Raggle Rock is Bock! We shall see if it's bock with a vengeance. I've been away for over a month for reasons that ultimately don't matter, and listing them would be more boring to you than a midnight showing of Broken Flowers at the Tower would be to me. However, it must be said that I missed this, and I missed YOU. So, let's cut the excuse-y bullshit, and get to thissssssss:
He was going to be my Obsession for the Month of October, or maybe even November, but in reality, Richard Pryor has been more like the passion of my motherfuckin' life. I categorically couldn’t limit writing about my appreciation of him to just one month in one year of this thing called a calendar (and to be honest, Prince's spell on me spilled so far into the Halloween and Thanksgiving seasons, I would have been lying if I told you I was focused on anybody or thing other than the Raspberry Beret). What may turn into a three-parter if I'm not careful will start where it should – in a head shop in Sugarhouse, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Back when I was fifteen, my girlfriends and I went to Wizards and Dreams with a late twenty-something year-old schmuck we shoulder-tapped to buy us a pipe. While one of the girls was combing through all of the pot leaf and Led Zeppelin posters, and the other was paging a kid from our high school to hook us up with weed, I was puttering around the front of the store, singing, “Look at this stuff...isn't it neat?” At first, the clerk behind the counter was polite, and sung back, “I've got Whozzits and Whatsits galore. You want Thingofabobs? I've got plenty,” but eventually got bored with me and returned to watching a Richard Pryor stand-up tape on the overhead television set. I started watching it as well to avoid the all too obvious ‘I-wanna-fuck-a-teenage-girl-in-the-face’ eyes the schmuck we brought was giving me. Not really paying too much attention for the first five minutes or so, my blood-shot eyes abruptly fastened to the screen when this bit came on:
He went on and on and on, not just with some of the most honest observations about race in our country (whether applied to his generation or the present, i.e. “There’s a lot more hypocrisy than before. Racism has gone back underground.”), but also with some of the most honest and profound observations concerning life I’ve ever heard, all the while without being even remotely pretentious about it. My cognizance warped into a whirligig lobbing out eddying thoughts about the condition of things, or something like that. Maybe there was more. More to life. A lot more. A lot more to life…than I originally conceived. Shuffling my feet, I softly sang, “I wanna go where the people go. Ask them my questions and get some answers. What’s a fire, and why does it…what’s the word…burn?” Funny how Richard answered both questions within minutes.
Yaz, yaz, I realize every hick and their toothless child knows that Pryor caught himself on fire and ran down the street, but nothing about his familiarity with the public will change my perception and respect for the man that actually joked about a nurse’s assistant asking for his ‘last autograph’. I grew up in a household of movie buffs in the 80's, so I was acquainted with and cherished comedies with Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy, John Candy and a multitude of other SNL alumni long before I learned multiplication and division in elementary school. Like you’ve probably gathered from up top, it took me a while to come around with Richard Pryor. I saw The Toy probably before I was ten, but was too young and too stupid to understand what kind of genius I really dealing with. In hindsight, I’m actually glad that I discovered his brilliance during the most impressionable time of my life – that of being a puny, stony teenager. I may have been in love with the reefer at that very moment (and so on), but I still recognized that before my eyes was a comedian that in effect left me feeling like my brain never swam out of the kiddie pool, which consequently made me want to be a smarter person. I felt like this (in all three forms of restoration):
I know I told you I wasn’t going to mention anything, but being such a goddamn Super Fan incidentally sprung on the first case of writer’s block I’ve experienced since starting this blog in July. I desperately wanted to write about Pryor back in October, but every time my fingers started typing, they froze in despair at the notion of articulating the gushing admiration I’ve felt towards Richard Pryor into words. Finally, a voice inside my head told me, “Everyone carries around his own monsters.” To be continued…
***By the way. Don’t forget to vote in the poll on the blog’s front page. There’s a month left until it closes, and only six motherfuckers have voted thus far!***
No comments:
Post a Comment