LENNY BRUCE & LORD BUCKLEY

[jazzman4133]

Any recollections by those who might have had to good fortune to see either of these legendary characters live?

[ghost of miles]

I wish that I had... I plan to play recordings by both on my new show.

Anita O'Day was a friend & fan of Lord Buckley & talks about him in her autobiography.

Anybody else here read DeLillo's UNDERWORLD? If so, what did you think of DeLillo's Lenny parts? (A couple of his characters are portrayed listening to Bruce in a nightclub.)

[jazzman4133]

I hope you decide to play "The Hip Gahn", which is my #1 favorite, followed closely by "Jonah (what is you smokin' in there) & The Whale.

[ghost of miles]

I hope you decide to play "The Hip Gahn", which is my #1 favorite, followed closely by "Jonah (what is you smokin' in there) & The Whale.

Thanks for the recs, Jazzman! I'm going to pick up some Bruce material when I order from Fantasy next week.

[jazzman4133]

There are two Fantasy CDs that contain most of the early Lenny Bruce material not having to do with subsequent trials. You should really get both as either contains great material. Make sure you get at least the one with "Lawrence Welk" which contains the famous line (when Welk is interviewing a new member for his band who happens to be a jazz musician, and is about to hire him) the musician tells Welk that he has one problem, which Welk asks what it is and the musician responds "I've got a monkey on my back" and Welk responds"That's alright, we like animals around here".

Religions Inc. is also a classic.

[ghost of miles]

I'm gettin' both of 'em... now who is it who actually does the Shorty Petterstein piece on that one Bruce CD? It's not Bruce, right?

Definitely going to play that Welk track!

[stevebop]

Shorty Petterstein was in reality one Henry "Sandy" Jacobs. The interviewer is Woodrow Leafer. Jacobs had something to do (by inheritance, I think) with the Alan Watts public radio zen meditation lectures, based in San Francisco. Leafer was an early radio staff announcer. These two were also responsible for "Interview with Dr. Shalom Stein" also on "Interviews of Our time"

[Larry Kart]

I caught Bruce once at Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, in 1959 or '60. Got in with a friend -- we were were both way underage (a senior [me] and a junior in high school), but my friend was well over six feet tall and looked pretty grown up. Unless my memory is playing tricks, this was a night when Lenny made up or debuted a routine -- the "Jean Laffite is bombarding the Capitol!" one about Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana going batty -- because the events that gave it point had happened that day. Not the greatest thing Lenny ever did by any means, but the "nowness" of it was exciting. In fact -- and I'm someone who went on to write a shitload of reviews and think pieces about comedians over the years and interview lots of comics (from Sahl to Andy Kaufmann) -- the "nowness" that Lenny could create was without parallel in my experience. I remember in particular some interplay he launched with one of the club's Latino busboys. The sense that a norm was being at once casually and threateningly violated was overwhelming -- if only because we knew that Lenny was stepping over a line, and that neither we nor he know how far he was going to go. The phrase that I came up with at the time or soon after, and that's stuck in my head is: "Being with Lenny is like being in the same room with a ticking time bomb." BTW, the idea of Lenny as some kind of crusading civil libertarian strikes me as nonsense. Not that his work didn't bring up such issues -- and to the degree that his work became preoccupied with his legal problems, more's the pity for the most part, in terms of the quality of his work. Pauline Kael, of all people (I'm not normally a fan), wrote by far the best piece about Lenny I know, her essay-review of Bob Fosse's sanctimonious biopic "Lenny" (it's in her collecting "Reeling"). A sample:

"Lenny Bruce was on nobody's side. The farthest-out hipster, like the farthest-out revolutionary, has an enormous aesthetic advantage over everybody else: he knows how to play his hand to make us all feel chicken. Bruce's hostility and obscenity were shortcuts to audience response; he could get and hold audiences' attention because they didn't know what or whom he was going to attack or degrade next; and they could sense that he wasn't sure himself.... The scriptwriter of 'Lenny' must have thought that Bruce's material was so good that an actor can say it and this will be enough. But those routines don't work without Bruce's teasing, seductive aggression and his delirious amorality. If they are presented as the social criticism of a man who's out to cleanse society of hypocrisy, the material falls flat.... [bruce] went to the farthest lengths he could dream up not out of missionary motives but out of a performer's zeal."

[JSngry]

Lenny was/is a personal hero, to be sure, and I've committed most all of his bits to subliminal memory.

So why do I listen to Lord Buckley more these days, and why does he now make me laugh more?

Especially "Senator Slugwell"....

[ghost of miles]

Larry, agreed. I read that Kael piece years ago... it puts me in mind (and Kael may have actually referred to this scene in her article) of Hoffman's reprise of the "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties" routine.

[jazzman4133]

There is no better book or text about Lenny Bruce than "Ladies & Gentlemen Lenny Bruce" by Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller. Available in soft cover by Penguin Books.

[jazzman4133]

Did you know about Lenny's pardon?

Tuesday, December 23, 2003 Posted: 3:11 PM EST (2011 GMT)

ALBANY, New York (AP) -- Comedian Lenny Bruce was granted a posthumous pardon by Gov. George Pataki Tuesday for a nearly 40-year-old obscenity conviction prompted by a foul-mouthed political commentary.

Pataki called his decision, the first posthumous pardon in New York state history, "a declaration of New York's commitment to upholding the First Amendment."

The campaign to win a pardon for Bruce was supported by his ex-wife and daughter, more than two dozen First Amendment lawyers and entertainers including Robin Williams, the Smothers Brothers and Penn and Teller.

Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer and member of the campaign, said Pataki's decision "is really a major step forward in recognizing the mistreatment of Lenny Bruce personally and of the First Amendment that Bruce defended."

During a November 1964 performance at Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, Bruce used more than 100 "obscene" words. Undercover police detectives attended the show, and later testified against Bruce. The charge was Giving an Obscene Performance.

He was convicted following a six-month trial. Bruce mishandled his own appeal, and, beset by legal and financial problems, died of a drug overdose in 1966 with the conviction still on the books. He was 37.

Bruce's daughter, Kitty, and his former wife, Honey Bruce Friedman, both sent along letters of support for the campaign last spring.

"I truly believe my father's soul can rest in peace with this," Kitty Bruce said at the time.

While Bruce was considered a pariah by some in the '60s, he's generally viewed now as a performer who totally changed the stand-up comedy business.

"Every night when I get onstage, I thank God or whoever's up there for Lenny Bruce," comedian Lisa Lampanelli, one of those who pressed for the pardon, said earlier this year. "He has become my hero."