Sly Stone and Richard Pryor on The Mike Douglas Show: Really, Really Real

I love this clip.

It's Sly Stone and Richard Pryor -- easily at the apex of their respective careers at this point --  overwhelming Mike Douglas on his show with pure star wattage and verve and yes, blackness. The premise is that Richard will accompany Sly on drums. (Huh?)  Ultimately, they completely upend the interview with stops and starts of what seems to be their own private conversation that started elsewhere and spilled onto this situation.  Surprisingly, it's not drug induced. What's apparent is that they have a great deal of love and respect for each other.  Even when they're figuring out what's going on with whatever they're going to do ("Richard, are you going to play drums?")  in front of an audience of millions with chunks of blank space idling between them, you can glimpse their genius.  And their friendship.

Who does this? When things go awry on a talk show nowadays, it's (somewhat) scripted.  This wasn't planned or improvised. They were just goofing off.

It's more than wonderful, to watch Sly change clothes onstage behind a folding screen with the help of a female assistant -- onstage! -- and hear not only the audience gasp audibly as he presents himself transformed, but Mike Douglas' reaction as he glances behind the screen. Like a superhero in full regalia, Sly is a shiny gleaming silver glitterbomb, ready for action.  Then and now (remember his blonde mohawk at the 2006 Grammys?) Sly understands performance, the importance of fantasy and the power of a strong visual.

Were performers more brilliant then -- or were they simply more commonplace because they were on television every day?

Someone should release all of the episodes for The Mike Douglas Show. Or maybe I should be grateful that I live in New York City and join The Museum of Radio and Television so I can watch them whenever I want. 

Sid Caesar, Rest In Peace

No cue cards. No teleprompter. No human prompter. No script. No nothing. Just you, spazzing out -- and a few cameras, broadcasting your low brow hi-jinx to millions. Talk about flying by the seat of your pants. Such was the infancy of television, those early bad old days when Ernie Kovacs and Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner and Woody Allen and many more ruled the airwaves as writers initially, and Sid Caesar ran the show.  No. He was the show, in Your Show of Shows.   What's breathtaking is how well so much of that material still holds up -- and how far reaching his influence has been/still is.


I know, I know -- we have The Groundlings, we have The Upright Citizens Brigade. We have a lot of comedy troupes nowadays that have churned out a few diamonds in the rough that institutions like SNL have polished to a brilliant sheen, more or less.  But SNL hasn't been seriously funny in a really long time.  And SCTV happened in the 80s. In Canada.

Very few artists get to live long enough to know how they mattered within their genre or that their work will outlast them.  Sid is clearly amongst them.  I don't know why but somewhere in there, I began to look for the ones whose work had outlasted them. I looked for the qualities that connected them. I deliberately veered away from the trendy, the popular, the now.  I was certainly aware of what everyone else liked but I knew that there was something more.  When I glimpse work that connects with the eternal, I know I'm on the right road.

Avoiding hacks at all costs is key, of course.

This is by far one of my favorite bits.  Sid has this long drawn out wordless argument (!!!) with Nanette Fabray (quite the humdinger in her day -- and yes, she's still alive) -- with the Fifth of Beethoven as an aural backdrop. 

I've got to work with Mel Brooks.  I've just got to...!