Regman forwarded this to me today!! Evolution Revolution!!!

[Jennifer]

BUSTIN' LOOSE
Rarities compilation reveals how Richard Pryor became Richard Pryor

Richard Pryor
Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966-1974) [Rhino]
* * * * (out of five stars)

In 1967, Richard Pryor crashed. After six years working the nightclub circuit, he stood on the edge of the big time. There had been TV appearances. He was feted as "the new Bill Cosby."

Which was exactly the trouble. Life as a Cosby imitator, safe jokes, only bringing up his blackness to get it out of the way, was suffocating the real Pryor; the trouble kid with dazzling imagination and acute observational skills whose first dealings with white men had been in his grandmother's whorehouse in Illinois. The meltdown came in Vegas: he walked on stage, regarded the sold-out crowd and said, "What the fuck am I doing here"--then he walked off. When he burst back into the public consciousness seven years later with '74's classic That Nigger's Crazy LP, he was a different man: fucked-up, foul-mouthed, filthy-minded, fragile and furious: the Pryor who owned '70s stand-up.

Pulling together recordings from those missing years, this brilliant double album documents how Pryor found his voice. Disc one charts his disaffection. The earliest routines from '66 are painfully stiff. He tries to improvise. A heckler wonders why he doesn't just do one-liners. Pryor asks why the guy doesn't just go to Vegas.

More arresting are outings following his own Vegas meltdown. In "Black Power," recorded May '68, a month after Martin Luther King's assassination, he calls a white heckler "a spokesman for the bigot group." By now, he's left gags behind. His "I Feel" monologue is simply Pryor repeating those words in different ways, trying to express all the ways he feels until it feels right. Less comedy, more psychodramatic soul music.

On disc two--which includes '71's low-down underground LP Craps, alongside Pryor's inspired monologue from Wattstax, '72's "black Woodstock"--he's really jamming. With riffs like "Wino And Junkie" and "Jesus Saves," he finds the radical, digressive, uncomfortable groove on race, sex, society, the streets and America that made his legend.

This is a vital set for anyone interested in the history of stand-up; like watching a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, farting, then blowing jazz.

--Damien Love

[dougdigitalpro]

Jennifer,
Great review! I think I'm gonna try to get this along with the greatest hits CD and my T-shirt later this month.

Searching for strength... searching for answers... searching for remedies...searching for the power to breakthrough...

...where the fuck else am I am gonna go but to Richard Pryor!

[ed broeth]

dougdigitalpro,


heck isnt that what we are all trying to do? be ourselves and not what others want us to be....i have to admit that is what i myself am doing in my life now..make it my own.