“The Carnegie Hall Concert” by Lenny Bruce
February 4, 1961
World Pacific / Capitol Records © & ® 1995 (D 202262)
[liner notes by Albert Goldman, 1972]
The snow started falling during lunch hour on the Friday, February 3rd, 1961. It was welcomed because the New York traffic had ground previous snowflakes into a sea of gray and brown slush. Laughing under the big white flakes, the rush-hour crowds poured underground on their way home for the weekend. Hours later, sitting in their slippers before the 11 o'clock news, they watched indifferently as the cameras struggled to record the drifts. Next morning, though, everybody was stunned.
Awaking at god knows what hour, you felt the whole world blanketed by an eerie silence. Peeking through the Venetian blinds, you gazed at an astonishing sight. The street had risen during the night up the sides of the buildings, and now it lay there like a snow canal, pure and glistening, with not a single track upon it. Switching on the TV to learn the extent of the blizzard (still teeming down), you heard the jowly face of Mayor Wagner proclaim a "state of emergency." The giant metropolis was snowbound and until the Sicilian contractors could bulldoze a couple million cubic feet of snow into the East River, no one would be able to leave or enter New York City.
This was the moment that an obscure yet rapidly rising young comedian named Lenny Bruce chose to give one of the greatest performances of his career. Booked into Philadelphia for Friday night, into New York for Saturday night, Lenny had been battling his way north from Miami since the onset of the storm. Abandoning the Philadelphia date, he had flown around the blizzard to Boston and taken a slow, halting train down to New York. When he finally got into his chilly hotel room at the Hotel America on West 47th Street, he began wondering whether anyone would actually come out in such terrible weather to see him perform. A midnight concert at Carnegie Hall? In sub-freezing temperatures? With an official ban on automobile travel? Why, the doors of the hall would probably be locked when he trudged up Sixth Avenue that night to make the gig.
Yet well before midnight, Carnegie Hall was jammed with Lenny Bruce fans. They had come by subway, bus, on foot, across the frozen gridiron of the city, past the silently blinking stop lights and up the steep stairs of the Hall to dig a comic they loved as a friend. It was the greatest tribute any performer could receive, and Lenny was out of his mind with excitement. He would repay them! He'd show them his gratitude! He'd give them a show that night they'd never forget!
Charging out onstage, he almost flipped. Hey there! WOW! What a scene! Hundreds, thousands of people stacked up in those old-fashioned, horseshoe balconies. Why, it was the George Gershwin Story! The Yascha Heifetz Story! The Hymie Schlemiel Story! Throwing up his beautiful hands before his face, popping his fingers in ecstacy, Lenny seized the mike and started off with a burst of energy that did not exhaust itself until well past 2 A.M., by which time he had run through a dozen of his latest routines, improvised material he didn't know he had in his head, while lecturing the audience intermittently on moral philosophy, patriotism, the flag, homosexuality, Jewishness, humor, Communism, Kennedy, Eisenhower, drugs, venereal disease, the Internal Revenue Service, Shelly Berman and a recent operation which Lenny had undergone to remove a bone splinter from his hip. It was an astonishing performance, equal to the occasion that produced it; and it was all copied down on a tape, which is finally being unwound for the public in this album.
For one of the ironies of this electronic age is the fact that its greatest creative heroes have largely eluded the monitoring media. Only a tiny percentage of the finest performances of the greatest jazzmen, actors, comedians, classical musicians and popular singers has actually been captured on tape. Even those, like Lenny Bruce, who were discovered early in their careers and eagerly pursued by commercial recording companies have never been properly presented to the home-listening public. All of Lenny's records, with the sole exception of the Berkley Concert - a valedictory performance that reveals virtually nothing of his original brilliance - are chopped up into routines that are themselves composites of several different performances, one night's version being intercut with the next, despite the fact that the jumps in volume level and shifts in vocal quality destroy the illusion of actual performance. The effect of listening to a whole record of these routines is to make Lenny Bruce a joker; whereas, in fact, he prided himself in being a thinker: a man who could step out in front of an audience and remove the barrier that divides one mind from another. Only now, with this first full-length, uncut recording of Lenny at the height of his powers, can the record listener obtain a clear idea of what Lenny Bruce was like on a really inspired night.
The performance contained in this album is that of a child of the jazz age. Lenny worshipped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. He fancied himself an oral jazzman. His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker, take that mike in his hand like a horn and blow, blow, blow everything that came into his head just as it came into head with nothing censored, nothing translated, nothing mediated, until he was pure mind, pure head sending out brainwaves like radio waves into the heads of every man and woman seated in that vast hall. Sending, sending, sending, he would finally reach a point of clairvoyance where he was no longer a performer but rather a medium transmitting messages that just came to him from out there - from recall, fantasy, prophecy. A point at which, like the practitioners of automatic writing, his tongue would outrun his mind and he would be saying things he didn't plan to say, things that surprised, delighted him, cracked him up - as if he were a spectator at his own performance! At the same time, he would become as self-absorbed, as self-contemplative as a man sitting on a toilet bowl, lost in his own thought, totally alone - with just two thousand onlookers!
Narcissistic? Ego maniacal? Of course! But how else has the creative process appeared to those who were privileged to witness it? Taking a seat inside Lenny Bruce's head was a thrill like going for a fun ride at an amusement park. The best moments were often sparked by the occurrence of something unexpected, some distraction or interruption that would momentarily derail his mind and send it skittering like a phonograph needle across the grooves. Thus, on Side One of this album, a chance screech from a balky mike ignites a volley of associations that are just as fast, elliptical and startling as the notes that used to come out a Yardbird's horn. Lenny's first association to the screech is a scene from a horror movie: he goes into his George Macready voice and solemnly intones: "I have done a cursed thing!" Then he flea-skips into a radio commercial, shouting: "It's Andrew Stone in Freakscope!", following the line with a series of fading reverb noises. Then he adds, as throw-aways, the other line in such ads: "We dare you! Bring a doctor! 12 Midnight Show." Meanwhile, his mind is racing on to Bela Lugosi, whom he introduces first with a tumbling, blubbering vocal scale that was his abstraction of Lugosi's speech pattern; then he goes right into the familiar, lifting, Transylvanian accent: "Pairmeet mee to interoduce myself!" At which point, Lenny probably threw up his arms in the Dracula batwing gesture, quipping: "Those kinda guys, I dig, like to smell their arms!" By the time the laugh dies, he mutters, "Klu Klux Klan" - and he's right back on the track at the point where he bounced off!
What happens in these few stunning seconds is simply a speed-up of what was always going through Lenny's mind. He zips from bit to bit with no logical order, only the chance connections provided by the words, images and sounds. Watching him work is like watching one of those old-fashioned candy cranes that would suddenly—despite your frantic efforts to control their direction—plunge into brightly colored balls and bring up Ju-Jube. Yet in this show there is an underlying theme. It emerges early, when Lenny goes into his rap about there being no such thing as right and wrong—only need. This was the deepest of all his moral insights, a recognition won through agonizing personal experience. It tempered the moral acerbity of his satire, which in the early years was often bitter, angry, "sick". It also provided the theme for some of his famous bits - but those came later. At this point, he is still struggling to formulate and illustrate the idea: he has yet to treat it with the full force of his humor. Even so, it keeps coming back all through the show—an intellectual refrain betraying a deep private obsession.
The conclusion of this concert is just as unplanned as the opening. Lenny wants to leave the audience with a joke, but he gets carried away in the story of his operation and reveals in the recitation a great many details of his own personality, such as his fascination with drugs, his reluctance to ever submit himself to another person, his mingled naivete and cynicism with regard to doctors (and all authority figures). This passage is probably the nearest thing on record to the way Lenny talked in private life.
This album as a whole, therefore, is simply a great close-up of the greatest comic of modern times. It restores the natural balance in Lenny's act between rapping and doing shtick; it catches Lenny with his head clear and bursting with ideas, his tongue fast as a badman's six-shooter and all his many moods and humors coming in and out of focus like the colors of a lightshow. When you've heard it all, you'll feel exactly as the audience must have felt that night at Carnegie Hall: you'll feel you know this guy, that he's a genius and somehow he's exactly like you! That was the Lenny Bruce experience, and no other album has ever delivered it so fresh and alive.
If Albert Goldman's take on this excellent concert doesn't convince you to listen to this performance, then nothing will!