OJ
Let's see now. I met Lord Buckley through a group at a place called the Renaissance Room, which was a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard run by a guy named Benny Shapiro, who was a wonderful guy who would take in acts of people who had---let's just say---some previous difficulties with the law. And he gave them some gigs and allowed them to play [to perform].

OJ
You got it---he was the most big-hearted guy---and they would perform. Because as Lenny Bruce, who was one of them, would bitterly complain, it's cruel and unnatural punishment to take a guy's livelihood away from him. You know most of those guys were busted on marijuana charges. And in those days that carried a very stiff penalty. So they didn't have a livelihood. Buckley, by the way, was one of those who---I don't know about the marijuana---but he didn't have a license.

OJ
They used to call it a cabaret license. And so he was bitter. We used to call Lenny the jail house lawyer because he was always writing briefs to try and awaken the government to this form of punishment.

OJ
I don't know to what extent they helped each other, but they knew each other. And they exchanged views on the subject. I don't know how much direct connection they had. But I know that Lenny had a tremendous regard for Buckley, as did everybody else, by the way. That group of people at the Renaissance Room was an extraordinarily interesting bunch. There was a fellow named Hugh Romney, who became Wavy Gravy. And they all performed there. And the police would come in, sit around, listen to the performance and then bust them. We'd say "Why do you do that?" [And they'd say] "Well the guy's terrific, we like to hear him." I was sort of the resident psychologist/psychiatrist or whatever, the resident shrink I suppose.

OJ
I was a psychiatrist. I had also been a teacher at the University of California during many of those years. I simply was interested in music and consciousness change, shall we say, and just hung out and enjoyed the people. And they would consult with me occasionally on personal matters here and there. So we had a kind of nice relationship.

OJ
No. At that time I was at the California College of Medicine, I guess it was. But the research was done on a semi-autonomous basis through Sandoz.

OJ
Yeah, Sandoz would supply us with the materials and everything we needed and then we did the clinical research.

OJ
No, no the idea was to give it to a cross-section of all kinds of people, to get an unbiased report of what simple measured doses would do in a non-selected, naturalistic setting, where we'd have random selections of-people in a pleasant setting like a living room with an adjoining garden. And [ask them to] very carefully note what the effects were and have them write these things down as soon as they were capable of doing it. In other words, to study the phenomenological effects of LSD on a random demographically selected population. That is people with different occupations, different education and the like.

OJ
1955 to 1962. Over a thousand people from all walks of life. And I think we gave 2500 to 3000 administrations [doses of LSD]. Each carefully observed, each under controlled conditions. Cary Grant was in the group and Andre Previn and many, many others.

OJ
Well, Buckley plus acid was some form of special configuration, I can tell you right now. It was remarkable. And after that, he apparently---I don't know if he had taken anything before---but I think it loosened him up considerably.

OJ
I really do. Only by virtue of his saying so. Many times people will tell me it has opened up their repertoire, their creative abilities, expanded their ideas about things, and given them more options and more information; more material to work with---you know, that kind of thing. But anyway, that was the setting, the milieu, the background to my meeting Lord Buckley and we became very good friends, we really liked each other. He had a great deal of regard for me and I had [the same] for him. I met his family . . . One thing led to another and he took the acid and other things and we just kind of enjoyed each other's company.

OJ
Under my auspices I think he took it one time. What he did after that I couldn't say.

OJ
I think it was all in keeping with the idea of the freedom of the individual. That was, you might say, the theme song for the Sixties. We're all in it together---whether on stage or in the audience, we're all the same. And you might say the stage bled over into the audience and the audience began to become one with the performers, and I think that entered into a whole new kind of presentation, where there's a great deal more freedom on stage and a great deal more reference to the people outside as being part of this general notion that we're all players. And that did something to the content of the performances. It humanized them in a sense.

OJ
For example, when you take the early rock songs, the Dylan songs, they dealt with the human condition---I ran away, don't pine for me. There's this whole thing of moving into people, and their daily lives, their daily concerns, their daily considerations became part of the performance. The black guy is a perfect example---the famous black performer who tells about his home life and the kids and all that kind of stuff. You see that wasn't generally the substance of mainstream show business before that time---the humor of everyday life and the humor of the human condition, as it were. The theater of the absurd. It melted the barrier. The second big thing that happened was that performers were beginning to draw from stream of consciousness material, you know? And they were going down with the whole psychological revolution, the whole idea that there are depths within us, that there are things coming up from inside, that they were more free to tap into sources that weren't rigorously prescribed. That's what happened with my cousin, Allen Ginsburg, his poetry became part of the internal aspect.

OJ
Yeah. And so not only did the I and Thou barriers melt down but the Myself and I barriers melted down. The connection between the two parts of the self began to become more permeable. Do you see what I'm saying?

OJ
But Buckley drew a lot from the internal. A lot of the things he did were like Jack London and the early writers who said they wrote pieces and didn't even know they were writing them. It was beginning to draw from internal sources in the Jungian sense. So that was also in the wind.

OJ
Exactly. It did both. It loosened the internal barriers and to some extent it loosened those between us and others as well. And that, of course, had to change the format of performance. And when you see something like "A Chorus Line," or something like that, you see these conventions breaking down. Because there the actors appeal directly as individuals to the audience.

OJ
In my mind, he was an educated man in the true sense. Once in awhile Lord Buckley and I would get into more serious themes about life and philosophy and so on. He was consummately bright, a man of depth, a very exceptional person, pulling up literary sources you would hardly believe. I had some background in English literature and I had written some things and he always would astonish me with his knowledge. He was a voluminous reader. And he was one man who could get an enormous amount out of personal experience. Like a novelist would, you know, being able to bring in his personal experience and integrate it. The kind of exceptional person you see here and there. These qualities more likely would exist in a fine novelist. Everything he heard or did was kind of reformulated in his mind, in this marvelous artistic sense that he had. That made him a cut above the average performer in the sense that he didn't have generally prescribed material which he rigorously adhered to, or a routine or patter, or that sort of thing. Even though the genre in which he worked---that hip patois, whatever it was---might certainly be considered a form. But he could vary that. It so happened that we caught him when he was going through the hip phase. But I'd seen him and heard him in a variety of styles. And he was at home in every one of them. He could be very literary. He could be very down home. He could be Southern style or sophisticated. He had an extraordinary repertoire. I think he could have been a very fine writer. He was kind of a literary person in that sense. And he had a poetic instinct. He was a mixture of poet and a troubadour. I used to think of him as a troubadour---a person that would go around the country singing songs, or tell stories relevant to the human condition.

OJ
Oh, absolutely. Because it was before its time. Like every good performer he was ahead of himself. And the people weren't used to that, and so they saw that as an affectation instead of a genuine artistic development. Just as they might have seen Picasso's Cubist period as an affectation instead of a genuine progression in the development of art.

OJ
A little bit before he left for New York, I guess. We were very close. We would talk a lot. We got to be very, very friendly. And he left for New York---I can't remember the date. I don't remember.

OJ
Something like that. He went to New York. Then I was visited by his Prince Foremaster. You know that story? Did I tell you about that? Foremaster was announced in my office and he came in wearing a bowler hat, pinstriped suit and with a rolled up umbrella. Very meticulous, English waist-coated gentleman, carrying an attach case. He solemnly sat stiff-backed in my chair and announced that he was on a mission. He said that before he died, Buckley had given him the names of several people that he was to visit in person and give them Buckley's special message. And I was one of the people on the list. I don't know how many there were. And he went through this little recitation, telling me about Buckley's feelings about me and so on---it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. And at the end, with great gravity and very official, he snapped the little locks on the attach case, stood up, smoothed down his trousers and stiffly walked out of the room.