there is much to be found all round e-town, a lonely wood palate between Beck's and Clark's, all of the bagels not used by the end of the day at Einstein's, and have you looked in the dumpster outside of TI lately?
there is a thin line between foraging and stealing, it mostly involves communication.
This was the moment that an obscure yet rapidly rising young comedian named Lenny Bruce chose to give one of the greatest performances of his career. ... The performance contained in this album is that of a child of the jazz age. Lenny worshipped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. He fancied himself an oral jazzman. His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker, take that mike in his hand like a horn and blow, blow, blow everything that came into his head just as it came into his head with nothing censored, nothing translated, nothing mediated, until he was pure mind, pure head sending out brainwaves like radio waves into the heads of every man and woman seated in that vast hall. Sending, sending, sending, he would finally reach a point of clairvoyance where he was no longer a performer but rather a medium transmitting messages that just came to him from out there — from recall, fantasy, prophecy. A point at which, like the practitioners of automatic writing, his tongue would outrun his mind and he would be saying things he didn't plan to say, things that surprised, delighted him, cracked him up — as if he were a spectator at his own performance![8]
ReplyDeleteHe was banned outright from several U.S. cities, and in 1962 was banned from performing in Sydney, Australia. At his first show there Bruce took the stage, declared "What a fucking wonderful audience" and was promptly arrested.
ReplyDeleteGrace Slick (whose "Father Bruce" with The Great Society was written while Bruce was alive, in celebration of his surviving a 1965 fall from a San Francisco hotel window)
ReplyDeleteMickey Avalon ("Dipped in Vaseline", including the lyric "filthy on the mic like Lenny Bruce used to be")
Metric ("On The Sly," including the lyric "For Halloween, I want to be Lenny Bruce")
Bob Dylan's 1981 song "Lenny Bruce" describes a brief taxi ride shared by the two legends. In the last line of the song, Dylan recalls: "Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had."
In part because of his freewheeling, jazz-like style, Lenny Bruce has always had fans in the music community.
ReplyDeleteBruce is one of the celebrities immortalized on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono ("We're All Water"), Nico ("Eulogy to Lenny Bruce")
Steve Earle ("F the CC," including the lyric "Dirty Lenny died so we could all be free")
Paul Simon sings, "... and I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce, that all my wealth won't buy me health."