By DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK
It's here, it's for real, it's happening -- almost. And, baby, I can't wait to lock my claws on it. New York writer Oliver Trager has put together the definitive oral biography of the great and singular Lord Buckley, entitled "Stompin' the Sweet Swingin' Sphere." Now, if some publisher will kindly wake up and smell the decaffeinated double latte, maybe we'll get to read it one day soon.
Lord Buckley, who died in 1960, was a comedian who didn't tell jokes, a storyteller who treated words as music and ideas as Ping-Pong balls, a poet who worked nightclubs. For years, he appeared as Dick Buckley, doing a melange of shticks until, in the 1950s, he began to use in his performance the stories he'd been telling at parties and backstage. Then came an amazing transformation. Employing a volatile blend of words, flimflam, beaucoup charisma and utter madness, he reinvented himself as "Lord Buckley."
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