The Wax - LB In Concert

LORD BUCKLEY IN CONCERT LINER NOTES

In an age worshipping the negation with a humour that is sick sick sick, Lord Buckley insists on being triumphant, joyous, positive, proclaiming himself the poet of the well well well. Listen to him. He starts off talking a kind of actorish-elocutionary English. Boom. He's into hip-talk. Then out of it. Then back in again. Can't get away from it, because this is a language where the words clutch closer to the emotion, where the voice following the Negro hipster intonation, adds extra dimensions to the word . . Like a jazz musician, Lord Buckley never works on paper. The performance is the thing. It's heart to head to voice. And sometimes heart to voice. And sometimes not even voice but an obscene trumpet sound like a ripped pair of breeches . . . He will flatten you with an absurd non-sequitur, then lift you up as high as a pigeon. He will venture into areas of reverence where most people leave their laughter behind them. And then, when he's got you good, when you're laughing so very hard in front . . . why then-in back you'll find creepy little feelings shivering up and down your spine. And ask-Where am I?

ABOUT HIS LORDSHIP

Some men are born to their titles. Others win theirs. But Richard Buckley came into his title because a friend with the unlikely name of Midas, went to a bankrupt circus to buy his kids a pony. With a fine nose for bargains, Midas bought the circus. And phoned Buckley for help. (What do I do now, Daddy?).. .The watchman led them through the warehouse, marched them past the line of mighty elephant rumps, past the dark roaring cages with thick aromatic clouds hanging overhead. They halted before the wardrobe trunks. From the first trunk, Buckley pulls out a vast purple robe studded with emeralds, rubies, sapphires, all of fine solid glass. The robe is strangely shaped but he wraps it carefully about him, head to ankles. It leaves a broad trail in the dust as he steps over to the mirror. "Is he crazy?" the watchman asks, "That there's an elephant hanging. Belongs to the elephant!" But Buckley stares at his reflection. He bows. "Your excellency," he whispers.

Richard, now Lord Buckley swept berobed from the warehouse and on through the streets of Chicago with people pretending not to stare, with wind off the lake whipping his train sky-high, making a great clatter with the glass jewels. Arrived at his apartment, he set about celebrating his title, as nobility obliges. They came from everywhere, politicians, pimps and bankers, Negro musicians and Italian gangsters, chorus girls, policemen, pitchmen and hookers. And together they worked out

the etiquette of the royal court. For Lord Buckley was not the man to keep all that nobility to himself. He knew Lord-ship is no good unshared. So it was "Your Ladyship, this . . . Your Grace that. . . Will your Highness please let go of my goddam leg?" . .. They papered the kitchen with eviction notices. Everybody had a very fine time . . . and the party lasted three years.

For Lord Buckley, the party is swinging yet. And the audience in the Ivar Theatre, in Hollywood, Californian February 12, Lincoln's Birthday, 1959-this audience which heard the original performance of which you now hear the record-to Lord Buckley, this was just another group of royal late-comers to the same old ball celebrating a small miracle that took place quite a while ago in a bankrupt circus warehouse in Chicago, Illinois.

"My Lords and my Ladies," his Lordship addresses them and you, "Beloveds-"

-Dan James

tter other's happiness; Until the heavens,
envying earth's good hap, Add an immortal title to your crown!
Shakespeare: Richard II

"The flowers, the gorgeous, mystic multi-colored flowers are not the flowers of life, but people, yes people are the true flowers of life: and it has been a most precious pleasure to have temporarily strolled in your garden."
Lord Buckley

Sir Richard Buckley - Lord of Flip Manor, Royal Holiness of the Far Out, and Prophet of the Hip - has gone to his reward. It probably won't be as swinging as his life, but Valhalla will have a hard time keeping him down.

I think it is terribly difficult for anyone who really knew Richard Buckley to think of him as dead. It is more like he has been on an extended engagement in Reno and can't get back to town - I still expect a 4 a.m. phone call from him, trying to borrow money, and tendering an invitation to visit the new castle, which is inevitaby on top of a mountain or just inside the gates of Disneyland.

He was that rare breed of quixotic non-conformist who tolerates nothing short of a full-tilt charge at life no shrinking beatnik mumbling poetry in a corner, but a heads-up, belly-in, screaming blaster in a red-faced rage, who never took "no" for an answer. His windmills were all marked "you can't," and he demolished a lot more than the dictators of social behavior would like to admit. He marched sixteen nude people through the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, organized his own brand of religion (The Church of the Living Swing, America's first Jazz church) starring himself and a pair of belly-dancers on a split bill which had the distinction of being the only church performance ever raided by the vice squad. The bizarre incidents would. (and undoubtedly will) fill a book.

His humble birth by part-Indian parents in Stockton, California, gave no hint of the riotous life to come, or his future influence on American comedy, but his presence is felt strongly in the Mort Sahls and Lenny Bruces of today.

The "blast 'em and insult 'em" school of comedians so popular today was actually started by Buckley when, back in the twenties, he became the pet of one of the big Chicago gangsters, who set him up in a nightclub because he liked the way Dick put on the suckers. Of course, Dick had the protection of this gang-land element during that period, and possibly he never got over it. He carried a bit of it with him always. He never really expected retribution to come or be paid. Dick always figured he would get away with it, and he. usually did. It seemed pre-destined that Dick could never really become successful during his lifetime. He used up all his luck just staying alive.

For a moment, let's turn to Elizabeth, his wife. Here was a woman who very deeply loved the man Lord Buckley, who bore him two children, and of whom I have only one outstanding impression whenever I think of her: she was dead-game. Elizabeth had resigned herself to living with not a man but a royal court, and sometimes it seemed that she met this challenge with more fortitude than Richard himself. She was the extraordinary wife of an extraordinary man.

As for the children, I have seldom seen any who were as wellbehaved and well-disciplined as Richy and Lori. It seemed to me sometimes almost as if Dick wanted to teach them what he himself had never learned. They were not disciplined in a threatened way, but with a very real and obvious love. I remember Dick once asked the children to show me their room, which was downstairs in the Whitley Terrace house; and one of the ways of reaching it was a rickety staircase on the outside of the house. It was around 2 a.m., of course pitch-black, and the children started to go down the less hazardous indoor route, but papa would have none of it. He hustled all of us outside, and as Richy and Lori, who were only five and six at the time, were hurrying down the worn-out staircase, he kept saying, "Faster, children, faster, faster," until little Richy and Lori were just a blur of running arms and legs. Then Buckley turned back to me with his best Maniacal look, and in a stage whisper said, "They are heavily insured."

To go on the road with Lord Buckley was another experience you would never forget, and. I once had this honor bestowed upon me, with the result that Dick and I didn't speak for about a year. But despite his disorganization you would find people in every major city who knew and really loved Lord Buckley, and when he came to town they dropped whatever they were doing and took care of him. He was that type of a person. Dick could not be ignored or put aside. To have him in your company was to yield to whatever happened to pop out of his head, and I was always amazed at the number and types of people who would, for a few days, quite joyously put their whole life aside and jump into the royal court to lead Buckley's existence for the time that he was there.

Dick could never hold on to money, or he never did, anyway. To know him was to have him owe you, but I don't think there is anyone who can really say that Lord Buckley was not worth whatever it was that he borrowed and, of course, never paid back. To have him visit you was to keep him, and his tastes, which sometimes were quite expensive . . . but few complained. Wherever he went, people seemed to pick up the tab, one way or the other, because Richard was always broke. However, if he had money, no matter how large the sum, he would spend it the same way. He did not treat his money any differently than he treated yours, and it seemed that the only thing he was concerned about was to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I have seen him buy dinner for thirty people with money he borrowed from me or anyone who happened to be there. He believed in life more deeply than anyone I have ever known. He extended himself more in that direction than anyone I have ever known, and he got his wife to go along with it. He made no compensations for anything. He went straight over or straight up or straight down, whatever it happened to be, with apologies to no-one and love for all.

"The flowers, the gorgeous, mystic multi-colored flowers are not the flowers of lift, but people, yes people are the true flowers of lift: and it has been a most precious pleasure to have temporarily strolled in your garden."