When Lord Buckley's A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat was issued by Frank Zappa's label, Straight Records, it must have struck some observers as a project that was uncommercial even by Zappa's avowedly maverick standards. Here, after all, was a collection of previously unreleased tapes by a comedian who was not only about 50 years old at the time they were recorded, but had been dead for about a decade by the time the LP hit the marketplace. Yet the connection between Buckley and the hip music community was hardly a fascination peculiar to Zappa, as Buckley had in fact attracted a strong cult following among musicians going all the way back to the swing age and through psychedelia.
The further one
digs
through Lord Buckley literature, the more one's amazed by just how many
celebrated musicians counted themselves as fans, and in some instances
directly referenced him in his work. George Harrison's 1977 Top Twenty
hit single "Crackerbox Palace" was inspired by the name of Buckley's
residence, and George cited Buckley as "my favorite comedian" in an
interview with Timothy White quoted in Harrison's autobiography I, Me, Mine. Bob Dylan performed
one of Buckley's routines, "Black Cross" (actually written by Joseph P.
Newman), live in the early 1960s, with a couple of versions even
surviving on bootlegs. Pete Townshend would listen to Buckley
recordings with friends in the early days of the Who. The Grateful
Dead's Jerry Garcia was another fan, exclaiming "I wish I could have
made music with Lord Buckley" in Oliver Trager's biography Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord
Buckley. Jim Dickson, a pivotal figure in the birth of folk-rock
as a co-manager, producer, and overall mentor to the early Byrds,
initially got into the record business as a producer of Buckley's first
LPs in the 1950s.
And the list just goes on and on. Such unlikely
suspects as James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, and Jimmy Buffett
have used phrases from Buckley's work in their songs. The "make it
Jude" bit from perhaps Buckley's most famous monologue, "The Nazz," is
sung by Paul McCartney on the elongated fadeout to the Beatles' classic
"Hey Jude." "The Nazz" also made it into 1960s rock lore in the title
of the Yardbirds' "The Nazz Are Blue," which inspired a young Todd
Rundgren to name his early group the Nazz. And the "Nice" in the title
of the Small Faces' 1967 psychedelic hit single "Here Comes the Nice"
has been reported to be a play on the word Nazz.
In the jazz world, Charlie Parker and Anita O'Day
were Buckley fans; Lionel Hampton backed Buckley on some unreleased
January 1959 recordings; Cannonball Adderley played at Buckley's
funeral ceremony; and Ornette Coleman and Dizzy Gillespie played at
Buckley's memorial service. Going beyond jazz, the comedian's admirers
also included Frank Sinatra; folkies Martin Carthy, Ramblin' Jack
Elliott, and Dorris Henderson (the last of whom would sing backup on
some of Buckley's late-'50s recordings); top L.A. '60s record producer
Nik Venet; Wolfman Jack (who admitted to copying Buckley's style); and
Henry Miller (who compared Buckley to the poet Rimbaud).
The influence of Lord Buckley is worth recounting at
some length in this preamble as proof that, although he was hardly a
household name at the time these 1956 tapes were dug up for A Most Immaculate Aristocrat, his
cult was an exceptionally wide and influential one. Indeed, it could be
argued that in some senses, he was far more popular than most cult or
underground figures. He had, after all, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show several times
between 1949 and 1959; also appeared on the Steve Allen-hosted Tonight Show, and Groucho Marx's TV
game show You Bet Your Life;
and even been the voice of "Go Man Van Gogh" on the nationally
syndicated Beany and Cecil
cartoon. He'd also put out records on one of the biggest labels in the
world, RCA.
Something he hadn't
done on television, however, was let loose with his truly irreverent
and groundbreaking routines. These adapted African-American hipster
lingo and jazz phrasing for comic uses; poked irreverent fun at sacred
cows (and, in "The Nazz," the most sacred cow of all, Jesus Christ);
and, particular in his later years, been influenced by drugs,
including LSD, that few Americans were even aware of before the 1960s.
(Another memorable Garcia quote from Dig
Infinity: "I didn't know that Lord Buckley did acid but if he
did I'm really glad.") These were the sort of routines that had been
responsible for Buckley's records accumulating an international
underground following, particularly among the '60s youth
counterculture, who could appreciate his references and sensibilities
far more than 1950s television audiences possibly could have (not to
mention that he wouldn't have been allowed to perform such monologues
on TV in the first place).
Even though Buckley had passed away in 1960, when
Frank Zappa assembled A Most
Immaculate Aristocrat, the comedian had actually been undergoing
a renaissance of sorts on record. Two compilation LPs of his work had
been released in the two preceding years, including the Jim
Dickson-produced The Best of Lord
Buckley anthology on Elektra, the hippest independent label of
the era. Zappa had started the Straight label specifically as an outlet
for oddball non-Zappa/Mothers of Invention projects, including the
first albums by Alice Cooper (who had, coincidentally, changed their
name from the Nazz); Captain Beefheart; avant-folk-jazz-rocker Tim
Buckley; psychedelic duo Judy Henske & Jerry Yester; L.A. groupies
the GTOs; and a cappella vocal group the Persuasions. In this august
company, Lord Buckley fit right in, posthumous a project as it was.
Zappa himself edited the tapes; Cal Schenkel, designer of numerous
Zappa/Mothers LPs (most famously We're
Only in It For the Money), did the cover; and Herb Cohen,
Zappa's manager and partner in the Straight label, was credited as
executive producer.
The material on A
Most Immaculate Aristocrat was recorded in 1956 in Los Angeles
by jazz trombonist Lyle Griffin, who also recorded several Buckley
singles that found official release that same year on Griffin's Hip
label. By the time of these sessions, Buckley had already been in show
business for about 30 years, even if he'd only recently struck upon the
style for which he would become most renowned. Far from being a real
Lord (although he was of English ancestry), he was born Richard Buckley
in California in 1906 to a miner and laundress, and had most likely
done the rounds of jazz clubs as a comic and emcee since around the
late 1920s.
Though not issued during Buckley's lifetime, the
Griffin tapes exhumed for A Most
Immaculate Aristocrat -- recorded without musical backing,
although the Lord did sometimes use backing musicians on other records
-- nonetheless were not superfluous leftovers, featuring some of the
pieces that now rank among the comedian's most beloved. Indeed, only
two of the five tracks, "Governor Slugwell" and "Bad-Rapping of the
Marquis de Sade," had been released in different versions prior to the
LP's appearance; the other three routines appeared on vinyl for the
first time. Certainly "Bad-Rapping of the Marquis de Sade" was one of
Buckley's most famous works, referencing the Marquis's infamous
sensibility a good decade before the Velvet Underground introduced it
into rock music with "Venus in Furs." Although a live 1960 recording of
the rap was included on the 1969 World Pacific LP Bad-Rapping of the Marquis de Sade,
the one on A Most Immaculate
Aristocrat predates it by four years; a different version of
"Governor Slugwell" (titled "Governor Gulpwell"), recorded in 1952, had
previously been issued on the 1963 LP The
Parabolic Revelations of the Late Lord Buckley: A Collection of Six
Lessons By the 'Hip Messiah'.
All of the routines that had been previously
unavailable on Lord Buckley records were grouped together on side two,
kicking off with his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's' "The Raven" and
ending with the ten-minute "The Hip Einie," "Einie" being Albert
Einstein. At just two-and-a-half minutes, "The Train" was by far the
shortest of the tracks, but was by no means a throwaway, being one of
the most accessible comedic pieces that Buckley ever did. Along with
"Governor Slugwell," it was included on Zapped sampler/compilations on
Zappa's Bizarre label; actor-playwright-monologist Eric Bogosian, in
fact, first heard Buckley when he came across "The Train" on one of
those anthologies.
It's known, incidentally, that there are numerous
unreleased Buckley recordings from the decade before his death on
November 12, 1960. It's been hard enough, however, keeping his official
discography available, with A Most
Immaculate Aristocrat dodging in and out of print since it was
issued several decades ago (different discographies give initial
release dates of both 1969 and 1970). Lord Buckley never did get to see
this material released; with the hundredth year of his birth having
passed recently, no doubt he'd get a mighty chuckle out of finding out
just how durable it ultimately proved. -- Richie Unterberger
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