(1970, Traffic Records)
I made this list a couple of months ago, and it’s sad that I’m writing about this record a couple days after Rudy Ray Moore died. (I found it strange that Dolemite was born in 1927, though; he was truly ahead of his time.) My folks used to have 8-track tapes back in the day, and they had a couple of Rudy Ray Moore ones, one of which the cover was nothing more than a champagne glass. I knew I wasn’t supposed to listen to it, mostly because no one ever played it while I was around, and it got kept in one of the side cabinets of the actual working Victrola my folks had. But dad also had a stack of a couple hundred Penthouses, Ouis, and Hustlers in a closet that I looked at like a motherfucker when I’d stay home from school, pretending to be sick, so I could masturbate myself silly. I put on the Rudy Ray Moore 8-track one day, expecting like some super-awesome sex soundtrack that was just gonna make my young pubescent dick pop right outside of my body, but no. There were dirty words, and a foul-mouthed lady who sounded like she had fat hips from too many pork chop sandwiches, but nothing to make my dick hard. And I was too young to really appreciate blue humor.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m in college in Richmond, Virginia, which at this point (around 1991 or 1992) was still a run-down piece of shit and not yet rejuvenated by my alma mater Virginia Commonwealth University as well as other projects (but one man’s rejuvenation is another man’s sterile ass bullshit). There were tons of shitty thrift stores, benefitting all sorts of charitable groups (meaning most likely the old couple that ran them), and I was a college student in the early ‘90s, so getting stuff at thrift stores was like the best shit ever. The stupid ebays hadn’t been created yet, so people couldn’t scour the earth for dumbasses to rip off on every obscure piece of crap they had laying around, so a lot of times, you could still find great shit at a thrift store, at a great price. (My best thrift store purchase, really ever, was in this weird little hole-in-the-wall thrift store on Broad Street near VCU where I bought four old Hustler magazines and a really nice satin American flag, complete with the yellow fringe, for $10. I masturbated to the Hustlers, and a few years later, after an all-night session of drinking, me and Eddie the singer from the M-80s who is now a heroin junkie and probably dead and his girlfriend Whitney tied the flag onto a clothesline pulley thing in my Oregon Hill back yard, set it on fire as the sun came up, and pulleyed it out over the middle of the yard, standing there drunkenly laughing. Then my cop neighbor who lived one building over on the bottom floor came out to see all this. He didn’t even bat an eye, we said “morning” to each other, and he drove off in his cop car.) Well, the Salvation Army that used to be on Broad Street down where all the non-white people mill about waiting for buses or jobs or death or whatever, it was a prime ass thrift store. I went in there one time, and right on the end of a stack of records on the floor was a Redd Foxx LP. So I dug. I ended up finding a Reynaldo Rey LP too, plus two Rudy Ray Moore ones, one without the sleeve though, which I just tucked into this one, which did have the sleeve. By this point in my life, I had been corrupted by the rapping musics, so I had an appreciation for the blue humor, as performed by old school darkies who used to do the Chitlin Circuit.
The thing about Rudy Ray Moore’s better albums, and this one’s still my favorite out of the seven or eight I’ve ever owned in one format or another, is the use of a live house band, as well as foul-mouthed singers. Calling himself the Godfather of Rap wasn’t just jive (haha, I’ve been using that word a lot lately, because I’m a stupid fucker who thinks retarded shit like that is funny to do to unsuspecting people, and if I can’t entertain myself in my time on this shitty rock, then fuck you and your judgemental ass nature), because there’s some seriously ass funky shit in there. I am surprised no one has sampled a few of these tracks intros or outros, although then again, there are far faggier whiteboys on this earth nowadays than myself, and they’ve stolen far more electronic Rudy Ray Moore files than I ever bought at shitty thrift stores, so I’m sure these things have been sampled silly by the Swedish and Norwegish and all that shit. But I guess this album is most notable for being where the story of “Dolemite” was first on the wax, and I’m sure three million rappers have sampled lines from that. But their’s isn’t as grainy and poppy as my copy. Which is why I love vinyl - so organic and fucked-up and full of a story. You can pick the seeds out of a big bag of weed on an album cover. I’d like to see you fags do that with your tiny assed ipods.
Actually, I just did some quick research, and this was Rudy Ray Moore’s first LP. His second was This Pussy Belongs To Me, released like a month after his first one, which is the other sleeveless LP I got that day, but I tucked it in some other album at some point for safe keeping and have never remembered where that was. Which sucks, because that album has “Hurricane Annie”. But both made the Billboard Soul charts, making Rudy Ray Moore the first soul artist to have two albums on the chart at the same time. That’s all the internet-based music fag minutaie I have for you though. You can anything else you need on your own. Also, my album cover is the more Salvation Army clean one, not the completely awesome ass one as pictured above.
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