OT
As a sophomore at Bennington College, in the mid 1970s, I was discovering jazz, the Beat Generation, Coltrane, Monk, Charlie Parker, Ginsburg, Kerouac, etc. While attending Bennington College in Vermont as I said.And, somehow, Lord Buckley's albums were a part of that discovery. Someone brought me up to their dorm room and said, "You've really got to check this out." I was both a jazz student and a literature student. And, they played me "Jonah and The Whale" and, I believe, or course "The Nazz" and he seemed to be, even then, to me the perfect synthesis and marriage of my passions within jazz and literature. This incredibly visionary poet expostulating with delicate, subtle language and someone who had the improvisatory fire of, you know, the greatest tenor sax or alto sax players of all time. At the same time, I was reading the liner notes about him on the albums and trying to put together the pieces of who, even then, you know, "Who was this guy?" How did he make a living? Was he accepted? Wasn't he accepted? You know, the notion that there was someone doing this, you know, very special work and living this strange life style really appealed to me and piqued my curiosity a great deal.

At the same time, I was reading the liner notes about him on the albums and trying to put together the pieces of who, even then, you know, "Who was this guy?" How did he make a living? Was he accepted? Wasn't he accepted? You know, the notion that there was someone doing this, you know, very special work and living this strange life style really appealed to me and piqued my curiosity a great deal.

I whole heartedly went out and, you know, I collected his records, began listening to all the different routines that were there, began thinking about them, began writing about them. And yet, I feel - I felt that, I still feel as those these are high works of art that no one has really addressed in their total, in their entirety, as a unique body that needed to be preserved and shared with, either this generation, or future generations, who ever might come across his. I guess part of my thinking too, in terms of documenting him and interviewing people who had anything to do with him or were associated with him, friends with him, in some way had to do with their encroaching age and that time was going on and that these people would no longer be around to talk to. And, naturally, I've had a lot of people who I've interviewed or, you know, pass away and people passed away before I got to interview them. So, it's, you know, it's like history has sort of fallen between the cracks just like him. And, the necessity to try to track down people, try to track down the documentation as become, certainly, more pressing in the last few years.

MM
Do you want to say anything more about your process and your - what you've been going through? I think I would like you to talk about your - the frustration of the lack film of him doing the hip stuff.

OT
Well, there certainly is a dearth of his visual, visually recorded legacy. That's obviously frustrating. Especially given that some many of those are basically the same Sullivan appearance.

It's quite frustrating that, that for such a great artist that there's so little material available to actual see of him performing. Obviously there are a lot of great photographs from a certain period but in terms of moving image of Buckley we're really only left with about thirty-five seconds of the peak performance of "The Nazz."

MM
What do you want to say about "The Nazz"?

OT
Tthe editors of the film that that's from had great taste in the material because they did picked the best part of that performance to utilize in their film. But other than that, we don't really get a full throttled, full blown presentation of what any of his routines would be like. That one little bit is certainly enough to get our imaginations going to see what a power house he would have been in performance. And you compare that with the passion that he brings to all of the routines that we've been able to collect on audio tape and you can almost get a little cartoon like idea of what it must have been like to sit in the audience of a club on Fifty-Seventh street or a coffee house in California in the 1950s and get a notion of his magnificence as a performer. But, I suppose that's part of the Buckley legacy, this elusiveness that's always kind of slipping away from you in some way. I mean, it certainly would fit with his karma that there would be very, very little for us to pin our eyes around one way or the other.

The fact that only a half a minute or so of him doing his hip material exists would seem to be quite symbolic in a metaphorical sense of the rest of his life. This was someone who's legacy has slipped through the cracks. Who's been discarded by society. Who is not regarded like a Michelangelo or even a Charlie Parker. Someone who made a great contribution to the letters and mythology of the written word, the English language. Where is, obviously, I feel this was someone who was a visionary genius. A neglected, visionary genius, there are my favorite kind of visionary geniuses, the neglected kind. Because they're the people who seem to have the teaching, the method of a way to live. I mean, I guess I'm one of those people that think that exposing yourself to good art can make you a better person. That there is a moral subtext to what they're about. It's not about entertainment, it's more about shamanism or storytelling in it's purest tribalistic form. Buckley's material really was never about the punch line. In fact, I often tell people not to listen for a punch line because it's not really about that, those words. It's about the quality of the storytelling, the texture of the storytelling, the journey that that story takes you. Again, like listening to a great saxophone solo or a guitar, a rock guitar solo. All the little sort of subtle places, little back eddies of the story that might exist in a jazz solo, within that sound, that his - that both his sound and words will take you - these little experiential curly cues - it's a hard thing to express in words the detail with which he approached his art and that can be found within his art.

MM
Would you consider Lord Buckley, the physicalness of Lord Buckley - like it's his instrument? I mean, Charlie Parker has a saxophone, Frank Sinatra had a, you know, a style in his voice.

OT
Yeah, I think it was Buckley's whole presence. It wasn't really - obviously we are left with only, basically only the recordings. But, it was, not only the entire body, it was the entire lifestyle. This wasn't someone who came onstage, did some schtick and left. This was someone who was bringing his whole schtick onstage and coming off with it and was living it to the nth degree. It’s one of those really rare cases, I think, where the art and the life merged and stayed that way. It’s a quite fascinating phenomena actually. And in a sense he was lucky that his artifice was based around the spoken word. Because that’s something you can take everywhere. You can’t go around with an alto sax in your mouth twenty-four hours a day but you can go around talking all day long and preaching all day long, and spreading the kind of vibe that he did all day long. And he seems to have done it with his Royal Court.

MM
Could you talk a little bit about his life from zero to twenty?

OT
Yeah. Buckley was born, apparently, into very impoverished surroundings. He was the last of something like six or seven children. His father was a miner and a lumberman in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California. His - who often left their mother for long periods of time to follow the business north or south. As a result, his mom was often a single mom forced with the rearing children in desperate circumstances to say the least. Both, economically and physically. The town of Tuolumne, where he grew up was a definite rough and tumble place, boasting dozens of bars. I think they had wild coyote fights, things like that where - it was their version of cock fights but obviously a lot more vicious and ruthless, prostitution, gambling, all the concomitant social distress that a town like that would find itself in. Somehow he found his way out of that situation. He supposedly went to join his brother in an oil campaign in Texas or Mexico. Caught up with a traveling musician of some kind and began an act with him.

MM
Did you also say he might have played the streets when he -

OT
Yeah, there's some notion that he busked on the street corners of his home town, performing for itinerant roughnecks either from the lumber industry or cowboys with his sister. I guess singing songs or doing little dances. That's just one of those stories that's told about Buckley. Naturally with a character like he - there are oodles of apocrypha that come along with him. What's true and what isn't true is, I guess, part of the game of being a biographer but I see it all as fitting into the larger Buckley myth or legend if you will.

MM
So, when he was eighteen or twenty?

OT
Yeah, when he was eighteen or twenty he found himself, supposedly, in what were known as the tent shows or minstrel shows of the 1920s. These were itinerant performing groups that would go from town to town to town doing one nighters. Again, there's no actual documentation of him doing this or he himself saying it. It's just something that is written about a lot and spoken about a lot in terms of his early days.

And is a possible explanation for how he found himself in Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an MC at what was known as the Walkathons or dance marathons. These were, sometimes, multi-week or multi-month extravaganzas that would find dancers either - I should say contestants either dancing or walking for weeks or, as I say, months on end until the last couple or person standing was the winner. Being an MC at these events involved basically talking for ten hours straight or performing for ten hours straight. Keeping the audiences attention to an otherwise static performance piqued in some fashion. So, whether that meant doing prat falls or telling jokes or doing a high wire act or riding a unicycle - whatever it took he did to keep the show rolling all day and all night. This is where he crossed paths with Red Skelton and others from the mystic universe of the dance marathons. Which themselves were a rather radical, progressive form of entertainment in that era. Not unlike punk rock believe or not. The kind of revolutionary group performance that at least characterized the desperation of that particular period at that particular time. Much like, I say, punk rock did forty years later. For instance there were mock marriages and mock funerals. There was a sense of turning social convention on it's ear in some fashion and this may have informed Buckley's sort of radical, at least revolutionary view points in lifestyle in some way. I think you can make a case for that.

MM
Do you have a sense of how he got involved with Vaudeville?

OT
I think the lineage would go something like this: you know, concurrent with the dance marathons he fell into performing at nightclubs as an MC. These were mob run, usually Capone organization run, speakeasies, which he befriended, you know, the notorious characters of the Windy City during that era. There's people who say that he never really got over that feeling of being protected by those strong arms and henchmen. He certainly had a certain bravaro that he carried, bravaro that he carried with him for the rest of his life, as if there was always going be, you know, some gangster to bail him out for something at one point - at some point should he get into too much hot water. And I think there was a sort of natural progression and milleu that nightclub performers, Burlesque performers, Vaudevillians all kind of shared. The notion that he would have passed rather easily from one to the other would certainly be keeping - keeping with other performers of his ilk who followed similar paths. I guess Skelton is a good example of someone who went from - to dance marathons through burlesque and Vaudeville to the variety shows. And variety shows really were the last vestige of Vaudeville as we seen in this country. The Sullivan Show being, I suppose, the apex of that. Skelton and Jackie Gleason both had wonderful variety shows. I mean, I suppose, what's-her-face Carol Burnett had one as recently as the early '80s but it's - or maybe even Dolly Parton - it still reveals itself in some fascinating aspect of American public life. But that was really - the swan song was the Sullivan Show I suppose. And as far as live presentation, when Buckley's involvement with them in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But by that point he'd made his decision, or he felt his calling to be Lord Buckley and present the hipsemantic material and the other material -

MM
When did that come about?

OT
I think you could pretty much pin it down to 1946, '45, '46 - the post-war bebop revolution of that era. Which seemed to be the earliest indication of people remembering him doing at least parts of "The Nazz" if not full blown versions or then full blown versions of "The Nazz" and "Jonah and The Whale" and that type. Although, there is not clear evidence when he became "Lord Buckley" it would seem that 1945-46, the period immediately following the end of World War II, was when he emerged with this persona and this emerging body of work. There are those who remember him doing at least partial versions of "The Nazz" and "Jonah and The Whale" as early as that. And certainly by 1950 he was doing really solid renditions of all the material that he has remained famous for or remember for in some way.

Where he got those stories from, what inspired those stories, that's - your guess is really as good as mine. There are people that remember a lot of characters around Fifty-Second Street who had informal acts like that, people who would hang around coffee shops and tell whole stories of Mussolini and Hitler in hip talk. And whether he picked up that kind of approach to storytelling from them or whether he was already developing it in some ways is very hard to say. There is no audio evidence of him doing anything prior to 1949, 1950 or so. That's the earliest documentation of any of his work that we really have. Other than that we are dealing with people memories of things. And, as we know, people's memories of things is not always that accurate. The recording of his versions of "The Nazz" and "Jonah and The Whale" and "The Gasser", "Gettysburg Adddress", "Hipsters, Flipsters, Finger Poppin' Daddies", you know, by the early '50s and have them be as solid as they were, leads me to think that he'd been working on them for quite some time.

He did have a little coterie of friends and associates who would bounce ideas off him, help him write stuff. A fellow named Mel Welles, for instance, claims to have written Gettysburg Address and presented it to Buckley. I pretty much believe him. Buckley was not necessarily the sole hand or mind behind the work that he did. But, he could have really had been the only voice behind what he did. People say that he became like an instant translator of the material. That you could basically tell him a short hand version of a story and then he within a few minutes could at least whip some retelling hipsemantically casting of it. Very, very fast and within a matter of weeks or shorter have a very, very together presentation of that bit.

MM
What's your take on the Club 7? I know you've talked about this before ??

OT
The Club 7 video to me is a very significant piece. It's what I would call a crossover piece in that there's elements of Buckley's old Vaudeville act in it. I.E. the Amos and Andy, or Four Chairs bit, where you get the Stephen' Fetchit type approach to the black voice but there's hints of the great work to come. For instance there are whole snippets of what later found it's way into "Jonah and The Whale" in that Club 7 bit. "The Great Lord was sitting in his rosy rockin' chair one hallelujah morning." That - I assume that he had the Jonah piece pretty much worked out but was sort of cutting and pasting and using different parts of that and presenting it on - in a form that would have been acceptable to broadcast television at the time. He never, I don't think, in his lifetime, could have gotten up and done "The Nazz" without not being invited back. But, he could get away with telling a story such as "The Sinner", as he did on the Club 7 broadcast.

MM
How about the way he structured his act on that show? Because he goes from singing a song to doing a camp revival into the hip material. Do you see any significance in the way he structured that?

OT
I think you probably got a little microcosm of what a full blown Buckley performance was like through that. And that's about as close as we're going to get to it. A little bit of a Louie Armstrongese imitation, the warming up of the crowd, the endearing himself. At one point he goes into preacher mode. I forget what he says, exactly but he says, "It's gospel time now." Or something. And the band is right there with him and, by the time he tells the story, he has everybody wrapped around his finger. I think if you were in a nightclub you would have gotten that in spades. A much longer and varied version of that for sure but he knew who is audience it was. He knew how to get them. He knew that he only had a certain amount of time to go and get them and he went and did it. It's really a quite remarkable discovery.

One of my mission within in my larger mission of dotting his historical "i"s and crossing his historical "t"s and getting all the Buckley P & Qs in order in regards to his work, is that I always want to make the case that Lord Buckley was not a one note Johnny. He wasn't someone who just got up there and just did one kind of act. It wasn't just "The Nazz", it wasn't just "Jonah and The Whale", it wasn't these word for word, line for line translations of Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln. It was a broad, vast spectrum to his material and his approach to that material. Pieces like "Black Cross", pieces like "Subconscious Mind", pieces like "Governor Slugwell" or "The Train". These are very different kinds of work. They don't rely on the knowledge of hip talk or venacular to any specialized degree at all. They address different social and political concerns.

"Black Cross" is really a pro civil rights piece years before it was fashionable to be in the Civil Rights Movement or even was a so called Civil Rights Movement.

A piece like "Subconscious Mind", in which he has a day dream or sexual fantasy while driving a car, is obviously not only dealing with the taboo subject of sexuality in a very flowery and elevating way, but in many way could be described as an out-of-body experience or a Zen like experience.

"Governor Slugwell", an incredible invective against the power structure, perhaps influenced by Huey Long's "All The King's Men", perhaps influenced by the story of Huey Long, who the hell wrote that, "All The King's Men"?

MM
Who wrote it?

OT
James Agee?

MM
"Governor Slugwell"

OT
"Governor Slugwell" was, perhaps, influenced by Agee's "All The King's Men" about the life of Huey Long. It's an incredible political invective against the power structure as such. And he does it in a very funny way and gets it under the radar, so to speak. But, aside from being that, it's also an incredible tour de force of performance. He does about a half a dozen different characters in the course of three or four minute rap.

As in "The Train", his comic book style description of a train trip that ends in tragedy, is an amazing performance of, not only an imitation of a train barreling through the American night, but of all the different kinds of people that one might find on that locomotive: the conductor, the guy selling peanuts, the guys - the engineers. It's almost like an R. Crumb comic strip or cartoon unfurling before you. It's very, very visual. And it's his power as a performer and attention to detail I think, and his ability to stop on a dime from character to character to character and scenario to scenario to scenario as the drama unfolds is really extraordinary. It takes your breath away every single time you hear it. When you get into this stuff you never really get sick of it because he keep on hearing new things in every performance, or with every listening.

MM
The significance of "The Nazz" in the 1950s?

OT
Doing a piece like "The Nazz" in the late 1940s or early 1950s must still be regarded as some kind of revolutionary act. I mean, after all this was Billy Graham's America, this was Ozzie and Harriet America, this was Einsenhower America, this was two garage - two cars in every garage America. This was a very white America. And he is presenting Jesus Christ and his disciples as, essentially, as black men on street corners, in ghettos, if you want to take it to that degree. And, perhaps, even though the work didn't extend to a milieu much larger than the jazz clubs it was still be regarded as a profane and threatening act, I believe, for this work to be shared on a mass popular level. It would freak a lot of people out. It would freak the Newt Gingrich's and the Jesse Jackson's out. And I kind of like it about - I kind of like that.

A lot of what this work is about for me and I think some of the people who've been pursing the Buckley legend in some ways is really about giving a proper burial, if you will, to this great American. The words "Grateful Dead" have to do with a cycle of folk tales that involve basically the Good Sumaritan story of a stranger coming across a group of people around a dead body. The person had, apparently, not paid their debts and they don't know what to do with the body because there is no money to bury the guy. The stranger pays for the proper burial and goes on his merry way. He encounters some life threatening travail of his own, is saved by a stranger who later reveals himself to be the spirit of the man he saved. In some way, I feel that we are enacting, or partaking in a true Grateful Dead myth, if you will, that Buckley has never had the proper burial and that all the work involving resuscitating acknowledgment of it has to do with bringing attention to this incredible artistic legacy that he man left.

MM
Alright. Lovely. Thank you, Oliver.

OT
And thank you.