“If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.”
- Charlie “The Bird” Parker
Sunday nights in the early nineties was a time to be excited. Why? Because that's when In Living Color came on. You'd have had a hard time making me miss it. Of course, you could tape things back then, but seeing it in real time was preferable so you could talk about it Monday at work.
Are you familiar? It was an innovative, un-PC madhouse of skits and characters, the brainchild of writer/comedian Keenan Ivory Wayans. It launched the career of his brother, Damon Wayans as well as Jim Carey, Jamie Fox, David Alan Grier and several others. Jennifer Lopez was even one of the nameless “Fly Girl" dancers, a troop that spun and gyrated about in the show's intro and when it went into commercial breaks. That's where her career peaked as far as I'm concerned.
The show spawned numerous characters that live on in comedy history: Fire Marshall Bill, Homey D. Clown, Oswald Bates, Wanda Wayne, and skits like Men on Film and This Old Box. It was no stepchild of SNL. It was hipper, really. They skewered modern culture in their own inimitable style. Most everything about the show could not exist today because somewhere someone might possibly get their feelings hurt. Can't have that.
One of the recurring characters was David Alan Grier's Calhoun Tubbs, an old black blues singer who had hundreds of songs that were all identical and lasted about ten seconds, “I wrote a song about it, like to hear it? Here it goes.” I saw Grier interviewed about where he got the idea for Tubbs. If I remember correctly, he said it was when he was in college at the University of Michigan. There was an old bluesman playing some club and a huge crowd of mostly white kids were lined up outside waiting to get in when Grier passed by. Intrigued, he hung around and bought a ticket. He said the old man was TERRIBLE, but the white kids thought he was the authentic item and were captivated, or at least pretended to be. The equivalent of seriously thinking a Duck-taped banana to a wall was high art, I guess.
So here's to you, Calhoun Tubbs. Also, I mentioned a while back that my personal Mississippi Delta blues player was R.L. Burnside. My second, Skip James.