Who is Biff Rose? Oh, he’s the guy who wrote that song that David Bowie and Tiny Tim covered, right?
Well, more than that. An up-and-coming songwriter, a damn good piano player, a singer with a voice you couldn’t take seriously, a comic who once wrote jokes for George Carlin, Johnny Carson guest, reciter of wry doggerel about random topics, guy who named his son Quicksilver Rose in the manner of the late sixties.
Then he went nuts. Or did he? Not always easy to tell. Anyway, he never quit. Recorded tons of material on self-released labels. Kept up a blog that was occasionally nasty, chock-a-block with anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories that were funny enough that you couldn’t be sure if he meant it. Local crank who toodled around New Orleans with a portable keyboard where he’d entertain tourists with impromtu improvised songs. Painter of Jesus portraits who liked to use naked women as his canvas. A former semi-mainstream entertainer who crossed over into “Outsiderdom”.
I saw Biff Rose perform live several times in the early 1970s. He was hysterically funny & never made racist or antisemitism comments. When did they start? Maybe he had a stroke, which is known to cause personality changes.
I doubt he had a stroke. Who can say what caused him to go off the rails? His album “Half Live at the Bitter End” is a somewhat unhinged dose of his riffage. Why did he give over the last ten minutes to an Elvis impersonator doing karaoke?
I also saw him, in the 0s, when he spent some time in Cambridge, MA. It was mostly piano playing, nothing controversial.