Condition:
Lord Buckley-Bad Rapping of the Marquis de Sade
Re-issue LP (original recording from 1969)
Demon Verbals, England 1986
Cat# Verb 6
Vinyl is in M- condition. Cover is in great shape as well with some very slight ring wear (See picture).
Tracks:
Bad Rapping of the Marquis de Sade
H Bomb
The Chastity Belt
The Ballad of Dan McGroo
His Majesty the Policeman
"A most immaculately hip aristocrat," Lord Buckley was the epitome of comedy cool; a onetime vaudeville performer and a hulking ex-lumberjack, he was a comic philosopher, a bop monologuist whose vocalese fused the rhythms and patois of the street with the arch sophistication of the British upper-crust to create verbal symphonies unparalleled in their intricacy and dexterity. A comedian who didn't tell jokes and a word-jazz virtuoso riffing madly on the English language, Buckley combined the frenetic intensity of Beat poetry with the lessons and moral heft of Biblical tales and historical discourse; holding court over the "hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin' daddies" of the postwar era, he was a true visionary, the original rapper.
His Lordship was born Richard Myrle Buckley on April 5, 1906 in Tuolumne, California, a mining town located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. After spending his formative years as a lumberjack, in the mid-1920s Buckley set out to find work in the oil fields of Texas and Mexico; he never made it, instead teaming with a traveling guitarist to form a musical comedy act. By the 1930s he was in Chicago, emceeing in mob-owned speakeasies; there he became a protege of Al Capone, who set up the comedian with his own club, the Chez Buckley, where he performed backed by a cadre of jazz musicians. Constant vice-squad pressure soon forced Buckley out of town, however, and throughout the early 1940s he worked the vaudeville circuit, gaining a notorious reputation for ridiculing unhip audiences and smoking dope onstage.
After attempts to break into films proved largely unsuccessful, Buckley began taking on the persona of "His Lordship," an aristocratic hipster madman clad in tuxedo, pith helmet and Salvador Dali-esque waxed moustache. He quickly emerged as an underground legend, partipicating in LSD experiments while throwing wild parties at his rented Hollywood Hills mansion (dubbed the Castle) where the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Tony Curtis mingled with jazz musicians, junkies and poets. At a Topanga Canyon art gallery owned by his friend Bob DeWitt, he also founded the first jazz religion, "The Church of the Living Swing."
In the summer of 1960, Buckley set out alone in a red VW microbus to tour the country; in August he arrived in Chicago, where he fell ill. Still, he forged on to New York for a series of October performances at the Jazz Gallery; during one of his shows, the city's vice squad confiscated his cabaret card -- a document necessary to play area clubs -- on the grounds that he lied about having a prior arrest record. On November 12, he called the novelist Harold Humes, complaining of great anxiety triggered by the cabaret bureau's daily refusals to reissue his card; he also said he was hungry and broke. Within hours of hanging up the phone, Lord Buckley was dead of a stroke brought on by "extreme hypertension; " he was 54 years old. A few weeks later, civic pressure forced a repeal of the cabaret card law.
While never a mainstream figure, Buckley's stature grew to mythic proportions in the months and years following his death. He is still the subject of a fanatical cult following and a true underground hero, even decades after exiting "this sweet, swingin' sphere" the self-styled Messiah of Hip lives on.
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