17cb [Image] [Image] ------------------------------------------------------------------ "I wish I could make music with Lord Buckley. Oh God, I'd leap at it. I can hear it in my mind's ear." JERRY GARCIA: "Part of Lord Buckley's appeal is that basic humanness. With his bits there was always a little character who was like a verbal equivalent of Charlie Chaplin. There was some pathos in there. And you could sympathize with them. The characters always had their human side. I think that's something missing from Lenny Bruce who was happening on whole other levels, but not that particular level. The heart chakra, so to speak. Lord Buckley was the hipster of the heart. 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 who'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. Buckley's work was part of the whole bopster deal -- the whole beatnik thing. It was the other side of the Neal Cassady/Jack Kerouac reality. Actually it was the black side of it if you want to think about it that way. It had a little more of the black experience, which is an important part of the whole beatnik aesthetic. Lord Buckley was a more loving spirit. He would have fit in good with the hippies. Lord Buckley and Grateful Dead philosophy merge in a certain irony of viewpoint. It's not literal, it's indirect. But it fits in there in the way we actually do business and the way we relate to each other. It's kind of a sideways influence, but it's definitely some part of it. I saw him perform someplace in North Beach (in San Francisco) when I was about 16 or 17 at the Coffee Gallery or someplace like that. It was hilariously funny. That may have been the first time I even heard of him. I had no idea of who he was when I went to see him. And I loved him by the end of the show. You couldn't tell what race he was by looking at him. He could have been anybody. He looked like a generic Third Worlder. He could have been from any continent. The way he did his show was very dramatic. It would start off like a regular stand-up routine, but he had lights and the whole deal ... It was like sitting around a campfire with a guy telling a story. It really turned into kind of a primal experience. A very powerful style with a lot of magic. You can't act it. You have to think of yourself as 'Lord Buckley.' That's one of the things that made him really special. This wasn't a guy just doing shtick. But after that I immediately started making connections with others who were into him. It was one of those things like when you discover gold -- suddenly it's everywhere. After I'd seen him perform, more or less accidentally, all of a sudden everybody I ran into knew all this stuff about Lord Buckley and knew all his routines. It was everywhere maybe because the records were widely circulated at the time. My friends and the guys in the Grateful Dead knew about Lord Buckley. Pigpen (the late vocalist and organist Ron McKernan), one of our early guys, used to do Lord Buckley routines. Phil (Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh) was really into Lord Buckley as well. (Buckley) used language like a musician uses notes -- that kind of riffing. Old hippie friends of mine used to call it riffing, really when you're talkin', you know, talkin' shit. It's something that's been around for a long time. I see all this stuff in the folkloric vein 'cause that's one of my handles. Lord Buckley's routines had a little of that formalness you get in the rhyming recitations of prisoners, street rap stuff or playing the dozens. All of these things that are part of the black language experience. Like Joseph Campbell, the mytho-historian, Buckley was into putting new clothes on the old horse. It's all part of the same thing. At that time, I was starting to discover the richness and whole total experience of American music: black music, white music, country music, city music. So, for me, seeing Lord Buckley was just throwing another set of doors open. That's what I was looking for and that's what I was finding. If you put yourself on a path like that eventually you're going to find out what you're looking for. And Lord Buckley was part of that process of discovery. I wish I could make music with Lord Buckley. Oh God, I'd leap at it. I think it would be really, really sparse with just a little teeny bit of percussion. For me it sounds right to go back into that coffee house space. So I'd have some bongos and little wind chimes and things that make hollow, rattling sounds -- an ethereal glassy sound. Then maybe a flute -- very sparse -- and a little bit of something that sounds like something between a sarod and a banjo. Something that has that sensual Eastern quality, but has that happy thing of a banjo. I can hear it my mind's ear. If I had 20 minutes with Lord Buckley I could do it really nice." Excerpted from "Stompin' the Sweet Swingin' Sphere" by Oliver Trager. Used by permission. Copyright © 1995 by Oliver Trager. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to Lord Buckley [Image] . 0