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Richard Pryor: meltdown at the Hollywood Bowl
Starring at a gay rights fundraiser, the great standup saw other black artists being treated with racist contempt – and launched into an astonishing tirade that the 17,000-strong audience would never forget
• The enduring genius of Richard Pryor
Scott Saul
Sun 11 Jan 2015 13.00 EST Last modified on Sat 25 Nov 2017 03.27 EST
‘Kiss my happy, rich black ass’ … Richard Pryor during his performance at the Hollywood Bowl on 18 September 1977. Photograph: Lennox McLendon/AP
On 18 September 1977, when Richard Pryor took the stage of the Hollywood Bowl as a headliner of the Star-Spangled Night for Rights – a benefit promoted by an early gay rights group – the event had, according to one journalist, “all the makings of a cabaret version of Woodstock”. Less than 15 minutes later, when Pryor ended by asking the audience to “kiss my happy, rich black ass”, the concert was closer to a cabaret version of Altamont. The good vibes had dispersed; a night of unity had turned into a hot, steaming mess. Many in the crowd booed or shouted abuse: “Richard Pryor, you just committed professional suicide!” or “Kiss your ass, hell! I’d like to put a hot poker up it!” Others cheered a provocateur who, before he had dismissed the crowd as self-serving “fakkits”, had spoken bravely about the joy of gay sex and exposed the fault lines of the gay rights movement.
Still others sat poleaxed, trying to grasp how, in coming to the Hollywood Bowl, they had taken a detour into the Twilight Zone. “In more than 14 years of covering the great, near-great and terrible of show business, I have never seen anything like it,” wrote John Wasserman in the San Francisco Chronicle. “To call what happened bizarre would not, for me, do it justice. It was like watching a person come unglued in front of you and then, as in a cartoon, disappear piece by piece.”
The meltdown at the Hollywood Bowl was, in its own way, a vintage Pryor performance: artful and impulsive, merciless and hapless, and above all, devilishly attuned to the hidden dynamics of the moment. The driving force behind the benefit concert had been the Save Our Human Rights Foundation, a San Francisco group composed largely of gay professionals, formed in response to the anti-gay crusade spearheaded by Anita Bryant and other Christian conservatives in Florida.
The foundation hoped to do for gay rights what the American Cancer Society had done for cancer: “to educate people, but in a nice glossy way”. Dignity was of utmost concern. When the show’s producer discovered that one of his performers, a comedy act, would satirise Bryant directly, the act was removed from the bill; the appeal for “human rights” meant always aiming for the moral high ground.
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‘I came here for human rights’ ... Pryor at the Hollywood Bowl. Photograph: Lennox McLendon/AP
The 17,000 people assembled at the Bowl, mostly gay men, sang the national anthem “with the volume and fervour usually associated with conventions of the veterans of foreign wars”. Performers avoided specific mention of gay life, much less gay sex; in the words of another observer, it was “an evening of unspoken assumptions”. Richard’s friend Lily Tomlin came the closest to striking a direct chord when she reminisced about the 1950s as a time “when sex was dirty ... and, of course, no one was gay, only shy”.
Over the course of the evening, Pryor grew increasingly allergic to the atmosphere of moral superiority. He despised euphemisms, and yet here he was headlining a gay rights benefit that couldn’t put the word gay in its title. He felt the victim of a bait and switch; like at least one other black artist on the programme, he’d originally been asked to perform for a human rights rally, pure and simple. Other resentments gathered. He scanned the sea of faces in the audience and spotted only a handful of black people. And he noticed that the Lockers, a young black dance group on the bill, kept suffering from poor treatment. When the dancers asked stagehands for help with the lights, the stagehands paid no notice; when the dancers performed onstage – one jumped over six chairs in a single bound – the audience sat in their seats. An hour later, just before Pryor was set to perform, the formerly indifferent stagehands leapt to fix the lights for two white ballet dancers; and the formerly blasé audience applauded them as if they were “some bad motherfukkers”. Backstage Pryor saw the fire marshal dress-down a Locker for setting off a small explosive onstage as a special effect, and he saw the show’s promoters refuse to come to the dancer’s defence.
To Pryor, all this was racism in action. He simmered, and awaited his turn. When he finally walked in front of the audience, Pryor didn’t speak for a little while; he prowled back and forth like a pent-up animal. Then he pounced: “I came here for human rights,” he said, “and I found out what it was really about was about not getting caught with a dikk in your mouth.” The crowd erupted in laughter.
“You don’t want the police to kick your ass if you’re sucking the dikk, and that’s fair,” Pryor continued. “You’ve got the right to suck anything you want!” With three sentences, Pryor had outflanked all the other performers on the bill – some of whom, like Tomlin, had open ties to the gay community – by stripping away the airy talk of “human rights”. He had brought into the open the basic demand of the gay struggle: sexual freedom in the face of police harassment.
Starring at a gay rights fundraiser, the great standup saw other black artists being treated with racist contempt – and launched into an astonishing tirade that the 17,000-strong audience would never forget
• The enduring genius of Richard Pryor
Scott Saul
Sun 11 Jan 2015 13.00 EST Last modified on Sat 25 Nov 2017 03.27 EST
‘Kiss my happy, rich black ass’ … Richard Pryor during his performance at the Hollywood Bowl on 18 September 1977. Photograph: Lennox McLendon/AP
On 18 September 1977, when Richard Pryor took the stage of the Hollywood Bowl as a headliner of the Star-Spangled Night for Rights – a benefit promoted by an early gay rights group – the event had, according to one journalist, “all the makings of a cabaret version of Woodstock”. Less than 15 minutes later, when Pryor ended by asking the audience to “kiss my happy, rich black ass”, the concert was closer to a cabaret version of Altamont. The good vibes had dispersed; a night of unity had turned into a hot, steaming mess. Many in the crowd booed or shouted abuse: “Richard Pryor, you just committed professional suicide!” or “Kiss your ass, hell! I’d like to put a hot poker up it!” Others cheered a provocateur who, before he had dismissed the crowd as self-serving “fakkits”, had spoken bravely about the joy of gay sex and exposed the fault lines of the gay rights movement.
Still others sat poleaxed, trying to grasp how, in coming to the Hollywood Bowl, they had taken a detour into the Twilight Zone. “In more than 14 years of covering the great, near-great and terrible of show business, I have never seen anything like it,” wrote John Wasserman in the San Francisco Chronicle. “To call what happened bizarre would not, for me, do it justice. It was like watching a person come unglued in front of you and then, as in a cartoon, disappear piece by piece.”
The meltdown at the Hollywood Bowl was, in its own way, a vintage Pryor performance: artful and impulsive, merciless and hapless, and above all, devilishly attuned to the hidden dynamics of the moment. The driving force behind the benefit concert had been the Save Our Human Rights Foundation, a San Francisco group composed largely of gay professionals, formed in response to the anti-gay crusade spearheaded by Anita Bryant and other Christian conservatives in Florida.
The foundation hoped to do for gay rights what the American Cancer Society had done for cancer: “to educate people, but in a nice glossy way”. Dignity was of utmost concern. When the show’s producer discovered that one of his performers, a comedy act, would satirise Bryant directly, the act was removed from the bill; the appeal for “human rights” meant always aiming for the moral high ground.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
‘I came here for human rights’ ... Pryor at the Hollywood Bowl. Photograph: Lennox McLendon/AP
The 17,000 people assembled at the Bowl, mostly gay men, sang the national anthem “with the volume and fervour usually associated with conventions of the veterans of foreign wars”. Performers avoided specific mention of gay life, much less gay sex; in the words of another observer, it was “an evening of unspoken assumptions”. Richard’s friend Lily Tomlin came the closest to striking a direct chord when she reminisced about the 1950s as a time “when sex was dirty ... and, of course, no one was gay, only shy”.
Over the course of the evening, Pryor grew increasingly allergic to the atmosphere of moral superiority. He despised euphemisms, and yet here he was headlining a gay rights benefit that couldn’t put the word gay in its title. He felt the victim of a bait and switch; like at least one other black artist on the programme, he’d originally been asked to perform for a human rights rally, pure and simple. Other resentments gathered. He scanned the sea of faces in the audience and spotted only a handful of black people. And he noticed that the Lockers, a young black dance group on the bill, kept suffering from poor treatment. When the dancers asked stagehands for help with the lights, the stagehands paid no notice; when the dancers performed onstage – one jumped over six chairs in a single bound – the audience sat in their seats. An hour later, just before Pryor was set to perform, the formerly indifferent stagehands leapt to fix the lights for two white ballet dancers; and the formerly blasé audience applauded them as if they were “some bad motherfukkers”. Backstage Pryor saw the fire marshal dress-down a Locker for setting off a small explosive onstage as a special effect, and he saw the show’s promoters refuse to come to the dancer’s defence.
To Pryor, all this was racism in action. He simmered, and awaited his turn. When he finally walked in front of the audience, Pryor didn’t speak for a little while; he prowled back and forth like a pent-up animal. Then he pounced: “I came here for human rights,” he said, “and I found out what it was really about was about not getting caught with a dikk in your mouth.” The crowd erupted in laughter.
“You don’t want the police to kick your ass if you’re sucking the dikk, and that’s fair,” Pryor continued. “You’ve got the right to suck anything you want!” With three sentences, Pryor had outflanked all the other performers on the bill – some of whom, like Tomlin, had open ties to the gay community – by stripping away the airy talk of “human rights”. He had brought into the open the basic demand of the gay struggle: sexual freedom in the face of police harassment.
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