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‘Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies, knock me your lobes!’ That’s ‘Friends
, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,’ in hip-speak.
Sadly, whole generations of people have never heard of this man Lord Buckley (pictured), who, by the way, was not a real lord but he certainly sounded like one when he wanted to. Why, he even wore a pith helmet at times along with his tuxedo. (Then, again, so did Groucho Marx on whose quiz show Buckley appeared in October 1956.)
Lord Buckley died over 50 years ago, and even in his own lifetime he never enjoyed more than a small cult following. Having said that, Buckley was a giant in what he did. ‘And what did he do?’, I hear you ask. Well, he was the ‘hippest cat of them all’ in the Beat era. I guess that doesn’t mean much to you either. No. Well, he had been a vaudevillian—ha, that’s been gone even longer—-and a raconteur and monologist extraordinaire. No, he wasn’t a comedian as such, but he was very, very funny in a ‘black’ humour sort of way.
Perhaps the best way to describe Buckley is to say that he was a comic philosopher, actually a jazz philosopher. He specialised in word-jazz—spoken jazz—having taken onboard the slang and the rhythms of the Black jazz musician. Yes, he was a strange mixture of Sunday black preacher (no, he wasn’t an African-American), orator, philosophy teacher, satirist and, well, all-round hipster. Buckley even founded his own church—the first ever jazz religion—the ‘Church of the Living Swing.’ Buckley hated all forms of humbuggery including, most especially, organised religion, but he was very religious (‘spiritual’, we would say today) in his own way. You see, Buckley knew that only love could save the world. He also knew that if anything was divine, well, it had to do with people like you and me. He often would say to his audience, ever so respectfully and sincerely, ‘M’Lords, M’Ladies … beloveds, would it embarrass you very much if I were to tell you … that I love you? It embarrasses you, doesn’t it? Mmm.’ Buckley also said this: ‘The flowers, the gorgeous mystic, multi-coloured flowers are not the flowers of life, but people, yes people, are the true flowers of life.’
I first heard of Lord Buckley when I was in my late teens. I heard this track on a comedy record, and I have dug Buckley ever since. Buckley had style—and class—and he had the knack of being able to capture and put into rhythmic words—yes, spoken jazz—the minutiae of life in all its glory and occasional decadence. Yes, he was an eccentric, but we need more of those people—not less. Clever people—truly talented people—are always eccentric. It’s the price you pay for genius. Mediocre people—that’s most of us—never understand. We’re too busy conforming and pretending to be normal.
Listening to Buckley is an exercise in mindfulness, requiring that you pay attention, and listen, yes, mindfully—that is, with choiceless awareness—to what unfolds from one moment to the next. Try that now. It’s not easy. For starters, it takes a while to learn the lingo and the idiom. It’s worth it, though.
Here, now, is the immortal Lord Buckley delivering his famous—and perhaps his greatest—routine ‘The Naz.’ (The Naz [sometimes billed as the Nazz] is Jesus Christ, whom Buckley called ‘the hippest cat that ever stomped this green sphere,’ for he was ‘the kind of a cat that come on so cool and so groovy and so with-it that when he laid it down—it stayed there!’)
