richard pryor

Thread reminds me to give his "semi-autobiographical" film "Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling" a try. Anyone seen that?

It's a mess, but a brave and fascinating mess.

Watched Which Way Is Up? last year, following that great biog that came out the year before, and it is really hard to watch, especially as the Pryor character's romantic approach is to stalk the female lead in a really creepy way, and then she inexplicably falls in love with him. It's a bad movie.

I recently read Jenny Lee Pryor's memoir from the 90s, which I'd owned for years but never cracked open. It's not very well written, but vivid, and it's a gruelling read, as Pryor basically abuses her terribly and she keeps leaving him but then going back to him, and then getting psychologically and physically abused by him again. He seems to have been a real horror-show to be around, a towering inferno of self-doubt, paranoia and anger, onto which he poured the gasoline of drugs. It reminded me of that thing on the internet a bunch of years ago written by a scriptwriter working on a movie with him, where he basically came into writing sessions completely out of it and raging with paranoia and violence.

I had no idea about this material - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution/Revolution

Was relistening to this on a long drive recently. The first disk is fascinating and well-titled, as you hear Richard morph from gifted Cosby/Allen copyist into his own sublime thing. The later stuff is great too, mostly taken from the releases Laff put out alongside the LPs Richard was doing concurrently for Warners, and very much of a piece (if not sonically as clear or clean). The comp is up for streaming IIRC, if you don't fancy tracking down a CD.

Soz, I meant the Laff stuff was released at the same time as the Warners records, but the material and recordings often date earlier, before he was signed to Warners iirc

Seem to recall a (silent?) sketch where he plays a whiskey doctor. He needs to have a drink to steady his hand for what one expects is going to be dealing with a bullet wounds but instead the joke is he delivers a baby. Hard to google, wonder if I dreamt it.

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