Some fights never seem to get settled once and for all, and the battle pitting freedom of speech against censorship is one of them; there’s always some new disgruntled faction working for the clampdown, and there always will be. That’s one reason crusaders like Lenny Bruce should be protected when they’re with us and remembered after they’re gone. It’s too late for the first part of that equation with Bruce — he died of a drug overdose 38 years ago, after five years of relentless hounding by the law — but a new six-CD set, Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware, should go a long way toward making sure he’s remembered.
Produced by gifted jack-of-all-trades Hal Willner, Let the Buyer Beware takes us from Bruce’s first public performance in 1948 to the recording he made the night before he died in his house on Hollywood Boulevard. Thirteen years in the making and including classic bits, rarities and previously unreleased material, the seven-hour set was culled from 200 hours of tapes from Bruce’s personal collection, now under the stewardship of his daughter, Kitty Bruce, and the late Marvin Worth, who worked with Lenny early in his career.
Let the Buyer Beware will come as a revelation to anyone who knows Bruce primarily through Bob Fosse’s 1975 film, Lenny. Although Dustin Hoffman made a valiant attempt to capture Bruce, he failed to express his astringent charisma — but then, who could? Bruce hummed with an intensely complex rhythm all his own, and nobody else could sing his tune.
In the ’40s, Bruce began as a fairly routine and well-mannered comic doing voices and impressions. It wasn’t until he began working seedy strip clubs, where the stakes were so low he had nothing to lose, that he began to find his voice. As his style came into focus, his roots in the jazz world became increasingly apparent; Bruce was the ultimate hipster, and he punctuated his monologues with jazz slang — dig, nutty, solid, bugged — and snapped his fingers to underscore a point. As can be seen in any of the surviving performance footage, his body language was beautifully musical too, and that was central to what set him apart from other comics.
The thing that really put Bruce head and shoulders above his peers, however, didn’t emerge until he wandered away from set comedy routines and began thinking on his feet. Then it became clear that he was more than a comic — he was a philosopher and a prophet with an infallible bullshit detector. Fascinated with religion and acutely aware of his own Jewish identity, Bruce revealed the full measure of his genius when he came up against the hypocritical limits of what he was allowed to say onstage. He simply couldn’t accept them, and that’s when his trouble started. Bruce’s fatal mistake was in placing his faith in America’s judicial system; in the years prior to his death, he became an authority on the law, but discovered too late that the law would fail him. He never served time or paid a fine for that mistake; he paid with his life.
“Lenny was constantly being busted on grounds of obscenity, but it was actually the religious stuff that got him,” Willner points out. “Why wasn’t Redd Foxx busted? Lenny wasn’t the only one saying motherfucker, but he was certainly the only one doing things like ‘Religions Incorporated.’ Religion was, and is, big business, and he offended people who were connected to people who had the power to take him down. And they did.”
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Let the Buyer Beware is loosely structured to chronicle Bruce’s rise and fall, and begins on a high note. “Lenny’s peak was his middle period in the early ’60s, and CD 1 is built around a 1960 appearance at the Den in New York,” says Willner. “CD 1 is basically the hits, but it’s versions you’ve never heard. We left off a few classic bits, and I’ll probably take some shit from people for that, but some of the classic bits haven’t aged well. ‘Genie in the Bottle’ and ‘White Collar Drunks’ are greatly loved bits, but in my opinion they don’t hold, so they’re not on there.”
Willner travels back to Bruce’s beginning on Disc 2, which includes routines recorded shortly after he left the Navy and began working as an impressionist. Included here is “Monster Routine With Hecklers,” a recording made in the mid-’50s at a San Francisco club that will make anyone who’s never heard Bruce before fall in love with him. There was a table of drunks in the audience at that show who refused to shut up, and the way Bruce handles them is so smart and so funny and so gentle that it makes him completely irresistible.
Disc 3 focuses on 1961, the year Lenny began getting arrested and was at his peak in terms of popularity. At that point he’d struck the perfect balance between set comic bits and freeform improvisation, and he was dazzling. “One of my favorite bits is a thing called ‘Spanish Harlem’ — it’s so real, and it’s something you never hear from comics,” says Willner of Bruce’s reflections on Puerto Rican culture as depicted in the Leiber & Stoller song. Also on Disc 3 is “Hubert’s Museum,” Bruce’s tribute to the Times Square museum he visited as a child, which was a favorite haunt for Diane Arbus.
