by SCOTT C

“You made a big mistake, Scott,” growls a low, menacing voice over the phone from Denver, Colorado. “By calling this number, you’ve entered the curse of Blowfly, and exactly 13 days from now, you gonna wake up in the middle of the night, buck naked! You’re gonna look up and see Michael Jackson, and he’ll tell you you lied about being 13 and to get out of his bed!”

If there was a simple way to introduce the X-rated world of the colourful character known as Blowfly, I would have to say that this spirited, indecent, 60-something individual pretty much single-handedly paved the way for Kool Keith, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Luke Campbell and 2 Live Crew.

Blowfly is Clarence Reid, a product of Cochran, Georgia, and a self-made musician and performer who has a staggering 40 albums and over 50 years of performing to his credit. Although he’s quick to point out that he’s written songs for soul sensations Gwen McRae, Betty Wright and Sam & Dave, these contributions have nothing to do with the infamy surrounding the legendary Blowfly, known the world over for records like “Cookie Man,” “Rapp Dirty” and Blowfly Does XXX-Mas.

Blowfly has literally made a career out of talking shit, tailoring his lewd persona after the “soul talking” style of Southern radio DJs of the ’50s and ’60s. In the ’60s, he released the offensively impolite and ill-mannered “Suck My Dick” (to the tune of “Do the Twist”), followed by the startling abruptness of “Shittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” He was also sued by the president of ASCAP for a forgettable little tune called “What a Difference a Lay Makes,” the original of which, “What a Difference a Day Makes,” was composed by the ASCAP headman.

With a discography that reads like a blue-movie catalogue, songs like “Porno Freak” and “Funky in the Hole” are only the beginning of the legend of Blowfly. I tried to toss the man a few questions about living life to crude and offensive new heights, but, unable to get a word in edgewise, I was instead treated to all sorts of crazy chapters from the weird and dirty world of Blowfly. Here are just a few of them.

Baby Blowfly

“My mama had me when she was 16, and when you 16 and pregnant in Georgia at the time, they either sent you away or made you get married. So my mama married the man who would be my daddy. I was walking at four months, and at six months, my grandmama told me I said my first words, which were ‘Fuck you.’ Now, she thought there was no way a baby could be saying words like this, but was still amazed that I was talking at all.

“When I was seven years old, my mama moved to Miami and I stayed back in Georgia with my grandmama. I was a loner. I didn’t hang out with no other kids, and I got along with the white girls better than anything else, but I just did my chores and kept to myself. There used to be this Ku Klux Klansman around named Colly Cross, and he was so mean the crackers and the niggers hated him, and Satan didn’t want him in hell. I used to watch them in the woods like a fly on the wall. A fly on the wall knows it all, they used to say.

“He used to get guys to try and run down mules in record time for money while people watched, and because I used to feed the hogs and pigs at night, I had a special way with the mules. I mean, I was feeding them five days a week, so they knew me, but when them people saw me run down a mule in no time at eight years old, even the man from the KKK was like, ‘How’d you do that?’ Black people making $3 a day as a slave, and I can make $10 in three minutes by doing what I know how to do? Who’s the nigger?”

Young ’n’ dirty

“I was different than the rest of the blacks in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. The boss called them by nigger, and they would crawl all over the place in fear of whether or not the boss was gonna do something to them later. I wouldn’t answer if they called me a nigger. I didn’t eat no squirrel, no coon, no possum, no rabbit and I hated chitlins. My grandmama ate all that stuff, but I didn’t so I was skinny. I wouldn’t eat seafood because I thought it smelled like unwashed nigger pussy, and it did. White women smelled like billygoat, and a lot of people don’t know that a billygoat menstruates like women. You can fuck a hog or a mule and nothing would happen, they’d just call you nasty, but if the law caught you fuckin’ a sheep or goat, your ass would go to jail.

“Because you were either a nigger or white, I used to do things to get into the white people’s heads, make them forget they were supposed to hate me. I remember singing, ‘I’m jerkin’ my dick over you/I keep tellin’ myself it ain’t true/I jerked it so much till it turned black an’ blue/jerkin’ my dick over you.’ They would call me a nasty little bastard, but would turn around and give me money. I had so much money that I would go home to my grandmama and she would think that I’d stolen it.

“So while white people were throwin’ me money, black people hated me. My grandmama told me, ‘You’re no better than a blowfly, and a disgrace to the black race.’ I didn’t even know what a blowfly was. I can remember her beatin’ me across her lap, and I’d call her a bitch and not even cry.”

One in every town

“In every Southern city—Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Little Rock—you used to find a statue of a Southern soldier in the middle of the town. That’s mandatory. I would go to this statue in the town square and talk shit. Now, just to get into white people’s heads, I wouldn’t respond to anything except nigger, so white ladies would come around and say, ‘Hey, boy,’ or, ‘That’s not very nice, junior,’ and I wouldn’t respond. One time, the sheriff came and said, ‘Hey, you little nigger, what do you think you’re doing?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m a nigger, but get it straight, though. I’m the world’s baddest nigger!’”

Hanging with the big boys

“After I moved up to Miami in the ’50s and started trying to get jobs as a musician and a songwriter, I had an opportunity to present a song I’d written about homosexuals called “Oddballs” to Dick Clark and Henry Stone. They thought it was the worst piece of shit they’d ever heard! That led to me working as a session musician and writer in a bunch of studios, and working with some strange and interesting folks.

“I recorded a song called ‘I’m Doing My Thing’ as Clarence Reid in 1964, and it came out shitty. The record label hated it. Years later, the Isley Brothers would record ‘It’s Your Thing,’ and the bosses at the studio were kicking themselves because that hadn’t done nothin’ with my earlier song. They asked me to re-record it, and they had Muscle Shoals horns and Issac Hayes, who I didn’t know at the time, play on the record. Top 10 on Billboard! But the Isley Brothers filed a lawsuit, saying that my song sounded exactly like their song.

“The lawyers are in the office raising all kinds of hell, and I started hollerin’ and screamin’ and slammed my fist down on the desk. ‘Let me get this straight. I’m part nigger, part Indian and part German. I’m a third-grader, and I know more about this shit than you Harvard fuckin’ graduates! It’s impossible for them to win a lawsuit against us, when I recorded this shit in 1964,’ which seemed like a million years ago at that point. I knew it was gonna be hard for them to prove I’d stolen the song from them in 1968, when this nigger had recorded it in 1964! We even considered suing the Iselys! After all that, the studio let me start doing things like The Weird World of Blowfly in 1969.”

God bless the Germans

“There was this East German dude who wouldn’t leave me alone in the ’60s. Bitch kept touchin’ me and I thought he was gay or something! He wanted to make me a deal. I didn’t know nothing about making no deals, so I sent him some master tapes and waited. One day, I get home and my mama calls me and says, ‘Junior, there’s a bunch of Germans over here, looking like Nazi skinheads and shit. They nice people an’ all, I’ve been feedin’ them, but you got to come over here and deal with them.’

“I get over there, and I say to myself that one of these guys looks familiar. Turns out it was the German dude who I had made the deal with before, and he had come all the way to Miami to give me four cheques adding up to around $2,000. So I went down to M&M Liquors to get them cheques cashed, and the lady told me the cheques added up to about $16,000! I had to go home and get my identification, and go back and cash them.

“Those Germans were responsible for ‘Rapp Dirty’ getting a proper release after the Sugarhill Gang started getting popular, and it made the charts in the ’80s. ‘Rapp Dirty’ came out before any of them rap records, way back in the ’60s, but nobody heard it except the Germans!”

Me against God and mama

“My mama said to me, ‘Junior, when you gonna give your life to God? Look at Natalie Cole. She’s a minister now. MC Hammer is a minister, and Prince is a Jehovah’s Witness minister now. When you gonna give your life to God?’

“How many years did it take Nat King Cole to become a millionaire, and it takes his bitch crackhead daughter less than 10 years to put the family in the poorhouse, in and out rehab seven times. My mama knows I ain’t never did no drugs, and now she wants me to be like Natalie Cole? MC Hammer lucked out because Rick James died before he could collect what was his. Hammer had babies with six of the 12 girls that danced and toured with him, and somehow he finds God and decides to become a minister? My mama wants me to be like him?

“Now we get to the nitty-gritty. Mr. Purple Rain buttfucked Vanity and Apollonia, and then performed oral sex on they nephew while singing, ‘Am I slick or sly, straight, gay or bi, controversy...’ He says he don’t even like dirty shit now! What kind of hypocrisy is this? Any fuckin’ scumbag can become a minister or a priest, and you know them priests have been covering up shit forever, messing with them little boys and girls.

“I tell it like it is, don’t hide or cover up nothing, and I make my peace with God every day. Don’t get me started on Michael Jackson...”

With Tony Ezzy at Petit Campus on Sunday, April 2, 9 p.m., $13.50

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