“Live at the Curran Theater” by Lenny Bruce
November 19, 1961
Fantasy Records, Inc. © & ® 1999 (2FCD-34201-2)
[liner notes by Ralph J. Gleason, 1971]
In the months before he died, Lenny Bruce couldn't get a job. Actors who today are scrambling to play the lead in the road company versions of the Broadway hit about him wouldn't return his phone calls. The gas company wanted to turn off the electricity and the gas—and did for a while—and what spirit he had left was eaten up by the interminable court fights over his arrests on drug and obscenity charges.
Lenny Bruce's end was the proof of Artie Shaw's insightful statement that "death is the best publicity agent." It began right away, with the lurid stories of his naked body found on the bathroom floor. It continued when there was one hassle after another concerning his burial. Religious authorities, cemetery officials, and the cops were all frightened there would be some kind of demonstration. The idea of that memorial service scared them.
Phil Spector put up the money for his funeral but he always wanted that a secret and I hope he will forgive me for laying it out plain. There has been so much publicity and so many myths about Lenny in the few years since he died, that some facts ought to be set down for history. That is one of them.
Another is that, contrary to mythology, Lenny did not die of an overdose of heroin. He died of an overdose of drugs, alright, but it was morphine and somehow morphine is just not fashionable for myths, the lab report to the contrary notwithstanding. That was how he died, but what really killed him was the society that persecuted him.
It's five years now since Lenny died of that overdoes and they're busy selling postcards of the hanging, to borrow Bob Dylan's phrase, from every possible huckster's stall. Some of the people around him laid it on the line for cash right away and the smile Phil Spector says was on Lenny's face as he lay on that cold bathroom floor seems to me now to have implied the knowledge that this would be so. And that people who wouldn't pay to see him then, would buy the books and see the play and go on TV and discuss him and scramble to be a part of the worldwide theatrical presentations and films that are inevitable. Lenny would have forgiven them because he had rachmonis, if anyone ever did, for the frailty of man and for the necessity that drives them to cop whatever they must cop to keep going. Lenny would have done it himself.
But the importance of Lenny Bruce is neither, in the personal habit he had or didn't have nor in the behavior of any of the people he knew, or who knew him, since his death. It lies in what he was and what he did and what he said and how the society reacted to it and what it revealed about that society.
Lenny Bruce was a prophet. I don't think he saw himself as such and I think he would have been embarrassed by the idea. He knew that he was the best, the top banana, and nonpareil in stand-up comic satire, of course. But I don't think he ever saw his dedication to the truth as a religious stance, though in retrospect what Irwin Kaiser said to me the night before Lenny was busted for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco seems even more true than it did at the time. Lenny, Irwin said, is "a primitive Christian preaching a moral message." That was Tuesday, October 3, 1961, opening night at the Jazz Workshop, Lenny's first nightclub engagement after his arrest in Philadelphia for possession of drugs. We had gone to the first show (Lenny insisted that even the press agent for the club must pay the $2.50 door charge) and in the intermission, we had gone across the street with him to Enrico's Coffee House where Lenny told us of his wild idea to make a film about Christ.
The next night a cop was there for the first show, standing just inside the door and smiling at several points during the show. Ben Webster, the great tenor saxophonist, had a quartet there as the other half of the bill and the pianist in it was a man named Paul Moor.
That was what did it. Paul Moor ticked off Lenny's stream of consciousness monologue because they both had been working at a club in the Valley outside Los Angeles when Lenny got the phone call from his agent two and a half years before to go to San Francisco and open at a club named Anne's 440 which was right across the street from the Jazz Workshop. The coincidence was too much and Lenny had to tell the audience about it. And he did and he got busted for it. Two busts in two weeks. And the subsequent court appearances changed his life. And so at the Curran Theater he had to tell us about that, too.
Lenny Bruce's Curran Theater concert was, I believe, artistically the most important public appearance he ever made. In it, with a frankness rivaled only by James Joyce and John Lennon, he explained what was really happening with him as a man, as an artist, and as a symbol; why it happened and what he intended to do about it. If his brand of satirical comedy was, as I believe it was, a kind of public self-analysis, this was his most revealing moment as both an artist and as a man. And those who were fortunate enough to be there, experienced a rare and important event.
In order to tell you about the Curran Theater appearance and the tapes of that concert, I have to go back to that night and set the context. It was November 19, 1961, a Sunday night, and Lenny was being presented in concert by Hal Zeiger, the balding promoter of Borschtcapades, the Hootenanny shows, Frank Zappa's early rock appearances, Dick Dale and the Surfin' Sound, Johnny and Shuggie Otis, and many other professional shows then and now. He took Ray Charles on the singer's first U.S. concert tour and he did the same thing for Lou Rawls. That he also did it for Mickey Katz and Borschtcapades is only an indication of how professional he actually was. He was a showman and he loved Lenny Bruce.
Zeiger rented the Curran Theater in San Francisco for one night. The Curran has been for decades one of the two San Francisco legitimate theaters, showcase for innumerable theatrical companies, with a capacity seating of 1768 seats including the sharply tilted balcony upstairs. Zeiger advertised the show and he hustled it and he believed he would have a good house because of Bruce's arrest in Philadelphia seven weeks before and the subsequent nationwide publicity, and the recent San Francisco arrest. San Franciscans, Zeiger felt, would flock to the show to support Lenny. The town was like that.
It rained that night. Not just rained, it poured. Driving across the Bay Bridge from Berkley to San Francisco (that bridge you saw in The Graduate) it seemed like a late-night movie of some terrible storm in a Balkan Mountain kingdom of which, silhouetted by lighting, Dracula might at any moment appear. I thought about Dracula, naturally, since we were going to see Lenny Bruce and Lenny's Dracula imitation was already a classic bit. No Dracula appeared and hardly anyone else showed up either.
There were under 500 people in that hall, probably closer to 300. It was so wet outside that the check room did a land office business with soaking coats and hats in the lobby, one of those small legitimate theater lobbies, people like Shecky Greene (who had flown down from Tahoe, I think), the Assistant District Attorney Art Schaefer, and Bruce's lawyer, Al Bendich, professor at the University of California, talked about the San Francisco arrest and what it all meant. Especially the warning of the San Francisco judge, Albert Axelrod, who according to the San Francisco Chronicle (November 8, 1961) had said,"...if I get a report you have repeated this language, you'd better bring your toothbrush with you when you come to court again." Bruce was due back in court December 4 on the San Francisco obscenity charge, the case having been held over until then by Judge Axelrod because the judge was leaving for a vacation in Phoenix "to visit my grandchildren," the Chronicle reported. "I assure you I'm not going to use your kind of language," the paper quoted the judge as adding.
Naturally, the talk in the lobby was about what would happen if Lenny used the Magic Words and whether he would or would not use them.
By now—ten years later—that concert has become legendary and you hear about it on the Dick Cavett show. Bruce went on stage and did a solo performance that was a tour de force of improvisational satire. He did a show that ran over three hours with no intermission. To be precise, it ran three hours and 7:25 minutes and, according to the review I wrote for the Chronicle from the notes I made at the time, he didn't lose a customer until the last 20 minutes—a remarkable achievement. "Those who were not there missed a great, possible an historic show," I wrote later. Hundreds of people now claim to have been there, more than the 1768 seats in the house could have accommodated and Hal Zeiger would not have lost a bundle, as he did, if they really had been there. Actually the show didn't end at midnight; only the onstage part did.
All of Lenny's capers were complicated. He lived a complicated life and though he was a gentle and sometimes simple man (his mind was complex and his shows became so increasingly, reflecting the life he led), he seemed literally unable to do anything simply and straightforwardly without some kind of twist to it. His pre-concert negotiations with Hal Zeiger were full of that, packed with involved cons and propositions all designed to net the most possible money for Lenny and to screw the union or whatever.
It was only natural to the normal complexity of his life that the show actually would be recorded by two entirely different and rival individuals. Reice Hamel, one of the early tape virtuosos, was recording the show and so was Tamar Hodel, a rather legendary young woman from the San Francisco underground of that time. She had an informal arrangement with Lenny to tape it for a radio show she was working on at a local FM station. As it worked out, only Reice's tape actually functioned properly and after the concert was over there was a lovely backstage row between the two of them over who would or would not assume possession of the tapes. It ended with microphone stands swinging through the air and each of them splitting out different exits, clutching different sections of the evening's tapes. Reice had, it turned out, one half of the concert, and Tamar had the other.
Fantasy was unable for years to get with Tamar for the missing half. Eventually she brought her tape to me and let me dub it and I tried to get Fantasy to put it all out as a package then, but at that point in time, Fantasy was going through a change of ownership, Creedence Clearwater Revival was busting loose, and the project simply never got off the ground. After I came to Fantasy in 1970, I brought it up again to and Saul Zaentz, Fantasy's president, said "Go ahead." But the problem was that in the meantime I had moved and a casualty of the move was the Curran Theater tape! I couldn't find it! It was almost a year before I finally dug it out of the box in the cellar and Ed Azlant spent hours going over the two parts of the concert, equalizing the sound and matching it all up.
Lenny always treated the microphone like an enemy. He would walk away from it, back off, come in too close and, in effect, do everything wrong from the sound standpoint. His early records, all of which he produced himself basically, were nightmares for the engineers because of that habit. That in itself was paradoxical (like many other things about Lenny) because he was a true tape freak. He recorded everything—performances, phone conversations, interviews. There must be thousands of hours of Bruce tapes around the world. Every place he ever appeared—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco—somebody recorded him. And some hard-working early battler for female emancipation spent months transcribing them. I fantasize sometimes that somewhere there is still a harried legal secretary typing madly away amidst a stack of Lenny Bruce tapes right this very minute.
It took hours to get the Curran tape into shape and then when we listened to it, that tour de force of three hours and 7:25 minutes was really too long. It had dead spots, believe me! Lenny had asked for a copy of Life to be brought onstage and he rambled on and on turning the pages and commenting on what he saw and some of what he saw wasn't worth keeping and some was (and is on the LPs). So we trimmed it down to three LPs; the best of the evening and, really, the essence of what he did. We didn't cut references to specific people nor did we bleep out any language, as used to be necessary. It's really just Lenny at his stream-of-consciousness best, his free association of ideas running along like what the old timers used to call greased lighting.
It adds up now to two hours and 26 minutes, a lot of time to spend listening to a man talk, but not a lot of time to spend listening to Lenny Bruce. Because this treasure of Bruciana has true depth, the kind of depth that Gide talked about when he said that all art must have density. You can listen to it over and over and every time you do, just as with repeated listening of Ellington or Miles or Bob Dylan, or readings of Joyce or, for that matter, any great novel, poem, or other work of art, you find something new in it, some little throwaway line will explode in your head like an incandescent flame, changing your life.
It helps, of course, to know some things about that concert - the Life magazine bit, for instance. It also helps to know that the point in the Bruce chronology that this concert occupies. It was six weeks after Lenny's arrest at the Jazz Workshop and his first court appearance before Judge Axelrod and seven weeks after his Philadelphia bust his appearance there before Magistrate Keiser. It helps a bit, too, to know something about these two episodes.
Lenny was arrested in Philadelphia, where he was appearing at the Red Hill, precisely as he describes it on the tape: in his hotel room. They grabbed him after breaking down the door and entering the room and finding prescribed drugs in his possession which had been given to him by his doctor a few days earlier after he had been in a Philadelphia hospital. They lugged him off to jail on a stretcher, strapping him to it and standing it upright in the elevator. After his arraignment in court, Lenny held a public press conference on the steps of the court and told the story of how he had been approached by a lawyer for a bribe for the judge and others to quash the case.
It hit the Philadelphia papers and TV like the bombshell it was. Lenny was released on bail and, just before the Curran concert, had gotten the telegram from the Philadelphia D.A. that he talks about. Eventually the Philadelphia case was dropped altogether by a grand jury and some years later the judge was removed from the bench.
Lenny believed at the time—and he was not alone in this—that the Philadelphia bust was a direct result of the Religions, Inc. routine in which he made fun of the Pope (as well as other religious figures). Once the Philadelphia bust hit the wire services, of course, the story was headlined everywhere and at the time the image of "sick" humor was floating in the air like a ghost looking for places to light. Lenny always insisted that he wasn't sick; society was sick, but the whole country knew of his arrest and dismissed what he had to say. Hell, they weren't surprised, a sick comic like that had to be a junkie. Right?
Philadelphia was, for all intents and purposes, Lenny's first real brush with the law and the beginning of his involvement with his thenceforth go-for-broke effort to insist on truth and reality and a literal interpretation of the Constitution which was to dominate the rest of his life.
The San Francisco bust was an interesting thing in itself. Up to that point, Lenny had had little trouble with San Francisco police although they had once searched his hotel room (broke into it in fact while he was onstage) looking for drugs. (If the rooms he lived in were really like the ones described in recent magazine articles, they would have busted him right then! But they did not.)
Lenny came back to work at the Jazz Workshop because he needed a job, the Philadelphia affair having dried up a good deal of his employment opportunities. Two shows a night, $2.50 door charge and a complicated, personally worked out scale of payment, the only contract for which was a two-page telegram sent from Philadelphia to Art Auerbach who then owned the club
North Beach was just blossoming as the entertainment section of San Francisco, and two uniformed cops were on the sidewalk there every night. One of them dropped by opening night. People saw him in the back but he did nothing. The following night, he attended the first show, smiled at the gags, and then made the arrest, later claiming an anonymous phone caller complained about Bruce's "obscenity."
I was at the show Lenny was busted for (so was Saul Zaentz, of Fantasy, and his wife; a couple of the Fours Brother, and a full house of San Francisco Tuesday night nightclub goers). After the show, the audience went out, and as they talked to each other, and some of them to me, about what a remarkable show it had been (he did the "To Come" routine among other things) and how it had gone over (no one objected or left), a friend and I sat in the corner until Lenny came out from backstage. He was sweating and shivering and he had stomach cramps. He sat there with us, a white trenchcoat wrapped around him, and we talked for a bit.
The club had emptied quickly and there was a moment of silence and then the cops walked in with the club owner, Art Auerbach. They strode purposefully down the center aisle and went into the men's room at the back. I thought they were making a touch on the club owner and said so to Lenny, but he laughed and said he thought they might want to make a pinch because he'd seen the cop at the show both nights. Pretty soon they walked out again and we went on talking. A few seconds later, Art Auerbach came back in, walked over to us, leaned over and said, "Lenny, he wants to make a bust." Lenny said "O.K." like it was the most natural thing in the world and asked where the sergeant was and Auerbach said outside, and Lenny said, "O.K., let's go out." All the way to the door, Auerbach, who was a practicing lawyer in San Francisco at that time, kept chattering away about he didn't know why and Lenny kept saying it's O.K., man, and we went outside.
The patrolman was standing there and Lenny looked at him and said, "Cold night." "Yes," the cop answered, and added pompously, "You understand that the sergeant wants to have a word with you."
It's about 100 feet down to the corner from the Jazz Workshop and another 40 or so across Broadway to the police call box on the pole at the corner of Broadway and Kearny right out in front of Enrico's sidewalk café. Lenny, the two cops, Auerbach, and I walked down to the call box without causing any curiosity. Lenny kept a running dialogue with the arresting sergeant, I was clutching my press card in my pocket and keeping my mouth shut. The cops never asked me who I was and neither Auerbach nor Lenny told them, and of course, neither did I. Lenny would ask the cop a question and then look quickly at me. It was uncanny. He led the conversation like an investigative reporter and interspersed his questions with reassurances to both policemen that he wasn't angry with them: "It's your job, man."
Lenny's first question was, was there a complaint? This never really got cleared up even at the trial; the police version was an anonymous phone call complaint but that never sounded convincing even in court.
The sergeant told Lenny, "I took exception. I took offense. We've tried to elevate this street. I'm offended because you broke the law. I mean it sincerely. I mean it, I can't see any right, any way you can break this word down, our society is not geared to it." "You break it down by talking about it," Lenny answered. "How about a word like 'clap'?" Lenny asked the sergeant. The sergeant looked somewhat like Peter Sellers in I'm Alright, Jack and he puffed his chest out a bit before he said, "Well, 'clap' is a better word than 'cocksucker.'" And he no sooner had the words out of his mouth than Lenny snapped right back at him, "Not if you get the clap from the cocksucker!"
By this time there was quite a crowd around our little group, since we were only a few feet from Enrico's sidewalk café's tables (it included Mary Costa, the opera queen, and Herb Gold, the novelist) and Lenny got a good laugh with that one.
But it wasn't funny. The noise from the band upstairs at Finocchio's in the corner building (the female impersonator club that has been a feature in North Beach for generations) drifted out over the crowd and finally the sergeant got on the call box phone again and yelled into it: "I'm not going to wait here till midnight!" Shortly after that, three squad cars drove up, lights flashing, and surrounding the crowd, and a bit later the paddy wagon arrived, turned a half circle and backed towards us.
All the while Lenny and the sergeant were involved in this long dialogue and the cops wrangled over whether or not they should get the Jazz Workshop's nightclub license now or later. "I don't want my wife to hear things like that," the sergeant said. Lenny asked him if he had ever been unfaithful to his wife. "Never in 20 years," the sergeant said. "Not even for a minute?" Lenny asked him. "Not even for one minute." Lenny turned away and said, "I can't talk to you man."
The sergeant finally ended the conversation by opening the door at the back of the paddy wagon, making a gesture towards Lenny saying, "Mr. Bruce, if you will please step into the car [sic]." Lenny did, waved at the crowd and the paddy wagon drove away.
I dove for the phone at Swiss Louie's across the street and called the Chronicle city desk and dictated the story which made the front page of the last edition and then went back to the Jazz Workshop.
There, the prescription for breaking down the magic properties of the word (which Lenny had given to the sergeant) were already being tested empirically. The waitresses and a few customers for what they hoped would be the next show were chattering like magpies. "What happened? What did he say?" "He said 'cocksucker'... " "No, he said 'cocksuckers,' it was plural." "No, it wasn't, it was just 'cocksucker.'" The word, singular or plural, must have been used 500 times in the next hour, and male and female adults who would never have uttered the word in mixed company before that night used it like it was familiar as in Groucho's famous line, "something you find around the house."
Later at the San Francisco trial (where Lenny was acquitted, the first of his many vindications), the word was used some 37 times, the assistant D.A. who prosecuted the case swelling up like a trumpet player blowing a high note every time he had to force it out.
In between discussion on the merits of the arrest (the consensus being that it was pretty weird to bust him for saying something the cops and everybody else said all the time) the phone would ring and I'd grab it and some other reporter would ask, "Was there some trouble at the Workshop tonight?"; I'd claim to be the manager and tell them the show was going on in ten minutes. I couldn't resist the Front Page role. It was too good a shot.
It took a little over an hour for Lenny to get back on stage. They took him to the old Hall of Justice, booked him, and Auerbach was right there and sprung him (the bail was $357.60). Lenny went back on stage at 1:10 A.M., clutching his white trench coat around the jeans and high boots and Nehru jacket he wore.
He started right in to tell the audience the whole story. "I better keep my coat on," he said. "I may have to go out again! Know where I've been? Oh no, you people don't know what happened to me! I've been busted! No, no, not in Philly, that was last week. Right now! Right after the first show!" And he laid it all down, the whole story, including the dialogue with the cops, what they asked at the station house ("Do you really think it's right to use a word like that?" "Well, you use it right here, don't you?") and the rest. Lenny was wailing by then and at the end he launched into a free-association word thing all addressed to the patrolman and the sergeant by name and asking if the cop's joint had ever been copped, did the cop ever cop a joint and so on and on. "If the cop is just doing his gig because I broke the law, I love him," Lenny said. "But all that about 'I wouldn't want my wife and kids to hear,' I don't want that."
Lenny worked on for most of the two weeks despite off-the-job harassment. The Clift Hotel threw him out. (They now refuse to let anyone, including millionaires, with long hair eat in the Redwood Room.) At the end of the week he missed a couple of shows and then flew to Philadelphia to for his court appearance there, at which he made his sensational charge of the offer by the lawyer to fix the Philadelphia arrest by bribing the judge. The Philadelphia hearing was October 9th and Lenny came back to San Francisco for a November 7th hearing on the Jazz Workshop arrest before Judge Axelrod (graphically described on the Curran Theater tapes), and the day before the Curran Theater concert, the San Francisco trial was postponed. It went to court eventually before Judge Clayton Horn and Lenny was acquitted.
Lenny ended the second show the night he was arrested by apologizing to the audience. "It wasn't very funny tonight. Sometimes I'm not. I'm not a comedian, I'm Lenny Bruce."
Lenny Bruce established a very special and fragile relationship with his audience. It was public intimacy. he spoke as if to every one of us privately. It wasn't just that he talked publicly about things which formerly were talked about in only in private (now they talk about tits and ass on the Johnny Carson show; and Laugh In, to name one, is a show that could never have existed without Bruce's pioneering satires on race and religion). It was the way he did it.
Lenny assumed that the audience and he were intimately friends, friends to whom he wanted to tell the funny things that happened to him, the bizarre confrontations he had every day, and the contradictions he found continually in every corner of our society. He talked once about how all of public performances is "Look Ma, no hands!," the image of the kid showing off his first tricks to his mom. All Lenny ever wanted, really, was acceptance and love he talked to his friends from stage as if no one else were there.
His assumption of a special personal relationship with the audience produced episodes that shattered traditions like a point eight temblor on the San Andreas fault. When he opened at Fack's in San Francisco once, he started his rap then ran off stage saying, "I forgot something! I'll be right back!" Nobody, I mean nobody, did a thing like that in the show business world of the Fifties. Show biz had tradition and tradition didn't allow for Lenny calling out from the stage to Shecky Greene or Frankie Dell for a missing reference. He'd do it anytime with anybody he knew if he forgot something. And like all artistic acts, if it works it works, and with Lenny it did.
Lenny's shows were thought by some to be formless. At times I thought so myself. but after I began to study them, it became obvious that they were far from formless. The point was that their form was different than what we expected from someone who identified himself as a satirical comedian and different from what we had been used to in show business tradition.
John Coltrane abandoned the use of the linear structure of European music (i.e., the scale, chords, bars, keys) and brought a new, free-form, modal manner of playing into jazz. It changed that music. The Beatles and Bob Dylan smashed the conventions of the popular song (the length and structure and especially the assumption that the listener was at the median age of eight) and spoke out about the real things in language that came right from the culture the addressed. Comedian Lenny Bruce stopped telling jokes long before he played Ann's 440. Instead he created short scenes which became monologue routines in which he frequently played a variety of roles (he was an excellent mimic) and which were constructed to satirize aspects of American culture; the movies, race, the whole show business world, religion, and the rest. These routines (Lenny called them "bits") were and are classics, because he was the best and the sharpest mind ever to concern itself with these things publicly. Lenny's bits bit deep and the bit at important points. The ordinary comics like Mort Sahl and Bob Newhart generally only took aim on the thick outer skin of America. Sahl aimed deep when aimed at politics but even Jonathan Winters, who was and is a superb comedian, did not strike out as a social critic challenging the values, priorities, and assumptions of the whole American Way of Life as Bruce did.
After Lenny made the "Comic at the Palladium" into a deeper comment on the world of the public performer than even Lawrence Oliver's The Entertainer (Lenny struck out at the original version of the American speed trip of inflated values with this one) and then shocked and shook everyone with his "Religions, Inc.," there was not place for him to go but to the hypocrisy of sexual attitudes, which he did with "To Come." But by that time, of course, he saw that the form itself, the creation of a linearly structured "bit" to make his point, was obsolete. The world was going too fast. The things he saw on TV (like the Bobby Kennedy program he refers to in the Curran concert) or read (he was a voracious reader and the reason he picked up on the Thomas Merton poem on Eichmann, which he refers to at the concert, was because the City Lights Bookstore was open later than any other bookstore in the city and Bruce hung out there after his shows) just happened too fast and begged too strongly for comment.
So Lenny, in the end, threw away almost all of the structured monologues and used them only when he ran out of things to talk about, as he sometimes did. Then, as in the film of his Basin Street West performances, he would quickly run through a couple of his standard bits as fast as he could.
The structure he replaced the bits with was a kind of verbal film, a sequence of flashing images (Bob Dylan described his own songs to me as "chains of flashing images") which were strung together by Bruce's comments. They were modal improvisations à la Coltrane, if one accepts the analogy that his earlier things were verbal jazz improvisations à la Charlie Parker and I think they were. They were full of jump cuts, flashbacks ticked off by reference (see how he jumps form the Axelrod hearing and the San Francisco bust to the scene in Philadelphia, for instance), intricate wandering down side roads of free association and intuitive leaps forward. In this concert, for instance, he talked about many things that are now, ten years later, much in the news: the jury system ("Where are the three Chinese jurors?"), American society's corruption of other cultures, special privilege, the emerging reevaluation of white and black ("shitkicker poets" is a classic phrase), and false concepts we have of welfare, the hypocrisy of marijuana laws (Bruce predicted it would be legal in five years. He was wrong on that, if right in its inevitability) and, above all, his total, all-out drive for a literal interpretation of the Constitution we see reflected today in the attacks on the jury system.
So that night Lenny told the audience it was the turning point. He knew it. "Religion has no point any more to me," he says then adds that he has a need to expose the lie. "When I see the lie... I don't want it to be that way." "I wasn't going to tell you this," Lenny says, "but I really love you! O.K. It's obvious that I won't do bits anymore, I just want to get out and wail. So, like if you're drug I don't do any bits, that's it. That's O.K. You'll know from now on that I just want to cook and freeform it all the way." That's an artist telling the truth.
Bruce was from show business tradition in the sense that those of his generation, born in the Thirties, were conditioned to think of Arthur Godfrey and Sophie Tucker as heroes. Lenny even did a shot on the Godfrey Talent Scout show once. All that drive to show business was in the days before two vital mass media forms evolved as they are now: television and phonograph records. In its search for roots in those days, America accepted the fact that all the best jokes were Jewish. Jewish humor was dominant and Lenny's rhetoric is liberally sprinkled with Yiddish words and phrases from his childhood as well as from his later show business associations. TV took that concept to the whole country. The phonograph record brought black music and the concept of the black as an artist to the forefront, and that helped open the whole can of worms about the treatment of minorities in this society.
When Lenny did his great definitions of Jewish and goyishe (some of which are on this tape) and said, "Gene Ammons is Jewish" (joining two minority cultures), jazz lovers fell out. He changed that line the night he opened at the Jazz Workshop because Ben Webster was playing there and used Ben instead. I thought Ben would fall apart, he laughed so hard.
Anyway, the whole of Lenny's performances were always packed with Yiddish words and phrases and to really get into him was an education in that pungent argot all by itself. Lenny used Yiddish as a symbol of the cumulative value of a culture in which chicken soup can be made into a delicacy and he used Goyishe to signify the culture of machine-made, cellophane-wrapped, least-common-denominator, mass-produced food.
Nobody expects to get a fair trial under the law of the Old World. Nobody but the rich and the powerful, that is. Even English justice is toward the vested interest, and an important part of the dream that brought millions to America and to whom the Statue of Liberty was a symbol of a whole new possibility of life, was the idea that here, in the New World, unlike the Old World, the common man not only had a chance to make a living (get rich, even) and to worship as he pleased, but also to live under a law that was equal for all and which would protect him by its logic from the persecutions he had had to live with for centuries in Europe.
So Lenny believed in the law. his father, he says, "must have instilled in me, 'there's nothing worse than a lie'... When I see the lie I don't want it to be that way." And Lenny thought the law was logical and that it was really like the myth - "I thought judges were... 'I listen, I am wise, the scales. I listen to all, then I weigh what I hear.'" When Lenny found out that the courts were human, even perverted, that, as he was later to say, the only justice was in the halls, that the society of which the law was only a reflection was hypocritical, he fought it till he died. "What I want the people, my friends, to dig is the lie. That you should say the words and be able to say the words in a street car... if you do them. Respectability means under the covers. That's what it means. Not 'in front of.' So I saw the whole thing was a mockery." Lenny always wanted to fight it out on the pure lines of the law itself and ended up winning on appeal but dying meanwhile, after suing judges and district attorneys and spending tens of thousands on legal fees, research, and private eyes. He even took up other cases at one point, results of casual encounters in a courtroom. If he'd had a million, he would have been a legal Robin Hood.
Just as Bob Dylan did with "It's Alright, Ma" Lenny pointed out "there's no good-bad. People are made to measure up. Pleasure has become a dirty word... so when I pulled the covers off, the crime I committed, I didn't have anything to replace it!" When I first heard that revealing line on tape, I got a chill, his insight into his own situation was so clear.
So the Curran Theater concert was free-form all the way. True, there were parts of it that had been thought through before, possibly even worked on. But Lenny then would turn them back into free things, too. He took the situation he was in, his two arrests and court appearances, and since, as he said, "I see things in a very ludicrous sense and I report that kind of scene," Lenny reported his scenes and they were funny. But he also, in a pure form of objets trouvés, picked up whatever was at hand and utilized it as part of what he did. He wove everything he came across into a kind of surreal verbal film, slipping into and out of reality so quickly you can hardly catch him at it even when you write it all down.
He related it all - his own problems, random objects, the TV - to the twisted world values, Lenny's unmasking of "the lie." Note the way the refrain "I gave you every break in the world" is repeated throughout the show.
And note too, how at the end, Lenny brings us all together with him in a bit that is a hairline away from cloying sentimentality. But it isn't sentimental, it's honest and it's true, and it speaks for every one of us, prisoners of our own mortality, alone at birth and death and in the long, hard hours of the night.
A few years after Lenny died, a young student wrote me asking who he was. "They say his poster is the most popular one at the campus bookstore, but who was he?"
This is who Lenny Bruce was: a wise, gentle, brilliant man who, like all the martyrs of history, took upon himself the weight of our mistakes and our greed and our selfishness. But Lenny was an unwilling martyr. He didn't keep his mouth shut. He kept crying out that it was a lie and that it didn't have to be that way at all. And when it finally got to be too much for even his strength to battle, he split.