Deep Dive - Raunchy 70's Funk and Soul w/ Millie Jackson and Blowfly
Biography Millie Jackson
Born July 15, 1944, in Thompson, GA; divorced; children: Keisha, Jerrol. Addresses: Office--Keishval Enterprises, Inc., 2095 High Point Tr. S.W., Atlanta, GA 30331.Record company--Ichiban Records, P.O. Box 724677, Atlanta, GA 31139-1677. Millie Jackson has built her singing career on her rich, smoky voice, her musical talent, her business acumen, and her sense of humor. Jackson has always made her own business and career decisions; for many years she has acted as her own manager. A coproducer of her own recordings, she also owns a production company, Keishval Enterprises. She writes many of her own songs and all of her own raps, the spoken sections in her concerts and on her records. In these raps, she has consciously chosen to continue the blues tradition of explicit honesty. She talks about every angle of sex, relationships, and everyday life. As Vertamae Grosvenor wrote in Ms. magazine, "Her buck-naked everyday truth-telling style is pure raunch.... When Millie sings and raps about love and relationships, the liberated lyrics of her spokesongs proclaim that there are choices. Alternatives." Jackson grew up in the middle of the blues-oriented South, in Georgia. Her mother died when she was two years old; her father left her to go find work in the north when she was 11. For years, she lived with her strictly religious grandparents. When she was 15, she moved to New Jersey to live with her father again, but left shortly thereafter to live with an aunt in Brooklyn. Jackson began singing professionally in her late teens on a dare. One evening she was with friends at the Palm Cafe in Harlem. A friend challenged her to get up and sing with the band. Not one to shy away from any such challenge, she got up and sang "Stand By Me," and the audience loved her. One member of the audience liked her so much he offered her a job singing at a nearby club, the Crystal Ballroom. Jackson wanted a singing career, but also was quite aware of the pitfalls and insecurities of such a life. For ten years, she sang at night and on weekends while still holding down a full-time day job. "I didn't quit my secretarial job until I had two records on the charts," she told Essence. "I wasn't sure I was gonna continue because so many singers come out there and get hits then disappear. I told my agent that if he could book me three months in advance, I'd quit. I came in the next day and I was booked. That was it." Beginning with little formal musical training, Jackson learned what she needed to know about music on the road. She described her musical education in High Fidelity: "[My road band] taught me a lot, and I familiarized myself enough with the piano to write.... I took a test at Juilliard in order to enroll. I told the professor 'You know I came here to better my career. Why do I have to name three Russian composers? I could give a damn!' He said, 'Well, you have to know theory--about major and minor, about diminished and augmented.'" When Jackson told the Juilliard professor that she knew theory, she related, "He said, 'Go home. You're further ahead now than the majority of students graduating this year. You say you've got a record? How many of my students do you think would love to have one? If you go through these classes you're going to think about the right way of doing things and kill your artistic side. Go home.'" She went home, and has been writing many of the songs she sings ever since. Jackson's early recordings fit squarely into traditional rhythm and blues categories, and included two singles that made the Top Ten: "Ask Me What You Want" and "My Man a Sweet Man." She developed her stage personality as she developed her raps in her live performances, in which she often talked about sex. "Sex is always a good subject," she told Essence. "People always been cheatin' and always will be.... [My songs] give people something to talk about and keeps their minds off their problems." She has also acted as something of a role model and spokesperson for women. "Women come to me all the time to comment on what I'm doing," she explained to Essence. "Maybe it's because I'm saying something they want to say." In 1974 Jackson scored a big hit with the release of Caught Up. This album, which contained country-western and rock tunes as well as soul, was the first successful concept album by a female singer, describing a love triangle from the perspectives of both the wife and the "other woman." It was her first album to contain raps developed from her concerts, and it was the first to contain explicitly sexual talk. It was also her first album to go gold. Jackson's next album, Still Caught Up, continued with the same themes and also went gold. After her initial albums drew some complaints about her frank language and subject matter, she recorded a couple of tamer albums. She described the results in High Fidelity: "After I saw the sales I tapped on a few desks and said, 'I'm gonna do what the hell I want and if it doesn't sell it's my career.'... I went back into the studio and did Feelin' Bitchy and it was the biggest album I ever had." She did not change her style again. Jackson's success has been something of an anomaly in the music industry. Usually a song's financial success depends almost completely on how much airplay it gets--recordings that are played frequently on the radio sell well. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, few radio stations played Jackson's songs because of their explicit lyrics, and few radio and television talk shows invited her to appear. Even when Jackson did appear on shows, she rarely had a chance to really talk. "They always expect you to go completely off [the air] and say all those dirty words. You get to sing your song sometimes, but they never let you say anything," she explained to Rolling Stone. "Then when the show's over and you're backstage talking, they realize you have a brain in your head slightly larger than the size of a pea, but the show is over with, so you gotta wait until you get your next hit record maybe." Even Jackson's clean albums did not receive radio play. "When I have a clean album, nobody'll play it. They say it's not Millie," she told Rolling Stone. In the long run, she does not waste too much time worrying about the radio. "I found out it doesn't make too much sense to gear yourself for radio anyway," she observed in Rolling Stone. "I'm one of those few artists whose albums people will buy without hearing. But I've had Number One R&B records that got no pop play at all." In 1994, however, Jackson released Rock N' Soul, a collection of 11 tracks of varied styles, ranging from a cover of country singer Vince Gill's "Whenever You Come Around" to rockers Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me." Billboard's J. R. Reynolds noted that the album marked "a more conservative approach" in the singer's career, as it left out the racy lyrics and off-color poetry in favor straight-ahead rock and R&B. Reynolds reported that the move was due to Jackson's disapproval of much of what is on the airwaves. Jackson remarked in Billboard, "It all sounds the same, and I wanted to show you can make different kinds of good music." Jackson has spent much time during her career deciding what does make sense (and cents), for she manages herself and runs her own production company, Keishval Enterprises. "It's a pain in the neck," she told High Fidelity, "and very time consuming, but no one has given me a better offer. I haven't given a manager 20, 25, or 30 percent of my money because I've found that I can speak for myself very well. He'd have the right to place me with a booking agency, but I've already got one that I like. I've never had any trouble collecting money or saying whether or not I want to work this week." After almost 20 years of recording and performing in concert, Jackson felt it made sense for her to begin expanding her career. The woman who could not get radio airplay in the 1980s got her own radio show on KKDA-FM in Dallas in the 1990s. She took her concert raps to their logical conclusion, and created an entire program, "set up more as a play than a concert," as she told the Atlanta Constitution. The show, Young Man, Older Woman, includes monologues, dancing, and comedy; the cast features not only Millie Jackson, but her daughter, singer Keisha Jackson. Like the rest of her work, Young Man, Older Woman talks about life and relationships, telling the story of a married woman who becomes complacent in her relationship, ceases to take pride in herself, and then regains control over her life. Having command over one's own life has been a personal theme for Jackson, and her gift to her audience and younger female performers. While her many recordings constitute a rich legacy of their own, Jackson has given the music industry much more than songs. Through her individuality and independence, she has been a role model for many young women. She paved the way for aggressive female rappers in a genre famous for its misogyny. In her business dealings, she showed other female performers like Janet Jackson and Madonna that women can manage their own careers. Just as her songs feature raps about choices and alternatives for women, Millie Jackson's life course has been determined by her own choices. by Robin Armstrong
https://musicianguide.com/biographies/1608001103/Millie-Jackson.html
Articles
https://www.vibe.com/features/editorial/music-sermon-millie-jackson-639759/
https://www.npr.org/2006/05/19/5416489/catching-up-with-soul-icon-millie-jackson
https://famousinterview.com/rhythm-and-blues/millie-jackson-interview/
https://www.thecouchsessions.com/articles/featured/interview-live-and-uncensored-with-millie-jackson
https://www.eldredgeatl.com/2015/11/02/live-uncensored-a-conversation-with-keisha-millie-jackson/
https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/caught-up-40-years-later-millie-jackson-recalls-creating-a-classic/
https://routes-mag.com/issue-1980-1-2/
Music Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Spotify Mix
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aiVK9APEcghz6pN0h4tSJ?si=HrUjcoh2Tyio3tDjzBkOCw
Video Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Video Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4zYKaPKme7C7D7-A-qZX6AsSIEGK8u1
Biography - Blowfly
Clarence "Blowfly" ReidClarence Henry Reid (February 14, 1939 – January 17, 2016) was an American musician, songwriter and producer, also known by the stage name and alternate persona Blowfly.
Reid was born in Cochran, Georgia, in 1939. During the 1960s and 1970s he wrote for and produced artists including Betty Wright, Sam & Dave, Gwen McCrae, Jimmy "Bo" Horne, Bobby Byrd, and KC & the Sunshine Band. During this period he was also a recording artist, cutting many of his own songs, including "Nobody But You Babe".Reid wrote sexually explicit versions of hit songs for fun but only performed them for his friends at parties or in the studio. In 1971, he along with a band of studio musicians, recorded a whole album of these songs under the name Blowfly. The album, The Weird World of Blowfly, features Reid dressed as a low-rent supervillain on its cover. He created this alter ego to protect his career as a songwriter, and continued to perform in bizarre costumes as his Blowfly character and continued to record sexually explicit albums throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The albums were widely popular as "party records". The explicit version of his song "Rapp Dirty" (a.k.a. "Blowfly's Rapp") helped the album Blowfly's Party reach No. 26 on Billboard Magazine's black albums chart and No. 82 on the Billboard Top 200 in 1980.
Blowfly's profane style earned Reid legal trouble. He was sued by songwriter Stanley Adams, who was ASCAP president at the time, for spoofing "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" as "What a Difference a Lay Makes". Reid's own compositions have been sampled by dozens of hip hop, R&B, and electronic artists (such as Beyonce, Wu Tang Clan, DJ Quik, DMX, Method Man & Redman, Main Source, DJ Shadow, Eazy-E, RJD2, Jurassic 5, Big Daddy Kane, Mary J. Blige, Brand Nubian, and the Avalanches) but Reid received almost no money from sampling due to signing away most of his royalties.
20th centuryBlowfly's Zodiac Blowfly LP (also released on CD in 1996 on Weird World Records) includes the songs "If Eating You Is Wrong, I Don'tWant To Be Right", "The First Time Ever You Sucked My Dick", and"Ain't No Head Like My Woman's Head", as well as a version of "Clean Up Woman", which he co-wrote.Another album of this period is The Weird Worldof Blow Fly.
21st centuryIn 2003, Blowfly sold the rights to his entire catalog after years of debt. The catalog was said to be worth millions of unpaid royalties.
After 17 years of sporadic touring and occasional re-recording of his classic raps, Blowfly signed with Jello Biafra's independent record label Alternative Tentacles in 2005. Fahrenheit 69, the first album under the new contract, featured appearances from Slug of Atmosphere, King Coleman, Gravy Train, and Afroman.
Blowfly's Punk Rock Party, a 2006 album release from Alternative Tentacles, features several punk rock classics given the Blowfly treatment—including a rewrite of the Dead Kennedys song "Holiday in Cambodia" recast as "R. Kelly in Cambodia", which features Biafra (the song's composer and original singer) playing a trial judge. The album also includes "I Wanna Be Fellated", "Gotta Keep Her Penetrated", "I Wanna Fuck Your Dog" and "Should I Fuck This Big Fat Ho?".Blowfly completed his first tour of Australia in March 2007, and toured Germany with Die Ärzte in 2008. He performed at the 2010 Big Day Out music festival, held in Australia and New Zealand.
The Weird World of Blowfly, directed by Jonathan Furmanski, premiered at South by Southwest in 2010 and received a wider release in September 2011.
Illness and deathOn January 12, 2016, Blowfly drummer "Uncle" Tom Bowker announced in a statement on the Blowfly Facebook page that Reid was suffering from terminal liver cancer and had been admitted to a hospice facility in Florida. According to Bowker, the singer would release his final LP – entitled 77 Rusty Trombones – in February 2016. Reid died on January 17, 2016, from cancer and multiple organ failure at the hospice facility in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, aged 76.
FamilyReid's daughter is former WNBA player Tracy Reid.
DiscographyAlbums as Clarence Reid
Articles
https://www.vice.com/da/article/mv5ada/blowfly-is-a-filthy-old-man
https://www.artforum.com/print/201605/blowfly-59511
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/01/19/463569514/remembering-blowfly-black-music-s-filthiest-legend
https://indyweek.com/music/features/original-dirty-rapper/
https://larecord.com/interviews/2008/05/15/blowfly-sampling-is-like-raping-somebody
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rm5p3r/blowfly-is-a-filthy-old-man-interview
https://bohemian.com/blowfly-1/
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/music/blowfly-the-original-dirty-rapper-brings-something-long-and-hard-to-the-firebird-tonight-2650795
clarence-reid-singer-and-songwriter-also-known-as-blowfly-dies-at-76.html
https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-18074-i-the-weird-world-of-blowfly-i.html
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.3418738/remembering-blowfly-one-of-music-s-filthiest-1.3418748
http://www.musicfilmweb.com/2011/01/rap-documentary-weird-world-of-blowfly/
https://larecord.com/interviews/2008/05/15/blowfly-sampling-is-like-raping-somebody
Music Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Spotify Mix
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aiVK9APEcghz6pN0h4tSJ?si=HrUjcoh2Tyio3tDjzBkOCw
Full Documentary
The Weird World of Blowfly - 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG-4eutJX0k
Video Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Video Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4zYKaPKme7C7D7-A-qZX6AsSIEGK8u1
Born July 15, 1944, in Thompson, GA; divorced; children: Keisha, Jerrol. Addresses: Office--Keishval Enterprises, Inc., 2095 High Point Tr. S.W., Atlanta, GA 30331.Record company--Ichiban Records, P.O. Box 724677, Atlanta, GA 31139-1677. Millie Jackson has built her singing career on her rich, smoky voice, her musical talent, her business acumen, and her sense of humor. Jackson has always made her own business and career decisions; for many years she has acted as her own manager. A coproducer of her own recordings, she also owns a production company, Keishval Enterprises. She writes many of her own songs and all of her own raps, the spoken sections in her concerts and on her records. In these raps, she has consciously chosen to continue the blues tradition of explicit honesty. She talks about every angle of sex, relationships, and everyday life. As Vertamae Grosvenor wrote in Ms. magazine, "Her buck-naked everyday truth-telling style is pure raunch.... When Millie sings and raps about love and relationships, the liberated lyrics of her spokesongs proclaim that there are choices. Alternatives." Jackson grew up in the middle of the blues-oriented South, in Georgia. Her mother died when she was two years old; her father left her to go find work in the north when she was 11. For years, she lived with her strictly religious grandparents. When she was 15, she moved to New Jersey to live with her father again, but left shortly thereafter to live with an aunt in Brooklyn. Jackson began singing professionally in her late teens on a dare. One evening she was with friends at the Palm Cafe in Harlem. A friend challenged her to get up and sing with the band. Not one to shy away from any such challenge, she got up and sang "Stand By Me," and the audience loved her. One member of the audience liked her so much he offered her a job singing at a nearby club, the Crystal Ballroom. Jackson wanted a singing career, but also was quite aware of the pitfalls and insecurities of such a life. For ten years, she sang at night and on weekends while still holding down a full-time day job. "I didn't quit my secretarial job until I had two records on the charts," she told Essence. "I wasn't sure I was gonna continue because so many singers come out there and get hits then disappear. I told my agent that if he could book me three months in advance, I'd quit. I came in the next day and I was booked. That was it." Beginning with little formal musical training, Jackson learned what she needed to know about music on the road. She described her musical education in High Fidelity: "[My road band] taught me a lot, and I familiarized myself enough with the piano to write.... I took a test at Juilliard in order to enroll. I told the professor 'You know I came here to better my career. Why do I have to name three Russian composers? I could give a damn!' He said, 'Well, you have to know theory--about major and minor, about diminished and augmented.'" When Jackson told the Juilliard professor that she knew theory, she related, "He said, 'Go home. You're further ahead now than the majority of students graduating this year. You say you've got a record? How many of my students do you think would love to have one? If you go through these classes you're going to think about the right way of doing things and kill your artistic side. Go home.'" She went home, and has been writing many of the songs she sings ever since. Jackson's early recordings fit squarely into traditional rhythm and blues categories, and included two singles that made the Top Ten: "Ask Me What You Want" and "My Man a Sweet Man." She developed her stage personality as she developed her raps in her live performances, in which she often talked about sex. "Sex is always a good subject," she told Essence. "People always been cheatin' and always will be.... [My songs] give people something to talk about and keeps their minds off their problems." She has also acted as something of a role model and spokesperson for women. "Women come to me all the time to comment on what I'm doing," she explained to Essence. "Maybe it's because I'm saying something they want to say." In 1974 Jackson scored a big hit with the release of Caught Up. This album, which contained country-western and rock tunes as well as soul, was the first successful concept album by a female singer, describing a love triangle from the perspectives of both the wife and the "other woman." It was her first album to contain raps developed from her concerts, and it was the first to contain explicitly sexual talk. It was also her first album to go gold. Jackson's next album, Still Caught Up, continued with the same themes and also went gold. After her initial albums drew some complaints about her frank language and subject matter, she recorded a couple of tamer albums. She described the results in High Fidelity: "After I saw the sales I tapped on a few desks and said, 'I'm gonna do what the hell I want and if it doesn't sell it's my career.'... I went back into the studio and did Feelin' Bitchy and it was the biggest album I ever had." She did not change her style again. Jackson's success has been something of an anomaly in the music industry. Usually a song's financial success depends almost completely on how much airplay it gets--recordings that are played frequently on the radio sell well. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, few radio stations played Jackson's songs because of their explicit lyrics, and few radio and television talk shows invited her to appear. Even when Jackson did appear on shows, she rarely had a chance to really talk. "They always expect you to go completely off [the air] and say all those dirty words. You get to sing your song sometimes, but they never let you say anything," she explained to Rolling Stone. "Then when the show's over and you're backstage talking, they realize you have a brain in your head slightly larger than the size of a pea, but the show is over with, so you gotta wait until you get your next hit record maybe." Even Jackson's clean albums did not receive radio play. "When I have a clean album, nobody'll play it. They say it's not Millie," she told Rolling Stone. In the long run, she does not waste too much time worrying about the radio. "I found out it doesn't make too much sense to gear yourself for radio anyway," she observed in Rolling Stone. "I'm one of those few artists whose albums people will buy without hearing. But I've had Number One R&B records that got no pop play at all." In 1994, however, Jackson released Rock N' Soul, a collection of 11 tracks of varied styles, ranging from a cover of country singer Vince Gill's "Whenever You Come Around" to rockers Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me." Billboard's J. R. Reynolds noted that the album marked "a more conservative approach" in the singer's career, as it left out the racy lyrics and off-color poetry in favor straight-ahead rock and R&B. Reynolds reported that the move was due to Jackson's disapproval of much of what is on the airwaves. Jackson remarked in Billboard, "It all sounds the same, and I wanted to show you can make different kinds of good music." Jackson has spent much time during her career deciding what does make sense (and cents), for she manages herself and runs her own production company, Keishval Enterprises. "It's a pain in the neck," she told High Fidelity, "and very time consuming, but no one has given me a better offer. I haven't given a manager 20, 25, or 30 percent of my money because I've found that I can speak for myself very well. He'd have the right to place me with a booking agency, but I've already got one that I like. I've never had any trouble collecting money or saying whether or not I want to work this week." After almost 20 years of recording and performing in concert, Jackson felt it made sense for her to begin expanding her career. The woman who could not get radio airplay in the 1980s got her own radio show on KKDA-FM in Dallas in the 1990s. She took her concert raps to their logical conclusion, and created an entire program, "set up more as a play than a concert," as she told the Atlanta Constitution. The show, Young Man, Older Woman, includes monologues, dancing, and comedy; the cast features not only Millie Jackson, but her daughter, singer Keisha Jackson. Like the rest of her work, Young Man, Older Woman talks about life and relationships, telling the story of a married woman who becomes complacent in her relationship, ceases to take pride in herself, and then regains control over her life. Having command over one's own life has been a personal theme for Jackson, and her gift to her audience and younger female performers. While her many recordings constitute a rich legacy of their own, Jackson has given the music industry much more than songs. Through her individuality and independence, she has been a role model for many young women. She paved the way for aggressive female rappers in a genre famous for its misogyny. In her business dealings, she showed other female performers like Janet Jackson and Madonna that women can manage their own careers. Just as her songs feature raps about choices and alternatives for women, Millie Jackson's life course has been determined by her own choices. by Robin Armstrong
https://musicianguide.com/biographies/1608001103/Millie-Jackson.html
Articles
https://www.vibe.com/features/editorial/music-sermon-millie-jackson-639759/
https://www.npr.org/2006/05/19/5416489/catching-up-with-soul-icon-millie-jackson
https://famousinterview.com/rhythm-and-blues/millie-jackson-interview/
https://www.thecouchsessions.com/articles/featured/interview-live-and-uncensored-with-millie-jackson
https://www.eldredgeatl.com/2015/11/02/live-uncensored-a-conversation-with-keisha-millie-jackson/
https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/caught-up-40-years-later-millie-jackson-recalls-creating-a-classic/
https://routes-mag.com/issue-1980-1-2/
Music Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Spotify Mix
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aiVK9APEcghz6pN0h4tSJ?si=HrUjcoh2Tyio3tDjzBkOCw
Video Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Video Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4zYKaPKme7C7D7-A-qZX6AsSIEGK8u1
Biography - Blowfly
Clarence "Blowfly" ReidClarence Henry Reid (February 14, 1939 – January 17, 2016) was an American musician, songwriter and producer, also known by the stage name and alternate persona Blowfly.
Reid was born in Cochran, Georgia, in 1939. During the 1960s and 1970s he wrote for and produced artists including Betty Wright, Sam & Dave, Gwen McCrae, Jimmy "Bo" Horne, Bobby Byrd, and KC & the Sunshine Band. During this period he was also a recording artist, cutting many of his own songs, including "Nobody But You Babe".Reid wrote sexually explicit versions of hit songs for fun but only performed them for his friends at parties or in the studio. In 1971, he along with a band of studio musicians, recorded a whole album of these songs under the name Blowfly. The album, The Weird World of Blowfly, features Reid dressed as a low-rent supervillain on its cover. He created this alter ego to protect his career as a songwriter, and continued to perform in bizarre costumes as his Blowfly character and continued to record sexually explicit albums throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The albums were widely popular as "party records". The explicit version of his song "Rapp Dirty" (a.k.a. "Blowfly's Rapp") helped the album Blowfly's Party reach No. 26 on Billboard Magazine's black albums chart and No. 82 on the Billboard Top 200 in 1980.
Blowfly's profane style earned Reid legal trouble. He was sued by songwriter Stanley Adams, who was ASCAP president at the time, for spoofing "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" as "What a Difference a Lay Makes". Reid's own compositions have been sampled by dozens of hip hop, R&B, and electronic artists (such as Beyonce, Wu Tang Clan, DJ Quik, DMX, Method Man & Redman, Main Source, DJ Shadow, Eazy-E, RJD2, Jurassic 5, Big Daddy Kane, Mary J. Blige, Brand Nubian, and the Avalanches) but Reid received almost no money from sampling due to signing away most of his royalties.
20th centuryBlowfly's Zodiac Blowfly LP (also released on CD in 1996 on Weird World Records) includes the songs "If Eating You Is Wrong, I Don'tWant To Be Right", "The First Time Ever You Sucked My Dick", and"Ain't No Head Like My Woman's Head", as well as a version of "Clean Up Woman", which he co-wrote.Another album of this period is The Weird Worldof Blow Fly.
21st centuryIn 2003, Blowfly sold the rights to his entire catalog after years of debt. The catalog was said to be worth millions of unpaid royalties.
After 17 years of sporadic touring and occasional re-recording of his classic raps, Blowfly signed with Jello Biafra's independent record label Alternative Tentacles in 2005. Fahrenheit 69, the first album under the new contract, featured appearances from Slug of Atmosphere, King Coleman, Gravy Train, and Afroman.
Blowfly's Punk Rock Party, a 2006 album release from Alternative Tentacles, features several punk rock classics given the Blowfly treatment—including a rewrite of the Dead Kennedys song "Holiday in Cambodia" recast as "R. Kelly in Cambodia", which features Biafra (the song's composer and original singer) playing a trial judge. The album also includes "I Wanna Be Fellated", "Gotta Keep Her Penetrated", "I Wanna Fuck Your Dog" and "Should I Fuck This Big Fat Ho?".Blowfly completed his first tour of Australia in March 2007, and toured Germany with Die Ärzte in 2008. He performed at the 2010 Big Day Out music festival, held in Australia and New Zealand.
The Weird World of Blowfly, directed by Jonathan Furmanski, premiered at South by Southwest in 2010 and received a wider release in September 2011.
Illness and deathOn January 12, 2016, Blowfly drummer "Uncle" Tom Bowker announced in a statement on the Blowfly Facebook page that Reid was suffering from terminal liver cancer and had been admitted to a hospice facility in Florida. According to Bowker, the singer would release his final LP – entitled 77 Rusty Trombones – in February 2016. Reid died on January 17, 2016, from cancer and multiple organ failure at the hospice facility in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, aged 76.
FamilyReid's daughter is former WNBA player Tracy Reid.
DiscographyAlbums as Clarence Reid
- Dancin' with Nobody But You Babe (1969)
- Running Water (1973)
- On the Job (1976)
- The Weird World of Blowfly (1971)
- Blow Fly on TV (1974)
- Zodiac Blowfly (1975)
- Oldies But Goodies (1976)
- Blowfly's Disco Party (1977)
- At the Movies (1977)
- Porno Freak (1978)
- Zodiac Party (1978)
- Blowfly's Party (1980) #82 US, #26 Black Albums
- Rappin' Dancing & Laughin (1981)
- Butterfly (1981)
- Fresh Juice (1983)
- Electronic Banana (1985)
- On Tour 1986 (1986)
- Blowfly and the Temple of Doom (1987)
- Blowfly for President (1988)
- Freak Party (1989)
- Twisted World of Blowfly (1991)
- 2001: A Sex Odyssey (1996)
- Analthology: The Best of Blowfly (1996)
- Blowfly Does XXX-Mas (1999)
- Fahrenheit 69 (2005)
- Blowfly's Punk Rock Party (2006)
- Superblowfly (2007)
- Live At the Platypussery (2008)
- Black in the Sack (2012) - PATAC records
- 77 Rusty Trombones (2016)
Articles
https://www.vice.com/da/article/mv5ada/blowfly-is-a-filthy-old-man
https://www.artforum.com/print/201605/blowfly-59511
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/01/19/463569514/remembering-blowfly-black-music-s-filthiest-legend
https://indyweek.com/music/features/original-dirty-rapper/
https://larecord.com/interviews/2008/05/15/blowfly-sampling-is-like-raping-somebody
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rm5p3r/blowfly-is-a-filthy-old-man-interview
https://bohemian.com/blowfly-1/
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/music/blowfly-the-original-dirty-rapper-brings-something-long-and-hard-to-the-firebird-tonight-2650795
clarence-reid-singer-and-songwriter-also-known-as-blowfly-dies-at-76.html
https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-18074-i-the-weird-world-of-blowfly-i.html
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.3418738/remembering-blowfly-one-of-music-s-filthiest-1.3418748
http://www.musicfilmweb.com/2011/01/rap-documentary-weird-world-of-blowfly/
https://larecord.com/interviews/2008/05/15/blowfly-sampling-is-like-raping-somebody
Music Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Spotify Mix
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aiVK9APEcghz6pN0h4tSJ?si=HrUjcoh2Tyio3tDjzBkOCw
Full Documentary
The Weird World of Blowfly - 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG-4eutJX0k
Video Playlist
Vintage Annals Archive Video Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4zYKaPKme7C7D7-A-qZX6AsSIEGK8u1