February 7, 2018 is a day that will live forever in the hearts of celebrity news connoisseurs, for that was the day that Quincy Jones gave an interview to Vulture in which he claimed, among other things, that: A) Ringo Starr can’t drum for shit; B) The Chicago mob killed John F. Kennedy; and C) Richard Pryor and Marlon Brando made sweet, druggy love to each other back in the ‘70s. It was a great moment in internet culture, bringing together people of all walks of life to gossip about affairs that happened 40 years ago—which are the best kinds of affairs to gossip about, because everyone involved has already moved on (or is no longer with us, in the case of Brando and Pryor).
Now, though, Jones has apologized for the “silly things” he said in his interviews with Vulture and GQ, saying that his six daughters had sat him down and basically told him he was too old and too distinguished of a public figure to be running his mouth like that. “Even at 85, it’s apparent that ‘word vomit’ and bad-mouthing is inexcusable,” he says, referring to all the shit he talked not only about The Beatles, but U2 (who he says used to be a good band) and Michael Jackson (who he called “Machiavellian”) as well.
Jones doesn’t go so far as to walk back anything he said in those interviews, mind you, just says that he should have known better than to put all that on the record. As far as Brando and Pryor go, soon after the Vulture interview was published, Pryor’s widow Jennifer Lee Pryor told TMZ that hell yeah, they hooked up, and that Pryor would have found the whole thing hilarious. Pryor’s daughter Rain and Brando’s son Miko then came forward to dispute Jennifer Lee Pryor’s claim, a family disagreement that may have helped prompt Jones’ apology.