00 Notes.txt
LENNY BRUCE IS OUT AGAIN
Philles Records PHLP-4010, 1965
LP rip (128 kbps mono) by Dick Baker, January 2015
side 1
1 Craphouse
2 Obscenity
3 The Law
4 Marijuana
side 2
1 Midgets
2 Guys Exposing Themselves
3 Dating Advice
4 Guys Don't Cheat on Girls
5 Get Even (child custody)
6 Thank You Masked Man
7 Orphan Annie [actually, Daddy Warbucks]
[NOTE: Lenny Bruce himself produced an album with this title (LB-3001) in c. 1964,
containing material recorded 1958-63. This LP, however, while using the same cover
art front and back, was produced by Phil Spector and contains entirely different
material. There were no track breaks on either side of the LP, and no track titles
listed, but there were quiet spots between different items. The titles above were
taken from the Philles Records discography in "Wall of Pain: The Biography of Phil
Spector" by Dave Thompson (2004, Sanctuary Publishing). --DB]
ST. CLEMENT'S CHURCH
423 West 46th Street, New York 36
The Reverend Sidney Lanier, Vicar
The Reverend Sterling Minturn, Assistant
January 13, 1963
Mr. Lenny Bruce
The Village Vanguard New York, New York
Dear Mr. Bruce:
I came to see you the other night because I had read about you and was curious
to see if you were really as penetrating a critic of our common hypocrisies as I had
heard. I found that you are an honest man, sometimes a shockingly honest man, and I
wrote you a note to say so. It is never popular to be so scathingly honest, whether
it is from a nightclub stage or from a pulpit, and I was not surprised to hear you
were having some "trouble." This letter is written to express my personal concern and
to say what I saw and heard on Thursday night.
First, I emphatically do not believe your act is obscene in intent. The method
you use has a lot in common with most serious critics (the prophet or the artist, not
the professor) of society. Pages of Jonathan Swift and Martin Luther are quite
unprintable even now because they were forced to shatter the easy, lying language of
the day into the basic, earthy, vulgar idiom of ordinary people in order to show up
the emptiness and insanity of their time. (It has been said, humourously but with
some truth, that a great deal of the Bible is not fit to be read in Church for the
same reason).
Clearly your intent is not to excite sexual feelings or to demean but to shock
us awake to the realities of racial hatred and invested absurdities about sex and
birth and death . . . to move toward sanity and compassion. It is clear that you are
intensely angry at our hypocrisies (yours as well as mine) and at the highly
subsidized mealy-mouthism that passes as wisdom.
You may show this letter to anyone you wish if it can be of help. Please call
me when you come back from Chicago.
May God Bless You
The Rev. Sidney Lanier
BILL THOMAS - PHOTOGRAPHER
ATTORNEYS:
SEYMOUR FRIED
RUSSELL BLEDSOE
JOHN MARSHALL
SYDNEY IRMAS, JR.
STUART KAGEN
ALBERT M. BENDlCH
EPHRAIM LONDON
MARSHALL BLUMENFELD
JOHN J. BROGAN, JR.
ROBERT MlNG
HARRY KALVEN, JR.
MAURICE ROSENFIELD
MELVIN BELLI
DAVID BLASBAND
MALCOLM BERKOWITZ
CHARLES R. ASHMAN
LARRY STEINBERG
RICHARD ESSEN
ALEX HOFFMAN
EARL WARREN ZAIDINS
JOSEPH STECK
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