Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Second that... I spent some time looking through lordbuckley.com, and 
found it pretty rich.
  

    
The's more like it. Many intriguing, informed psosts from the
intriging WELL commnity! There was a fire at the 14th St. Con Ed plant
yesterday and I had to walk most of the way home to Brooklyn from
midtown and was way to fried to anything last night but eat Chinese
food and watch the Met game. So, what a great surprise to see such
heightened chat chit going on without me.

Let me respond in order...
To "FOM": The name Sam Stout is not familiar though many names of
secnd and third gen Buckley-style riffers have come up. Do you remember
any of Stout's riffs?

Brother Dave Gartner in L.A. I think was one and I knew a cat named
Brother Blue when I lived in Campbidge. I have a great memory of him
spieling atop a gigantic snow mountain in Harvard Sq. circa blizzard of
'78 with a great line: "I tried going to divinity school...it just
wasn't divine enough fo' me!!"

Gans: Glad to have you on board and pleased your enjoin' "DI!" All
that early show biz stuff is fun and was a huge kick to research. I
think that's one reason writers might like writing...it gives us a
chance to learn. And the Holmesian search for detail and clue can get
obsessive. For example, you probably noticed those excerpts of
newspaper reviews of Buckley's show from his vaudeville days in the
mid-1940s. Around 1995 I was given a xerox of a page from a 1944
"Variety" called 'Routes.' It listed the venues that scores of
vaudeville performers would be performing in that week. And listed Dick
Buckley at a theater in Detroit or someplace.

So, with my great calculi (two times two equals mother four), I
figured that if he was listed for one week, he'd be listed for others.
I was able to find all the old "Variety"s on microfilm at the Library
of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (one of the great troves of low,
middle, popular and high culture in the world) and, through painstaking
spinning of the microfilm machines, was able to create a week-by-week
itinerary for Buckley over the course of about two and half-years
during this era in the mid-'40s.

But I didn't stop there. I then went to the old newspapers on
microfilm of each of those cities he had visited available at the Main
Branch Library on 5th Ave. (site of my original flash), located the
week he had visited with the show, and was often able to locate the
review of the revue. This was a big event in both the small cities and
got predictably large and wider coverage. But the shows were reviewed
in the larger cities too. Ironically but perhaps not so surprisingly
given its proximity to Broadway in the golden age of Times Sq., the New
York press seemed not to review the shows with which Dick Buckley
toured.

Ultimately, I did collect more reviews than were rerprinted in "DI!"
but suffice it to say those four or five pages covering this Buckley
era were the result of weeks of popping over to library on my lunch
hour over the course of several weeks.

Similarly, the notices from the Walkathons reprinted earlier in "DI!"
were the fruits gathered from finding a page called "Endurance Shows"
in the "Variety"s of the mid-1930s. Naturally, they covered the dance
marathons and the like and I was able to find the earliest press
notices of Dick Buckley and his act from nearly 70 years ago.

Both David and Berliner have brought up Rhino as a possible outlet for
some of the archival Buckley material. I have spoken with James Austin
in the past and he has shown an interest in such a project. If such a
project were to gain steam, I'd also like to see icluded the out-of
print material see the light of day again. This would include the hip
Aesop Fables originally available on "Euphoria Vol. II," his RCA
release "Hipsters, Flipsters & Finger-Poppin' Daddies" (incl.
outtakes), the rare "Parabolic Revelations" release, and the World
Pacific material some of which found its was to CD accompanying "DI!"

Linda: I'm getting that contact, first-flush of the Lord vibe from you
that I've received from hundreds of people I've prostyltized over the
years...I'm lovin' it...especially through it cyberspace...Never made
the Jackie Gleason connection but now that you mention it, I can sense
that connection. Both men were gregarious, larger than life types who
created a wide body of work and were underrated. Gleason, I feel, is
still overlooked especially for his dramatic, harder-edged roles. Check
out "The Hustler" or "Requiem for a Heavyweight" for a hit of
something other than Ralph Kramden. I guess I feel a deep humility and
sympathy and hope for humanity from both men. I suspect Gleason knew or
at least knew of Buckley, especially given their mutual friendship
with Sinatra.

What Gleason/Buckley connections are you sensing, Linda (or anyone
else)?

Ari: "The All-Hip Mahatma" or "The Hip Gahn" is one of Buckley
all-time greats breathing great joy and jazzy musicality into a figure
that we've probably come to feel somewhat remote especially these days
as Mother India continues to "square-up" with her nukes. The piece is a
great example of refreshing a subject, speech, or historical figure
with the hipsemantic allowing the listener to reconsider, in even
greater depth and glory, the messages contained in these venerable,
universal tales...."the spinnin' wheel, baby..."

Michael M: Certainly I think Lord B would have fit right in with the
1960s but probably more like an Irwin Corey or Soupy Sales media
curiosity visiting the "Mike Douglas Show" and the like than as some
kind of culture god though Tom's silk pillow entrance at Woodstock
would have been great. He would have fit right in at the Fillmores.

I also think, like any performer, he would have looked for other
material to develop. There is evidence that he was honing a sequel to
"The Nazz" late in his life and the development of other, still-mostly
unheard pieces in this era like "Lucius" (his hip take on the early AD
Roman novel "The Golden Ass") is a testament to his ongoing artistic
quest. I'd have liked to see him take on Orpheus, Icarus and Rasputin
as hip fodder.

Michael S: Though mutual acquantances, I am nearly positive that
Southern was aware of Buckley. Either way, the similarity between the
Southern-penned "Dr. Strangelove" and Buckley's own "H-Bomb" are
uncanny.

Not sure how/if Buckley reacted to reviews. My guess is that he didn't
take them seriously one way or the other if they didn't prevent him
from working. Though I can't believe that he wasn't bugged by
influential Bay Area journalist Ralph Gleason's lack of interest in his
work as is briefly discussed in "DI!"

Lioness: The name Spider Robinson came up recently. Please hip
me....who he?
  

    

> I think that's one reason writers might like writing...it gives us a chance
> to learn.

Amen to that!  I got a million-dollar college education in my ten years as a
music and recording-industry journalist.
  

    

> So, with my great calculi (two times two equals mother four), I figured
> that if he was listed for one week, he'd be listed for others.  I was able
> to find all the old "Variety"s on microfilm at the Library of Performing
> Arts at Lincoln Center (one of the great troves of low, middle, popular and
> high culture in the world) and, through painstaking spinning of the
> microfilm machines, was able to create a week-by-week itinerary for Buckley
> over the course of about two and half-years during this era in the mid-
> '40s.

That is such a rush, when you're hot on the trail and the information is
showing up.
  

    

> Michael M: Certainly I think Lord B would have fit right in with the 1960s
> but probably more like an Irwin Corey or Soupy Sales media curiosity visit-
> ing the "Mike Douglas Show" and the like than as some kind of culture god
> though Tom's silk pillow entrance at Woodstock would have been great. He
> would have fit right in at the Fillmores.

Given that Bill Graham put Lenny Bruce on a bill with the Mothers of Inven-
tion, we can have some fun imagining Lord Buckley sharing a stage with the
Jefferson Airplane of Quicksilver Messenger Service!
  

    
   >To "FOM": The name Sam Stout is not familiar though many names of
   secnd and third gen Buckley-style riffers have come up. Do you 
   remember any of Stout's riffs?

Unfortunately, only snippets. His stories were real-life ones rather than 
narratives based on history, and although he was white he hung out with 
lots of black hipsters and had a black/southern/hipster way of speaking. 
He was one of those larger-than-life guys; he would go on for hours, and 
had quite a following; however, I don't know if he performed 
professionally (he generally held forth at hipster bars and parties). He 
did write but I haven't been able to track down any published work.

He would punctuate his riffs with "Say rah-la!" and people would 
respond "Rah-la." He called formidable people "mean motin'gators" and when 
two people were disagreeing or fighting he would say they "came down 
opposite scrapers." His speech was full of obscene, funny images ("And if 
I am lyin', let my natch'ul membah CRAWL down my leg and walk away right 
now. Say rah-la.")

(Sorry for the bad dialog renditions. This kind of speech isn't easy to 
write down.)
  

    


re: Ralph Gleason

The subject of Ralph Gleason came up in an interview with SF gallery
owner Charles Campell (who is still kicking posteriors at the age of
88).  Campbell called Ralph Gleason a "Jim Crow" for his reverse racist
stance.  Evidently Gleason never saw Buckley perform but he summarily
condemned Buckley's use of black hipster patois.  During his life, Lord
Buckley put forth a wide range of black based argot (from Amos and Andy
characters to the Moorish Duke of Clitsford, from the hapless soul in
Georgia, Sweet and Kind to the ultimate golden-eyes-of-love hipster The
Nazz).   I'd be interested to know more about how this Dig
Infinity!/Inkwell community feels about Buckley's use of dialect.  Was
it quaint, over the top, condemnable, a tribute, a harbinger?  And why
do you think he choose the "zig-zag semantic that originates with our
beautiful Negro brothers and sisters" in a world filled with countless
English based derivatives?

--
Michael Monteleone
Industrial Haiku
  

    


David,

Ooops, my dislexia strikes again. I meant to type "Crow Jim" 

thanks,

michael
  

    
One possible answer is he dug the incongruity. After all, here's a guy
who'd walk down the street with a pith helmet, a tuxedo jacket, and no
pants. Also, the black jazz musicians he hung with all spoke that way,
and he was sure to have equated it with "hipness" in much the same way
teenagers today try to talk like rap guys from the 'hood or some of
the reggae fans I've known talked in excruciating imitation of Jamaican
patois. It wasn't, as Oliver takes great pains to point out, all that
odd, really, when it was happening. Buckley got his start in the '30s
as the blackface comedians were fading out (Jamup and Honey lasted into
the '50s, if I remember correctly) and a lot of people, black and
white, considered them more a genre than a political statement. So you
dress up like a Lord, talk in this fake English dialect, and then slide
into patois. What an act!  
  

    


Michael Monteleone writes:



Berliner,

this is maybe a wild leap but your mention of the incongruity of Buckley's
image made me think about the power of a Zen Koan - the object of which is to
"shock" the listener into new consciouness (or perhaps just to free the
listener from the binds of their current mental state) - perhaps His
Lordship, either purposefully or by accident, projected this as a kind of
visual koan. Here is a tall, elegant white man (albeit missing a couple
teeth), acting like a rather manic peer of the realm. His ramrod posture and
cigarette perpeturally poised in hand telegraphed a sort of "Reggy, old boy"
feeling but when he got down to it what came out was pure hip. It's another
leap but perhaps part of the message was a subtle mocking of the Anglo. From
my understanding of history, the British were deeply into the slave trade. Is
it possible that another message in the Lord Buckley persona is that in the
end the British were mostly about facade and that the real  humanity and the
real soul and the real knowledge would be found in opressed?

A further goof on the koan riff might be to mention a little performance
technique of Lord Buckley's. On occasion, perhaps when an audience's
attention was drifting,  he would abruptly produce a sound cannon of a shout
followed by a phrase like "Get that big dog out of here, Jim, or so help me
God I'll drill him!". A number of people who saw Buckley perform recalled
this with great gusto and they all commented on it's effectiveness.

re: the dialect

one of my favorite interviews so far has been an interview that my co-
conspirator Roger Mexico and I did with a man in Claremont, California named
Gregory Toliver. Gregory read humanities at Oxford. While growing up in
Pittsburg he was admonished time and again by his parents to make his speech
less "niggerish" and more "like the white folks on the other side of the
tracks." Gregory said his very hip uncle turned him on to Lord Buckley when
Gregory was in his teens. He said it was "a revelation" because he had always
thought that black patois had a power and then along comes a white man that
says, in effect, well here's a quote from the interview:

"We know that from nineteen hundred straight up until the time I was born
[1950], while white Americans had a sort of fascination with the panache and
the grace of black entertainers, there was this sense that: "Well there was
the white world of art that was high and sophisticated and of moment. And
there was the black world of art which was entertaining but, after all,
that's what it was." So, along comes Lord Buckley and what Lord Buckley is
doing is adding substance to something which, up until then, the white world
assumed, and I guess, even most of the black world assumed, had no substance.
Which was black humor. He was a white man doing black humor but his black
humor was political satire, social commentary, had religious overtones. It
wasn't buck and wing, and it wasn't Mr. Bones and Mr. Interlocutor. And it
wasn't even, Moms Mabley or Red Foxx. It wasn't jokes about drinking or jokes
about sex. It wasn't regular nightclub fare. So, in that sense, all of a
sudden, coming out of the face of a white man was what I recognized as a
distinctly black voice. It was saying the kind of things that you were
reading in the New Yorker about what Lenny Bruce was saying. And we all today
know that what Lenny Bruce was saying and doing was culturally significant
and socially significant. And that's what Buckley was doing. He was, in those
days, one of those handful of people who rose above the level of being a
comedian to what was, in the last century, called a "humorist." like Twain
and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby." - Greory Toliver, Jeune 6, 2000
--
Michael Monteleone
Industrial Haiku
  

    
Minor correction:

> Brother Dave Gartner

I think you're referring to Brother Dave Gardner, who was originally from 
Tennessee, and was a surreal kind of dope-smoking southerner whose riffs 
were inspired by preachers, and who was clearly influenced by LB. 
  

    
     Ah, Brother Dave Gardner, definitely on the same bus as Buckley,
Lenny, and Terry Southern.  To a degree also like Buckley in that he
had hipster audiences who "got" the entendres as well as
Southern-American cracker fans who he simply made laugh.  
     The truth will out no matter how clammed up a society is.  Humor
is the best Trojan Horse cuz the squares don't know it's them who're
being laughed at half the time.  F'rinstance I hear Mr. Patriot Act
hisself, Reverend Ashcroft, loves "The Simpsons" and does a mean Mr.
Burns imitation (if the shoe fits...).  I've often wondered what middle
America thinks when they watch "The Simpsons".  Do they not get that
they're the joke?
     With Buckley and certainly with Lenny, law enforcement -- being
the moral guardians -- caught on and Lenny and His Lordship were
punished.  
     It's a hard lesson to read about -- f'rinstance -- Lord Buckley's
problems with coppers.  No matter how often "freest country on earth"
is repeated, it's tragic that statement isn't saying, nor is it true
any longer.  Check out the decrimming of weed in Europe and Canada, but
I digress...
  

    
Sorry.  Meant to say "it's tragic that statement is saying much."
  

    
Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby!
  

    
I mean "ISN'T saying much".  Jeez, I gotta lay off the curdled soybean
product.
  

    
Oliver, Spider Robinson is a science fiction writer whose characters have
made various references to Lord Buckley in (I think) several different short
story collections.  If I get bit by the rereading bug after I finish the
current book (Tim Powers' _Declare_), I'll catalog the references for ya.
They were why I was on the lookout for Lord Buckley in the first place, and
why I bought the first Lord Buckley recording I saw.
  

    


MICHAEL MONTELEONE writes:


I found an article on the web that cites Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. I think it
sheds some light on Gregory Toliver's reference to that 19th century humorist
and also starts to build a case for a connection to some of Lord Buckley's
effort one hundred years later. There are little echoes of God's Own Drunk
and Black Cross in the Nasby piece. Certainly not in the politics of the
speaker or the message but in the rhythms and the use of dialect as implied
by the writer's crude spellings.

Is it so very far from: "Upon a rigid examination of my fizzleckle man, I
find it would be...madness for me to undertake a campaign..."

to

"It was just like the jitterbug, it was so simple it evade me"?



Here is the excerpt:

A richer combination of grandiloquence and orality can be found in the
writings of David Ross Locke, whose nom-de-plume miscreant Petroleum Vesuvius
Nasby satirized post-bellum Southern bumpkin politicians opposed to
Reconstruction and the reuniting of the South and North. Labeled by Locke
himself as "a sort of nickel-plated son of a bitch" as well as "an ignoramus,
a hypocrite, a sluggard, an alcoholic, a coward, a bigamist, a thief, a
corrupt politician, and a traitor," (Blair and McDavid 144-145), Nasby was
worthy of neither respect nor humor, but his verbal forays into
grandiloquence--usually in the form of mispronunciations, malapropisms, and
overblown diction-- endowed him with his sardonic appeal. In a short piece
called "Why He Should Not Be Drafted" (1861?), which satirized men who were
dodging the military draft by concocting bogus illness, Nasby wrote:

I see in the papers last night the Government has instituted a draft.... I
know not what others may do, but...I can't go. Upon a rigid examination of my
fizzleckle man, I find it would be...madness for me to undertake a campaign,
to wit: [...] I have a chronic catarrh. [...] My teeth is all unsound; my
palate ain't exactly right, and I have had bronchitis 31 years last June. At
present I have a cough, the paroxysms of which is frightful to behold. [...]
I am afflicted with chronic diarrhea and costiveness. The money I have paid
(or promised to pay for Jayne's carminative balsam and pills would astonish
almost anyone. [...] I don't suppose that my political opinions, which are
aginst the prosecution of this unconstooshnel war, would have any weight,
with a draft officer. But the above reasons why I can't go, will, I make no
doubt, be sufficient. (Blair and McDavid 146-147)

To a modern audience, such a harangue comes across as rhetorically
unappealing and even vulgar, but Nasby's sprinkling of arcane medical
terminology into this vinegary peroration was just the stylistic ticket for
his readership.

[excerpted from: Opposing Voices, Apposing Styles: Structure and
Metastructure in 19th-Century American Humor Writing by Craig Sirles, Depaul
University]

Here is the URL for the above citation:

http://www.eiu.edu/~ipaweb/pipa/volume/sirles.htm
--
Michael Monteleone
Industrial Haiku
  

    
     Of course, for grandiloquence and rapier wit, Oscar Wilde
delivered.  
     A large part of Buckley's singular genius was combining his
specific disparate influences.  To do what no one else does or has
thought of is a remarkable achievement. 
  

    
     The same for Nasby or any of these characters we've been
discussing.  Their eccentricities are their calling card.
  

    
Okay...

I know about Buckley. I was first exposed to his work in the spring
of '67, when my sociology professor was teaching a Free University
course (like I said, it was the '60s...) on Lenny Bruce, and felt that
he had to teach us Lord Buckley first. So we got a whole lot of 
scratchy taped-off-the-air-with-bad-equipment recordings of The Nazz
and God's Own Drunk and Jonah and the Whale, and all manner of other
classics. Naturally, I liked him WAY better than Lenny Bruce, and
subsequently found a couple of records in a remainder bin in North Beach.

In short, you kind of had to go out of your way to be exposed to his
work at all, a few short years after his death, and I think while
the cult has gotten bigger since then, it's still a cult and a cult
that doesn't talk to each other much (which is okay, as it would
certainly detract from Marc Antony's Funeral Oration to have it dissected
to death).

This topic so far has consisted mainly of cult members chatting amongst
themselves. My question is--given the myriad people who haven't been 
exposed to this and would flip over it, what do you tell them to induce
them to check it out? 

Or, what track do you play for them? And why that one?

(E.g. I'm not sure I'd start with Bad Rapping of the Marquis de Sade.)
  

    
Mary: I love that story about your sociology course at Free
University...sign me up for the next semester. But regarding your
suggestion on how to bring people to Lord B. I guess I'd start them
just as you were: "The Nazz," "Jonah," "Marc Antony" are all excellent
places to start as most people are already familiar with these stories
and/or soliloquis. I'd also tell them to really pay attention and
listen: there are quick, thoughtful deep little riffss within the
riffs. Not to slide into dissection land, but I mist have heard the
line in "The Nazz"--"...Nazz had them pretty eyes. He wanted everybody
to see through his eyes so they could see how pretty it was." What an
amazing way to describe an enlightened cat. It almost puts the listener
in the Nazz's head looking out. And Buckley's pieces are full of these
juicy little wig bubbles...I mean "ideas."

I seem to recall that you are a Deadhead, no? So, for people in that
grand world I might induce them by pointing out that if they dig
Pigpen, they'd dig Buckley. Pig was a notorious Buckley hound and not
only can you hear His Lordship's attitude coming through some of Pig's
e-longated raps (think "Lovelight"), he sometimes can be heard quoting
Lord B (especially "God's Own Drunk": "...it was right where themap
said it was...") between songs on some of those circa '69 tapes.
  

    
Then there's the deathless

LLOOOOOOOORRRRDDD! Can you dig me in this FISH?
  

    
So maybe you Buckley scholars can decode the famously opaque "box-back
knitties" outburst in Pigpen's "Lovelight"?
  

    
dang, i know i've seen that tracked down recently. i know the rest of
it is "great big noble thighs/workin' undercover/with a boar hog's eye"
and i think the nitties part is pigpen's misremembering of something
but for the life of me can't recall right now where i heard it. 

i think nick meriwether's "dead letters" had a student paper on lord
buckley in its first volume. i'll see if i can track down my
recollection a bit better.
  

    
There is also a fabulous, non-hip bit called "The Train." Though only
a couple of minutes, Buckley paints a vivid word painting of a
soon-to-be runaway locomotive with many of its passengers interacting
as he moves them between the sound of the train rumbling through the
night headed for inevitable, Irwin Allen-style disaster. A great piece
and a great intro to Lord B...especially for children.

Re: Pig's "box-back knitties"...I hope that stays a question mark
forever...just like a Stingray on a four-day drive...