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MW
Now, your first name is?
MM
Michael
MW
And your last name?
MM
Monteleone
MW
Mon - Mon-tell-lee-oh-knee
MM
Monteleone
MW
And you're Italian?
MM
I'm about 25 percent Italian. My father was half Italian and half Irish. And my mother's side of the family was all Irish. So - My father's father came from Calabria and his mother came from Cork. And the rest of - almost all my family on my mother's side came from Cork area - around there. So -
MW
So you're really an Irishman.
MM
Much more than -
MW
I tell people I'm half Irish. The "ish" part.
MM
That's good. OK. Let's see, where shall we start? Maybe, this is kind of a corny one but how did you meet Lord Buckley?
MW
Well, actually it was in New York. He had an apartment sort of in the basement, in the village. And the drunks used to throw their empty bottles down in the grate, so he had like a skylight with all these colorful bottles. And he had a throne there , a real throne, that he used to sit on. And I was friends with an actor/dancer name Paul Valentine at that time. Paul Valentine was in a picture called "House of Strangers" with Edward G. Robinson about the - sort of a take off on the Gionnini family that founded the Bank of America. And Paul said - Paul used to take me places that are - were weird because I was kind of a straight laced guy. And he said, "I want to take you to a place that will really fracture you." And he took me to this place, and as we walk in there was a nude girl, standing on a pedestal, right inside the door, and you had to kiss her in the love spot in order to get in. You know, so that was the most outrageous thing I'd ever come across in my life, so I was already in a good mood when I got in. And, of course, everybody, was like smoking pot and laughing and there was like jazz music playing. And then sitting on the throne was this chap that looked like a colonel in the Bengal Lancers, you known, and he was talking real, real down jive, you know. And that's how I met him.
And there was a gap after that and I didn't see him again until the famous house on Whitley Terrace.
MM
So, by that point you had moved to Hollywood?
MW
Yeah, well, I came to Hollywood by way of Canada. I was hired to put the second government owned station on the air, television station in Montreal. And I went to Canada for six months. And put the station on the air and then came to Hollywood to pursue a career. And right after I got to Hollywood, I heard from Ed Randolph, Prince Eaglehead, that Dick Buckley was in town and had a castle on Whitless - Whitley Terrace. So, we renewed our friendship.
MM
Did His Lordship remember you at that point?
MW
Oh, of course, he had a fabulous memory. Because when I met him he was off booze, you know, he'd - somebody had introduced him to marijuana and he got off booze and he got very creative. And when I met him he was still doing the Amos 'n' Andy routine but he was disenchanted with it. And that's sort of how the hip talk and hip talk translations of famous stories began. Because one day I heard him say, "To swing or not to swing. That is the hanger." And from that point on I helped him write the end of that. And "Hipsters, Flipsters". And then he went off and failed with that. And came back and helped him into venues where I thought that he would find loyal followings and that was the case.
MM
The Royal Court, he took it kind of - he took it seriously, yeah?
MW
Well, he took it seriously as a philosophy. I mean, he really saw everybody as noble. And his philosophy was that if everybody treated each other like lords and ladies of the royal court, we would be so busy being nice to each other and courteous with each other, that we wouldn't have any time for meanness and nastiness and all the insidious things that happen. And he was quite right. He proved it many times.
MM
Could you relate the story of the - when you were both on different sets.
MW
Oh, well, I got him - you know, he was notorious about not showing up for jobs. And so, yet he never had any money, so getting him a job was always kind of a blessing. So, I got him a job on a film at Fox called "We're Not Married." There was a casting director that I knew quite well, named Owen McClean. And I thought he would be right for one of the parts, so, he got an interview and he got the part. But knowing him, I stayed up all night, practically, and sat on him so that he would get to the studio by - I was only sure if I drove him to the studio. And I was doing a picture called "Solider of Fortune" with Clark Gable and Susan Hayward on the same lot, with Ed Demitric directing. So, I arrived at the studio with him, and he addressed the cop at the gate as "Your Grace" and the cop chuckled a little bit. And we drove in and he went to his stage and I went to my stage. And then we had a lunch break and I said I'm going to go over and see how he was doing. And I went over and here was eighty-five crew members: grips, electricians, hairdressers, makeup people. And they were all bowing to each other and saying, "Your Grace, would you throw me that wrench down?" and "Sir Buck, would you mind putting another scrim?" He had turned, in one morning, that whole set onto the game of being courteous and nice to each other and respectful. And I thought to myself, "Well, that kind of proves what he's been saying to us all these years." He was really quite ahead of his time in abstracting thought and abstracting ideas.
MM
From all I can gather, he's not like a highly educated man in the sense of having gone to institutions to learn. But, everybody I've talked to says he really was a smart cookie.
MW
Well, he was brilliant. But he was brilliant in a sense, that his perception, the context in which he put things was always glamorous and exciting. And let me go further than that. If you take a bunch of fruit and you put it in a cardboard box, the fruit is the content, the box is the context. If you take the same fruit and put it in a cut glass bowl. The content is the same, the context is different and the whole picture is a lot more exciting. And that's the premise upon which he lived his life. Even without money, without success, without, without anything he had just loads of friends and a lot of excitement around him at all times. Because he was totally tolerant of everybody, regardless of your bent in life, or your skin color or you religion. He was just totally tolerant of everything around him.
MM
Was he - was he interested in other people. I mean was he a narcissist - was he - I mean -
MW
No, he was an egoist, but not a narcissist. I mean he was - he liked to hold court there's no question about it. And he liked to be the center of attention, but at the same time he was compassionate. And he loved - he loved the African American people, the black people, the Negro people as he knew them. He love them. He loved their dignity. He loved their ability to bounce back from adversity and to maintain buoyancy and a sense of humor in the face of oppression. And he taught that lesson to everybody. And he was surrounded by enormously talented black musicians like Benny Carter, Calvin Jackson, the pianist, Miles Davis, Bird Parker. All those people were around him - Theolonius Monk. They were all his friends. And they - they all accepted his performing in the idiom of the American black.
MM
Was there every criticism of him?
MW
Oh, by whites usually.
MW
I don't think I've ever heard a negative remark from a black person or an African American of any kind because they understood, from the love with which he performed that he understood the black experience. And was sympathetic to it rather than imitative. I mean he never imitated anything. He always manifested the reality.
WS
Could you tell us about the Church of the Living Swing?
MW
The Church of the Living Swing. I mean he did a lot of outrageous things in his life. And being the center of a really far out elitist culture, let's say, a subculture, let's put it that way - he decided that the next step would be to take all these elements, all of these facets, all of this respect for spirituality, for mysticism, for drugs, for swinging, so to speak. And the next step would be a church. So he established, in a former general store in Topanga Canyon, America's first jazz church - the Church of the Living Swing he called it. And it was packed for the first service. And for the second service - the second service the cops swooped down and busted about fifty-two, I think, for holding. Which gave birth to a rumor that Dick was at the center of the controversy, the cause of it, which was utter nonsense. He never did ‚ anything like that and it was only the American love for conspiracy theory that caused that rumor to pop up. So, that's the Church of the Living Swing. It was short lived but it did swing for a couple two, three services after that. And then he did one of his numbers and he disappeared again.
MM
Now this is a common theme with him.
MW
He would disappear - disappear. And nobody would know where he was, not even Lady Elizabeth. And then he would surface again.
MM
This is days, weeks?
MW
Sometimes years. Once it was three years. I think she was in touch with but - you know - he would - I suspect he would be on a self search because, as you say, he wasn't terribly educated but, but he certainly was curious and questioned the universe around him and perceived the universe in a kind of absurdity that allowed him to create these wonderful pieces that he did.
Nobody spoke hip talk in those days except people that were in the hipster circle: beatniks, musicians, some carnival people and ghetto people. The only hip words that the American public knew was - they heard Frank Sinatra or Steve Allen say on television words like "Groovy" and "Do you dig?" and all of that. But, you know, "kip" for a bed, "tool" for a car, or a "short" for an automobile, those kind of things they never, they never heard. So, naturally, it was a - it was a natural thing that he died at the Hotel Sherman trying to break in this material, but then when he came back to Los Angeles and started to work theatre and coffee houses he began to build his audience so to speak.
MM
What do you think was driving him?
MW
Well, I don't - I don't think I can answer a question like that "driving him." I think he was not driving - being driven - I think he was in the driver's seat all the time and it was a search for joy. He believed, really, in some of the conversations we had, as you know, I was his personal full time psychologist. He believed that the purpose of life is living it. That that's the purpose. So there was no great, complex quest for meaning for him. He was a free form liver. He was, he was an untethered soul and he rolled with the showing, which is what we should do really. Whatever came up, he rolled with that kind of thing, instead of planning it out and living a structured environment with a lot of parameters. He carried it to the extreme, which was ultimately what made him fail in the commercial sense, in that he was unreliable, unresponsive, irresponsible. He never made appointments on time, he didn't show up for work when he got a job. And he didn't, he didn't keep it together in the sense of structure. But you can't add up the score until the game is over and he's been dead a long time and the game is not over yet for him. I mean, you're making a documentary,
There isn't a year go by that I don't get a half a dozen calls with questions about Dick Buckley, interviews about him, the - there's an occasional record released, there are new fans such as yourself. I mean you were a child when -
MM
When he swooped.
MW
- when this was all happening. And yet, you're a fan. And your partner there is a collector of every bit of material that Buckley ever did, so - who's to say that was wrong.
MM
He has a power, for us, that seems very contemporary.
MW
Well, yes he is contemporary because he was way ahead of his time. I mean, today if you play a Buckley record everybody understands every word. If you played it in Beverly Hills, at a tea party in those days , nobody would understand anything. So, that's the difference. I mean, if he was around today, he would be an idol of some kind. He would be a big success today. Because he was - he had the finger on the pulse of the hip, and the hip has come into it's own.
MM
Could you tell us a little bit about - I mean, this - like, it's "the" recording, the Euphoria I recording.
MW
Well, all of the material, or practically all of the material that Buckley ever recorded, was recorded in my living room in Burbank, in Toluca Lake, in a modest little house with a few friends and a lot of marijuana. And, and one of the close intimates was doing the sound. But there was no record company at that time. We just were obsessed with the idea that this man had to be recorded. Jim Dixon and I - Jim Dixon, by himself, met a woman, a rather wealthy woman, in - who lived in Mexico. I can't remember her last name, but her first name was Elizabeth as well. And she financed Vaya Records. And we had two artists. One was Dick Buckley, in which we did Euphoria I and Euphoria II. And the other was the Page Cavanaugh Trio, which we did an album of their greatest hits, "Jeepers Creepers" and all those kind of tunes. Needless to say, the Page Cavanaugh record was a total failure.
And the Lord Buckley record sold for years, to people like Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Henry Miller. I can't tell you how many copies they bought. People who were in the Lord Buckley "light", so to speak, wanted - it was kind of an evangelist thing. They would to turn their friends on to Lord Buckley: "Did you ever hear Lord Buckley? Oh, man, wait 'til you hear this!" And they would play The Nazz and all of those things for their friends and then at Christmas time they'd give out the record album as a gift. Eventually all that material was turned over to World Pacific Jazz and Dick Boch put out an album or two - you're more up on the details of this than I am. But, I remember that when Dick died they did a memorial album with the material. And, so that' how Vaya Records came about and faded out as well.
MM
Was there a sense, when you were recording him, that this was something of historical -
MW
When we were recording him in my living room, we knew that this was something special. I mean, I knew it was something special. I had written some of the material. And I knew that this was one of the greatest storytellers that I'd ever come across. And a man with a gigantic love for the idiom, for the African American idiom. And the paradox of having a man, who could be found at the Hollywood Ranch Market with a twenty-five cent hamburger, at four o'clock in the morning wearing tails, with a brushed silver mustache and impeccably groomed, speaking in the African American idiom, the paradox was very powerful to me. Because his love was so apparent.
MM
Let's see -
WS
Could you tell us about some of the collaboration you did with him and what routines, that you helped write or didn't write?
MW
Prior to what?
WS
Collaboration on some of the routines like "The Gettysburg Address", your collaborations with Buckley.
MW
Well, I wrote "Hipsters, Flipsters" and I wrote "The Gettysburg Address" in seven or eight minutes, at his kitchen table, in the morning after everyone had been up all night. And Benny Carter had played a few bars of "John Brown's Body." And as he was playing that riff , the whole thing came to me, the whole "Four big hits and seven licks ago our before-daddies swung forth on this sweet, groovy land, with a rompin', stompin', wailin', jumpin' new nation." You know, and from there on it went, it just - it was kind of like a Donald O'Connor, Sydney Cohen movie, where they say, "I got it, I got it!" And they write the whole song in one thing. That's kind of like it was for that too. Just flowed out. And it was a very strong piece and we recorded it with "John Brown's Body" in the background and Benny Carter.
MM
Did audiences think it was sacrilegious or whatever the equivalent is?
MW
Oh, no. You know you're talking audience - you're talking Buckley audiences. Buckley's audience loved it and the other audience didn't understand it. And they understood the opening, when he said, "Come a big speechifyin' day at Gettys-Motha-Burg, there was this long playing orator, Edward Everett. Spoke for two hours and fifteen minutes and along came sweet, Lanky Link. And he started to goof with his scratch pad." It's not verbatim, but it's practically what his intro. was. How could you resent someone that speaks about "Sweet, tall Lanky Link, goofin' with his scratch pad. And this is what he done put down: Four big hits and seven licks ago, our before-daddies. . . " You know, how could you resent that? I don't care who you are. And I don't think anybody did resent it but I guess it's possible there's somebody who resents everything.
MM
Yes, you seem to have a great love of this idiom as well.
MW
Well, I was born in Harlem. I'm seventy-four now, so you can imagine when that was. I was one of five families in a black neighborhood. I was born just a block or so off of the center of Harlem at that time, which was a Hundred and Thirty-Seventh Street and Lennox Avenue in New York. And I lived in a cold water flat because we couldn't afford anything else. The bathtub in the kitchen. And I lived until I was nine years old in the company of store front churches and dirty saxophones and blues and the great, wonderful sense of humor that African Americans have always had in the face of a real dirty deal that they always got. And the ability to sing about all their problems, I liked things like - my favorite, I guess, was, "I Can't Pay the Rent Blues". And, like I said, I loved all those gospel tunes, you know, some of those far out ones I talk about like, "You Got a Telephone Right In Your Bosom -" "You Got a Telephone Right In Your Bosom and You Can Call Him Up Right From Your Heart" It's called "Jesus is on the Mainline"
I think if people would look at the black experience, at the American - the African American culture, they could see such dignity, such a wealth of nobility in the face of a lot of crap. And Dick and I had a great agreement on that, a great affinity for that. That's why we were never molested or harassed in any way about anything that we had to say about African Americans. I played, you know, Dick Buckley in a movie that I suppose you either knew about that or didn't know about it.
But, I got him a job, and Chuck Griffith, the fellow that wrote the original "Little Shop of Horrors", wrote a part in it called Sir Bop, an agent for rockabilly bands. And it was written for Dick Buckley and a couple of weeks before the film was to start, he disappeared and couldn't be found anywhere. There was rumor he was in Florida but we couldn't find him. So, I had to play him myself. Fortunately I had just finished a picture, for which I had my hair dyed sterling silver, so I kind of effected the transition. And I played Sir Bop, as a matter of fact -
You know. I didn't do it, of course, as good as it would have been with Dick himself there. But, nevertheless it had to be done. So I - Roger Corman, who produced the movie, which was based on an Emmy Award winning television show called "The Little Guy", which was played by Dane Clark. Dick Miller, in the movie "Rock All Night" played the Dane Clark part. And Roger thought that nobody would understand anything I said. And I guess he was quite right. So, I created a small pamphlet called "Sir Bop's Unabridged Hiptionary - A Lexicography for Hipsters of All Ages" And a couple of million of them went out with the picture, so that Roger could rest at peace: that people would understand what was being said. Anyway, that's quite a distinction in my life, of all the bizarre things I've done: to have played Lord Buckley in a film while he was still alive and could have played himself.
MM
But missing, alive but missing.
MW
But missing, yeah, alive but missing.
MM
How many - was it like, you know three or four pages or, you know, half a dozen page?
MW
Oh, the little pamphlet was eight pages.
MM
Eight pages. It included all the hip slang, the carny slang and the high school slang. There was a difference. For example, in high school they would refer to driving around in their "iron" "tooling around in their iron". Where as the hip expression was "my short", the car was a short". The hip expression for bed was "kip", you know. The high school expression was pad. There was a lot of difference.
MM
Real differences.
MW
Yeah.
MM
Were you involved, at all, with "The Raven."
MW
Well, I was there when he did. He did it extemporaneously like he did "Jonah" and a lot of things. He would just take off and - he got it so into that idiom that he could take any story that he knew and just translated it. "Quo Vadis" was a perfect example, it was the first example. The first time he did it, he did it in it's entirety. Complete with those great lines like "Snatch them Christians!" and all those wonderful lines like, "Nail a golden spike where that chick blew." and all of that just poured out of him. Bear in mind, outside of the few pieces that I wrote, nothing was ever written. He would try a story and there may be a few changes as he did until it was polished, you know. But, at the same time, it was complete in his first performance, his first showing of it.
MM
It's frightening talent.
MW
It just was unbelievable. It was like he was on automatic.
MW
What do they called that "stream of consciousness", the psychological term, when you talk at a stream of consciousness. It - when he did a show at the Renaissance or at one of the coffee houses it was like that: he was sitting in his living room with two or three hundred people and he would talk in the hip idiom in a stream of conscious fashion and new pieces would arrive. You know, the only things that I know that were written were "The Nazz", the two Shakespearean pieces, "The Gettysburg Address", and "Murder." Those were the only things that I knew that anybody every put down on paper.
MM
That were written.
MW
But I was present when he told "Jonah and the Whale" the first time. And "Vasco de Gama, the Gasser", I - that one blew me away because Vasco de Gama was always a favorite kind of historical character of mine. And I didn't think anybody else knew anything about him, you know. And Dick started to talk about Vasco de Gama the Gasser. And the whole piece came out and "Jonah and The Whale" the whole piece came out all at once.
MM
Man!
MW
Polished later, you know, as he told it to groups of people, he would get new ideas and polish it off a little bit but -
MM
He - he seemed, like in the "Quo Vadis" piece there's a fantastic "around the corner" quality at the end where it's "Nero, Nero Nero", this big egotistical maniac and then, all of a sudden, you're on to this little, what's his name, I forget his name?
WS
Oo-bop-a-lop.
MM
Oo-bop-a-lop, I mean, the whole thing goes - “Oo-bop-a-dop, Oo-bop-a-doo, You wit me, And I'm wit you” Man, you're givin' me the same show every night!” No, it was - "Quo Vadis" is a wonderful piece, because of all the - because it was an action piece, like an action movie, first of all and - I love the whole thing - when the head Pretorian stud comes in and Nero said, he says, "You don't know what them Christians saying about you." He say, "What them Christians saying about me?" He said, "They saying you is nowhere, you ain't nowhere, you goin' nowhere, and you've been nowhere from in front." He say, "Snatch them Christians!!" That just floored me. And he was just extemporaneously pouring that out and I fell right on the floor I must say. All right what else?
MM
Oh, this is just sort of a little footnote, but - you're familiar with carnival slang. In "The Bugbird" there is a phrase "Neeazever, Meeazore"?
MW
Yeah, well, that was also musician's slang, not just -
MM
OK, it wasn't just carnival.
MW
No, and Prince Eaglehead is the master of that language. But we all talked that when - "Dig the chee-is-zig", you know, when we didn't want anybody to know what we were saying. The same as the carnies, we would use the "iz" talk. And then many years ago, it was an up thing. Before the "iz" it was "up", like "Four score and seven": "Fup pour sca pour upan sa pevapen." "Upears apugapo", you know, instead of "Fee azore scee azore", you know.
MM
Ah, ah.
MW
So, that, that, you know, that was not just carny, that was also musician lingo. That was hip talk, legitimate hip talk.
MM
Is there a memorable performance?
MW
Well, unfortunately, I left for Europe when he was really coming into working alot. I was in Europe when he died. And my most memorable performances were at the Renaissance. I mean, there were numerous ones. But the most powerful storytelling was when he told the story of "Leviathan", without the hip talk, proving that he was a master storyteller no matter what the idiom. I had never seen him attack anything like that and, although I suspected he had the ability, I didn't really know. I thought maybe, maybe only his ability showed up in - when he was wearing a costume, you know, a mask. Which is true for a lot of people, they're very good when they are wearing a mask but they're kind of like, kind of not very good when they have to be themselves. And with "Leviathan" he suddenly was Dick Buckley and he was just as powerful.
MM
It was an American voice?
MW
Huh?
MM
His is an American voice? Would you say that this is -
MW
Well, that's how he talked. He talked, what you call "Mid-Atlantic." or what we use to called "Mid-Atlantic stage diction", you know, I mean that's how he talked when he talked to you.
MM
No, I guess what I meant was - did he -
MW
He's not English.
MM
No, no, no, what I meant was - is his an American voice, I mean, his - like Mark Twain is an American voice.
MW
Oh, he was - yes, he is an American voice, but for a very small, narrow window of culture. He - like Lenny Bruce was an American voice for what he did as well. Dick Buckley certainly will be in time immemorial, he certainly will carry on a kind of immortality. And his, his act closing - I even use it in my web site, as you probably saw, because I think it's so dynamic. It used to blow people away when he used to say, "Lords and Ladies of the Royal Court, it's not the flowers, beautiful, multi-colored flowers that are the true flowers of the earth, but people, wonderful, multi-dimensional people are the true flowers of the earth. And, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lords and Ladies of the Royal Court, it has been a pleasure to have strolled in your garden." It was a knockout when he did that.
MM
Yeah, thank you, Mel. Anything that you want to say at all?
MW
No.
MM
OK |
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