THE BEAT GENERATION LINER NOTES

Before there were Beats, before there was bop, before almost anyone had spread the gospel of hip on stage, there was Richard M. "Lord" Buckley (1907-1960). This brillantly unhinged personage was more than a great nightclub comic-he was the original hipster comedian and directly influenced everyone from Lenny Bruce to Bob Dylan. Lord Buckley first adopted his aristocratic persona in the 1930s, graciously referring to his audiences as his "royal court." With an air of woozy dignity, His Double Hipness would launch into a jivetalk retelling of Shakespeare or the New Testament, sometimes breaking into song with a Louis Armstong-like grow. Offstage, Buckley's king-sized appetite for women, alcohol, and drugs became the stuff of legend. Yet what remains most vivid about him is his loving, benign nature as a performer. No matter the level of lunacy he reached, his routines were never mean in spirit. "The Hip Gahn" (that's Mathatma Gandhi, dig?) reveals His Lordship in all his flipped-out, warm-hearted glory. (The best of his Vaya recordings are available on His Royal Hipness, Discovery Records, #7100, and A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat is available from Rhino, R2/R4 70363.)