The Weird World of Blowfly (3/10)

January 3rd, 2012

Back when I worked in a collectible records store I encountered the music of Blowfly. The records sold well, people paying ten bucks or more to buy twenty-year old records of what was, essentially, comedy music. I listened to it to see what the fuss was all about and hated it. Listening to the songs again in the biography doc The Weird World of Blowfly, I discovered that I hated it even more now.

Clarence Reid, as he used to be known, wrote some pretty decent hits in the sixties, mostly for other artists. He, to a certain extent, gave Miami a distinguishable voice in soul music: not quite The Sound of Philadelphia, or Mo(tor) Town, but identifiable for acts like Betty Wright, Gwen McCrae, and even the anaemic KC & the Sunshine Band. At some point he began parodying popular songs, changing the title to something more profane like ‘Shittin’ Off the Dock of the Bay’. He was, in essence, a dirty Weird Al. Amazingly, the parodies became popular locally and encouraged Reid to concoct his Blowfly alter-ego. Now he REALLY got filthy.

And misogynist, and homophobic, and profane, and incredibly, cataclysmically, unfunny.

Jonathan Furmanski’s perfunctory documentary picks up Reid in modern day times, broke and attempting a comeback. Now in his late sixties, with a dodgy knee and gravelly voice, Reid is molly-coddled back to some sort of shape by the firm hand of Tom Bowker, a journalist-cum-drummer who rediscovered and repackaged Blowfly for a new generation. Theirs is an uncomfortable partnership to watch, with Bowker rather the sergeant-major to Reid’s naughty squaddie. Still, team Blowfly is back up and running again and performing once more, with varying results. Warm-up shows in little bars across America go well, but a support slot to German band Die Ärtze ends with Blowfly being flipped the finger by 10,000 punk-metallers. You might have thought, as did the members of the Teutonic rock band, that Blowfly’s toilet humour would appeal to the German sense of humour. It did not.

Whether you enjoy The Weird World of Blowfly (which isn’t weird at all, incidentally) will ultimately come down to whether you like the man and his music. I wasn’t partial to either. Reid’s rants against those he perceive to be wrongdoers becomes tiresome, his Faith ridiculous when you consider the misogyny of his songs, and his music unmemorable. Fourteen year old boys, the ones who’ve just discovered the C and F words, will laugh at his lyrics for sure, but hopefully those of a discerning nature will dismiss him as an afterthought – a shame, bearing in mind his early contribution to music, but one makes one’s bed so one must lie in it. This movie reminded me of Anvil! The Story of Anvil a great deal, but with less sympathetic people involved. Comedy music is bad enough, but old chaps attempting to recreate this comedy two decades later is quite another. I don’t think I’ll be alone is feeling slightly nauseous at the lyrics that come out of this old man’s mouth. Influential figures such as Chuck D and Ice-T may suggest otherwise, but Blowfly is nothing more than a blip in soul music (and a poor one, too, having sold the rights to his music some years ago). My advice: watch Still Bill, a wonderful, spiritual documentary about Bill Withers instead.