MM
Grover, I remember calling you a couple of years ago, and you said, you didn't think you could be much help but, in just the little bit of time we've been here you've told us some great stories.
GS
Wail.
MM
Alright, do you remember your first meeting with Lord Buckley?
GS
My first meeting with Buckley was- I was doing publicity for the Coffee Gallery in North Beach, which is on Grant Avenue, which is a beatnik thoroughfare at that particular time, in the middle nineteen fifties. And, so, he was booked to come in there and the first time I met him was before the opening night. And had a brief talk with him and then I had not heard any of the records at that time. Now, of course, I have all the records I could get a hold of and so, my first meeting with him was before and after the first show. And then I did publicity for a club in Palo Alto called "Upstairs at the Downstairs."
MM
Inside at the Outside.
GS
Inside at the Outside. I could never remember the name of that place which was a totally different venue. And Buckley did totally different shows because they were completely different audiences. The one in Palo Alto was an audience of undergraduates and their parents and so he did comparatively gentle material like "You must never hit a pedestrian. To do so would be out of the question." And then he did a ventriloquist act where he would get eight undergraduates sitting on chairs in a row and he would scurry behind them. And every time he pressed their neck they were suppose to move their mouth to what he was saying. So, he had these twenty-five different voices going, moving very quickly from one to the other and it was quite effective. But, when he was in the Coffee Gallery he was openingly smoking pot onstage, and everybody knew it. And then he would stretch out and do his familiar material. That is like the "Bad Rapping of the Marquis De Sade."
MM
How did that go over?
GS
Oh, they loved it. They just loved it. And "God's Own Drunk" and, of course, what he was mainly noted for was translating the Shakespeare and the Bible into, into the patois of a black hipster.
MM
(talking about the Chairs routine) Did you actually see him do eight? Because I've only seen - I've only heard it referred to as four people.
GS
Oh, there were a lot more than four people. There might have been six - it was six or eight - but there were a lot more than four.
MM
He must have liked the challenge.
GS
Yeah. He was just scurrying around the back of these kids and they were having the best time. And these undergraduates very quickly caught on to what he was doing and they went out of their way to move their mouths to syncronize to have he was saying. He had a nine octave range - well, that's an exaggeration - Buckley might have a four octave range. From the very high to the very low. And could imitate just about anybody or anything: animals, abstract sounds - he did this one thing about a 4th of July picnic that was very funny, where he imitated the band and imitated the 4th of July political orator who was talking completely in double talk and nonsense. But, as I said, when he got to the Coffee Gallery then he did his real schtick which was the Bible and Shakespeare in the language of a black hipster. In fact, many, many people who had never seen Buckley but who owned his records or heard him on some broadcast, assumed that Buckley was black. A lot of people said - they were quite surprised they said he looked like a member of the House of Lords. I remember Buckley, one time, was quoted as saying that, "I could never get over that magical way of talking, when I heard black people talk. It was this magical way of talking that absolutely intrigued me and I wanted to learn more and more about this." Buckley was in the tradition of what I call the "jazz comics" to distinguish them from the older brand of comics like the, ah, Bob Hope generation that were more of the middle class comics. Beginning with Mort Sahl and then Lenny Bruce and continuing with Buckley, this new generation of comics was jazz oriented. Mort Sahl began by telling jokes with the Stan Kenton Band on tour. His best friend was Paul Desmond out of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. When Lenny first surfaced in the strip joints in L.A., the bible of show business Variety panned him saying "Mr. Bruce is only trying to make the band laugh." Well, that was something they inadvertently stumbled on a great blast of truth. Because the band, in a burlesque house, makes a point of never laughing at the comic. But Lenny broke the band up. He would walk onstage after the headline stripper did her number and, he was the M.C., and he'd walk onstage applauding, "Let's give, everybody, everybody give the little girl a great big hand." And Lenny was wearing nothing but his socks and his wristwatch. And the band completely freaked out. And Buckley was a jazz talking comic. He was a jazz fan. He introduced Anita O'Day to the right records. Took her under his wing and played her the best records of Louis and Duke and Charlie Parker and said, "This is the good stuff, this is what you should be listening to." And when you listen to Buckley he's a jazz musician and he thought of himself as a jazz musician. And all these, all these jazz comics hung out with jazz musician. Lenny Bruce hung out with Hampton Hawes and Joe Maini and Buckley was always haunting the jazz clubs. He came to the Monterry Jazz Festival in 1960 I believe it was and he came up to me and said, "You people need me here." He said, "You don't have anybody to do what I do." He said, "You need me as an emcee." And he - he said, "Come outside and let me lay a few routines on you." I said, "Buckley, I know your routines, I can do your routines as well as you can do your own." So, then Ralph J. Gleason took me aside and said, "Grover, he's your client and he's your friend, get rid of him!" And when Buckley was at the Coffee Gallery, in the Chronicle, Ralph Gleason wrote an attack on Buckley and called him an Uncle Tom. Well, never mind, I won't go into that. I loved Ralph as a person and sometimes Ralph could get some very strange ideas cozied up in his mind and that was one of them, Richard Buckley as an Uncle Tom.
MM
Charles Campbell told me that he felt, he had the same sentiments about Ralph, that he was a nice guy but he had this - he called him a "Crow Jim".
GS
(laughs) Oh, well that, "Crow Jim" is a term that has been used in the jazz world since time immemorial because there are a lot of critics that have this syndrome of ah, of being very anti-white. And these are not all black critics like Amira Baraka or Stanley Crouch. Some of the worst "Crow Jim" critics were Ralph Gleason and Frank Croftsky. And the worse of all was Stanley Dance where as Gleason did like a lot of white musicians like Annie Ross and Woody Herman, I mean, it was not that exclusive. But, there was this thing going on about, about black versus white and it infected a lot of critics of both colors.
MM
There was kind of a real movement - Norman Mailer wrote about "The White Negro".
GS
Yes.
MM
Do you have any comment on that in terms of Buckley?
GS
Oh, well, "The White Negro", of course, was the quinticensstial essay of that particular time. It was very influencial. I haven't read it for many, many years but when I did read it it made an enormous impact on me. Most of Mailer's writing has made an enormous impact on me. Of course, Mailer came under vicious attack, especially from women who were active in the movement, when the women's movement. When he wrote "The Prisonor of Sex" which was a real, ah, time bomb for women in the movement. But, the white negro was certainly a part of Buckley, I mean, Buckley would - you might call him a white negro. The first avante garde white negro was Mezz Mezzrow, a Chicago Jew, who - when he was busted for selling pot and they sent him to Riker's Island and they asked to fill out the police blotter he entered his race as "negro." He said, "I wanted to spend - in the slammer, I wanted to spend time with my own people." So, he was - Mezz Mezzrow was an extreme case of the white negro. And, Lenny Bruce was a white negro and Lord Buckley, of course, was a white negro. Mort Sahl was not. Mort Sahl was not of that same genre at all. Because he was - he never had crossed that, that boundry. But -
MM
What was it about black culture that appealed to Buckley - the "negro" culture is what they would have called it then.
GS
The music and the speech.
MM
Well, what about the speech?
GS
Lenny put it this way - one of Lenny's children and Lord Buckley's children is George Carlin. And he put it better than I could. George Carlin said, "If you mix an Irish neighborhood and a black neighborhood, it won't have any effect on the blacks at all. But in six months all the Irish kids will be finger poppin' and doing the boogie and saying, 'Hey, what's happening, motherfucker.'" And this is true, the black mode of speech, this rapping made an enormous impact on the white culture and not the other way around, with the exception of Richard Pryor who is, to me, the greatest extension of Lenny and Lord Buckley. Because when - Richard did a marvelous thing about a black cop and a white cop busting up a crap game. And he imitated the white cop to the - absolute perfection. He had the rhythm of a white cop down, especially a white cop who's trying to be hip. He says, "Now, crimenety we're doing the best we can trying to help you people out in this neighborhood. Now, why don't you chip in. What do you say?" And they say, "Funky honkies!" And (the white cop speaks), "I don't understand you people." But, Lenny could imitate anybody black or white, and so could Buckley.
MM
He [Buckley] could do this kind of harmonic? He would do it when he did that thing called "The Train" where he would go (MM does a poor imitation of Buckley making the train sound.) Woooooh!
GS
Yes.
MM
And it would be about two or three notes at once.
GS
Yes, Buckley had a great musical mind. And I remember when I saw him inadvertently on a rerun of Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life". The category he selected was "Popular Songs" and the band would play popular songs and, of course, Buckley got everyone of them without any difficulty. And when he started to spritz on the show, Grouch Marx turned to the audience and said, "Do you know what he's talking about?"
MM
What was your impression of him as a man?
GS
I never really got the feeling that he was offstage. I think that - you can say that about a lot of comics, great comics. That they are either are onstage or they stare at a wall. Jonathan Winters was like that. Woody Allen was certainly like that. Lenny Bruce said that you scratch a comic and it's always the case of "Hey, ma, look at me!" Which I think is quite prescient and Lenny should know. Buckley was always putting on a performance onstage or offstage.
MM
There wasn't much difference?
GS
No, no. He always had an entourage around him. He had groupies. He had acolytes following him around. They were dressing like him. When he affected a bow tie made out of a soda straw his acolytes would also wear bow ties made out of a soda straw.
MM
A guy who does Lord Buckley impersonation in New York, told me that he thought, he thought Buckley could talk five or six people, probably, into jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge with him.
GS
Oh, he was charismatic. He was - there's no doubt about that. He had worshippers. He had - like one time he lead a group of acolytes stark raving naked through the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
MM
I heard about this. Where you there for that?
GS
Oh, no, I just heard about it. And then he started a church in L.A. called "The Church of the Living Swing".
MM
With him as the pope I guess.
GS
Yes.
MM
Did you have a favorite routine of his?
GS
I would say that - oh, it's hard to say, I just loved all of them. I thought that - I really liked God's Own Drunk and I liked Martin's Horse. Martin's Horse I think was very creative. And extremely sexual. And it was upsetting to a lot of people because Buckley was going through all the noises of an orgasm as a jockey trying to get this dog Joey, this horse that was completely lost, that was paying odds of 500 to 1 goading him into winning the race. He said, you know, [imitating Buckley] "One more, baby, just one more." He said, "If you do it, I'll marry you, baby!" He said, "This horse paid the longest odds in the history of the California Racing Association." I love Martin's Horse.
MM
You saw him perform that?
GS
Oh, yes.
MM
did he have a physicality to it?
GS
Well, like I say, Buckley looked like Nigel Bruce, the British actor in the movies, he looked like a member of the House of Lords. He had this bristling white mustache, and his face was very animated and when he was doing Martin's Horse he could be a jockey. When he was doing God's Own Drunk he was a rural western roustabout. [imitating Buckley] "I'm not a drinking man. Never liked it. But I promised to watch my brother-in-law's still when he went into the wood. It was just where the map said it was." You know, and he would look like that, that character. And then when he did Jonah and he did all of the other Biblical characters he would look like those characters.
MM
Now, when he did Jonah and the Whale - there's a little section where Jonah and the Whale are having a repartee.
GS
Yes.
MM
Did, did he switch back and forth, or did he just stand there and change his voice.
GS
Well, it was his voice. He did it mainly with his voice. [imitating Buckley] "And the whale is saying, 'Jonah, what in the world are smoking down there?'" [Grover laughs] There was a lot of pot humor in Buckley.
MM
Now, that was a little more radical when he was performing, right, then it would be today?
GS
Well, my god, this was back in the middle ages. I mean he was doing stuff back in '58 and '60 that was just unheard of. Which is about the same time that Lenny was coming up. It was a new wave of comedy. One of the avant garde comics who was doing this in New York, before any of them, was Professor Corey.
MM
Irwin Corey.
GS
Irwin Corey was the father of all of these people in many ways. Because he was - he was a great improviser. I don't think that Buckley was as an great improviser as Lenny or as, certainly, Irwin Corey. I've seen Buckley thrown onstage by hecklers. By people repeating his routines. And he didn't seem to have quite the knack of handling them that Lenny had. Or, my god, of Corey. If somebody heckled Corey it was pathetic because he'd have them walking out of the club on their hands and knees so that nobody could see them. I mean, he was devastating to hecklers and he was a fabulous improviser and so was Lenny. And Jonathan Winters was one of the greatest improvisers of all. Mike and Elaine were fabulous improvisers.
MM
From everybody's account Buckley was a Vaudevillian. These routines were really well rehearsed.
GS
They were very well rehearsed. Also, he was one of the very few new wave comics that never played places like the Hungry i. The Hungry I had Dick Gregory and Lenny and Woody Allen and Mike and Elaine but Buckley was too much of a cult comic and I think Enrico Banducci felt that Buckley's humor was too esoteric and too extreme for the kind of upwardly mobile middle class audience that the Hungry i was attracting at the time - the Shelly Berman audience.
MM
Would you say the esoteric, that that may be the formula for why he didn't make it?
GS
Yes. He was appealing to a cult audience. It was too specialized, too narrow an audience, and he was too far ahead of his time. I just got a postcard from a relative who was in his thirties quoting Buckley: "There is a great power within" which reminds me of another one of my favorite routines of Buckley, was Cabeza de Vaca. It was a gasser.
MM
What appeals in that to you?
GS
His sense of history. The story he told about Cabeza deVaca exploring the new world where he was Crocodile City and the spirituality of it---"there is a great power within"---and the image he created of Cabeza deVaca, stomping all the way from Minnesota to Mexico. It was---he did create an image. I never saw him do this, but I heard him on a record and it was like great radio.
MM
I think that was something that I found really significant in him - that I could close my eyes and everything was happening in my head because of his words.
GS
Yes.
MM
I was ten years old when he died, so was Roger. You know, what did we miss by not seeing him?
GS
Well, he was so visual. And you couldn't take your eyes off the man. He was handsome. He had a barrel chest, broad shoulders, he was well built. Muscular---and this marvelously expressive face and this bristly mustache, and his eyes that would widen and narrow. And his lips that would purse.
MM
Was it like a rubber face in some ways?
GS
Well, it was a very animated face, and he used it to perfection, to fit any of the thousand of voices that he could summon up.
MM
If you ran into somebody who never heard of Buckley, how would you describe him?
GS
Now there you have me---it's like trying to describe Hamlet. How would you describe Hamlet? You know, how would you describe Citizen Kane? Ah, I would just say that he was a stand-up comic who looked like a member of the House of Lords, who spoke the language of a Black, jazz-talking, jazz-freaking hipster. I think that's about it---I don't know if I could add anything to that.
MM
What was his contribution to comedy?
GS
Well, I think that this cult audience has been very slowly beginning to develop into a much larger audience. As witness you're interested in making this film. And I find that a lot of younger people, like yourself, have graduated toward this kind of humor. As I said, he was too far ahead of his time. The audience he was appealing to was a jazz audience, a beatnik audience, a hipster audience period. And gradually over a period of years you find people who are not hipsters and not beatniks and not jazz people, who are intrigued by anybody this inventive and this original.
MM
Was it significant, his treatment of, say, Shakespeare?
GS
Frankly, to me this is the least interesting material that he did. It was, you know hipsters, flipsters, finger-popping daddies. I mean this was clever, but this didn't wear well with me. Not like the bad rapping of the Marquis de Sade or Cabeza de Vaca. That Mark Anthony and hipster talk and---oh, another one that I really did like that I haven't mentioned was The Naz. The life of Jesus in hip talk. That was very inventive. Or the life of Gandhi. I like the one about the life of Gandhi better than the ones that I did about Willie the Shake.
MM
Now do you see themes running through most of his stuff?
GS
The themes that ran through---worked with---he was a white Negro and a jazz comic. I think that was the theme of his work. Which made him very limited as far as audience appeal was concerned.
MM
How about the audience itself, I mean you've been to maybe 25 of his performances. What kind of reaction did he get from the audience?
GS
Well, he had two different kind of audiences. It was because I was doing publicity for this Palo Alto club which was a rather sedate audience of undergraduates and their parents, and he tailored his performance accordingly. When he was smoking pot on the stage of the Coffee Gallery, which is on the beat thoroughfare of Grand Avenue and North Beach, he had a built-in audience of hipsters and pot smokers. And they all were playing Miles Davis Kind of Blue---if you walked up and down Grand Avenue at all hours of the night, you would hear from every apartment Miles Davis Kind of Blue or Howard Silvers The Preacher, the theme song of the beatnik movement during the 50's when North Beach became the thoroughfare for the disaffiliated, middle class, white drop-out kids from Sioux Falls or from East Jesus, MN---who left the hinterlands behind forever and what the public didn't realize---what the press and media didn't realize---because the media naturally got intrigued by these kids with their tangled beards and their army hand-me-downs. What they didn't realize was that these were a bunch of white middle-class kids trying to act Black. That was essentially what was going on, they were listening to Black music, were trying to talk Black, and they were trying to walk Black. They weren't dressing Black, because Black men have always been sharp. Black men have made a point of being very well groomed and turned out. But they were wearing those clothes to signify, like the Chinese aristocracy wore long fingernails to signify that they could not do manual labor. The French aristocracy wore lace cuffs covering their hands, which signified that they could not do manual labor. And so the beatniks wore these clothes to signify ---and beards--- that they could not take a 9 to 5 job on Wall Street or Montgomery Street.
MM
Did Buckley appeal to these Palo Alto kids?
GS
Yes, because the material he was doing was very engaging and very clever. They liked it, and he was a very likable person, on stage and off, he was very engaging.
MM
Studs Terkel said that he felt that Buckley's early history was out of the walkathons and the speak-easies and the vaudeville stage---
GS
Yes
MM
---and he felt that as a young man he'd been a heavy drinker, he'd been a carouser, he'd done --- well you read Anita Day's book; he had kind of bacchanalian existence, like a Roman aristocrat.
GS
Yes, he was a sybarite and a non-stop Jesus-freaking ecstatic.
MM
And then Studs feels that somewhere along the line, he says he wouldn't exactly call it a religious conversion, but he went from this kind of buoyant and saucy master of ceremonies into doing this material that, actually, he didn't get paid nearly as well when he started doing the hip material. He didn't have near the audiences that he did when he was in vaudeville.
GS
He was scuffling. And I do know that he had a lot of financial support from his groupies. He was very good at---he was a con artist-he was very good at conniving money out of his groupies, because he certainly wasn't making that kind of money playing the coffee gallery. And places like that, because that was not a high -class room.
MM
How big an audience would he have?
GS
Coffee gallery was small---he'd have a couple of hundred people in there. He was always packed, always---but that was a very small place to pack.
MM
Did he ever talk to you about wanting to make it bigger?
GS
No, I never talked to him about things like that. I never really got personal with him.
MM
Then how did you publicize him? What was the process of publicizing Lord Buckley?
GS
It was a process of publicizing anybody. I was doing publicity for the Hungry i or I was doing publicity for the Bolshoi Ballet. I did publicity for everybody from Moms Mabley to the Budapest String Quartet. And what you do is you get the name in Herb Kane's column, you get people to write features about them and get them in Sunday magazine sections, and you get news stories about them planted. The same that you would do for anybody who was in the field of show business or entertainment.
MM
So there wasn't any particular bent to the thrust of your work with Buckley.
GS
No, I don't think - there were no magazine articles about Buckley or Sunday supplement articles about Buckley the way there would be about Mort Saul, for example or Mike and Elaine or Jonathan Winters. He was too much of a cult figure to attract that kind of press notoriety.
MM
Roger, do you have any questions that come up for you?
RM
We've encountered speculation about the end of his days and his demise and various myths that run through that time in his path. Do you have any opinions about that?
GS
No, I heard about his death and I was not prepared for him to die so young, and to this day I don't even know what killed him, except probably burning the candle at both ends. That probably was what did it. I don't know if he was dissipating, I don't know if he used any drugs stronger than cannabis or if he was drinking much, but I do know that I lost contact with him for a couple of years before he died.
RM
Did he ever do anything that really touched your heart?
GS
I think what I most remember about Buckley was something he did on stage---I only heard him do it once. He was talking about Joyce Cary's novel "The Horse's Mouth" that Gully Jimson, the dissolute painter was dying in a hospital bed and he knows it's the end and he's laughing it up and he's smuggling liquor in there and pinching the nurses and having a big hoot for himself. And the nun comes in a said, "Mr. Jimson, don't you think that at a time like this that you should be laughing a little less and praying a little bit more?" And Gully Jimson says, "But it's the same thing, madam."
MM
That was lovely, Grover.
GS
I'm glad you reminded me of that, because "touched my heart" that was a thing I remember, it not only sums up my feelings about him but about Buckley's feeling about himself. "It's the same thing, madam."
MM
Okay. Thank you, Grover.
GS
My pleasure. |
