Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Stu Gilliam at The Basin Street West (1964)

The cover of this comedy LP on the "risque" label FAX Records states that this is the "Greatest Single Performance of Spiced Satire Ever Recorded." I certainly wouldn't go that far, but it isn't too bad. This LP was released during the early stage of Gilliam's stand-up career: 1964. In the next handful of years he performed his act on The Hollywood Palace, Playboy After Dark and three different spots on The Ed Sullivan Show. He also became a regular on the game show circuit popping up on The Hollywood Squares and The Match Game. He even had a turn in an episode of Get Smart. When things finally opened up for Black actors in the nineteen seventies, Gilliam appeared in The Mack (1973), Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde (1976) and as the voice of Curly on Hanna-Barbera's Harlem Globetrotters cartoon. Now listen to the man Redd Foxx describes in the liner notes as "... amazing, the greatest new talent of this decade," Stu Gilliam.

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