...And It's Deep, Too!

I decided to do something a little different for the next week or two; instead of uploading songs, I will instead put up either albums or sketches from albums from some comedy legends. I know, it's not exactly music, even though at places like Amazon.com, spoken word albums are grouped in with music and more importantly, in the past you used to have musical artists perform either before or after a comedy routine. For example, in the movie "Richard Pryor: Live In Concert," Patti LaBele performed before Richard's set. You don't see her in the movie but the producers acknowledged her in the beginning of the film.

Ever since Richard Pryor passed away in late 2005, I have been looking for albums of his to buy, but except for "… Is It Something I Said?", the only ones you can find are compilation albums, which is great and all and they are rather comprehensive, but if you don't want to buy a 9 CD box set, then the best bet for you who want to start off with much of his best material right away is "The Anthology (1968-1992)", a 2 CD set of 26 tracks. It's what I bought; it's a great deal. There are also live concert movies out there to get. Awhile back I got a 2 DVD set of his concert movies "Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip" and "Richard Pryor: Here And Now". The former was marred by obvious editing throughout where you see people laugh but it's obvious that they aren't laughing at the joke or comment that you just saw seconds earlier; it's so jarring and unneeded that it's distracting, although the material was still great; the latter was marred by asshole hecklers, but there was still some classic material.

But, there is a whole world of material out there that you can get via P2P services like Kazaa or MP3 Rocket, which is what I used to find a lot of tracks.

I'll start off, though, by posting a track from the aforementioned Anthology set, as an enticement for you to purchase it, as it's a must-have; Pryor just may be the funniest comedian of all time. He certainly wipes the floor with many of the current "popular" comedians out there, such as Dane Cook, Jim Norton, or David Cross.

Picking just one track is difficult but I decided to go with one where you can easily see his genius, so I went with a track from the record album version of "Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip." This is "Hospital," where he talks about the infamous incident where he burned himself after a night of freebasing. He doesn't say it in the track, but later it was made clear that the incident was a failed suicide attempt. Obviously, it's a sad and tragic moment, and yet he made it hilarious in a 10 minute dialogue where he talked humorously of the incident and his long recovery process.

Richard Pryor-Hospital (9.38 MB, 128Kbits/second)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VY5NRTYW

On Sunday I'll upload some harder to find tracks for y'all.