Documentaries That Document the Wrong Thing

The Weird World of Blowfly was hard to watch. I've never understood why Blowfly might be funny so I thought I'd give it a shot, and it turned out that the film didn't have much history but instead followed the now-fairly-infirm Clarence Reid around as a hipster white guy tried to make a buck off Blowfly by being a terrible manager/drummer in a new Blowfly band. And let me put it in a sentence: Tom Bowker is a leaden and uninspiring drummer. Off-stage Bowker comes off like Philip Seymour Hoffman trying to be unfunny and pathetic, which Philip Seymour Hoffman is quite good at but looks very sad in a real person. I don't know what the financial arrangements actually are - maybe Reid comes out ahead (there's a scene in which Bowker complains of his debt and Reid doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wants to incur more of that).

This was somewhat amusing because the excerpt in the film stuck with the part that sounded like straight soul except for the words, so the chorus, uh, came as a surprise:



Later on the song becomes just way too obvious.

Apart from such brief surprises - which isn't actually a surprise in context - he's about as unfunny as Frank Zappa.

Like Zappa, though, Clarence Reid had musical talent:



It's also a reminder that I don't know much about TK Records beyond KC and Anita Ward, and I should do some listening.