Lord Buckley
b. Richard Buckley, 1907, Stockton, California, USA, d. 1960. A celebrated humourist and raconteur, Lord Buckley began his career in Chicago's speakeasys where, it is said, he enjoyed the patronage of mobster Al Capone. He assimilated the patois of Black America, infusing his monologues with a bewildering succession of images and phrases which owed their inspiration to jazz or bop prose. The artist sustained comprehension by adapting well-known subject matter—Mark Anthony's eulogy in Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR began ‘Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies’, while in another sketch Jesus Christ was referred to as The Naz. Buckley was a true eccentric. Resplendent with his waxed moustache and sporting a pith helmet, the comedian challenged contemporary convention and even founded his own religion, the Church Of The Living Swing. For a time his career was overseen by later Byrds’ manager Jim Dickson. The enterprise substituted belly dancers for altar boys and was raided by the Chicago vice squad. A voracious appetite for artificial stimulants eventually took its toll, and despite rumours that the cause of his death was a beating by Black Muslims, Lord Buckley's death in 1960 is recorded as the result of prolonged drug and alcohol abuse. In the early '80s, Chris C.P. Lee, the leading member of UK comic rock group Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranioas, staged a one-man show in tribute to Buckley's legacy.