Becoming Richard Pryor (28 page)

For their part, black militants looked at the counterculture and saw two things at once: some of the least racist and most engaged people in America, and some of the most privileged and committedly naïve people in America. A case in point: the
Los Angeles Free Press
and
Open City
ran some of the most detailed and sympathetic coverage of the Watts riots and the Black Power movement, but they also published articles like “Hippie: The New Nigger” or “Diggery Is Niggery,” which appeared to turn black suffering into someone else’s plaything. H. Rap Brown expressed a typical ambivalence when, in a 1967 interview, he called the hippies “politically irrelevant,” but added that he wished “all white Americans were like the hippies, because they ARE peaceful, and that’s more than can be said for most honkies.”

Richard’s stand-up was one of the great beneficiaries of this dance
between Black Power and the counterculture. In 1968, performing for Troubadour audiences that, for him, were half white and half black, he invented a style that was as far-out as Frank Zappa and as defiant as H. Rap Brown, and was catalyzed by the fusion of the two movements. On the one hand, the freewheeling ethic of the counterculture shaded Richard’s act with irony, making his more political moves seem provisional and subject to revision. On the other, the militancy of the Black Power movement sharpened his zaniness, giving it a point: his improvisations could cut you open with their poignancy or shock you with their bitterness. For years, Richard’s comedy had set itself apart from the conflicts of the times; now it drew on the energy of those tensions and played them out in spectacular fashion.

He needed his art because, offstage, the chaos was sometimes too much. When news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination reached Richard on April 4, 1968, he was between sets at Mister Kelly’s nightclub in Chicago. The second set was immediately canceled, and everyone was warned to take caution and head home. Richard did the opposite. He smoked a joint with Jeff Wald, the booker at Mister Kelly’s. Then the two hopped in a car and “drove around Chicago like lunatics,” Wald remembered. They felt aimless, high on grass and miserable about the state of the world, and were curious to see where their careening would take them. Richard was sobbing uncontrollably; he couldn’t believe how crazy America had become. The two heard shots fired around them but raced through the streets anyway. It was the beginning of a riot that would wreathe the streets in smoke and tear gas, and leave at least nine black Chicagoans dead.

The death of King reverberated in Richard. He canceled a scheduled appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and returned to Los Angeles, where two weeks later he performed in front of an audience of ten thousand at a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial benefit at the Hollywood Bowl. The tone of the King event was set by actor Rod Steiger, who proclaimed that “we are here today because of a man with a purpose and a dream. We are gathered for one reason and one reason alone—to raise money to help fulfill that dream and that
purpose. We mean to guarantee that a future shall exist without ignorance and without prejudice.” These were high-minded thoughts, and Steiger was joined in his solemn tribute by entertainers ranging from Jimmy Durante and Edward G. Robinson to Bill Cosby and Barbra Streisand.

Richard punctured the mood. He looked out at the largest live audience of his career, one assembled to mourn one of the most grievous losses in American history, and spoke with the brazenness of his father at his stepmother’s grave. “All these people here are giving money,” he observed, “but if your son gets killed by a cop, money don’t mean shit.” There was a collective gasp at both the four-letter word and the bitter sentiment it carried. The show, after all, was meant to embody King’s vision and raise money for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Urban League, two organizations that represented the civil rights establishment. Richard, meanwhile, was refusing to turn the other cheek. He was pointing his audience’s attention to those, less sainted than King, who had been killed by police bullets in the riots following King’s assassination, and he was refusing to forgive.

For Richard, it was almost like a public “coming out”: no one with a decent pair of ears could mistake him for Bill Cosby any longer. Forty-five KLAC listeners withdrew their pledges in protest at his remarks.

T
he death of Martin Luther King Jr. marked the beginning of an extraordinarily productive four months for Richard as an artist. His manager, Bobby Roberts, had negotiated a fifty-thousand-dollar, two-album contract with Mo Ostin’s Reprise Records, and Richard generated a flurry of new routines for his vinyl debut. For the first time since his breakdown at the Aladdin, he was able to pour his volatile emotions into the channel of comedy, where they remained so intense that his act took on fresh vitality, audacity, and outrage. The salty characters of his teenage years in Peoria glided and swaggered on the stage of the Troubadour, where they were joined by a wild assortment
of Uncle Toms and black militants, faith healers and mainline ministers, prison guards and stage directors. And at the center of this new world was the newly unbuttoned character of Richard himself. “Strange, unconked and outspokenly glib, Pryor exudes the essence of every street-corner gang comedian who ever did his schtick while keeping one eye out for a prowl car”—so wrote Nat Freedland in the
Los Angeles Free Press
in April 1968, catching in print for the first time the stage persona that made Richard famous.

At his most freeform, the new Richard might work an angle like a jazz soloist working a motif. In one riff during his mid-April engagement at the Troub, he tried to describe how he felt:

[
Deep-voiced, imitating Paul Robeson
] “Sometimes I feel like a . . .”

[
Church woman’s voice
] “I feel!”

[
Loud sound of waves traveling down a tube, being sucked into a vacuum, then escaping into the air with the fading vibration of a tuning fork.
]

The comic had cycled, in exactly a minute, through several forms of black identity (funky dude, Paul Robeson, church lady); aligned himself with the freaks in the audience by experiencing a trip before their eyes; then lightly sent up the spiritual pretensions of that set by mocking his own sense of godhood. And while the pinballing of his mind made him seem one of the freaks himself, Richard denied that he was high, then ended by underlining his own love-hate relationship to drugs: “Dope just cut out, and leave you hanging there. Dope say ‘later!’ and you say, ‘But dope, I wanna go
with
you.” Despite the seeming randomness of the improvisation, it was all of a piece: Richard had a mind that established quick affinities, then just as quickly located the comic downside of every one—until the identity he’d just assumed had turned into an embarrassment, or a trap. No one was spared the thrust and parry, least of all him.

While “I Feel,” as this bit was called, was a loose and playful mind bend, other riffs had more bite. Instead of whitewashing his past, Richard hung it out to dry. He recalled, as a child, how he didn’t hesitate to use the term
nigger baby
for a small black licorice candy. For Richard, that candy, which he loved to eat, opened onto a parable of his childhood: “I used to play a game, ‘Last one to the store is a nigger baby’ . . . I used to run like hell myself. I didn’t want to be it. I didn’t know that I’d lost before the race started.” He had a sharp eye for the hustle, and for what it meant to be the dupe.

The most elaborate of Richard’s new sketches were around ten minutes in length, built on the multi-character template of “Rumpelstiltskin” but considerably more adult in theme. In “Prison Play,” a kind of play within a play that Richard performed for an imagined audience of the incarcerated, a black blacksmith has his bicep squeezed by a swooning southern belle in an upside-down version of
Gone With the Wind
. The blacksmith gently asks her if she’d like to feel his ass, and then the belle nearly faints, joined now in her swooning
by her mother. The play within a play races to an unexpectedly happy ending: the blacksmith proposes to the belle, and the belle’s brother, a cavalier of the old sort, approves the union in the name of “true freedom and true love.” That’s the breaking point for the redneck prison guard, though, who stops the performance, having been advised beforehand that “the nigger dies.” “Nobody leave,” he shouts. “I want a dead nigger out here!” Richard pauses, then reveals through the character of this prison guard the madcap logic of scapegoating: “If I don’t get me a dead nigger here, we gonna hang one of them homosex-u-als!”

R
ichard’s creative explosion now had to be brought to market—recorded, edited, packaged, sold—and here the complications began. His manager, Bobby Roberts, hired Robert Marchese, a recording engineer who had apprenticed with Phil Spector, as the producer of Richard’s album, and the two felt a quick bond: Marchese had grown up in a tough, racially mixed inner-city neighborhood in Pittsburgh, and he was game for Richard’s wildest and most provocative flights. At their first meeting, Marchese promised Richard a “motherfucking dynamite album” and pledged that “you’ll hear everything you say, and it’ll be live.” Marchese then recorded four nights of Richard’s shows at the Troub in late July 1968.

Afterward, Marchese had a surplus of material to work with. At the Troub, Richard had performed, in addition to “Prison Play,” a number of other newly conceived playlets. “T.V. Panel Show” was a calmer, if equally iconoclastic, sketch in which Richard impersonates a potpourri of guests—a bloviating anthropologist, a sheepish minister, a fiery black nationalist, a still-jumpy woman who has given up narcotics for God—on a late-night interview show. Their solemn conversation about the origins of man and the relationship between man and God is a thinly disguised bull session. Everyone is on this side of outlandish, and a target for satire: the former addict for her brittle devotion to God; the anthropologist for his self-serious nonsense (“Man was begat by raindrops, grew out of the grounds,
uprooted himself and just walked away”); the black militant for blowing his top at the slightest provocation (“Why didn’t you introduce me first, sissy?”); and the minister for his too-intimate rapport with the deity (“Often God touches me—at night. I lay in bed and I feel God touching me. It’s quite marvelous”).

“T.V. Panel Show” bore Richard’s stamp as a satirist, which was to smuggle some sharp insights into the mouths of his all-too-human characters. God “has been cleaning up every Sunday for the last thousands of years with that religion crap. And we all know it’s patootee-patootee, don’t we?” remarks the anthropologist, who turns out to be a skeptic first, a blowhard second. The black militant responds with a blast of counterintuitive wisdom, one that transforms God from a huckster into something much more vulnerable: “God was a junkie, baby! He had to be a junkie to put up with all of this, you know what I mean?” Here the militant is surprisingly seconded by the minister: “God probably did take some sort of outside medication. As it states in chapter six, verse thirty-two, ‘I will take unto myself what is needed.’” Strange alliances were being made in Richard’s countercultural theater of the absurd. No doubt the Troub’s audience relished the suggestion that God, like them, had suffered through the chaos of this world and, like them again, had found his way to dope.

Richard also performed, for Marchese’s recording equipment at the Troub, the comic masterpiece of this period in his career. In the eleven-minute “Hank’s Place,” he took his audience into the inner sanctum of this after-hours joint in Peoria and evoked the atmosphere of his misspent youth: a world of hustlers, prostitutes, gamblers and every other form of trickster black Peoria had to offer. Character after character presents him- or herself to a young and timid Richard, who drinks in their words and their style. There is, for instance, Mr. Perkins, a carpenter who hopes Hank, as the joint’s proprietor, will hire him to reupholster his craps table. His cajoling sales pitch is a soliloquy:

Mr. Perkins, like many of the characters of “Hank’s Place,” is a bullshit artist, but an artist nonetheless. He hammers on the word
truth
while speaking a language full of invention.

“Hank’s Place” also marked the first time Richard brought to life a pimp onstage—and the first time he took up in his act what it meant to grow up shadowed by the world’s oldest profession. “Coldblood” struts into Hank’s Place and, like Richard’s own father Buck, makes the young Richard feel small, pointedly calling him “Little Dick” and trapping him in a corner of the room, where the young Richard has no choice but to listen to his spiel. Yet Coldblood is, beneath the surface, a bundle of need. In a silky but wheedling voice, he appeals to the young Richard: