00 Notes.txt
THE LAW, LANGUAGE AND LENNY BRUCE
Phil Spector Records/Warner Bros. Records SP 9101, 1974
LP rip (128 kbps mono) by Dick Baker, January 2015
Mr. Phil Spector
9130 Sunset Blvd.,
Los Angeles, Calif.
From the desk of JERALD WEXLER
Sept. 5
Dear Phil:
Thank you for the test pressing on Lenny. I think it is fantastic.
Many of the bits in this LP surpass in brilliance, insight and compassion
anything I've heard of Lenny's. I had come to the point where his juridical musings
were beginning to put me off, and I was beginning to regard his obsession with his
trial (and trials) as a bore. I have a new insight. Lenny really achieves new
dimensions as a prophet when he addresses himself to the nature of the law, the judge
and policeman in the same sense as the Old Testament prophets did when they attacked
kings and commoners alike, exposing the unending cop-outs and rationalizations with
which people protect their paltry possessions and nurse their hard-won neuroses and
precious foibles. Those in power are better able to perpetuate their grip on their
baggage, both material and psychic, than those they oppress; but both the haves and
the have-nots are uptight in this regard.
Hence the terrible loss when the Master of Irreverence is destroyed. Who will
shoot down all the sacred cows now; who will go under the rug for the garbage we've
swept there?
I have just read a tremendous novel called The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. Yacov
Bok, the little Jew who is persecuted by the moribund establishment of the Tsar in the
early 1900s, is a great protagonist. With nothing but his gutsy mind and spirit, he
opposes the entire apparatus of police, prosecuters, judges and jailers.
He is the classic Victim Who Judges, who is easily superior to his tormentors,
who psychs them out, exposing their chicanery, their petty motives, who ends with
contempt for them rather than fear.
He reads Spinoza and does a retrospective analysis of Jewish persecution, and
finally comes up with the wonderful idea that "Suffering teaches us only that
suffering has absolutely no value."
To me, Bok is an archetype of Lenny Bruce, at least in respect to his
uncompromising judging of his persecutors, to his illuminating insights into the
stinking social apparatus which is slowly destroying him, fiber by fiber, and cell by
cell.
When Lenny is really popping and cooking, as he is in this LP, I get so turned
on that I get a euphoric kick. It is a case of terrific rapport and shared viewpoint,
and an electric-like phenomenon of awareness takes place, perhaps what James Joyce
refers to as "epiphany" in Portrait of the Artist. Lenny induced this in me manv
times in clubs, but I don't remember it happening listening to his records until this
time.
Again, I thank you for the record.
Warmest regards.
[Jerry]
All material written by Lenny Bruce. Created by special arrangement with and
controlled by Back to Mono Music Inc.
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