Lord Buckley rides again!

The new biography of the Hip Messiah gives us a quintessentially American character worthy of a Mark Twain novel.

By Douglas Cruickshank

Jun 26, 2002 | Like its subject, the very existence of "Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley" is some kind of miracle. Just published this month but well over a decade in the making, the first (and likely the last) oral biography of the humorist, "jazz shaman" and underground legend is one of those books that only gets completed because the person writing it -- author Oliver Trager in this case -- has a preternatural passion (some would say an obsession) for the material, coupled with formidable skills as a researcher and an unholy determination to see the work in print.

When the name Lord Buckley is mentioned, it gets one of two standard responses. The less common is a gleam in the eye, a signal from another member of the secret order of Buckley devotees, often followed by a fevered account of first hearing his Lordship and perhaps an imitation of his loopy lingo, maybe a passage from "The Nazz," his most famous monologue -- a retelling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth in hipster patois ("He was a carpenter kitty ..."). The more frequent response is, "Lord Buckley -- who's he?" It's that reaction that makes the existence of Trager's book and the attention it's getting -- it will be featured on NPR's "Morning Edition" on Friday, June 28 -- slightly miraculous. Because while the members of the secret Buckley cult have always thought that their guru deserved to become less of a secret, that such a thing might actually come to pass, especially 42 years after Buckley's death at age 54 in November of 1960, seemed unlikely at best, which is why the first chapter of "Dig Infinity!" is called "Lord Who?"

Trager answers the question with a call and response litany that fills most of a page, some of which goes like this: "Lord Buckley: the white, six-and-a-half-foot-tall, ex-lumberjack cat who invoked both the manners of the English aristocracy and the street language of black America ... Lord Buckley: the picaresque pill-popping darling of Al Capone ... Lord Buckley: the jazz philosopher who jammed with Charlie Parker ... Lord Buckley: the original viper, the Hall of Fame Hipster, the baddest Beatnik, the first flower child, the premier rapper ... best known for his 'hipsemantic' retellings of Bible stories, Shakespeare soliloquies, and modern poetry in the 1950s."

"Lord Buckley is a secret thing that people pass under the table," novelist Ken Kesey said. "You ask writers who they think is the best writer and they all mention someone above them. Gradually you get up at the top, and you get to Samuel Beckett and not many people have read him. But a lot of people have been influenced by Beckett. I think the same was true of Lord Buckley. There were a lot of people influenced by Lord Buckley who have never heard his material."

Indeed, far too many to count. What Trager has done for "Dig Infinity!" however, is track down people who have heard Buckley and acknowledge his influence, and scores of others who knew him and spent time with him. From Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters, Steve Allen, Studs Terkel, Wolfman Jack, James Taylor, Red Rodney, Ken Nordine, George Harrison, Dick Gregory, Ed Sullivan and Wavy Gravy to Dizzy Gillespie, Jerry Garcia, Judy Collins, James Coburn, Honey Bruce (widow of Lenny), Eric Bogosian and scads more. Virtually all of them testify to his singular gift for magical language, and many point out that he was equally gifted as a hustler and a con man, which only makes the story richer. (To make it richer still, a CD featuring 12 of Buckley's live performances, including "The Nazz," is stitched into the back of "Dig Infinity!")

When I first came across Trager in 1992 I was writing a magazine article about Buckley and he allowed me to quote from several of what became an estimated 500 interviews he conducted for "Dig Infinity!" (Portions of more than 100 appear in the biography.) Since then, we've corresponded sporadically, and he ended up using brief excerpts from two or three interviews I did for the magazine article in his book. I first wrote about his project for Salon in 1995, when this magazine was less than a month old and Trager was already shopping his book around to publishers, but with little luck. "Why did it take so long to get the thing published?" I asked when I called him at his New York home.

Next Page: Sometime in the early '50s, he radically transformed himself into the "Hip Messiah"

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