Redd Foxx You Gotta Wash Your Ass live comedy vinyl LP album cover 1975Redd Foxx You Gotta Wash Your Ass live comedy vinyl LP album cover 1975

You Gotta Wash Your Ass: Redd Foxx, Party Records, and the Pioneer Nobody Talks About Enough

March 23, 2026

Redd Foxx: the two funniest four-letter words in show business. Redd worked blue, motherfucker. The King of the Party Record. Everybody talks about Lenny Bruce talking dirty and influencing people. They make movies and TV shows aroundLenny Bruce. But Redd Foxx talked dirty and influenced people too. And early in the game. There would be no Richard Pryor without Redd Foxx. Foxx made over fifty records and sold over ten million copies, he signed an exclusive Vegas contract for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, he got around $35,000 an episode for his TV show, and Eddie Murphy still had to pay for his funeral. Redd’s tax problems were no joke. As Redd would say, ain’t that a bitch?

The Vogue has a copy of Redd Foxx’s You Gotta Wash Your Ass. This was a live recording of a 1975 show and was Foxx’s first new album in twelve years. During that time, Foxx was killing it in Hollywood, culminating in a hit TV show, whichrevolutionized the medium: Sanford & Son. For the time it was as important culturally as All in the Family, M.A.S.H., and Maude. Foxx was a pioneer in everything he did. Based on the British show, Steptoe & Son, the American version, which ran from 1972 to 1977, is how Lou originally knew of Redd Foxx. That probably goes for you out there too. And if you are around Lou’s age, you probably know Sanford & Son from reruns. That’s what Lou calls them. If you are hipper to the medium, you might say syndication. A syndicated show is a television program sold to independent stations rather than one of the major networks to fill out the programming. Lou had always heard that a hundred episodes was the magic number for syndication, and that was when the money came in for the actors and producers. Syndication was a huge pay day. That is why Jerry Seinfield is worth over a billion dollars. But this can’t be true. Lou saw The Monkees in syndication on MTV in the 1980s, and he saw the show on Saturday mornings before that. That show only ran for fifty-nine episodes. So, the magic number of a hundred is bullshit.

In any case, Lou saw Sanford & Son in reruns in the 1980s along with a ton of other old shows that make his childhood not unlike that of kids decades previously. We were watching the same shit, like Leave It to Beaver, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and I Love Lucy. That was during the week. On the weekend, Lou saw The Banana Splits, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Clue Club, and two of Lou’s favorites, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines and Wacky Races. Muttley and Penelope Pitstop forever. BTW Hollywood is fucking with her in 2026. Margot Robbie does the honors of driving over her cartoon corpse. Is nothing sacred? Lou can remember many of these shows’ theme songs. Sanford & Sonhad an iconic theme song, but Lou loved the song for The Rockford Files the best. At the time, Lou was a car guy, hence the love for Wacky Races, and he dug Rockford’s wheels. Not up to The Bandit’s, but a good whip, nonetheless.

So, in a sense through syndication, Sanford & Son became timeless, but looking back now what Lou finds so fascinating and, well, downright shocking, is that Redd Foxx was in his late forties, when he made that show. Holy shit!! He was younger than Lou is now by quite a bit. You can talk about “You big dummy” all you want but the catch phases of Sanford & Sonwere all about Redd Foxx being old: “This is the big one!” or “Arthur-it is”. There was recently a meme of Paul Rudd and Wilford Brimley about aging. Brimley was in his late forties and early fifties when filming movies like Cocoon and The Natural. Dude looks ancient. Diabetuhs, man. Paul Rudd looks like Lou’s son. If Lou was better looking and in better shape. It is crazy. Then you consider athletes like LeBron James, Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady playing sports (Lou said playing sports, not games like golf; golf is not a sport; bowling is not a sport) at an elite level in their forties. To paraphrase the lady at Katz’s in When Harry Met Sally, Lou will have what they’re having. Lou suspects they are not crushing pounders of PBR and chain-smoking cigars at a rapid pace. Redd Foxx was. He died of a heart attack on the set of The Royal Family in 1991 at the age of sixty-eight. Note to self, take it easy on the beer and cigars.

The Vogue has You Gotta Wash Your Ass for $5. Wash is filthy. Lou was going to keep it, but he decided to put the album back in the soap dish for someone else to discover. There was a time when the discovery of a Redd Foxx record in your parents’ LP collection, or maybe in some hidden stash tucked away in the closet, would change your life. Redd Foxx changed the comedic lives of Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Chris Rock, but Lou does not want to do that thing where every white basketball player who is any good, like Cooper Flagg, is compared to Larry Bird. The comedy of Redd Foxx transcended race. He was one of the first Black comedians to break into playing showrooms in Las Vegas. Foxx had a top ten TV show in the 1970s that played cross racial boundaries. Redd Foxx killed audiences of all colors. He is a pioneer and one of the most important comedians to ever do it. Five bucks. That would be about the cost of a good ticket to see Redd live in 1975. A two-drink minimum. So, when you get the LP from the Vogue, stop at Black Moon Public House and get a couple Narragansetts and have the time of your life, while you are shortening it.