Lenny Bruce - The Berkeley Concert
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Lenny BruceEdition: Music CD
Format: Explicit Lyrics
CD Release Date: 2004-09-14
Music Label: Bizarre Planet
Soundtracks:
- Berkeley Concert
Free Music Notes for The Berkeley Concert
Free Music Review: Everybody's A** is Up for Grabs
Hit: 5 Stars
I'm not a fan of revisionist history unless history gets it wrong. In this case, I believe history definitely got it wrong. The long-time rep on this recording has been that it's sub-par Lenny; that at this point in his career (December of '65) his legal travails had rendered him not only broke but bitter, and that too much of this concert is given over to aggrieved ramblings. I'd be far more inclined to plaster that label on the "Lenny Bruce Performance Film" shot at the Fillmore in San Francisco in June of '66, even though I still value that film as history. For this show, no. Absolutely wrong. But appreciation of this recording requires a fundamental change in perspective.
If you come to this album looking for 'laughs' in the way that we customarily listen to stand-up comics, there's a good chance you'll be disappointed. Not that it isn't funny; it often is, sometimes uproariously so, but `laughs' are not the point. I think it's well past time to relinquish this categorization of Bruce. As he said himself on more than one occasion, he was not a comic. He may have started out as one, and vestiges of comedy may have remained in his act up to a point, but by 1965 what you are getting is something much more valuable: You are getting an undiluted commentary from inside the rising tide of 60's cultural shift.
What Lenny provides here is not 'bits,' but 79 minutes of what it was like to be caught in the middle of a legal tempest over obscenity that would change our social fabric. It's 79 minutes of where we stood in 1965, with American life about to come undone. It's the church and state, it's Kennedy and Johnson, it's drugs and sex, it's what we were supposed to stand for in this country and a fervent belief in law and the system even though that system was undoing Bruce. More to the point, it's the curve, because Lenny was not ahead of the curve. Lenny was the curve, and he died in that curve before it later become a straight road for others to drive on, and what we have in this recording is his testimony from inside the turn before it carried him off the road. It's not comedy, it's a lecture. An amusing lecture, to be sure, but far more significantly an educational lecture. These aren't just words that make you laugh. They're words that make you think.
Trust me, I'm no sycophant (to borrow one of Bruce's favorite words). I'm not a blind disciple who thinks every word that dripped from Lenny's lips was pure wisdom and that he could do no wrong. Far from it, but I do recognize him for what he was: An inherently funny man, unrelentingly allied to truth, unintentionally but defiantly caught in the crucible of socio-cultural change. I'd give anything to find someone who was actually at this show. If you were there, I hope you'll e-mail me. I have a thousand questions I'd like to ask. With or without an inside report, however, I can recognize this recording for what it is: History, as it was happening. Its preservation is essential, and a thing for which to be thankful.
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