Bill Cosby is in the news again.  He just got through telling the middle aged crowd at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Conference in Chicago that the time for blaming white people for the problems of the black these days had worn thin, had worn thin especially with him, and that he insisted that many if not most of the problems in the ‘black community’ was the fault of crappy parents.  Many of whom, it was implied, were in the audience.

 

Cosby was applauded greatly. 

 

It is hard for me to recall that Cosby wasn’t always so old, so sounding like my own father, who out of the accepted level of prejudice of his time, would lacerate the Civil Rights Movement as a bunch of bums wanting to reap the benefits that my father had worked so hard to…etc., etc.   My father and my family hadn’t worked all that hard for years, in fact, and we lived awfully well on money passed down.  It was a stinging hypocrisy for me, and it made me very angry: at my father for saying it and myself for living off it.

 

It was only later, much later - not many years ago, in fact - that I realized the restrictive and socially confined Fifties made perfect sense because millions of Americans had been so traumatized by the Korean and Second World War, and even non-combat experience overseas shocked them with the relative paucity of wealth in the rest of the world, even England, that they returned more or less united in staying safe, at peace, and what ‘dad’ wanted when he got through with work was comfort and surety and the avoidance of controversy which might lead to real violence.  If there had to be violence, make it effective and quick.  It’s like someone said: ‘Parents don’t want justice.  They want quiet.’ 

 

Cosby said that. 

 

Alas, television and bored teens didn’t feed into that scenario for long, and hence: The Sixties.

 

In 1970, I was a member of a group called The Drambuies, which was a folk trio consisting of myself, my future wife, and a terrific banjo player.  We had entered and won the Budweiser-Olde Spice Intercollegiate Music Festival from our home base in Florida and won the national competition.  Out of this, we were to get national exposure singing Bud commercials or Olde Spice.  I forget.  We won in Evanston (this senior moment requires a correction 5/22/05: it was Edwardsville), Illinois outside of St. Louis over a three night competition.  We opened for Grand Funk Railroad, Jose Feliciano, and Bill Cosby, then nearly at the height of his stand up career.

 

We won despite our choice of Shel Silverstein’s “Three Legged Man” as our comedy bit, on which I soloed and which went over like a pregnant pole-vaulter.  I was shattered, but somewhat healed by the trophy.  In any case, I got so excited after meeting the Bud officials after the show that I jumped high and knocked myself unconscious in the doorway of the motel room.  A clue to the future, surely.

 

Still, a great experience and we learned much.  Among other things, Jose Feliciano did not know how to laugh, or stage laugh anyway.  Being blind, he didn’t know what a smile or a man laughing looked like, and someone had apparently told him he needed to lighten up his stage show some.  He was riding the wave of a hit song, The Door’s Light My Fire, and a best selling album, and the crowd loved him.  Then, he told a joke he either didn’t get or think was funny and faked a laugh that startled everyone.  Those of us up close could see his face contort into unseemly shapes, and his laugh was a horrifying audio experience.  It got worse through his set, but the distance and the dark glasses protected most of the audience from his light moments. 

 

I’ve seen him since, and the laugh and the contortions are gone and I can only assume he was then in the hands of someone trying to mold him into a concert performer with the outsized gestures needed to win over large numbers of people far away.  But….that laugh…

 

On the second night, Bill Cosby followed us on stage.  He was to have had, I learned later, a microphone, a chair and a table with water glasses on it.  He was standing on the side of the stage, was announced, and walked past us into the light.

 

He looked for a microphone.   Standing in front of 20k people in an outdoor amphitheater, without a microphone he had no point of connection.  Then, he saw it over on stage left, and he walked over, did a few ‘tests’ and was all right by the time the applause had died down.  There was no table.  He asked for some water later in the show, and he got it.

 

I’ve thought about this as just crappy promoters or amateur stage crew, being in the days before the huge contract riders and entourages that have contributed so much to the high expense and demise of live entertainment today.  But it was only 1970, don’t forget.  Later that decade the Pointer Sisters would appear on the Grand Old O’Pry and be heckled by members of Tex Ritter’s band because they were black and didn’t belong there.  Can’t recall if Charlie Pride was singing then. 

 

It was only two years after RFK and MLK had been killed within months of each other.

 

So there’s a better than even chance that Southern Illinois, Land of Lincoln, hadn’t seen the light yet on civil rights, and that Cosby Boy was just bein’ shown he ain’t so high and mighty as he thought, know what uh mean?

 

If so, Cosby never showed it, never mentioned it, and did a hysterical performance.  It’s difficult now, of course, to listen to that old material – Fat Albert, among other things – and realize how cutting edge it was, how actually rather dangerous.  Because Cosby had the temerity to insist that black kids were like white kids were like kids everywhere and that white folks like my parents – in the audience – could relate to his childhood because really?  It was just like theirs.  And he seemed so nice.

 

And he was.  My father, who I heard laugh, still managed to sum it up by saying “He should stick to acting” in his TV show with Robert Culp, I Spy.  Later, seeing Cosby in a movie, he reversed himself.  My father wasn’t going easily into the next decade.

 

Cosby’s greatest triumphs were ahead, with his television shows, with his books, with his specials.  In all that time, his support for the work of Martin Luther King and his beliefs never wavered, and as much as Harry Belafonte he carried the torch for the fallen.

 

But Cosby was, in upbringing and in education, somewhat hampered in the role of groundbreaking black comedian.  He was middle class white in manner, manners, and humor.  He is still, and as such the younger blacks, the new comedians, find him boring and offensive in his pander to white values.  But he was consistent and decent and never, ever condescending to any of us.  If time has rendered his humor bland, his advice rather forced and apparently for a generation long gone, his decency and strength of character still are powerful. 

 

On the dais with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and others, the deference went to Cosby that night he tore a new one in the image of the Welfare Queen, the Black Man wid no respect, the American Negro as Victim.  “Horseshit,” he didn’t say but clearly wanted to.  Time to slap this character upside the head and leave him behind.

 

Our dirty laundry gets home from school at 2:30 in the afternoon, he said.  They can’t talk, they can’t read, they can’t think.  And you blame it on whitey.  It’s analgesic, he said, to blame it on whitey.  He was just getting started.  He went after black parents…..

 

He got a standing ovation, but considering the economic class there, it was unavoidable.  It was also gutsy, because nobody else there, including Jackson and Sharpton, had ever had the courage to say anything so bitter, so angry, and direct it at the black community live and in their face.  Jackson had admitted that he was generally relieved to hear footsteps and turn around see white kids following him these days.  Sharpton has nudged closer, but cannot be as honest.

 

Cosby, the one with most to lose, did it.  And it might actually matter, because it’s started the conversation again; not “The Conversation” between black and white, the one between black and black.

 

It’s easy to get prim about this and say ‘how nice’ but the reality is the exact same things could be said about white kids as well.  And about white parents.  And that ‘conversation’ ain’t happening at all.  If blacks were disturbed that whites were now privy to their dirty laundry, hey.  Listened to how white kids talk recently, guys?  Can Cosby come stick it to the white folks…..again?  They need it as well.

 

Still, it was sad for me to see Cosby as an old black man with sensitive eyes, wearing Stevie Wonder dark glasses under the lights.  Cosby lost his son to senseless violence, he’s screwed up and wandered, he’s not been the ideal black man for white presentation, whatever that might be.  Perhaps if Erkel was an athlete or Richard Simmons were black, the ideal non-threatening black male to white America could be obtained.

 

But he’s been a better man than his detractors and admirers combined, has earned degrees, has helped others get through college, put on a decent and highly successful television career and, most important, often been damned funny throughout. 

 

You may have to be as old as I to recall it, though.  And I am sorry for that, that you missed those times.