In the 1970s, comedy fans found the dirty truth in the grooves of Laff Records
The “party record” label brought us LaWanda Page, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin, changing comedy forever
In the early days, everything Laff Records put out was going to be dirty. Pick a track, any track, like 1971’s “Husbands and Whores,” by LaWanda, and it’s clear before the first sentence is finished that the comic wasn’t performing for children. Backed by a band, she offers tips to wives on how to fake enjoyment in bed. “Act like ya feel it, because you never feel it,” LaWanda drawls, somewhere in the ballpark of lasciviousness. “But you pretend ya do.” The record’s crowd of hip L.A. showbiz people, scandalized by what was extreme candor for the Nixon era, erupts into laughter.
On the recording, the audience’s reaction comes through too loud. So does LaWanda’s voice, which goes all the way into the red as she shouts, “Sock it to me, Daddy!”
A proper engineer with an ear for clean sound would have caught that stuff. But there was nothing clean or proper about Laff.
As author Cameron Hines put it on the Laugh Button in 2017, “Listening to a record produced by Laff feels like the comic told the label, ‘I’m having some friends over tonight.’ And they replied, ‘Great, just tell jokes for thirty minutes and we’ll bring the one microphone we own!’”
Somehow it worked. Party records such as LaWanda’s Mutha Is Half a Word were a mighty cultural influence. LaWanda, who went on to have a legit TV career under her full name, LaWanda Page, was then just an obscure artist who had the opportunity to let America in on the lowdown — thanks to the grimy sound of Laff Records.
In the late sixties, nearly two decades before stand-up comedy would take America by storm, a a Jewish entrepreneur named Louis Drozen bought a building at the corner of Fifth and Broadway in downtown LA. His intention was to sell jewelry, but someone suggested he place bins of LPs in the front of his operation. Around that time, a party record label called Dooto, famous for Redd Foxx’s commercially successful albums, went belly-up. And so it was that Drozen found himself positioned to be a player in a niche industry, purchasing the busted company.
Drozen gave the party people what they wanted. Laff’s material was dirty the moment the needle hit the groove. The journalist Michael Gonzales reminds us that Laff’s recordings were often labeled “Adults Only,” noting that, “like old school pornography, the records were sometimes sold wrapped in brown paper that completely obscured the cover image.” Through 1970, Laff acts like Wildman Steve, radio personalities Johnny Otis and Mantan Moreland, Page, and the duo Skillet and Leroy were the label’s heavy hitters, bringing comic gutter narratives to the masses. Each album, no doubt pilfered from parents by curious adolescents, brought Laff’s comics closer to the mainstream.
Through it all, Drozen failed to subscribe to anything like leading-edge sound engineering and editing principles; the recordings, like the material on them, embraced human messiness. Some Laff products bore the label “Recorded at the scene of the applause, on stage or at the intimate party.” While this was true, it might have been a bit misleading. According to a 1978 Billboard article, the albums were actually recorded in a studio, with an audience “that was treated to a party atmosphere to liven it up.” Drozen was admired for making thirteen people sound like a fully lit house party, as they can be, with proper guidance.
But the dirtiest deed Drozen ever did was to give a microphone to Richard Pryor. It was 1971, three years after the comedian’s eponymous first album, recorded for Dove/Reprise, had flopped. Laff took a chance and released Pryor’s follow-up, Craps. Recorded at Redd Foxx’s nightclub, Pryor’s performance — shedding a clean, Cosby-esque style for intense improvisation and social criticism in the vein of Lenny Bruce — changed the worlds of both the label and its most famous and contemporary artist.
“I used to run from the cops and shit, because we had a curfew,” went one joke. “Niggers had to be home by 11. Negros, 12.”
“We gave Pryor a pretty healthy [$5,000] advance for back then,” Louis Drozen’s son and business partner, David, told the She Said What? podcast in 2013. “We manufactured maybe 5,000 LPs at that time and shipped to our distributors. For eight months,” he said, there wasn’t a single reorder. “Then one day the phone rang. And it rang and rang and it never stopped ringing.”
In 1971, Pryor jumped to Stax Records for a quarter of a million dollars. Laff sued, and as a condition of settlement, the label was allowed to release a trove of Pryor performances that had been recorded in bars and nightclubs and bought from a drug dealer to whom Pryor was deeply indebted. “One 10-minute bit could have been made in Atlanta, Georgia, and another one could have been done in Philadelphia,” David Drozen told Darryl Littleton, author of Black Comedians on Black Comedy (2006).
The release of these tapes infuriated Pryor, who thought the material was immature and the topics mad old. Performances — some outright hilarious — would be diced up, parceled out, and sometimes even put onto albums that were half his and half Redd Foxx’s material. When Laff’s 1978 use of dated Pryor content Are You Serious? was nominated for a Grammy, the comedian wrote a letter of protest to the Academy.
That didn’t stop Laff, which greeted every showbiz deal Pryor made with a release of its own. His appearance in the movie The Wiz was greeted in record stores by Laff’s Wizard of Comedy. When Pryor’s action movie Silver Streak hit, Laff put the comic on a record cover with a train coming out of his head.
“Basically David Drozen would get an artist to duplicate whatever was going on in Richard’s career,” says historian Dan Blazek.
Not that they needed to stoop to such dirty tricks. Pryor had opened the door for white artists such as George Carlin and Kip Addotta, who joined the Laff roster and helped keep the label alive until 1984. While Laff Records was often assailed for presenting audio product that was below industry tech standards, no one can deny its influence on comedy. The label’s recordings have even made their way into popular music, where artists like DJ Quik and RuPaul have sampled the crude genius of the label’s catalog. The sound may have been sloppy, but the Laff artists always had a story to tell.
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