Dig Infinity!: The Life and Art of Lord Buckley [With CD]

by Oliver Trager

Presents a biography of the American comedian, vaudevillian, and jazz musician. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566491576
• ISBN13: 9781566491570
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers
• Length: 405 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A most immaculately hip biography

Oliver Trager did such a fine and thorough job on _The American Book of the Dead_ that I had high hopes for his biography of the great Lord Buckley. It's even better than I expected.Trager's approach is suited to his subject. Rather than write a straightforward biography -- which would be difficult in any case because there are so many unanswered and unanswerable questions -- Trager has opted to tell His Lordship's life story through a sort of montage of mostly oral history. For this purpose he has interviewed, apparently, just about every living person on this sweet swingin' sphere who knew the Hip Messiah or was directly influenced by him in some way, and supplemented the interviews with excerpts from articles and other sources.This approach makes the book read a bit like an extended episode of "Biography," flipping back and forth between the interviewees' reminiscences and the author's comments. It's not at all hard to follow; Trager even uses a different typeface for his own comments so we can tell what's narrative and what's not, and each interviewee/writer is clearly named at the beginning of each excerpt. (Each is introduced the first time one of his or her comments appears. If you forget who somebody is, you can flip to the back of the book and look up his first appearance; there's a list.)It's about time somebody did a biography of The Lord of Flip Manor, and Trager's approach is highly appropriate to his subject. For example, by telling the story through the voices of others, he's able to present all the conflicting theories about Buckley's mysterious death without having to decide which one is most likely to be true. And more generally, since so much of Buckley's persona was realized through his interactions with other people anyway, it's fitting to present his life through the responses he created in the people around him. (You'll be amazed at the people he's influenced. Some of them are pretty obvious -- Robin Williams, Captain Beefheart, and so forth. But James Taylor? I've been listening to him for thirty years and I'd never have guessed -- and yet there's a song on _New Moon Shine_ that quotes directly from "God's Own Drunk.")If you're a Buckley fan, you'll enjoy Trager's book. If not . . . well, I don't really know how to explain to you who and what Lord Richard Buckley was. Was he an entertainer? A saint? A scoundrel? A bodhisattva? A con man? A raconteur? A shaman? A swindler? An evangelist? A shameless moocher? An artist? An agent of God? A prankster? A drunk?Well, yeah.Above all, His Lordship was a sweet cat who blew a solid ace lick, and the way to meet him -- really the only way -- is to hear him. The book includes a CD with lots of good stuff on it, including several of His Lordship's raps and snippets from an interview with Studs Terkel. If you want to buy (or already own) the CD _His Royal Hipness_ (which is a re-release of _The Best of Lord Buckley_ and, if I'm not mistaken, the only Buckley CD currently available), don

His Lordship deserves such fealty

A fascinating if disjointed study of the art [mostly] and life [not as much as one would wish, but it's tough to catch up with the detritus of vaudeville and walkathons] of one of the most original and most influential comedian/orators ever to grace a stage, a view that people ranging from George Harrison to David Bowie to Frank Zappa to Steve Allen to James Taylor to Lenny Bruce all shared. Anyone who hears Lord Buckley -- and there's a half-hour audio CD included with the book so you can sample his hipsemantic style -- has to become curious about the man himself. This book finally helps to explain, and paints a fan's-eye picture of a gone cat who sweetly and profoundly decided to regard everyone he met as a potential member of his own Royal Court. I start with five stars for the subject and dock it one for the overly repetitive and pasted-together oral-history format, which skips around too much for comfort, and for the publisher's lousy copyediting and proofreading job.

Lord Buckley Lives ! ! !

I have to give this book 5 stars on the subject alone. Its about time that someone sat down and took the time and effort to let Lord Buckley's story be told once again. - - I do have a problem with the narrative style of the book, but its probably moreso a matter of taste... Rather than telling the story, the author basically reprints one interview after another... and kinda pastes his sources together so Lord Buckley's story is told in the interviewee's own words... Many of these interviews come straight from the pages of magazines and radio interviews with people who knew him and they're strung together to create a sense of a coherent dialogue. The end result... some fascinating stories (I almost fell off the bed in laughter a few times... Lord Buckley's sick off stage pranks and antics often rivaled his actual act) but lot of repetition and choppy reading. I also felt that the author merely glanced over his childhood and evolution into the entertainment world, though in all fairness much of the information has probabably been lost to posterity. - - Overall, its a fascinating subject, the CD alone is worth the cost of the book... and the book really will pull you into Lord Buckley's sick world. - - Interviewees seem to include a cast of thousands... from Royal Court members to hiers of the legacy from the Rock and Roll and Comedy World... Move over Lenny Bruce, His Lordship is back ! ! !CD includes some interviews by Studs Turkel, The Nazz, Murder, Ode to a Policeman... about 34 minutes... Well worth it ! - -