouthed druggy comedian Richard Pryor had a kids’ show in the mid-80s on CBS, the reaction is invariably something along the lines of “No way. Get the fuck out of here!”

But it’s true, he did, even if the Internet has fewer than 9000 references to it, it really happened. Richard motherfucking Pryor had a kids’ show. Pryor’s Place was a sort of an edgier version (rip off?) of Sesame Street. Pryor played himself, and a number of other roles—including a Rastafarian street musician (with a totally shit Jamaican accent) and a return of Mudbone, his ancient wino sage character—along with child actors and puppets. The deliriously weird program was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft—who else—written mostly by Paul Mooney and had theme music by Ray Parker Jr., who was also in the opening credits.

“(Whoa-oh-oh) Let’s get on over to Pryor’s Place (Whoa-oh-oh) We’re gonna party, so don’t be late. We’ve got friends who live in the street The craziest people you’ll ever meet on Pryor’s Place! (Whoa-oh-OOOH) Pryor’s Place!”

Gonna party at Pryor’s Place, eh Ray? I don’t think he thought that one all the way through…
 

 
Pryor being Pryor, the show did try to tackle issues somewhat heavier than Sesame Street would, such as racism, shoplifting, adoption, bullying and so forth. Thirteen episodes were produced in total, and despite leery opposition to Richard motherfucking Pryor hosting children’s entertainment by some CBS affiliates in the deep South, the show aired in repeats until mid-1985.

There were tons of celebrity cameos in Pryor’s Place, from the likes of Marla Gibbs. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Scatman Crothers, Sammy Davis Jr., Kim “Tootie” Fields, Shirley Hemphill, Pat Morita, William (Blacula, King of Cartoons) Marshall, Willie Nelson, John Ritter, Rip Taylor, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams and Henry Winkler.

Below, a complete episode of Pryor’s Place from 1984:

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.18.2015
06:31 pm
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Richard Pryor’s ‘Dynamite Chicken’ is a raunchy, NSFW time capsule of the hippie era


 
Sorting out who is and who isn’t in the 1971 “comedy” movie Dynamite Chicken, written and directed by Ernest Pintoff, is no easy matter. The montage-heavy movie relies so much on found footage that it’s accurate to say that John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X, Humphrey Bogart, and Richard Nixon “appear” in the movie even if they were scarcely aware of it or, in some cases, were long since deceased at the time. Not to put too fine a point on it, the makers of the movie were verging pretty close to fraud here.

Richard Pryor they definitely had, as well as a lot of countercultural figures like Paul Krassner, Tuli Kupferberg, Joan Baez, Sha-Na-Na, Peter Max, and a comedy troupe called Ace Trucking Co. that featured a young Fred Willard. The movie’s a bit like Kentucky Fried Movie, only far more political in intent; it’s chock-a-block with skits, snippets of musical performance, political debate, a strip-tease or two, and whatever else popped into the noggins of the filmmakers at the time. There’s tons of quick-cutting montage of newspaper clippings and just a ton of random footage.
 

 
The full title,  “Dynamite Chicken: A Contemporary Probe and Commentary of the Mores and Maladies of Our Age … with Schtick, Bits, Pieces, Girls, Some Hamburger, a Little Hair, a Lady, Some Fellas, Some Religious Stuff, and a Lot of Other Things,” is an accurate reflection of what the movie is like. The emphasis here is squarely on free expression; the movie starts with a scroll explaining, in a way we today associate more with Lenny Bruce, that Richard Pryor had been witnessed “in the late ‘60’s” by a policewoman saying the words “bullshit, shit, motherfucker, penis, asshole” during a public performance. The distance between “free expression” and “annoying the audience for the sake of it” is pretty small, and in addition to some salubrious footage of women in various states of disrobe, we also get a pointless and somewhat sickening exegesis of a comic book about slicing women in two with a buzzsaw. Early on, I had been thinking that Chicken Dynamite is an almost perfect cinematic equivalent of SCREW Magazine, when who should materialize on the screen but Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley themselves.

Andy Warhol was one of the few luminaries who apparently did consent to be filmed, for a short sequence in which Ondine reads aloud from Warhol’s book a: A Novel while Warhol looks on. John and Yoko weren’t involved; their bit is just a statement about peace from the Montreal Bed-In a couple years earlier. The link to National Lampoon, mostly a spiritual one, is made explicit with a clip of Michael O’Donoghue, then one of the chief writers at the magazine, in a spoof of a cigarette commercial. There’s a bit towards the end in which Ron Carey (known to me primarily as a bit player on Barney Miller) dresses up as a priest and does some soft-shoe in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Ave., scored to Lionel Goldbart’s “God Loves Rock and Roll” that is pretty delightful.

The footage with Pryor was shot outdoors in a single day; Pryor riffs on a bunch of raunchy material while messing with a basketball somewhere in the projects. At this point in Pryor’s career, the similarities with Dave Chappelle were (in hindsight) particularly strong. After Pryor became a big movie star in the early 1980s, he apparently became annoyed with his association with Chicken Dynamite, as he successfully sued to bar “the distributors of the film ... from emphasizing his role in the film,” according to an issue of Jet from December 1982.
 

 
In the end, Chicken Dynamite was probably a little bit dated even when it came out. It’s a movie made by people who are waaaaay too “serious” to be funny, for the most part. It’s the kind of movie that even if you are “enjoying” it, you might choose to turn it off before reach the end of its 75-minute running time, just because it wears you out. Still, some parts are pretty entertaining, and it’s worth a look for those who missed the era and those who didn’t.
 

 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.04.2015
02:33 pm
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‘Wattstax’: The ‘Black Woodstock’ music festival


 
The Watts Riots are often referred to by lefties as “The Watts Rebellion.” While both are technically accurate descriptions, “rebellion” is considered the preferable word by sympathists, since “riot” has a negative connotation. For me, the word “riot” lacks any moralist stigma, since rioting has historically played a necessary role in the resistance of oppressed people. I also think “riots” paints a more identifiable picture.

In addition to less explicit economic discrimination, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was plagued with racist attacks from both white gangs and and a militarized police force (sound familiar?). The 1965 events that incited the riots are convoluted, but (briefly) a black man was arrested for driving under the influence, his brother (who was was a passenger), left to inform the man’s mother, who showed up to the arrest. There was a physical altercation, all three black citizens were arrested, and onlookers from the neighborhood began throwing things at the cops.

Eight days later, 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries and 3,952 arrests. 600 businesses were destroyed and over $40 million was done in damages over a 46-square mile-area.
 

 
In 1972, Stax Records put on a concert featuring their artists to commemorate the riots. Tickets for the Wattstax music festival (held in the massive L.A. Coliseum) were sold for $1 each to keep the event affordable for working class Los Angeles residents. Mel Stuart, who had just directed Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (a box-office bomb, despite its classic status), documented the concert in Wattstax, the electric results of which you see below. Wattstax has been shorthanded as “The Black Woodstock,” but it’s so much more.

The film is something greater than a record of fantastic concert footage, though the performances from artists like The Staples Singers, Isaac Hayes and The Bar-Kays are mind-blowing. It’s the interviews with Watts residents, who reflect on their lives and politics and what has and hasn’t changed since the riots, that really make the film. Richard Pryor serves as a kind of Greek chorus, and his interactions with the crowd are hilarious and full of humanity. You’ll notice that nearly the entire audience defiantly stays seated during Kim Weston’s rendition of the national anthem.

If you want a good clip to sample, there’s a fantastic bit starting around the 38:30 mark where Richard Pryor riffs on black identity (and pork). It then cuts to The Bar-Kays (looking like a heavenly choir from outer space), who do a blistering version of “Son of Shaft.”
 

 
Via Open Culture

Posted by Amber Frost
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08.28.2014
10:03 am
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Watch Richard Pryor’s jaw-dropping ‘Willie’ sketch featuring Maya Angelou
01.02.2014
08:34 am
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The Richard Pryor Special?
 
One of the hallmarks of Richard Pryor’s comedy was his fearless willingness to attempt and stunning ability to deliver authentic pathos. Humanity flowed from the man freely; especially after his famous 1967 meltdown in Las Vegas that represented a complete sea change in his career, his standup work often seemed almost as sad or heartbreaking as it was hilarious. Pryor had an essential sweetness that allowed him to remain relatable and childlike even when broaching the most delicate topics of race and sexuality, and had the guts, for example, to incorporate the “N word” into his work—not for nothing was his 1976 celebration of America called Bicentennial Nigger. What must have been an emotionally pulverizing childhood in a bordello in Peoria, Illinois, uniquely qualified Pryor as a subterranean spelunker of the human condition. Only someone inured to such pain could make us laugh about it so consistently.

On May 5, 1977, after several successful appearances on Saturday Night Live and a string of profitable movies, NBC gave Pryor an hour in prime time to put on a show of his choice—and the results were devastating. The show was called The Richard Pryor Special? and it included the most gut-wrenchingly honest and heart-breaking sketch I have ever seen—on what was ostensibly a comedy show.

The show started out on a confrontational note, as Audrey T. McCluskey described it in her edited volume Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a “Crazy” Black Man:
 

The opening skit takes place on a slave ship with a whip-cracking captain played by Belushi doling out punishment to the captives. Pryor, a random slave, is given the additional punishment of having his own NBC special. In this short skit Pryor manages to compare his predicament in the white-controlled world of corporate television to slavery. Such barbs against television, particularly against its censorship of his material, characterized his work on network television.

 
You can see Pryor’s horrified reaction to the news that he has been condemned to hosting his own NBC special above. Pryor’s very affability cloaks the sheer gumption it must have taken to open his special with a sketch about slavery, now matter how amusing. I can’t remember Saturday Night Live doing all that many slavery sketches in the last ten years.

The most powerful sketch of the show was almost certainly the one revolving around Pryor’s drunk “Willie” character. The eleven-minute sketch starts out in a bar, where Willie is already on the verge of being asked to leave for his inebriated antics. He berates a few of the bar’s patrons, jawbones with the bartender (played by John Belushi) for a little while, and gets beaten up by the irate husband of one of the tavern’s drunken regulars. So far there have been a few genuine laughs, but it scarcely seems like a comedy sketch—it’s too trenchant and cuts way too deep about the nature of poverty and alcohol addiction. But the sketch is just getting going.

At this juncture Willie stumbles home and passes out on the couch in front of his wife—played by the astonishing Maya Angelou. The last four minutes of the sketch are a monologue by Willie’s wife as she apostrophizes the hapless, unconscious figure of Willie. Her soliloquy is a masterpiece of pain, understanding, despair, and forgiveness, a howl of anguish by the woman who loves him, the man whose poverty-driven tribulations and shame-fueled alcoholism have, it’s fair to say, ruined her life. It’s a bit of trenchant kitchen-sink racial commentary—I have never seen anything else like it on American TV, and don’t ever expect to see anything like it on American TV in the future.

Definitely watch the video below; it’s futile for me to capture its courage, honesty, and brilliance. It leaves me pole-axed every time.

Here’s a special thank-you advertisement that Angelou took out in the pages of Variety that was excavated by the indispensable Kliph Nesteroff:
 
Maya Angelou Thank You Note
 
According to Billy Ingram, The Richard Pryor Special? was a critical and ratings success, and it led to a regular series of Pryor’s own the following autumn—which lasted only four episodes. 
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cocaine is a helluva drug: Richard Pryor jams with Sly Stone, 1974
Steve Martin and Richard Pryor on ‘The Tonight Show,’ 1978

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.02.2014
08:34 am
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Cocaine is a helluva drug: Richard Pryor jams with Sly Stone, 1974
07.10.2013
02:57 pm
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When Sly Stone improbably guest-hosted The Mike Douglas Show in 1974, Richard Pryor joined him to jam on the drums for a short, chaotic hash of “If You Want Me to Stay.”

What was the coke budget for this???

I can just see wide-lapelled, mild-mannered nice guy Mike Douglas knocking on the dressing room door before the show to find several of Sly’s armed “security” cronies, a few pounds of cocaine dumped on a table and Sly and Richard both looking like Heath Ledger as The Joker…

“Hi fellas!”

“Yeah.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.10.2013
02:57 pm
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Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him
05.20.2013
05:44 pm
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Wild. Singer/songwriter Joe Henry has co-written (along with his brother David) a biography of Richard Pryor entitled, Serious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him, due out in November. If you’re familiar with Joe Henry’s work, then you already know why this is so cool and appropriate, but if not, then I’ll tell you…

If you don’t know who Richard Pryor was, well then, no wonder you think the universe is kind of boring and tedious. Richard Pryor was Chris Rock before Chris Rock was even born, unleashing his ferocious comedy to both white and black audiences in the 60s and 70s, way before it was “OK” to joke seriously about racial issues and about the experience of being an African American in a nation still trying to suppress the inevitable realization that its cultural roots were about as black as they were white.
 
Here’s Richard Pryor as the first black president of the US. Like a lot of Pryor’s comedy, you can’t quite see where it’s going until it gets there and, prior to arrival it veers into the surreal.

 
Wild, no? That’s from the 1970s and I’m thinking popular culture was actually somewhat less brittle back then. The ghost of left-wing culture hadn’t quite faded away yet, though of course in just a few years Reagan’s jackboots would stomp even that poor pitiful thing into the ground. Even in the early 1980s, after Pryor recovered from a disfiguring freebasing accident that left him badly burned and near death, the nation laughed when Pryor explained: “When I dunked the cookie in the milk, it exploded!”

Joe Henry, meanwhile, dedicated one of his better albums (Scar) to Pryor, and wrote one of the songs (”Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation”) in his voice. Here’s “Stop,” from that same album (If you are a Madonna fan, you may have noticed that this song has the same lyrics as “Don’t Tell Me” from her Music album, and indeed Henry wrote those lyrics. Joe Henry is, bizarrely enough, Madonna’s brother-in-law (married to her sister Melanie) and also wrote the Baywatch theme, but don’t hold that against him.)

Henry operates in a nominally popular idiom by placing scraps of jazz, rock, R&B and even country into the athanor of his songwriting craft and then melting them all down and shaping the resultant amalgam into the odd and sometimes frightening little homonculi that are his songs.

When Henry (or his “people”) made the announcement about Serious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him on Facebook and his blog a couple of days ago, it came as both a surprise as well one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect. I’m stoked for the publication of this book and will almost certainly celebrate this news later with a bottle of Monday-night plonk and the very loud cranking of Joe Henry’s Blood From Stars album.

Here’s a rarity of sorts, of Henry singing (or pretending to be singing) the title track from hisTiny Voices album:
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.20.2013
05:44 pm
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Heavy meta: A Slayer meets Richard Pryor tee-shirt?
02.12.2013
12:31 pm
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image
 
Only 200 of these puppies have been manufactured by California-based artist Aye Jay.

The “Pryor” tee-shirt is selling for $26.00 at Shirts and Destroy.

Via Cherrybombed

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.12.2013
12:31 pm
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‘This Is Tom Jones’: His first TV show with Peter Sellers, Richard Pryor and The Moody Blues

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It was always the voice. He may have sold it short by appearing in over-produced TV shows, or playing seasons in Vegas, or becoming a caricature of a tanned medallion man, but none of it really mattered when you heard the voice—and Tom Jones has one hell of a singing voice.

When Jones’ star was on the rise on the late-1960s, he was offered his own TV show, This Is Tom Jones, which ran for 65 episodes between 1969 and 1971. It was an instant and massive success on both sides of the Atlantic, and led to the singer receiving 2 Golden Globe Nominations. It also saw Jones perform with an incredible array of stars ranging from Dusty Springfield, Little Richard, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Cass Elliot,  Burt Bacharach, George Carlin, Terry-Thomas, Sandi Shaw, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Lulu, Nancy Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin, amongst many others.

This is the first episode of This Is Tom Jones, which aired on February 7th, 1969. Jones sang several of his hits, and mixed with an incredible range of talent including a suave-looking Peter Sellers (who changed the script, tried out his Welsh accent and appeared in a skit written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman); a very youthful Richard Pryor in one of his first TV appearances (who looks almost teenage and has yet to find the anger that made his comedy dangerous); The Moody Blues (who reminded me of a holiday resort band); and a beautiful Mary Hopkin, singing “Those Were The Days”.

This Is Tom Jones has dated somewhat, and the sets and dance routines may look positively camp, but the quality of the performances, and the power of Tom Jones’ voice make this a special treat.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.06.2013
08:19 pm
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Phil Spector’s 1965 appearance on Merv Griffin’s show gets tense with Eartha Kitt and Richard Pryor

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And this is what he turned into? What a complete shock…
 
So although it’s fairly well-known what a crazy motherfucker Phil Spector is, it’s still somewhat surprising to see that he never even went a little bit out of his way to at least try to affect an air of bare minimum congeniality, or to be charming, or attempt to appear SANE, even when he was on television. From the get-go, he’s hostile to Merv (how can you be hostile to Merv?) and becomes increasingly irritated and paranoid throughout the interview.

By the time Spector alludes to hitting Merv and a very unimpressed and composed Eartha Kitt—who hits him hard with her well-delivered Socrates quip—the audience is hissing and booing him.
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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12.14.2012
10:13 am
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Steve Martin and Richard Pryor on ‘The Tonight Show,’ 1978
08.15.2012
03:13 pm
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Steve Martin conducted this awkward/awesome interview with Richard Pryor when he was the guest hosting for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on June 19, 1978. Glen Campbell was also on the couch that night.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.15.2012
03:13 pm
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Richard Pryor invents Black Death Metal in 1977
05.08.2012
03:35 pm
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From the first episode of The Richard Pryor Show, the comedian’s ill-fated NBC series (only four episodes were produced). Imagine seeing this at 8pm on ABC in 1977! Mind-bending!

From archieoogley’s YouTube description:

Pre-Spinal Tap Mystical Hobbit Rockers? Check.
Druidic cloaks? Check.
Smoke machines? Check.
Pryor utilizing the long-accepted habit of slurring your words to get past censors? (See ‘Louie Louie’ by the Kingsmen for history’s best example) Check.
Pryor throwing giant bags of drugs and pills into his all-white teenage audience? Check.
Pryor using a gas gun to kill the first few rows? Check.

And finally, Richard Pryor taking a machine gun to his fans, killing every white teenager in the place? Double-check.

Jimi meets KISS meets Funkadelic meets King Diamond meets Sunn O))) meets Sigue Sigue Sputnik meets the Cowardly Lion meets Dawn Davenport? You just can’t beat it.

You’ll see a very young Sandra Bernhard in the audience. They cut to her a few times.
 

 
Thank you, Lee Richard!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.08.2012
03:35 pm
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