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Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley
by Oliver Trager
Welcome Rain Press, 2002

Here, at last and with an accompanying CD yet, is the story of Lord Buckley, the Hip Messiah, the Hiparama of the Classics, the comedian sans punch lines, the entertainer who went for astonishment, not laughs, the Lord of all in his domain, which was pretty much whoever was in whatever Crackerbox Palace was his pad de nuit. Oliver Trager’s loving book includes quotes from the Lord, oral history bites culled from interviews, transcriptions of Buckley’s routines, newspaper squibs and other primary sources. He does not iron out the contradictions, and so gives an indelible portrait of an incredible man, the US-Dada link between vaudeville and TV, a free-love, pot smoking hedonist with impeccable manners who inspired Lenny Bruce, Captain Beefheart, Judy Collins and George Harrison, while raising a family and whose wife, Lady Buckley, taught “Life Ballet” to Charlie Parker.

Richard Myrle Buckley was born in Tuolumne, California, a small mining town in Yosemite, in 1906. But Henry Miller was not alone when, in an introduction to a book of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, he claimed the Lord was a Caribbean calypso singer who shared an aesthetic with the French poet much more than the academic US poets. Buckley affected both an upper crust Brit accent and look, but spoke entirely in hip argot. Trager gives illuminating albeit paradoxical connects to African American artists of the time who were working in similar veins, particularly Slim Gaillard and Spo-Dee-O-Dee along with jazz scatters Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks.

Buckley’s early days in show biz were primarily as an emcee (as it was then spelled) for dance and other marathons, the day- or week-long events where ordinary people could win their dream prize simply by outlasting their competitors on the dance floor. The emcee’s job could go on for twelve hours at a stretch of constant banter, cheerleading, analyzing and creating side events to keep the audience entertained while zombie couples segued from foot to foot. This constant play with theater versus reality became a hallmark of his later work, even led The Living Theatre’s Judith Malina to see Buckley as a precursor to the fourth-wall shattering plays of Pirandello. But what was it that led Buckley to be a regular on the Ed Sullivan show? And what was Ed himself doing portraying one of the Amos’n’Andy type characters that Buckley would animate on stage? How did the Lord score a part in “We’re Not Married” starring Marilyn Monroe and Ginger Rogers?

Why did Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights publish his chapbook, Hiparama of the Classics? Who else would streak a Sinatra concert? Sometimes surely the facts don’t all fit -- but in Dig Infinity! Buckley’s presence in US cultural history is secured.

Among the other unusual suspects that Trager interviewed are Jonathan Winters, Honey Bruce, Lenny’s wife (who gives the best description of a Buckley performance in the book), Buckley’s children, David Amram, Jerry Garcia, Robin Williams (who makes some very acute remarks about Buckley’s primacy in the comedic pantheon), members of the royal court like Tubby Boots and Harry the Hipster Gibson, contemporary incarnations like Eric Bogosian and Paul Zaloom, and Doc Humes, the legendary crazy and founder of the Paris Review, who was Buckley’s main aid during his horrific last days, hounded by the NY Police Department over asinine “cabaret card” violations. Cabaret cards, invented during Fiorello LaGuardia’s tenure as mayor, were meant to be a means of keeping organized crime out of the entertainment industry, but devolved into a system of bribes and ad hominem policies that kept Lenny Bruce, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and many others from being able to earn a living for large parts of their careers. In the case of the Lord, he died three weeks after being pulled off stage in what was seeming to be The Gig That Would Put Him Finally on the Map. (Of course controversy shrouds these events as well.)

The CD includes never-before released material and functions similarly to the way (excuse digression, but both are oral history references)

Compare prices  to buy the book • In Griot Time

Banning Eyre’s In Griot Time book and CD work -- not as an illustrated guide but as a “book” in its own right. For Buckley, Trager reveals not only presents brilliant, live versions of many of the classics (“The Nazz,” Buckley’s story of Jesus is here, as is “Hipsters, Flipsters and Fingerpoppin’ Daddys, Lend Me your Lobes,” his version of Marc Antony’s funeral oration), but also has the Lord gassing in such utopian euphorifics that the soul of the man is there to see -- a believer in culture and anarchy, the sweetest con man in town, who, when he had the dough, spent it, and when he didn’t, well, he’d peddle ice cream (literally, on a bike-powered ice cream cart) even though, if it turned out to be more profitable, he’d stock the cooler with wine and give the ice cream away to poor kids.

The book is replete with a thorough discography and list of sources; each of the participants in the oral history is ID’ed; but the book sorely needs an index. And I wish the CD had been mastered -- the volume swoops mean you have to stand by the CD player while listening. Quibbles, in the Great Sea where now the Lord is afloat, Ahoy! And as Trager always does, the Last Word goes to the Lord himself, first as a bow to Oliver Trager: “A little sound, please -- a little love sound!”

And then the dictum that serves this book so well: “To be cool is to believe. To stay cool is to have the sweet fragments of serenity rock your wig away.”

Bob Holman

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