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14. High SahibLord Buckley If you believe in something, stay on it! Because it belongs to you. The hopelessly square Vegas clientele forced Buckley to once again fall back on his "Amos ‘n’ Andy" shtick and vaudeville material with its emphasis on audience participatory parlor tricks. Except for the odd late show when he would unleash his hipsemantic classics on an unsuspecting and frequently unreceptive audience, the desert gig had a stifling effect on His Lordship. Fortunately, there was always California, and Buckley made frequent trips back to Los Angeles and the Bay Area to flex his chops for more sensitive ears. Buckley continued to perform in Southern California and it was at a 1958 engagement at one of his favorite haunts, Club Renaissance (a beatnik nightspot on Sunset Strip founded by a local free spirit named Ben Shapiro), that he found acceptance for his work. The burgeoning scene at Club Renaissance attracted both the hard-core strata of L.A. bohemia and a slicker clientele, with everyone from Rick Nelson to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott stopping by to catch his sermons. Buckley even shared a bill one night with the great jump blues vocalist Jimmy Witherspoon and future film director Paul Mazursky, then a stand-up comic. Jim Dickson I saw him perform many times. I saw him perform at Strip City and Jazz City and the Club Renaissance, which held about three hundred people. His hip classics had more appeal but they didn’t always make people laugh and that made club owners uncomfortable. "Where’s the punch line?" they’d say. But the story was better than any punch line. Working in some kind of a punch line was always a strain for Buckley. Sometimes when he had to work strip joints the people would become rowdy and ignore him and he got very abusive. Or there would be some heckling and interaction with the audience with some of them ready to punch him out. But when he worked places like the Club Renaissance or the coffeehouses near the end of his life he was different. People at these places loved him and understood him. It was the same thing that made those clubs successful for jazz and poetry readings. They had gospel music and they showed films there. It was that kind of coffeehouse—a more avant-garde artistic crowd. They could play Miles Davis without serving alcohol because the people listened. These performance coffeehouses drew what would later become the Hollywood elite. They were sort of the Hollywood want-to-bes back in those days: the Sally Kellermans and the Jim Coburns. That world of people was in that coffeehouse era. That was the time for all the people that were in the beginning of the beatnik or hip movements. They all knew who Buckley was. But after he died that whole movement became not thousands but millions, but it was spread too thin. A lot of guys got lost when it got that big. Nik Venet The world is full of secret heroes and the late Nik Venet was one of them. A founding force behind the Beach Boys, Venet cut his teeth in the music biz shepherding Buckley around L.A. in the late 1950s and went on to produce thousands of record dates including those of Bobby Darin, Jim Croce, Les McCann, Lou Rawls, the Lettermen, Fred Neil, Sam Cooke, Gene Vincent, Rick Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, and Glen Campbell. This was Hollywood before it became the sprawling metropolis that it is now—it was a lot smaller. Lord Buckley would leave my office at World Pacific, cross the street and go into the back door of Ben Pollack’s Dixieland Bar and make himself a sandwich. And then he would walk down to the Renaissance and perform. Phil Teretsky was the bookkeeper and associate of Richard Bock at World Pacific records who was also quite adept at equipment. He knew his stuff. Phil had moved all the portable Ampexs down to the Renaissance and recorded His Lordship for two weeks. I don’t know what ever happened to that stuff. And I know that there’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t been released because I sat there with the equipment, stopping and starting to save tape—today you could let the thing run for the whole show—but we used to stop when he would go offstage to get a drink. But that stuff never came out. He was trying out new material. And there were some remarkable things. They were all very new and very modern. Perhaps the most significant chapter of Lord Buckley’s California reign came as a result of a chance encounter at Club Renaissance with Dr. Oscar Janiger, a simpatico psychiatrist whose experiments with a then-obscure substance, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25, were well underway. Dr. Janiger was in the midst of a seven-year clinical research project exploring the potential medical use of LSD. At the same time Janiger was spending his evenings at Club Renaissance, he was spending his days administering the yet-to-be-controversial psychedelic sacrament in a standardized natural setting to the likes of Anais Nin, Andre Previn, Cary Grant, and close to a thousand others from all walks of life. Janiger’s research was aimed at studying the effects of LSD on a "demographic sample" cross-section of the population. Apparently Lord Buckley needed little coaxing to define himself as a member of that particular control group. Dr. Oscar Janiger There was a club on Sunset Boulevard called the Renaissance Room in the late 1950s. It was run by a memorable man named Ben Shapiro. Ben ran the Renaissance Room. It was notable because in those days when guys got busted for marijuana, for example, they lost what’s called their cabaret license. That was a very serious thing because it was a punishment that took away their livelihood. There were a number of people in that predicament who couldn’t perform and Ben very generously allowed them to perform in his club in a sort of semi-clandestine way. Among that group was Wavy Gravy, Stan Getz, Jimmy Witherspoon and, of course, Lenny Bruce. I was a psychiatrist in practice and I was connected to a medical school. And yet, I guess, I was sort of a hip guy, which was a unique combination. I would hang around the club, and got to know the performers and enjoyed the whole scene immensely. Sometimes I was pressed into service in the role of therapist-at-large. Lord Buckley was one of the guys. We hit it off and spent some fine times together. I found him to be a very literate and creative man and we became good friends. Then, in 1958, when my investigation was going on with the various mind-altering substances, he volunteered as a candidate in them. LSD was legal then and I was conducting research through a grant I had received. That led to the occasion of Lord Buckley taking LSD and giving his extraordinary paean to the experience, of which he spoke with beautiful eloquence. It was one of the most extraordinary examples of extemporaneous humor and artistic use of language that I ever heard, filled with delicacy and sensitivity. It’s amazingly good. He was speaking about the state that he was in after he’d taken it and acknowledging that fact. It was an extension of his way of looking at the bigger picture as it were: the larger sense of things. I think the LSD might have changed his comedic orientation. More important, he said it did. He said that it gave him more freedom, more access to his creative inner self. He even embarrassed me somewhat by the generosity of his compliments such as saying that it had changed his life. I had a special building that I was working in at the time. I had arranged it like a living room and included a garden to relax the subject and enhance the experience. The experiments are quite famous now. They were naturalistic studies of LSD and involved over a thousand people. Cary Grant was part of that experiment. I’ve known a great many very, very interesting men but Lord Buckley was one of the most gifted—a most remarkably talented and expressive man. The arrangement Dr. Janiger had with his subjects required that they write down their impressions of the experience shortly after having it. Lord Buckley’s lengthy report of his soul excursion rhapsodizes in the inimitably jubilant Buckleyesque fashion. The result of the experience was that it seemed to break down even further the barriers between his brain and tongue, if that was possible. LSD: First Trip. The following piece, a transcript of Buckley’s LSD appraisal written for Dr. Oscar Janiger, was read and interpreted by John Hostedder, an actor and second-generation Buckley acolyte, in December 1988. It was broadcast by KRCW-FM as part of a three-part Lord Buckley special on The Roger Steffens Show in Los Angeles. It appears with Dr. Janiger’s permission. By Richard "Lord" Buckley, Ordinary Seaman on the Good Ship Lovely Soul Detonator under the Command of Fleet Admiral Oscar Janiger, Head Detonator and Head Head. Introduction I first felt a tenseness in my groin and chest, as if something big was there. Something I knew was going to rise up to break through to something new. My whole body was jingling with alert signals: "This is going to be one mother of a take-off. Hang on!" It felt like a soul pressure. I felt strong. I felt words shooting out of me like projectiles. Acres of untapped sound were waiting to be put into the gun of expression and with the physical feelings of rising and breaking through came a great sense of expanding freedom. I knew I was there when I saw the high fluorescence of vivid colors. As I talked, the knots on the pine ceiling grew larger. Not abnormally large—I mean, nothing to be alarmed about, you know what I mean—but four or five times larger. I took this calmly for I understood it to be the animation of the inanimate, ya dig. Besides physical feelings of something big in my groin and chest and sights of pine balls growing before my eyes, I heard sounds of which triggered off new emotions. My ears were alert and pricked up like an intelligent dog. I heard a conversation on the divan—these people were interrupting me, making jokes and laughing rudely—irreverent towards the divine service being conducted in this holy cathedral. Their voices vibrated in my head like bells: "Ding! Dong! Ding! Dong!" Why, normally I would have shouted them down, stomped upon the ground and silenced them. But I felt a strange patience for their clanging interruptions. Instead of straightening them with my blasting voice, I refrained, restrained by the new insight into beauty. I couldn’t strike back at them. I didn’t want to. My insight into beauty included them though I was annoyed by their lack of sensitivity. Yet, I saw that the tremulous beauty and sweet serenity which I saw included the air they breathed. I felt tolerance for them. They couldn’t see what I saw. I was on a multicolored balloon swaying high above the motley crowd. I found great extra-added pleasure in hearing old routines roll off my tongue as if a dam had broken loose—a golden river. They poured out, wrapped in the essence of love. I looked down on these crows cawing on the couch and thought to myself, "I’m not mad at anybody. I have the patience of a rose." Well, I knew I was at the top when I paused in my speech and looked at the light. One orange lamp came on in color with the power of a floodlight that was sired by the sun himself. White heat poured through red. Then some sweet guiding angel said, "Come outside and look at the light, baby." I came outside and looked up through the trees. "Christmas," I said. "It’s Christmas!" Perfect reds, blues, greens, pinks—two absolutely white stars—purity stars. It was Christmas in Heaven. Heaven was hung with gorgeous light globes. I saw the tops of giant pines joined in union with the sky. I saw each star connected by an astral highway. Beams of light, not bold but clear, so clear—nice wispy clearness. The Dipper was connected by these same roads: the V in the diamond of the Dipper and all the stars seemed so close and friendly. I knew what they were. You knew what they were? I knew what they were: lovelights. That’s right, lovelights. The sky in its fullness showed a shifting, revealing infinity itself. A shifting to the left revealing depths of worlds beyond, a lifting of a curtain far beyond the first curtain: farms of Christmas trees as strong as those on the first curtain shining from infinite depths. Then the curtain would shift back and those beyond were lost. Then more curtains would shift. Curtain after curtain after curtain showing further back behind beyond the far stars, deeper yet. They were fluorescent jungle lights with a depth to them and a friendliness. They had a meaning as if they were shining not lights but messages. One message, it came to me with great positivity: that there’s only one way to live. That is, live in a house of love. That’s right, the universe is a house of love. You can make every house a house of love. You can’t walk out of a love house with a sword or a gun—there’s none in there to come out with. You have to come with a flower. If attacked, defend yourself with a rose. There’s no other way to live—the stars beamed it into me—except by love. I walked back to the house under my own power but with a sense that the people with me were so beautiful. I would go anywhere they led me. The star-flashed message stayed with me and buoyed up my soul as I came down from the sky. My conclusions: I was open to the beauty of people who had never seen beautiful before. You see, the next morning I went into a pancake house. I walked up and I bowed to four nuns. See, I’d never spoken to nuns before. I couldn’t penetrate their cloak of reverence, you dig. I walked up to them and I loved them and they were sure I owned the place, you dig, and they gave me their orders for breakfast. When the waiter came and I sat down at my table, it shook ’em. But I spoke to them again and I told them I saw them as sisters of beauty and they tittered and giggled and blushed and they were very well pleased. The love moment beat with a new tempo in me. It kept me from resting that day. It gave me further desire to perform, to salute the beauty of people. LSD makes love for other people and its desired expression an immediate necessity. In coming over that Sunday morning to apologize, LSD made it mandatory. Before I would have said, "They are wrong! Make them wait! If they want to contact me, let them make the move!" But LSD made it a driving necessity as I see them now, immediately. It was: "Tell them that I love them." Love must be shown at every moment! LSD tells me never to save up what I need to spend in my old age—spend your love now for I may not have the chance later on, dig? My unspent love draws no interest. Like an unused muscle, it goes slack. If LSD taught me one thing it taught me the immediate necessity of exercising the love muscle. Not tomorrow but now. Since this moment is now let me just say, to whoever’s pretty eyes or ears pass over these words...I love you very much. As might be expected, Buckley’s psychedelic excursions were not limited to the clinical realm. According to Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Buckley was "a practitioner of yoga" who, at one point, "rented a yacht and threw mescaline parties in the San Francisco Bay with live jazz by Ben Webster and Johnny Puleo and the Harmonicats." Also, despite evidence to the contrary, Buckley allegedly claimed that he first tried psychedelics under government supervision in Chicago during the late 1940s. Buckley’s renewed verbal explosion was exhibited during a Thanksgiving weekend bash at the quirky Lake Arrowhead home of the equally quirky Thad Ashby a short while later. It was there that Buckley delivered a nonstop monologue that is said to have lasted at least a day. Dr. Oscar Janiger There was a party up at Lake Arrowhead in 1959 and Buckley was one of the people invited. We were all just having a good time. It was a lovely setting. Everyone was very bright and receptive. There was plenty of talent and plenty of things to talk about. I had wanted to test the efficacy of LSD in a performance environment and this seemed like an excellent opportunity to make such an appraisal. I had discussed this with Buckley and he agreed to assist me in discovering whether it could be used as a stimulating creative catalyst in such a setting. We prepared by administering the medicine and going out for a walk. When we returned, Buckley got up and just spontaneously took the floor. And when he did everybody immediately gravitated to him and we just sat there listening to him hour after hour. Nobody had a word to say because he was so extraordinarily entertaining. I eventually fell asleep from exhaustion and woke up and he was still going. That was a virtuoso performance. Fresh, interesting material was just pouring out of him at every moment. We had a tape of it buried around here somewhere and I am told that it goes on for something like thirty-six hours. What was perhaps most notable was that he did not use any of his standard routines. That’s what made us immediately sit up and take notice. Here was a man who stepped aside of his prepared material and just pulled out magical, one-of-a-kind stuff. I might have seen him perform after that but I never saw him in public often because I had him all to myself. It was redundant for me to see him perform. I had all his records and I had a command performance anytime I wanted. He had a generosity about performing—a real class generosity, a real sharing of himself. He was a very serious man, a very profound man. When he wasn’t "on," he was a very sensitive and aware guy. Despite his off-the-cuff spontaneity, he had a sober and reflective element to his character. He read a lot and he was well informed. We had a shared passion for literature and we would have great conversations. He had a remarkable intuition of the foibles of human nature. Dr. James Macy I was there for the Thanksgiving marathon at Lake Arrowhead in 1959. Buckley arrived following a gig in Las Vegas so he had to drive all the way there. He was kind of tired but once he got going he was terrific. Believe it or not, we did not have a tape recorder. I called up a good friend of mine and said, "You’ve got to get a tape recorder up here. We got Lord Buckley here and he’s going ninety miles per hour and this is too good. We’ve got to record all of this." So anyway he got Mort Sahl’s tape machine, his Ampex, brought it up there and then we recorded him. It was the four-day Thanksgiving weekend so we got a couple of days of that. That’s all we got out of it. We gave him LSD that night. At one point during the night he went out and looked at the stars and said, "They told me it was a Christmas tree—and it was!" Meaning the effect of the LSD. Everything gets colored among other things. After that it was just a nonstop weekend. He got going on anything you’d suggest to him. He’d start to weave it into things and then he also had his own routines that he had started to work out even though they weren’t completed for professional performance. They were things that he probably couldn’t perform on a public stage because perhaps they were a little too racy or something like that. So he went through a lot of things like that. He was just unbelievable. Prince Foremaster had a suitcase full of tapes. These tapes were really something. One of them had Lord Buckley sort of jamming with Jonathan Winters. They were friends. The way that they played off of each other was incredible—priceless stuff. Doug Boyd The party at Lake Arrowhead in the Sierra Mountains east of Los Angeles was the wildest non-stop swinging party and His Lordship performed for a three-day wild Thanksgiving weekend...and I wasn’t even there. Through my memory of the tapes though I can pretty much recreate the buzz of the affair, picturing the eighteen-foot semicircular couch facing Thad’s great medieval fireplace before which His Lordship performed almost non-stop all those hours. Through those seven-inch reel-to-reel tapes it became the closest thing to having been there experiencing the whole thing firsthand. Besides, everyone kept relating things and details to me for months afterwards. On those golden gem tapes while waiting for the acid to hit, Gloria Smyth—she was a Count Basie singer at the time—sang a stirring a cappella solo of the ancient WWI love song "Roses of Pickardy." Then I vividly recall Buckley doing a stand-up rap about Abe Lincoln with the black singer. I was quite surprised when it turned heated in a kinda impromptu, black anger rehashing of the Civil War and the slavery thing. Gloria finally came right out and labeled Lincoln a hypocrite singing out, "ABE WAS A BIG HYPOCRITE!" in her rich, three-octave contralto voice which made Thad’s doweled rafters tremble! Buckley was more than a little taken aback by all the black rage and anger, the resentment she displayed in her improvised lyrics. Great Bugged Black Wombats! After all, hadn’t ole Abe Lincoln freed her people from the bounds of slavery?! Even though I wasn’t actually sitting there, I felt apprehensive as to how His Lordship would handle this draggy racial anger. In all the things he’d ever done he had always shown a great genuine love and respect for black people. But Buckley held the cool ground though refusing to castigate or put down Abe. You could just feel the tension zapping between the two rappers up there but His Lordship, with patriotic zeal, wasn’t about to trash the office of the sixteenth president if the United States. He was just too strong a patriot stud for THAT, daddy! Gradually Lord Buckley began to feel the acid’s effects, as he rose up from a chair at a new clear spot he had moved to near the kitchen’s buffet counter, his voice rising to shouts as he became more and more agitated from the effects he was now feeling. A little alarmed, Lady Elizabeth, a professional dancer of some worth, quickly took over the floor and, knowing her husband’s vicissitudes, begin to dance before him, executing some beautiful ballet steps that seemed to gradually calm His Lordship down. She continued her graceful performance much to the delight of the partygoers after her royal spouse had regained his composure. "PHEW!! This joint is really jumpin’," he exclaimed looking around approvingly, "just full of lighted Christmas trees! Let’s all go outside for a minute and get some fresh air." Thad Ashby and James Macy led the way for His Lordship out through the aromatic pine and scented night air. It held the mountain chill, but was refreshing and delightful to experience. Everyone just huddled together making things even more of a gasser as they walked through the heavy forest tunnel. Then an opening in all the foliage as they broke out upon a clearing. Suddenly the heavens drowned them in stars. "God’s Christmas trees!" Buckley intoned in an awed, squeezed voice as he bent his head up. Then looking about at everyone in the party, he uttered what were to become for us the classic Buckley word talismans: "Would it embarrass you if I were to tell you that...I loved you?" Many cats and kitties found themselves involuntarily staring down with a self-conscience giggle at their nearly invisible feet, just as predicted. Buckley the beautiful, chuckling with the understanding and humor of a true hip aristocrat he now had become for us all, intoned tenderly, "See...I told you it might embarrass and hang you Babies up..." Now the crystal-clear forest air heard only soft murmurs and the gentle tinkle of joyous laughter. Back inside, His Lordship, still visualizing the color-tinted heavens he had just experienced outside, couldn’t keep from repeating "God’s Christmas trees...they definitely were God’s little Christmas trees...what a double gasser it is to be alive!" Once settled again, Buckley launched into some skits and marvelous storytelling. He had several routines that he did on the military. One was "H-Bomb." Buckley by this time was deep into the LSD trip, and gazing about the room, gasped, "PHEEW! I’m as high as a goose in full flight!"—one of his standard lines only this time HE WAS! Next he did what, for me, was the greatest thing I ever heard him do. It wasn’t a skit as much as great storytelling. I can’t remember the name of the bit or if I ever heard a name. But it involved an old Confederate soldier trying to remember the name of his first old girlfriend while sitting on the porch of one of those antebellum mansions laying weathered and in disrepair on some old plantation in the deep South. Before long you could just see and smell the old magnolias hanging around you, and even the old warped porch deck creaking in protest as he rocked in his old chair. He simply spoke those pictures. Pretty soon you were completely lost in the pathos of his story. He was "Old Folks," so poignant and beautifully described in those heartfelt and positive tenor sax notes played by Don Byas on the old Savoy 78 rpm record long ago: "Everyone just called him Old Folks / did he fight for the blue or the grey?" You were sitting there with him, with his doddering despair of old age and fading memory. You were there as he struggled to remember her. Pretty soon you were lost completely in his story: You were there. He painted the goddamndest picture. The old Southerner getting the girls he had encountered or known mixed up and confused until he ended weeping in frustration. Just listening had me in about the same condition: "Oh, let’s see, was her name Mary Bell? No, I think it was Bonnie Bell, but wasn’t she that little gal down by the creek who lifted my head an’ gave me the drink of cool water when my mouth was so parched a-layin’ there wounded all day after Gettysburg? Oh, but I’m not sure. Maybe that was Suzy...Suzy Mae? I can just see her with that l’il o’ blue flower a-stuck in ‘at pritty yeller’ sweet smelling hair a-hers. It was right over her ear. But then? Oh no, ah thinks ‘at was the little o’ black-haired gal done the Virginnie reel wif me in Charlotte that afta’ noon. She be a real vixen, that one was...with those scarlet ribbons tied roun’ that shinny long black hair ah-hangin’ down here back an those flashin’ dark eyes glitterin like pieces a-coal. "Oh, well, ah’ can always ’member her hair ’least. Yes I can, it was long an’ honey-colored in curls that hung past her lil’ bitty shoulders." Now a chuckle of vivid rembrance and a smile. "Eh, eh...she would toss them about peeverish-like. An’ they’d look ’xactly like spun gold in ’at Vir-ginnie sunlight whenever I teased her ‘bout her skinny long neck. Wasn’t it Lila Lee? Or was she that one I kissed down by the mill pond, maybe. I jus’ can’t seem ta remember her atall. What’s matter wit me? I should be able ta remember her name ‘least, damn it? But I’ll think of it in a minute. Jus’ you...sob, sob...wait..." Buckley managed to convey all the sadness of growing old, useless, and forgetful in that one old vet’s struggle to remember the name of his first love. He was the most remarkable storytelling Gasser of them all. Lewis Foremaster We took acid ten years before anybody else did. James Coburn was at Lake Arrowhead that night and Lord Buckley was pretty stoned and doing all his stuff and mixing up stuff like he never had before. His performance did go on for two days. It was a pretty wild scene. I’ve never been so high—I never came down. I was there for the belly laughs. I was having the time of my life. James Coburn The actor and raconteur James Coburn, with films such as Affliction, The Great Escape, In Like Flint, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to his credit, was a young thespian making the boho L.A. scene when he first encountered Lord Buckley at Club Renaissance. Later he was present at the legendary Lake Arrowhead party. Club Renaissance was a place where anybody and everybody played. I don’t like to put labels on things but it was that post-Beatnik, pre-hippie era when things were still fresh, new and fun. Buckley sort of floated a little above everything. But he had never had acid until Lake Arrowhead and Thad Ashby had invited about thirty people to see this occurrence. We knew that Oz, Dr. Oscar Janiger, was going to prepare him and give him some acid and everyone was curious to see how Buckley would respond under the acid experience. Most of the people there had done peyote or acid so they were intrigued how it would affect this unusual individual. Since Buckley was so off anyway we hoped that this was going to be some great alchemy in the sky. And, as it turned out it was. I seem to remember that this gathering had been in the works for some time before it actually happened but Buckley kept postponing it for one reason or another. But, finally, it was set. Many of us who had come to witness this great event also secretly hoped that there would be a little taste of the acid for all. This, however, was not the case. We gathered in the main room of Thad’s house while Oz prepared Buckley with the acid. Then they took a long walk in the woods before Buckley came back and performed. He was on for about forty-five minutes and he talked about what he was experiencing. It was as accurate a description of the LSD experience that has ever been detailed. I had seen Buckley perform before but the content of what he did at Lake Arrowhead was entirely different because of what it was about and why it was about, similar to the Mulla Nasrudin in the Sufi tales. Jerry Garcia I didn’t know that Lord Buckley did acid but if he did I’m really glad. He was a seeker. I think of him as a seeker. A Holy Man. With that kind of power, it’s an elemental experience. You recognize it immediately for what it is. Lord Buckley invented his own kind of style too. What was it—"Gospel Comedy"? It was something very special. There are antecedents but there isn’t anything exactly like it. So he’s one of those guys that’s an innovator but nobody followed through. He didn’t create a school of comedy. But he certainly influenced the shit out of a whole generation of comedians, a lot of them without even knowing it. I really feel that Lord Buckley is an almost lost resource. He was on the track. Stand-up comedy is like sleight-of-hand. It’s a technique and there are technical comedians who know how to tell a joke and know how timing works and all the rest of that stuff. That’s one kind of thing. Lord Buckley is being that guy that’s not a stand-up comedian but instead is like a medicine man, a shaman. Garcia’s notion of Buckley as a shaman is close to the mark. Shamanism is primarily associated with a phenomenon of Oriental culture. Not a priest or a medicine man, the shaman’s nearest parallel in the Western world is the artist—an artist who employs his talents for the well being of his tribe. Lord Buckley’s entire persona was pure shamanism: his bizarre appearance, the chants, the music, the drugs, the surrealistic visions. The club became his magical cave charged with tension as the audience sat hunched over and expectant, their eyes fixed on this fantastic figure in the center of the spirit circle wrestling with their fate...and his. Lord Buckley My Lords and Ladies of the Royal Court. Right here the time and now is the meaning of the word "religion." It is a meeting of the people here, believe me...and I’m the mother who authorized it all. It was done in service to them these last thirty-five years. I am honored and privileged to swing in that natural church, the theater, let me hip thee. 15. Straight to the Road of Love![Author’s Note: CONDENSCED] Lord Buckley I think rhythm is the key to everything. Rhythm in attitude, rhythm in tension, rhythm in execution, rhythm in consummation. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm—rhythm runs the whole swingin’ gig. Vegas had finally gotten to Buckley. By early 1959 he was spending as much time in L.A. as in Nevada, finding the time to make a very special studio date. Moving in the substrata of the jazz universe, Buckley had always crossed paths with musicians and no doubt worked with many over the years, yet few of those unions were documented or preserved. His associations with the Herman and Krupa bands as well as the bop saints of Fifty-second Street are well noted. But along with the ‘55 RCA sessions that included Benny Carter in a supporting ensemble role and the ‘53 Lighthouse gig, only Buckley’s unreleased January 6, 1959 gem of a studio date with vibraphone deity Lionel Hampton remains and must be regarded as the peak of his archived musical collaborations. While the circumstances surrounding the impetus for the date (or even its precise location) are unknown, the stellar results are not. Hampton’s light touch and obvious sensitivity to Buckley’s material provide a definitive Buckley/jazz alchemy despite the frustrating and puzzling brevity of the session. For his part, Buckley’s recognition of his company’s strengths is evidenced by the pauses he takes between his verbal runs, giving the feeling of musicians "trading fours." "Gettysburg Address" and "Swingin’ Pied Piper" are the only two pieces known to have transpired at the session but they are exceptional indeed—easily among the best and most unique versions of these two very different presentations. Each performer both anticipates and leads the other in what may be the perfect synthesis of jazz and "word jazz." Additionally, an extended Hampton solo between the routines creates the type of unified, thoughtful segue Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Roland Kirk, and rock bands like the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers employed with magical majesty within the coming decade. Another Buckley recording of "Swingin’ Pied Piper" transpired on September 25, 1958, several months before the Hampton session, when he ventured into an unknown studio to record a solo version of one of his most fully realized classic hipsemantic translations and allegorical portraits. During the second week of February 1959 small ads began appearing in the entertainment pages of the Los Angeles newspapers advertising "An Evening With Lord Buckley" at the Ivar Theater, a run-down burlesque house that had seen better days. Honoring Lincoln’s birthday and running from the 12th to 14th of the month, two dollars and fifty cents would garner a good seat for what would be the pinnacle of the fifty-two-year-old entertainer’s performance career. Material from the first Ivar Theater concert on February 12 was released on World Pacific by producer Richard Bock and found long life after Buckley’s short run. And if the house wasn’t as packed as Buckley may have hoped, the recordings resulted in two of his finest albums: Way Out Humor (later retitled Lord Buckley In Concert) and side-A of the posthumously released Lord Buckley: Blowing His Mind (and yours too). The salient pieces from these records plus a previously unreleased Ivar track, "Martin’s Horse," also appeared on another posthumous World Pacific collection, Buckley’s Best. These influential LPs spawned from the Ivar gigs find Buckley in top form, performing peak versions of "The Nazz," "The Gasser," and some Shakespearean gestures as well as a slew of new bits that cover his range of theatrical presentation and social concerns. "Subconscious Mind" describes a universal experience: the onset of a powerful sexual daydream while executing a mundane yet potentially fatal task which, in this case, means driving an automobile. Backed by his rhythm section, Buckley’s evocation of the erotic flash recalls Molly Bloom’s primal internal predawn ravings in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In this regard "Subconscious Mind" might be seen as a kind of homage to Joyce’s Molly in shorthand. New Wave choreographer Karole Armitage, by the way, presented a dancer's interpretation of "Subconscious Mind" during her collaborations with painter David Salle in the 1980s. Subconscious Mind Play me some beautiful, dreamy music, dear Prince. "Subconscious Mind," Mi Lords, Mi Ladies. Gentlemen, have you ever swung along a beautiful country road with a gleam of sweet life in the air, groovy with gold in your pocket, ridin’ a wild set of wheels at an easy pace? Wheeewww! Are you there? Everything is smooth and cool. There’s some traffic, but not too much traffic. It’s all right, you see, because you’ve—brrrrtttt—got everything covered. Understand? An’ you’re drivin’ along and the feel of the sun and radio’s swingin’ a beautiful, crazy, wild tune and you’re so good you—hah!—you’re right in there tight. Can you feel it? Yes. And suddenly your mind—rrrrtttttttt—goes over to Hippleyville and you start thinking about a beautiful girl that you met there five years ago. Whheeewww! And what a gasser she was...Ho! Hah! Take me now!!! Wheeew! Beautiful! Have your nose rubbed in the rose garden so many times that there are still petals up there? Indeed, indeed. And you’re thinking about how charming she was, how gracious her people were, what a ball you had, what a beautiful time, how how how sweet, how gracious, how crazy, how like a home in a home in a home HOME! kick it was. An’ you get t’ thinkin’ how you went out to the lake, an’ you...cool, man! Yes, yes, yeeesss, yes! Yes, yes, yes. Hewheeeeww! An’ you go many, many, many other places along that rosette of the reverie kick, an’ all of a sudden you say—Rrrrtttt!—what am I doin’—wait, I—Is everything all right? I haven’t hit anything I don’t think, I don’t know. Those fenders all right? "Yes." Good. Excellent. Well...better watch what I’m doing here. "Who do you think’s been driving while you were gone?" Much of the Ivar Theater production evokes the buoyant, helium-saturated stream-of-consciousness sensibility found in the work of Joyce. And, like James Joyce, Buckley labored very hard on his material, obsessing over the inclusion and emphasis of each syllable. Both artists played with words, ultimately developing a language (and literary domain) that was theirs and theirs alone. While the roots of Buckley’s Uncle Remus–style yarn "God’s Own Drunk" can probably be found deep in Buckley’s past, its place on high in the Buckley oeuvre is set in stone. "God’s Own Drunk," a shaggy dog story told in the homespun vernacular of a Southern country bumpkin, is the last inclusion of an animal story (in this case a bear) in Lord Buckley’s canon and a testament to the ability of intoxicants to lift the soul to sublime stratospheric ecstasies. It also should not be lost on the non-logomaniac that the first letter of each word in the title spell out the word "God." Also known as "The Bear," Buckley would sometimes casually introduce "God’s Own Drunk" as a story "in square," demonstrating an expansive interest in all forms and styles of comedic expression. In musical terms, if one thinks of some of Buckley’s work as jazz-based, then pieces like "God’s Own Drunk" or "Let It Down" are Buckley’s nod to bluegrass. Elaine Thomasen Jim Buckley, Lord Buckley’s older brother, told me the story about the time when, as teenagers, he and Dick were asked to watch a still while the owner went into town. And they started sipping away and got so drunk that Jim would never drink another drop of alcohol. They just wandered all over the mountain and they saw this and they saw that but Jim said he just about died. At one point they got so drunk they imagined they saw a giant bear. I’m sure that is where the story of "God’s Own Drunk" came from because I heard it so much when I was growing up. The story in question is fairly straightforward: the speaker, a "non-drinkin’ man," is asked to check his brother-in-law’s moonshine-frothing still hidden deep in the woods. When he finds it, temptation gets the better of him and he samples the goods in such quantity that he quickly becomes cosmically sloshed. One has to wonder if Lord Buckley’s LSD experiences sparked a memory of or identification with the story and inspired its eventual presentation in performance as there is no record of its display in concert until after his experiments with Dr. Janiger. At the peak of his saturation he encounters a gigantic bear that he cajoles into sharing the white lightning with him. During the course of their carousal they become the best of friends before passing out. When the storyteller awakes he discovers that "the bear was gone. And you know what brothers and sisters...so was the still." God’s Own Drunk I’d like to do a little creative wig bubble for you called "God’s Own Drunk." Said, eh, just like I say before: I, I’m a non-drinkin’ man. Never drank for some reason or other. Didn’t like it. But like I said, too, I promised to take care of my brother-in-law’s still while he went in to vote. Went up there and it was just where the map said it was. And I’m a gonna tell you something—it was no little old five or ten cent still. It was laid there like a golden mountain opal, with a kind of honey dew cry comin’ from it. I aren’t a drinkin’ man, like I ‘splained to you, but that big old yellow moon was a hangin’ up there, and God’s lanterns was a hangin’ in the sky, and that curiosity got the best of me, and I took a slash. And I got a crazy, revolutionary feelin’ in my body. That yellow whiskey went down my throat like honeydew vine water. Humph, it tasted mighty good! I felt a revolution goin’ through my body like there was great neon signs a goin’ up an’ sayin’, "There’s a Great Life a Comin’!" Feelin’ it talkin’ to me, and I took another slash, and I got another jolt, and I took another slash, and I started to sing. I started to sing. And that big old yellow moon a hangin’ out there and God’s sweet lanterns a hangin’ in the sky, and I’s a singin’. Never could sing a note in my life, but I’s a singin’ as fine and as pretty as you’d ever want to hear. And I took another slash. And then I took a big full...That big old yellow moon a hangin’ out there. God’s lanterns a hangin’ in the sky, and suddenly I got a tremendous revolution of emotion in my body like I was fallin’ in love with everything in God’s sweet world that moved, lived, didn’t live, animate, inanimate, black, blue, green, pink, mountains, fountains. I was in love with life, ‘cause I was DRUNK!! I wasn’t fallin’ down, slippin’ slidin’ drunk. I was GOD’S OWN DRUNK!...A fearless man. And that’ when I first saw the bear. Big old Kodiak-lookin’ fella, about sixteen foot tall. I walked right on up to that bear, cause I was God’s Own Drunk and I loved everything in this world. Walked right up tight to him about four-and-a-half feet and I looked right up in his eyes and I want to tell you somethin’ brothers and sisters: my eyes was redder than his was! Hung him up. And he’s a sniffin’, he’s a sniffin’. He’s tryin’ to smell some fear. He can’t do ‘cause I’m God’s Own Drunk and I’m a fearless man. He expects me to do two things: flip or fly. I don’t do either. Hangs him up. I told him, I said, "Mr. Bear, I’m God’s Own Drunk and I love every hair on your twenty-seven-acre body. I’m a fearless man!" Said, "I want you to go...I know you got bear friends over the hill there. Harry Bear and Tim Bear and Jelly Bear and Tony Bear and Teddy Bear and Field Bear, Hazel Bear, John Bear, Pete Bear and Rare Bear! Go over and tell all of them that I’m God’s Own Drunk tonight and I love everything in God’s green creation. I love them like brothers. But if they give me any trouble, I’m gonna run every Goddamn one of ’em off the hill!" I moved up two feet—don’t you know he moved back three. I reached up and took the bear by the hand. I said, "Mr. Bear, we’re both beasts when it comes right down to it." He’s a lookin’ down at me. I said, "I want you to come with me. You’re gonna be my buddy. Buddy Bear." Took him right by his big, old, shaggy man-island sized paw, led him on over, sat him down by the still. Well, he’s a sniffin’. He’s a sniffin’. He knows there’s honeydew around there, some kind of honey bear honeydew of some kind. He’s a sniffin’. I know what he’s a sniffin’ at. I took a slash or two myself to taste ’er out and I filled him a bottle. Did you ever see them bears, the silhouette of them bears at the circus, suckin’ up that sarsaparilla? Ahhh, it’s a fine lookin’ sight! And he downed another bottle. And he downed another bottle. And I put two more in him and pretty soon he started to sniff and snort. Tapped his foot. And he got up and started to do the Bear Dance. Two sniffs, three snorts, a half a turn and one grunt. And I’m tryin’ to do it, but I couldn’t do it ‘cause it was just like a jitterbug dance: it was so simple it evaded me. But we was a dancin’ and yellin’! And God’s sweet moon a hangin’ in the sky, and God’s sweet lanterns out there and there’s jubilation and love on that hill. And finally, my love, it up and got so strong it overwhelmed my soul, and I laid back in the sweet green hill with that big, old Buddy Bear’s paw right in mine and I went to sleep. And I slept for four hours and dreamt me some tremulous dreams. And when I woke up that old, yellow moon was a hangin’ in the sky, and God’s sweet lanterns is out there and my buddy the bear was a missin’. And you know something else, brothers and sisters? So was the still. Henry Miller One of the great, secret Lord Buckley fans and friends, novelist Henry Miller referenced Buckley in the introduction to Time of the Assassins, his study of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. More important, Miller wrote a dedication to Lord Buckley that was originally printed on the back cover of Hiparama of the Classics, a City Lights Books chapbook containing transcriptions of several of His Lordship’s most famous raps. The one called "God’s Own Drunk" is absolutely superb, a classic. It takes one back to the fountain of ecstasy buried in the wilds of Patagonia...You must have drunk from the Holy Bottle that Rabelais speaks of. I know you have drunk from many a bottle, but this one is the elixir, the eau de vie of the gods. Though "God’s Own Drunk" may initially appear to be a minor work in Lord Buckley’s catalogue, it captured the attention of three modern minstrels. Jerry Garcia, for one, cited it as his favorite Buckley piece and Jimmy Buffett used it as a cornerstone for many of his concerts in the 1970s and early 1980s. Of equal significance, James Taylor lifted a line from it ("God’s sweet lanterns hangin’ in the sky") and plugged it into "(I’ve Got To) Stop Thinkin’ Bout That," a song from his 1991 album New Moon Shine : James Taylor "God’s sweet lanterns hanging in the sky" is an ecstatic line and that particular piece, "God’s Own Drunk," that has him falling in love with that family of bear and that trans-species ecstasy, is a truly sublime thing. That sends a jolt through me to this day. The thought of him drinking that moonshine up on the hill like that is a great image. The name of my album New Moon Shine even fits in with that a little bit. No one ever picks up on the Lord Buckley influence in that song but I know, for instance, that my friend Jimmy Buffett used to recite "God’s Own Drunk" in his show. Not only did Jimmy Buffett perform the bit in concert, he released it on two albums: his 1974 LP Living and Dying in 3/4 Time and the live You Had to Be There disc in 1978. Set to the strains of a laid-back, honky-tonk groove, Buffett’s ‘74 version of "God’s Own Drunk" isn’t half-bad. An in-studio audience has obviously needed little coaching (or coaxing) to party and they willingly oblige, helping to create an atmosphere of a turn-of-the-century roadhouse. Buckley gained Buffett’s attention during the 1960s, an era which should have cued His Lordship’s comeback. "I been doing this particular song for about twelve years," Buffett told an Atlanta audience in 1978 when he performed a slightly raunchier version of "God’s Own Drunk" for his You Had to Be There album. "I learned it from two friends of mine down when I first went to New Orleans...I was about eighteen years old. Got down to Bourbon Street...It was written by the late, great Lord Richard Buckley, who I heard it off of a record one night at a friend named Bob Cook and Brent Webster’s apartment. That song intrigued me to the point where I figured, ‘Well, hell, this is really great!’ Too many people have never heard of Lord Buckley, who was an old humorist and king of the jivers. So, with much respect to Lord Richard Buckley, this is ‘God’s Own Drunk.’" Buffett’s musical adaptations of "God’s Own Drunk" recall the country genre of "comic drunk" monologues of which Johnny Bond ("Ten Little Bottles") reigned supreme. In March of 1978, John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times: "Mr. Buffett emerged as a sort of folkie Southern boogier, and his cult still seems to regard ‘God’s Own Drunk’ as his theme..." Buffett told Rockwell, a tad defensively, "People picked up on songs like ‘God’s Own Drunk,’ which for me was almost like filler. I don’t do that song anymore." Perhaps not, but Buffett saw fit to tag two of his vehicles, an old pick-up truck and a boat respectively, with familiar Buckley references: "God’s Own Truck" and "Euphoria II." Buffett’s artifice itself was once described by Village Voice critic Geoffrey Stokes as "John Wayne meets Xavier Cugat meets Boston Blackie meets Lord Buckley at a cocktail party in Buffett’s head, and they all have a few drinks and go dancing with Carmen Miranda." The hidden gem on the crown of the Ivar collection is Buckley’s rendering of Joseph Newman’s "Black Cross" from the poet’s book It Could Be Verse! "Black Cross" is a haunting invective against the evil of racism and a companion piece to Buckley’s own "Georgia, Sweet and Kind." Indeed, part of what makes this performance so successful is the eerie musical background accompaniment by vocalist Dorris Henderson on the old spiritual, "Koombaya." Ms. Henderson can also be heard moaning "Rock of Ages" in the background on the Ivar release of "The Nazz." The decidedly serious "Black Cross" was one of Lord Buckley’s favorite pieces, a disturbing portrait he often performed late in his career even though the civil rights movement was little more than a distant rumble to most whites at the time. Lord Buckley This is a beautiful thing by Paul Newman’s beloved grandfather, a Cleveland poet. It’s called the "Black Cross." It could be the "Red Cross," the "Blue Cross," the "White Cross," "The Pink Cross," "The Yellow Cross," "The Aquamarine Cross," "The Criss Cross," or the "Cross Cross." But we call it the "Black Cross." Black Cross There was old Hezikiah Jones of Hog Back County Lived on a hill in a weather-beaten hovel And all that he owned was a two-acre plot And a bed and some books and a hoe and a shovel. Old Hezikiah, black as the soil he was hoeing, Worked pretty hard to make both ends meet; Raised what he ate, with a few cents over To buy corn liquor which he knock down neat. And a few cents more that he put in the cupboard Against what he called "de rainy season," But he never got to save more’n two, three dollars Till he spent it for this or that reason. The white folk around knew old Hezikiah . . . "Harmless enough, but the way that I figger He better lay off’n them goddamn books, ‘Cause reading ain’t no good fer an ignorant nigger." Reverend O’Green, of the white man’s church, Finally got to comin’ ovah To talk to him all about the Pearly Kingdom An’ to save his soul for the Lawd Jehovah! "D’ya b’lieve in the Lawd?" asked the white man’s preacher. Old Hezikiah puckered his frosty brow, "Well I can’t say ‘yes,’ so I ain’t going to say it, Caze I’ve never seen de Lawd...nowhere...no how." "Do you believe in the Church?" asked the white man’s preacher. Hezikiah said, "Well de Church is divided; Ef they can’t make up their minds, Ah can’t either . . . Ah’m just like them...I ain’t decided." "D’ya b’lieve in Heaven?" asked the white man’s preacher, "Where you go, if you’re good, fer your last rewa’hd?" "Ah’m good," said Hezikiah, "good as Ah’m able. But Ah don’t ’spect nothin’ from Heaven OR the Lawd." "You don’t b’lieve in nothin’!" roared the white man’s preacher, "Oh yes Ah does," said old Hezikiah. "Ah b’lieve that a man should be beholding to his neighbah Widout the hope of Heaven or de fear o’ Hell’s fiah." "But you don’t understand," said the white man’s preacher, "There’s a lot of good ways for a man to be wicked!" And they hung Hezikiah as high as a pigeon, And the nice folks around said, "Well, he had it comin’... ’Cause the the son-of-a-bitch didn’t have no religion!" "Black Cross" is an attempt to grasp the blind hatred of the lynch mob. Buckley speaks of Hezikiah Jones, "black as the soil he was hoeing," and slowly, eloquently builds up the picture of a dignified, self-educated man with noble principles, who, when accused of not believing in anything by "the white man’s preacher," answers with the honesty that proves to be his epitaph. Joan Baez Singer, songwriter, musical interpreter, and social activist, Joan Baez’s impact on American culture and world politics has been profound. She refers to Lord Buckley in her 1968 autobiography Daybreak and her son Gabe performed at the semi-annual Lord Buckley Memorial Celebrations in California in the 1990s. I was on a Joan of Arc mission for nonviolence and folk songs and yet the man touched me because of his social depth. "Black Cross" was so deep. I’d be laughing one minute because he was so clever and witty but then he’d flip it over and I would have to leave the room because I’d be in tears. Lord Buckley reached way deep inside. Ray Watkins A longtime Chicago musician, Ray Watkins remembered his experiences as Lord Buckley’s Gate of Horn lighting designer in a taped 1973 conversation with Del Close and Ann Brooks, from which the following testimony was drawn. When I first met Lord Buckley I admired him but I didn’t like him because he seemed very remote. Originally I was supposed to play piano for him at the Gate of Horn but we couldn’t get together on the parts so he said, "Ray, just blow lights." And so, I began working the lights. Then one day, he tries out this piece of material, "Black Cross." I started hearing it and I did some rather interesting things with the lights, flashing on different colors. When the Deacon spoke in the piece I’d have red and blue coming at him from opposite angles so he would really burn. And when Hezikiah Jones himself was speaking, it would be a very soft pin spot and it would flash back and forth as he changed personalities. That was the first time I ever really lit him and that was first time I ever really grew to like the man and love him. Within two years of the release of "Black Cross" on Buckley’s Way Out Humor album, Bob Dylan (then a young Jewish troubadour hailing from Hibbing, Minnesota) had transformed "Black Cross" into a dramatic talking blues in perhaps the one instance where a cover version of Buckley may well surpass the work of the master. Dylanologists all agree that Lord Buckley helped fuel the singer-songwriter’s inspiration and early aesthetic. Although the two never met, Buckley was important in Dylan’s development. A number of people are cited as having introduced Dylan to the Buckley magic, including comedian-turned-activist clown Hugh Romney (now loved the galaxy over as Wavy Gravy) and New York stand-up shaman Steve Ben Israel who was doing some Buckley riffs in his Greenwich Village nightclub engagements. Ben Israel also remembers a great night at the Cafe Wha? when Dylan shared the stage with Fred Neil, Rev. John Hicken and Dorris Henderson, who had supplied vocal support to Buckley's performance of "Black Cross" on the Ivar concert LP, so perhaps some connection was made then. Another version of how Dylan may have gotten juiced on Buckley concerns the apartment he shared with Romney during the summer of 1961. When Romney brought home Buckley’s album Way Out Humor that included "Black Cross," Dylan took to it immediately and studied it in the same way he had previously absorbed Woody Guthrie. Mikki Isaacson A friend of Bob Dylan’s during his Greenwich Village coffee house days, Mikki Isaacson’s recollection of Dylan’s fascination with Lord Buckley is drawn from Dylan: An Intimate Biography by Anthony Scaduto. He had collected a lot of material over the years, songs and things, and he asked me to take all these scraps of paper lying in his guitar case and type them out for him. One of the things he had me do was a routine off the Lord Buckley record, the one about the hanging of a black man. Bobby was so very anxious to learn it, and for me to type it for him. He was so excited about it, kept playing it on the phonograph over and over again ‘til I was going out of my mind. Jim Dickson Albert Grossman was interested in distributing the Buckley material so we had a hot dog over it but nothing came of it. Albert had run the Gate of Horn, a club in Chicago and I would imagine had his own experience with Buckley. He, undoubtedly, was the one who would have turned Bob Dylan on to Buckley. To me, "Black Cross" was the most powerful piece that he did. When Buckley came back to California with that particular piece of material it knocked everybody’s socks off. The civil rights movement began post-Buckley. Buckley was out there by himself defending black people and getting black people’s approval. But he made a lot of people nervous in those days. The two extant recordings of Bob Dylan’s interpretation of "Black Cross" (sometimes titled "Hezikiah Jones" or simply "Hezikiah" in Dylan discographies and on various bootleg releases) are phenomenal, but exist as a misidentified footnote in the singer/songwriter’s own voluminous catalogue that warrants correction. The question at hand is the authorship of the piece, which has been indisputably established as Joseph S. Newman, not Richard M. "Lord" Buckley. Some of the confusion surrounding the piece may have inadvertently been caused by Buckley himself who, on the Ivar recording, mistakenly introduces "Black Cross" either accidentally or on purpose, as written by "Paul Newman’s beloved grandfather, a Cleveland poet." The offhand nature of the remark would naturally lead one into falsely believing that it was a merely another one of His Lordship’s odd-ball, off-the-cuff put-ons. However, on other unreleased Buckley renditions of "Black Cross," he correctly identifies Joe Newman in the Cleveland clan’s lineage. Though there are only two surviving versions of Dylan performing "Black Cross," the budding singer-songwriter reportedly performed the song regularly over a period of about a year, starting in late 1961. His interpretations of it on the extant recordings are exceptional conjurings of the grizzled character of Hezikiah Jones and the bigoted deacon. Buckley was well into his fifties when he was performing it while Dylan was barely twenty, so hearing Dylan’s voice break as he narrated how they "hung Hezikiah...high as a pigeon" is an astonishingly dramatic moment, highlighted by the tender age of the performer. The monologue became a Dylan perennial of the period. Indeed, in a 1961 interview with Izzy Young (founder of the long-gone but fondly remembered Folklore Center in the Village), Dylan quoted whole chunks of "Black Cross" verbatim when asked about his views on religion: "Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided, can’t make up their minds and neither can I. Never saw a God, can’t say until I see one." It would appear that if Dylan was adapting Woody Guthrie’s attire, mannerisms, and Okie twang at this time, he was working Lord Buckley into his neo-folkie stew as well. The earliest Dylan version of "Black Cross" was the last tune of an extended set recorded on December 22, 1961, on what is known among Dylanologists as the "Minnesota Hotel Tape." Actually it was performed at the home of his friend Bonnie Beecher (who later married Wavy Gravy) and captured for posterity by fellow musician and comrade-in-song Tony Glover. This first, somewhat weaker, take is an indication that Dylan was in the early stages of learning the piece. It is interesting to note, however, that all of the twenty-eight songs performed that night were covers, a reflection that Dylan, like his peers at the time, was mining the back eddies of the folk and blues tradition. Though it is top-heavy in its inclusion of Guthrie material, the "Minnesota Hotel Tape" features chestnuts from the likes of Rev. Gary Davis, Big Joe Williams, Brownie McGhee, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Clearly Dylan was, at least unconsciously, lacing Buckley in this great lineage of American folk music by the inclusion of "Black Cross" into his repertoire. By the fall of 1962, when the second Dylan version of "Black Cross" was recorded at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, the young troubadour had learned his song well. The pacing and drama of the piece are perfectly nuanced, the unfolding horror of the story poignantly dark. In this fashion, Dylan tailored "Black Cross" into one of his finger-pointing protest songs similar to two originals he performed that autumn evening, "John Brown" and "Ballad of Hollis Brown"—sympathetic compositions that focused on the violent, martyred fate of its primary characters. The songsmith was to follow these up over the next couple of years with several others in the same vein, among them: "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "The Death of Emmett Till," and "Percy’s Song." Dylan encountered Lord Buckley at a crucial point in his emerging aesthetic and personal development. It was at this time that he was in the chameleon-like process of transforming himself from Bobby Zimmerman, middle-class son of a Midwestern hardware store owner, into Dylan: the poet/prophet/waif who would change the times and music. A Buckley reference appeared in a Dylan poem published in the December 1963 issue of Hootenany, the staunchly traditionalist songsters’ pamphlet. Curiously titled "Blowin’ in the Wind," the poem postdates that particularly famous Dylan classic and, along with mentions of Ray Charles, Julian Beck, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, and Joan Baez, the fractalized bit of impressionism includes the following stanza: "an Moondog’s beatin his drum an sayin’ his lines— an Lord Buckley’s memory still movin’ an Doc Watson’s walkin’" Buckley also seems to have informed some of Dylan’s later work. A close look at the atmospheric cover photograph of his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home reveals another LP jacket, The Best of Lord Buckley, prominently displayed on the mantelpiece in the background amid the funky, but pointed, cultural detritus littering the portrait. A couple of songs on that disc appear to show Dylan noting Buckley’s teachings. The proto-rap "Subterranean Homesick Blues" bursts with harsh, black humorous syncopation and "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream" with obtuse history. Additionally, "Mr. Tambourine Man," with its Pied Piper–like beckonings, contains the repetitive sound/phrase "jingle-jangle" echoing Buckley’s "Scrooge," which includes the identical refrain. Similarly, a line from the later Dylan masterpiece "Like A Rolling Stone" ("when you got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose") parallels Buckley’s sentiments in "The Gasser": "To know what it means to have nothing you must have NOTHING!" Within a year Dylan was utilizing Buckley’s method of transforming legend into a postmodern sensibility with the title track of his next album, Highway 61 Revisited: "Oh God said to Abraham ‘Kill me a son,’/Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’" Dylan also populated a couple of other Highway 61 songs, "Desolation Row" and "Tombstone Blues," with characters that either come straight out of Buckley’s lexicon or could have. Those making cameos include Cinderella, Bette Davis, Ophelia, Einstein "disguised as Robin Hood," John the Baptist, the Commander in Chief, the King of the Philistines, Gypsy Davey, Cecil B. DeMille, Galileo, Delilah, Ma Rainey, and Beethoven. And is it any accident that "Mr. Jones"—the man who knows something is happening but not quite what on Highway 61’s scathing "Ballad of a Thin Man"—shares a similar situation and the same surname as the doomed Hezikiah from "Black Cross"? Concurrently, Dylan included the following reference in the "Electric Black Nite Crash" section of his murky novel/poem Tarantula: "nature has made the young West Virginia miners not want to be miners but rather get this ‘46 Chevy—no money down—take to Geneva...hunting for the likes of escape & Lord Buckley & Sherlock Holmes about to be his mother turning to Starhole the Biology Amazon saying ‘i dont want to be my mother!’" And others see a Buckley-"Black Cross" connection in "Sign on the Cross," one of the more intangibly weird songs from the intangibly weird American collaboration: The Basement Tapes. Recorded informally in 1967 with The Band in upstate New York, The Basement Tapes feature a grab bag of genuine Dylan classics, genuine folk/pop classics and genuinely inspired, off-the-wall lunacy. Built like a symphony, "Sign on the Cross" finds Dylan taking on a persona somewhere between a late-night radio preacher and an aged backwoods wise man, in a voice sounding alternately soothing and deranged. Dylan shocked the music world in 1979 when he revealed that he was a Born-Again Christian and began performing a new, all-gospel repertoire—some of the most powerful (and unjustifiably maligned) music of his career. But, like Buckley before him, was he not merely celebrating the life and work of The Nazz in art and song? In 1981, still later in Dylan’s career, came the tune "Lenny Bruce" on his underappreciated Shot of Love album. Though there are again no Buckley-specific references in the song, it is reasonable to view the composition as Dylan’s identification with and homage to the idiom Lenny and His Lordship transformed. And, who knows, maybe when Dylan sang of hearing the "song of the clown who died in the alley" on "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall" at the Gaslight that night way back in 1962, he had Lord Buckley in mind. Perhaps more than the lyrics in many of these compositions themselves are the swirling, kaleidoscopic manner in which they flow sing-song from Dylan’s lips, defying rhyme and meter. Even the more straightahead rock and blues numbers have a raw angularity that reveal hidden facets with repeated listening. To extend the idiom’s lineage into the modern era (and Buckley’s influence via Bob Dylan) are cover versions of two Dylan songs: Kurtis Blow’s 1987 rap version of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and a 1993 hip-hop rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone" by the Mystery Tramps, featuring the first-ever authorized sampling of the singer-songwriter’s voice from the original cut in the dense but spunky high-tech mix. Or maybe Buckley was, as some Dylanists suggest, little more than a footnote in the Bob Dylan story. Maybe Dylan, the living sponge, got hold of Buckley’s records in 1961, spent a couple of weeks absorbing them inside out and then moved on. Dylan often cannibalized people’s record collections when crashing with them—the most famous example being when he devoured Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music—and perhaps "Black Cross" was all that emerged from his binge. Maybe the Buckley album on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home is just an album on a shelf, where Dylan left him, resurrecting him possibly not again until the mid-1970s to draw on Buckley’s hip "Dan McGroo" for "Jack of Hearts." "Black Cross" had a powerful, if opposite, effect on another composer/musician of renowned sound and round. When Buckley performed the piece in New York City in the fall of 1960, bassist Charles Mingus allegedly charged the stage with a knife in an attempt to stab His Lordship whom he incorrectly felt was glorifying a lynching. It was only the quick action and soft words of Prince Lewis Foremaster that soothed Mingus and saved Lord Buckley on that occasion. Back to the conversation with Oliver Trager in Inkwell.vue.
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