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5.0 out of 5 stars
A most immaculately hip biography, Jun 24 2002
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't worry about redundancy: the only overlap is in the two selections "The Nazz" and "People," and even these are different recordings. Also worthy of mention: a very thorough discography and bibliography, and a selection of hard-to-find photographs. I'm surprised by other readers' comments about poor copyediting/proofreading. Sure, I spotted a handful of typos, misspellings, and such, but I didn't think it was an unusually high number. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are in the transcriptions of the oral interviews -- references to e.g. "Tom Leherer [sic]" and "Betty [sic] Davis" and that sort of thing. (Also, readers who know what "erstwhile" means will be amused at one or two points, notably the introductory remarks on former Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten.) And I don't think the format looks "pasted together" at all; on the contrary, I think Trager has done a marvelous job combing through many, many hours of interviews and putting the bits into coherent order. On the other hand, I have to admit that there are a few things that could have been better handled. For example, there are many references to Buckley's "hat trick" during the first portion of the book, but we don't find out what the "hat trick" actually _was_ until something like page 182. At least a topical index would have been helpful here (though frankly it's not a job I'd have cared to tackle). It would also have been nice if, in summarizing Lord Buckley's influence on the world of literature, Trager had thought to mention Spider Robinson, who works a Buckley reference into just about every science fiction novel he writes and who has probably done more than anyone else to keep Buckley's influence alive among SF fandom. But it's always possible to pick on little omissions with a work like this. Trager has made a massively successful effort on a monumental task -- a task that, for him, is clearly something between a labor of love and a vision quest. God swing him.
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