A lot of water went under the countercultural bridge between 1969, when Douglas Music released the posthumous anthology of Lenny Bruce’s “dirtiest” work What I Was Arrested For: The Performance That Got Lenny Bruce Busted and 1975 when the album was rereleased by Casablanca Records. The sort of material that got Lenny Bruce arrested repeatedly for obscenity in the 1960s seemed almost—I said almost—tame when compared to what George Carlin, Richard Pryor and other comics who came after him were getting away with at the time.

At first the title might be confused with the actual recordings made on the nights when the cops physically pulled Lenny off the stage or arrested him right afterwards, but what one hears on the short album is instead a well-chosen selection of “Dirty Lenny,” the stuff that caused the police departments and district attorneys to pay attention to him in the first place. The album includes his beat poem about hearing his parents fucking “‘To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb”; a description of a conversation he had with his agent about performing in a gay nightclub in San Francisco; his lampooning of the “classy” immorality of Las Vegas,“Tits and Ass”; and “A White White Woman Or A Black Black Woman,” Bruce’s wonderfully skillful skewering of racism where he compares the charms of Lena Horne to matronly national anthem singer Kate Smith and asks a theoretical Klansman to choose one of them to marry.

Among the very first words Bruce speaks on the album are “I’m going to piss on you…”
 

 
What I Was Arrested For is a really good place to start for a Lenny Bruce neophyte. Today much of his often topical material would be incomprehensible to anyone without a deep knowledge of American history from the Eisenhower through the Johnson administrations, but the recordings to be found here do not fall into that trap and have aged particularly well.

BUT... as controversial as some of this stuff was/is, it’s not the actual recordings of the busted shows themselves (indeed Bruce refers to the busts in the What I Was Arrested For, so that much is obvious).
 

 
THOSE RECORDINGS, of performances at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop in 1961 and the Off Broadway club two years later, however, are online at John Whiting’s online history of Berkeley’s non-commercial listener-supported FM station KPFA. Whiting was the station’s full time Production Director for four years and writes “As KPFA’s Production Director, I had these recordings in my care. When tape-hungry volunteers started raiding the archives, I took them into protective custody, where they have remained to this very day. Now they belong to the world.”

What a gift to comedy and First Amendment history!

(Bruce attorney) Al Bendich was a good friend of KPFA, and so we often did the recordings [of Bruce’s shows so that they would be documented in case of a bust]. From these we extracted for broadcast a few routines that would not land us in a courtroom along with their author. Twice I was the one who lugged the Ampex over to the Off Broadway. The last time, we all met up in a back alley before the show. It was March, and Lenny was shivering in a long dark overcoat. I vividly remember a face as ravaged as the death mask which, within a couple of years, it would become.

Jack Nessel writes, “I remember talking with him on the steps outside a club one late night between shows. Acting strangely, as if he were imparting a dangerous secret, he gave me a tape he said would prove some kind of conspiracy. I couldn’t wait to play it. Of course it was blank.”

Below, George Carlin tells the story of getting busted himself at Lenny Bruce’s Gate of Horn gig in Chicago, 1962 for getting lippy with a cop:
 

 
Thank you Michael Simmons of Los Angeles, California!