The Player The Hustler

Rudy Ray Moore wasn't the first nationally successful X-rated comic — Redd Foxx got there a decade earlier — but hardly anyone was as dizzyingly and gloriously obscene as Moore in his prime, and this album captures the man who was Dolemite at the peak of his form. No one seems to know exactly when The Rudy Ray Moore Party Album: Player Hustler was recorded, but it's clearly the product of Moore's heyday in the mid-'70s, when his movies were grindhouse favorites and his albums were doing a brisk under-the-counter trade at inner city record stores. (Moore was still able to get a big cheer with some Nixon jokes for those interested in a more exact time line.) Moore's uber-raunchy braggadocio is in full effect as he spins long rhyming tales about his sexual prowess and his impressive level of bad-ass cool, interspersed with jokes that get wilder and more tasteless as the album wears on, running the gamut from flatulence contests to old women whose privates are infested with bugs. Moore's female protégé, Lady Reed, also makes a guest appearance on the album, but while she's just as explicit as the headliner, her more observational brand of sexual humor doesn't generate the same laughs (or howls of disbelief) as Moore. Player Hustler isn't the best or most infamous of Moore's '70s "party" albums, but it's a solid representation of his wild comic style, and the cover art documents his fashion sense at its most impressive. This is one album you can put your weight on!