Love For Lord Buckley

A reference on Robin Williams’ 1979 album Reality…What a Concept was my first introduction to Lord Buckley (Richard Buckley, 1906-1960). Buckley was gone long before I came into the world, and his media footprint is slim. There was no internet back then. It took years to fill out the portrait. One heard about him second-hand from older fans. Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce were among those he influenced. George Harrison pays him tribute in the song “Crackerbox Palace”. And of course he cut all those records.

Buckley was like no one else, a sort of combination stand-up comedian, poet, and pop philosopher. Standing six and a half feet tall, at his peak the dashing, mustachioed iconoclast sported a tuxedo, World War One era mustaches, and quite often pith helmets. The son of an English immigrant, he adopted his father’s accent, but the words he spoke were a tribute to black America, be bop slang as employed by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong,Pearl Bailey, Count Basie,Cab Calloway, Redd Foxx, and Frank Sinatra, (who employed a similar method of word substitution: “A mess of shoes, a gang of rice”) . Mel Welles claimed to have written some of his bits.

There was humor in the contrast between Buckley’s hip patois and his posh presentation. But it was also an acknowledgment that though there was a gulf, it could be crossed. His most legendary routine was a telling of the life of Christ called “The Naz” (i.e. The Nazarene). And as we wrote in this earlier post, he was groundbreaking in being one of the first performers to be fairly open about their use of marijuana. This naturally found him in conflict with the law sometimes.

Like his spiritual brothers The Beats, Buckley had performed physical labor, working as a lumberjack in his native Northern California. But he also busked with his sister in the streets for change, and pretty quickly found himself at home in the itinerant world of performing. In the ’30s he emceed dance marathons in Chicago, and opened his own club Chez Buckley, reportedly backed by Al Capone. In the ’40s he performed at presentation houses and in the U.S.O., which is where he met Ed Sullivan, who booked him for his show several times. He was also onSteve Allen’s Tonight Show,You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx, and The Milton Berle Show, etc. He was also in one movie We’re Not Married (1952) with Fred Allen, Marilyn Monroe, and Ginger Rogers. In the ’50s he chiefly played jazz clubs and similar venues.

Buckley was only 54 when a stroke took him in late 1960. How he would have loved the decade that followed. After all, he helped bring it into being.

For more on show biz history,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.