Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Less obviously, perhaps, “That Nigger’s Crazy” operated like a set of neon-lit folktales, shaking insight and laughter out of the harshest of predicaments. Just as folktales often surprise us with their ghastliness—stepmothers who banish their children, ogres who feed on a diet of bones—so Richard captivated the listener with a vision of the world that, from one angle, was beyond bleak. Thus the final line in his story of a black man getting frisked while out on the town: “What nigger feel like having fun after that? ‘Let’s just go home, baby.’ You go home and beat your kids and shit—you gonna take that shit out on somebody.” He dramatized the desperation and violence of the world, which wasn’t simply color-coded by race. In an absurdly grim scene, his junkie vomits in the unemployment bureau, then argues with a black security guard about who should clean up the mess. “[If] you don’t clean up that shit,” the guard threatens, “I shoot your ass.” The junkie replies, “Well, then, who gonna clean up the blood, nigger?” and laughs with self-satisfaction. For the moment he has, like a modern-day Brer Rabbit, bested the guard by outwitting him.

  “That Nigger’s Crazy” was unquestionably a comedy landmark, but it might have been better still, more searching and provocative, if it had included his routine on dropping acid for the first time. Richard first developed “Acid” around late 1973, and while he later performed it on Saturday Night Live and recorded a dazzling version on 1976’s Bicentennial Nigger, the original version probed deeper. In both versions of “Acid,” Richard hits many of the same marks: he takes the drug with bluster (“Baby, I can handle any motherfuckin’ thing!”); feels a trippy rush; falls into terror (“I don’t remember how to breathe!”); then loses himself in a parallel scene of a mind unspooling, the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this last section, Richard’s personal voice drops out, and for a long minute his stage routine has the suspended-in-air pacing of the Kubrick film. His audience is made to sit mute with concentration as Richard performs the scene in which Dave the astronaut deactivates Hal the computer:

  [The sound of labored breathing, Dave in a space suit.]

  HAL [gently and matter-of-fact as ever]: Dave, don’t. I’m losing my mind, Dave.

  Hi, my name is Hal 9000. I was embedded in 1992. My teacher taught me a song. Would you like to hear it?

  One critic described Richard’s performance as “like a ballet, his hands floating slow motion out of control, his head jerking this way and that as if possessed.”

  In the original version of “Acid,” Richard had inserted an extra existential twist to the tale. During his reckoning with the abyss, a powerful voice comes out of a howling wind and assails Richard, urging him to let go of his identity as a “nigger”:

  VOICE FROM BEYOND [whispering furiously, with an accusatory tone]: I’ve been waiting for about 22 years to meet your ass. You’ve been bullshittin’ me, you know, with all that old jive nigger shit? You know, hidin’ behind them shields and shit? Instead of coming forward with all this energy?

  You been layin’ back, posin’ an’ shit, bullshittin’, motherfucker, well you’re DEAD tonight. . . . I’m gonna free you, brother. I’m taking over where I rightfully belong; you givin’ up all that phony psychology you didn’t learn.

  RICHARD [speaking as if trapped in a slow-motion film]: Wha-uh-tin-the-fu-kis-sap-ning-to-me-ee?

  VOICE FROM BEYOND [calm now, comforting]: You becoming a man. You just born. But I’m afraid . . . you won’t be a nigger no more. But you won’t be ignorant, either. The truth . . . is everlasting.

  In this version, Richard was pushed to be reborn—and into a startling discovery about the fictions that ruled his life. In the mid-1960s he had been Mr. Congeniality onstage; then, after his identity crisis in Las Vegas, he had embraced the persona of the “crazy nigger,” a persona that allowed him to speak his own truth and violate whatever taboos required violation. Or so he thought. But what if “nigger” itself were just another mask, just another bit of jive? What if being “that crazy nigger” were a mere gimmick, designed to keep the deepest of anxieties at bay?

  For a different sort of artist, this moment in “Acid” would have been unthinkable or untenable—the equivalent of those cartoon scenes where a character saws away at the branch he is sitting upon. But for Richard, “Acid” was a fulfillment of his larger program as an artist and a “crazy nigger” both. Once he settled on a truth, he was compelled to unsettle it. Once the foundation seemed solid under his feet, his mind turned to thoughts of earthquakes, quicksand, dynamite.

  For a seeker like Richard, there was no easy resolution to the contradiction: race was both the thinnest of fictions and the hardest of truths. During an acid-induced dialogue with a voice from beyond, it might seem a mere illusion. But in the world, it raised your blood pressure, kept you unemployed, and got your ass strip-searched and hauled off to jail.

  In early March of 1974, Richard was in Washington, DC, for a set of concerts when he was approached by a friend who’d just been released from the Lorton Correctional Complex in Fairfax County, Virginia. The inmates, his friend said, were Pryor fans and wanted him to perform inside. Would he consider playing there?

  A few days later, Richard was in a packed gymnasium at Lorton, surrounded by a thousand inmates; he’d coaxed the promoter behind his DC shows to whip together a concert, and now he was on a bill with a local go-go band, a model, and Inner Voices, an inmate singing group. The inmates in the audience wore Lorton’s unofficial uniform—wool caps, fatigue jackets, jeans, and work boots or sneakers—and sat with the utmost attention for this rare reprieve from prison routine.

  The men of Inner Voices filed onstage, some in long white robes, one in black, another without a shirt, and sang the just-released ballad by the Stylistics, “You Make Me Feel Brand New.” The lead singer reached out, at a tender moment, to one of the two women in the hall, and a wave of applause swelled in the room. On every other day at Lorton, there were no women to serenade.

  Richard started weeping and didn’t stop. “Look at these guys,” he told Ron DeBlasio. “They’ll never get out. Look at the life they lead, how terrible it is.”

  When he took the stage, Richard connected with the men in the crowd, animating a set of characters familiar to them from their life before prison. With his pitch-perfect impersonations, he gave them a taste of the families in which they’d grown up, the players they’d known, the electricity of the streets they’d left behind. It was as if, through the magic of the stage, he had smuggled the world outside Lorton into Lorton.

  The full show lasted three hours, or as long as the warden would allow. When it ended, an inmate presented to Richard a painting he’d done. “We wish we had more,” he announced, “but we give you our love and this is a token of it.”

  After the show, the inmates “crowded around Pryor and the other performers,” wrote the Washington Post, “talking, touching, exchanging addresses.” Then they exchanged something more: Richard had been wearing an expensive studded leather shirt, and he traded it for the shirt worn by a young inmate.

  Richard left Lorton wearing prison denim. Seven weeks later, he arranged to have Inner Voices transported—with a contingent of armed guards for security—to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where they served as his opening act for four nights of performances. Richard introduced their act personally at the Apollo, an unusual move for a headliner.

  Seven weeks later still, Richard himself was Prisoner No. 2140-875 in the Los Angeles County Jail and wearing prison denim not by choice. He was serving a ten-day sentence for tax evasion, the result of the early years of his career, when he had acted like his grandmother in her brothel and kept his earnings—an alleged $250,000 over four years—off the books. The judge, making an example of Richard around tax season, had mandated prison time.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  Number One with a Bullet

  Los Angeles, Peoria, 1974–1975

  A telling coincidence: in the summer of 1974, as Richard Pryor’s “That
Nigger’s Crazy” surged to the No. 1 position on Billboard’s R&B charts, Richard Nixon’s presidency collapsed under the weight of the Watergate scandal. One Republican senator likened Nixon—protesting his innocence while his associates were linked to a squalid campaign of spying and sabotage—to “a piano player in a whorehouse who claims not to know what’s going on upstairs.” After August 5, 1974, absolutely no one believed the piano player anymore. The “smoking gun” tape had been made public, and with it, evidence that Nixon had blocked a FBI investigation that could ensnare him. On the night of August 8, Nixon resigned as president. Richard was playing an intimate Philadelphia nightclub called the Bijou, and rather than give his usual show, he brought a TV onstage. Everyone watched, transfixed. Richard supplied color commentary as the politician he’d long lampooned for his diabolical ambition—using red lighting when portraying him onstage—slinked off the stage of history.

  The fall of Nixon landed America in a funk, and Richard was the funk’s unexpected beneficiary: his peak years as a comedian aligned with the post-Watergate years of Presidents Ford and Carter. “Nixon took justice and broke its jaw,” he said, when asked now about the profanity in his act. “Now that is profane.” A surprising number of Americans agreed with Richard’s spin on the morality of the day. His streetwise talk, his cynicism toward those in power, his no-holds-barred wrestling with his own inner truths—all these had a larger purchase after Watergate. An NAACP activist in Peoria captured the prevailing mood: “[Watergate was] a shock and it’s leaving our country wide open. If things don’t change the attitude is, ‘Well, nothing’s going to change and I’ll free myself my way, any way I have to.’” Over the next five years, Richard’s audience spread outward from its black core to a mainstream that, having just watched its president devolve into a mere conspirator in chief, was looking to free itself any way it had to. “That Nigger’s Crazy” set the table for a run of albums that won Grammy after Grammy, exploded the possibilities for stand-up comedy, and turned Richard into the most unlikely of avatars.

  Or maybe not that unlikely. Who better to lead the way, in an uncertain time, than a performer who called things by their proper names and was quite honest about how he moved through the world? Mudbone, Richard’s most famous comic creation, dated from this period, and was a grizzled street corner philosopher who delivered wisdom through the tallest of tales. In a world of trickery—or Tricky Dickery—the self-styled trickster was at least candid about his appetites and open about his love of the extravagant lie, and that was refreshing.

  From a business standpoint, the success of “That Nigger’s Crazy” was a minor miracle. Because of the obscenities that riddled every track, the album carried a “Rated X” label, and radio stations refused to play it. And because of a slew of problems involving Stax, Richard’s record company, it barely benefitted from other forms of promotion. The once-mighty Stax was beginning to circle the drain, its financial resources consumed in battles with CBS, with the bank it relied upon for credit, and with the federal government. Just a year earlier, Stax executives had been arranging screenings of Wattstax for the United Nations and the U.S. Congress, and offering their company as a model black-owned business. Now they were under investigation by the IRS and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and their company’s cash flow had slowed to a trickle. When a Stax rep came to a Pryor show in the summer of 1974, he reversed the usual dynamic by acting the mooch, sticking Richard with the bill for his expenses—including not only his hotel room and dinner but also his prostitute for the night.

  On a quite basic level, too, Stax failed to get Richard’s album in the hands of record buyers. CBS had arranged to distribute other Stax albums but balked at Richard’s. “They flatly refused [the] Richard Pryor project because they didn’t understand the dollar impact of it,” remembered a Stax executive. “[A]nd once they listened to it they were absolutely certain that they didn’t want to be part of it.” According to Richard’s manager Ron DeBlasio, there was “no promotion, no nothing. They didn’t have [the album] in record stores.”

  Fortunately for Richard, he could generate some buzz for himself by touring. He island-hopped across the archipelago of urban America—Detroit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, San Jose—and performed, night after night, for largely black crowds. He saw hustlers and their women filling the most expensive seats in the front rows: they were the core of his core audience, and especially good at working the word on “the street” on his behalf. He started feeling something new and electric, something he’d tasted with his Wattstax experience—black America coming together around his humor:

  I noticed going around working for black people who’re in a depression now, they all laughed at the same things wherever I was working. There’s a kind of unity. In different cities, wherever I am, they be laughing at the same [shit], so I know we all know what’s happening. I say, “Well, now, Huey [Newton] done went crazy. Whipped his tailor ’cause the pants was too long.” And they laughed all over ’cause they knew who I was talking about. They knew about all the niggers who died following after him, and here he is beating up a tailor.

  Richard gave pleasure—the pleasure of shared disenchantment—to those who had expected little from Richard Nixon, more from Huey Newton, and been disappointed by both.

  The tour in support of “That Nigger’s Crazy” was a runaway success: sold-out concert halls, crowds caught up in “thunderous roars of laughter and applause,” his best-ever reviews in the black press (“the number one comedian in the world”). There was just one snag. On August 4 he was set to perform, on a rare stop south of the Mason-Dixon Line, for a sell-out audience of twelve thousand in Richmond, Virginia, when the venue’s manager warned DeBlasio that a municipal ordinance prohibited the use of foul language in a city-owned building. DeBlasio passed on the message to Richard, who was not interested in censoring himself. His act was his act, and he had not trimmed swear words from his live show since 1968, the last time he played Vegas. That night at Richmond’s Coliseum, he began with some swipes at Nixon, then was moved by the rowdy spirit of the crowd to his raunchiest and raciest material. He delivered a “blue—no, purple—routine,” what the Richmond Post-Dispatch called “porn.”

  For whatever reason, the police held back. Richard had his own explanation: “They was going to arrest me during the show, but with 12,000 niggers there enjoying themselves, they had second thoughts.” Richard returned to his hotel room, seemingly having tempted fate and won. At 1:30 in the morning, however, Richmond police turned up at his hotel room and arrested him for “conducting himself in a disorderly manner in public.” A black cop, slapping handcuffs on Richard, said, “Listen, brother, this pains me.” At booking, another black cop told Richard he loved “That Nigger’s Crazy,” then sent Richard off to his first stint in a southern jail. Richard spent a long fifteen minutes in lockup while the police processed the five-hundred-dollar bond posted by DeBlasio. At his release, the state scheduled a trial date for August 19.

  Then the prosecution did nothing: on August 19 the state attorney’s office announced it was dropping the charges against Richard. The decision was a sign that performers like him now held the upper hand; strictures against obscenity had relaxed since his flameout at the Aladdin and the demise of Lenny Bruce. In a world where Deep Throat was a date movie, it was hard to convict a performer for swearing in front of consenting adults. Adults-only entertainment—XXX films, peep shows, massage parlors, underground nightclubs for those of every erotic predisposition—had taken hold in major cities across America, assisted by a 1973 Supreme Court ruling that gave the local community, not the federal government, the right to determine what counted as obscene. The Richmond Coliseum’s manager had tried to get the old machinery in motion, but even in the Old Dominion, the principle of free speech carried the day.

  With the wind at his back, Richard took the opportunity to repay a long-standing debt. On August 23 he journeyed to his hometown of Peoria, carrying with him the Emmy he’d won in May fo
r cowriting his second special with Lily Tomlin. For the first time, his name was up on the marquee of the Shrine Mosque, one of the city’s larger venues. Officially he was there as part of “Richard Pryor Days,” a celebration sponsored by Peoria’s Ashanti Umoja Center. Yet Richard didn’t milk the occasion to grandstand. The afternoon of his show, he presented his Emmy to Juliette Whittaker, his old mentor from the Carver Center, at a ceremony at a preschool that Juliette had established. “It was our award,” Richard explained later. His first experience of a writers’ room had been in Juliette’s upstairs office at Carver.

  Juliette accepted the Emmy on behalf of all those black children who’d been involved in Peoria’s youth theater. “This is an inspiration for all of us,” she said. “Not that everyone can win an Emmy, because we know that’s impossible, but this is the impossible dream come true.” Then Richard cut the ribbon on another gift he’d provided for Juliette: a redwood playground set, with a steep slide and fireman’s pole. (Fearless in many ways, Richard was yet afraid of heights and refused to slide down the slide.) He proved eager to provide for the children who came into Juliette’s care. The next year, when Juliette founded a progressive elementary school named the Learning Tree, Richard became its financial angel, providing need-based scholarships for as many as seventy children at a time. Miss Whittaker unlocked the generosity within him; she touched that part of Richard that yearned for the innocence of childhood, an innocence he’d never been allowed.