Twisted Tales: Soul Singer's Secret Identity as X-Rated Costumed Superhero Blowfly

Posted on Jan 29th 2010 5:00PM by James Sullivan
Comments

Soul singer Clarence Reid had a Top 40 in 1969 with 'Nobody But You Babe,' an "answer" record to the Isley Brothers' smash 'It's Your Thing.' It's easy to see what drew him to the Isleys song: Reid, better known as Blowfly, would be only too happy to tell you who to sock it to.

If the singer's raunchy party records are to be believed, he's been socking it to whomever he pleases, and in any number of ways, his whole life. As a boy, Reid's grandmother caught him making up perverted lyrics for hit songs; she said he was "nastier than a blowfly," and the nickname stuck.

In the 1960s and '70s, Reid had a good degree of success as a soul songwriter; Sam & Dave, Irma Thomas and KC and the Sunshine Band were among the acts that recorded his music. But his own recording career didn't quite get up for the down stroke until he began taking his ridiculous alter-ego seriously. The early-'70s album 'The Weird World of Blowfly'
featured live-in-studio funk parodies of classic tunes such as 'Soul Man' ('Hole Man') and 'Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay,' reworded to suggest a rhyming, less passive activity than "sittin'."

Such juvenile revisionism would become Blowfly's signature gimmick: He once drew a lawsuit from the writer of the pop standard 'What a Difference a Day Makes' for his off-color version, 'What a Difference a Lay Makes.' The guy happened to be serving as the president of ASCAP, the composers' rights organization, at the time.

Most absurd of all, though, was the incredible 'Weird World' album cover, for which Blowfly posed in the world's most pathetic superhero costume: knee socks, tighty-whiteys and an alien mask, while holding ... a rubber chicken. Almost 40 years later, Blowfly was still dressing like the thrift-shop version of the Brown Hornet from 'Fat Albert.'

After the Sugarhill Gang's 'Rapper's Delight' became the first big commercially successful rap song, Miami's TK Records, where Reid had worked as a staff writer for years, rushed out 'Blowfly's Rapp,' a remake of his old song 'Rap Dirty,' which some hip-hop heads have claimed as the first rap record. Ice Cube, Wu-Tang Clan, DMX and Jurassic 5 have all sampled Reid; for her song 'Upgrade U,' Beyoncé sampled one of the hits he wrote for Betty Wright, ''Girls Can't Do What the Guys Do.' (Another, 'Clean Up Woman,' was a No. 6 pop hit in 1971.)

After decades as an underground funk phenomenon, Blowfly rubbed up against another audience when he signed with Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles in 2005. His second album for the label, 'Blowfly's Punk Rock Party,' included a nod to the Ramones ('I Wanna Be Fellated,') a remake of Biafra's own Dead Kennedys song 'Holiday in Cambodia' (the mind-boggling 'R. Kelly in Cambodia') and several other parodies too crude, sadly, to print here.

But the wildest part of the Blowfly legacy may well be the fact that he's not really that wild at all. In reality, Clarence Reid is a God- fearing Christian who, he insists, doesn't drink, smoke or do drugs. "I may go to hell," admits the man who created Blowfly, the original rude boy, "but it won't be for those things."