That night, Davis introduced Pryor to his drug dealer, “the Gypsy Lady,” who had rock “like the Hope Diamond.” “By trading places, he was giving me a vote of support.”Īfter the show, Pryor went to Davis’s dressing room, only to find him passionately kissing bandleader Dizzy Gillespie. “The gesture was pure Miles-intuitive, supportive, generous, and in sync with the moment,” Pryor writes. Instead, just before showtime, a lackey came in and told Pryor that Davis, already a legend, would be opening for him instead. In early 1968, Pryor was scheduled to open for Davis at the Village Gate in New York. Pryor found a soul mate and champion in jazz icon Miles Davis. “I knew,” he says, “that I could stir up more shit on stage than in a revolution.” Cat was rowing and dude says, ‘What you laughin about?’ He said, ‘yesterday I was a king.’” “You all know how black humor started?” he writes. He taught Pryor about his friend Malcolm X, whom Pryor said was “dedicated to teaching about human beings, about being human.” Performing for a Black audience, Pryor found inspiration in the minefield of his childhood and the trauma of being a Black man in America.
I spent many nights when I felt as if we were in the coke Olympics.”īut Foxx was a master storyteller. He ran the club like a gangster, treating friends like relatives and enemies with scorn,” Pryor remembered. In Foxx, he found a mentor-and a partner in crime.
Pryor returned to Los Angeles and regrouped, finding inspiration at comedian Redd Foxx’s small comedy club in Central Los Angeles.
‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Then I turned and walked off stage.” In a burst of inspiration, I finally spoke to the sold-out crowd. I gasped for clarity as if it was oxygen,” he writes. “I imagined what I looked like and got disgusted. This identity crisis came to head in 1967, when Pryor, already regularly doing cocaine after being introduced to it by a sex worker name Tia Maria, famously flamed out on stage in front of none other than Rat Packer Dean Martin. “So how do you want to end up? Have you thought about that? Do you want a career you’re proud of? Or do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis?” At a party one night, Marx gave Pryor a talking-to. ‘You sound just like Bill Cosby.’”īut while Rickles may have been amused, Groucho Marx was not. “Don Rickles came backstage and praised my act,” he remembered. Modeling even his speaking patterns after Cosby, Pryor was soon called out by a few comedic legends. “My routine included harmless spoofs of life in the ghetto,” he writes, “such as when I pretended to be a doofus saying, ‘I heard a knock on the door.’ I said to my wife, ‘There’s a knock on the door.’ And my wife said, ‘That’s peculiar. In 1966, Pryor’s career was boosted when crooner Bobby Darin signed him as the opening act for his show at the Flamingo in Vegas.
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