here, willya? Move that shit. I don't wanna hear that shit. Don't
gimme that shit. I don't have to take that shit. YOU'RE fulla
shit! Think I'm a shithead or something?" Always figurative. You
never hear anyone say: "L ookit the little piles of shit in the street,
Martha!" They don't say that. They have other words for that:
doo-doo, ka-ka, poo-poo. And good old Number Two. Could
never figure that one out, man. How did they arrive at that? Out
of all the numbers, TWO gotta mean shit! My dog does Number
Five. That's three Ones and a Two . . .
There is a clear line of evolution between "Shoot" and "Seven
Words." The piece grew out of a desire to talk about language stan1 4 7
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dards and the inconsistency in them. So by being authentic about
what had happened to me I found a way into a new comedy that was
accurate and natural.
The hair and the beard—which had to have been a factor in the
firing, a clear signal in divided times that I had come down on one
side of the Kulturkampf—were getting longer. As hair emerged from
my head, material did too. I'd already written the "Hair" poem,
which was my way of telling straight, parent-aged people that "You
should discount my hair as a reason to discount my material." This
too became a cut on the "FM" side of the next album:
I'm aware some stare at my hair
In fact to be fair
Some really despair of my hair
But I don't care, 'cos they're not aware
Nor are they debonair
In fact they're just square
They see hair down to there, say, "Beware!"
And go o f f on a tear
I say, "No fair!"
A head that's bare is really nowhere
So be like a bear, be fair with your hair
Show it you care
Wear it there . . . or to there . . .
Or to THERE if you dare!
Then there was the beard:
Here's my beard
Ain't it weird?
Don't be skeered
Just a beard!
The word "beard" shakes a lot of people up. Not
AMERICAN-sounding. BEE-AR-D! Lenin had a
BEE-ARR-D! Gabby Hayes had... WHISKERS!
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THE LONG EPIPHANY
The hair was certainly part of the next and final disaster. Daily
Variety for Monday, November 30, 1970, carried the bare bones of
the story:
Comic George Carlin was cancelled and asked to leave Lake Geneva (Wis.) Playboy Club after the audience got ugly during his
second show Saturday night. Management said it feared for his
safety. It was his shtick about materialism in American society,
press censorship, poverty, Nixon-Agnew and the Vietnam War
that apparently incensed the late-night crowd. Club manager said
Carlin "insulted the audience directly and vised offensive language
and material . . ." Reacting to his statements about poverty, one
woman heckled "You don't know anything about poverty. We don't
have any in this country!" A comment about going through Cambodia to get out of Vietnam brought the retort: "How do you know?
You've never been shot at!" Club manager said comic would have
been in danger "if he'd gone anywhere the audience could have
got to him."
The booking at Lake Geneva was scary. When the guy heckled me about never having been shot at, the only thing that went
through my head was, "Does he have a gun?" People were yelling
things like, "Where's the old George Carlin?" Soon it became the
entire audience, maybe two hundred straight, tight, asshole-looking
Wisconsin-Saturday-night-out people, getting up, walking out, fingers being waved at me—it was something out of a movie. I finished
whatever time I felt they had to pay me for, and in a ridiculous act
of bravado walked out through the audience, although there was
clearly a wing onstage.
The Lake Geneva Playboy Club was a self-contained resort. I
would have to spend the night in a hotel room in the compound,
alongside many of the people from that disgusted, hostile audience.
Management not only sent me a telegram canceling me but said,
"We cannot guarantee your safety if you remain on the premises.
We're asking you to leave." Apparently people had been going to the
front desk and asking for my room number. So I thought, "Fine, I'm
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only ninety miles from Chicago and Hugh Hefner's mansion. Hef
is probably home. Freedom of speech is involved. Hef says he cares
about that. Hef will back me up and I'll get my fucking money." I
drive down to Chicago, go to the mansion and Hef is there with Bill
Cosby, playing pinball. I tell Hef the whole story. And he says: "Well,
there are two Hefs, George. One of them sitting in that audience
would have loved that material. The other Hef [and here he was
paraphrasing Lenny], 'Ya gotta do business with these assholes.' "
So I was finally finished with that fairy tale too.
I began to do sets at a folk club called the Ice House in Pasadena.
The very first night I was there, I parked my Trans Am alongside the
curb instead of in the parking lot. And when I came out someone
had sideswiped it and the whole driver's side was just demolished
and fucked up. I remember thinking: "This is the price I'm paying.
This is a message that this material thing, this symbol of what I'm
philosophically rejecting, is behind me. It's irrelevant. This affirms
why I'm here. I must follow through on this."
There was another side to this time of discovery: acting on principle costs money. In spite of all the things that had been going on
in my head throughout 1970, Brenda and I had arranged to buy a
house in Calabasas. Our first home ever, in suburban Los Angeles.
The deal was proceeding, in fact at the time the Frontier canceled
my deal it was already in escrow. Ironically, my manager and I had
calculated that when the Frontier contract expired at the end of that
run, we would then be free to negotiate with any hotel in Las Vegas
and get a much better deal. So the house would have been no great
financial burden.
All that stuff ran away. The house, that dream just disappeared.
It was a wrenching thing for Brenda. We had to leave the house in
Beverly Hills we were renting from a CBS executive and move back
to the apartment complex we lived in when we first came to L.A.
We moved back down in the world. From there we went to Venice,
which back then, long before gentrification, was a very run-down,
hippie-ridden neighborhood. We took a little apartment on Pacific
Avenue, as a conscious way of entering the counterculture.
I think Brenda was afraid of how I was—of the things I now
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THE LONG EPIPHANY
believed and where I was going. I remember a resistance in her,
whether it was just body language or facial expressions or some retort, even when I was just reacting to something on TV. It produced
a lot of fear and apprehension in her. When I got angry with her I
would attack her for being a middle-class, midwestern, Protestant,
conventional thinker. Trapped and bound by those values.
And there was always my pot smoking. It left her out. She never
smoked pot, and the few times she did, she didn't like it. And pot
is a club. When the pot smokers are off laughing in the corner and
you're sitting there drinking your Cutty mist, that's devastating.
This wasn't a political clash so much as a behavioral one. What I
was saying was identified in her mind with unstable and dangerous
people. There wasn't a chasm between us at this time but certainly
a good-sized crevice.
I felt trapped by my commitment to things I wanted for Brenda
and Kelly versus the things I wanted for myself. I never felt, "Gee, if
I could only get away from this woman." I do remember thinking,
"Gee, if I could just get her to stop drinking, some of this could
begin to change." But that was selfish, because here I was full of pot
and my own intake of alcohol.
Right in the midst of this, as my hair and beard began to sprout
and the break was becoming irreversible, Brenda found out she was
pregnant again. We had no money. This time I said, "We can't do
it." And very reluctantly Brenda agreed. It was 1970, well before Roe
v. Wade.
We had about seven hundred dollars in the bank. I took it out.
I drove Brenda to Burbank, to the parking lot of a bank. A woman
met her, blindfolded her and drove her to an apartment house somewhere else in Burbank. She said there was just a room with a table
and a bucket. They did the abortion. Then she was blindfolded
again, driven back to the lot and I took her home. I can't begin to
imagine now what she went through because of that.
In addition, I was so focused on what was happening to me and
where it would lead that I never actually sat down with her and
explained myself, the physical and mental changes I was going
through. Eventually she asked me what the fuck was going on. I
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said, "I'm going to be the person on the outside that I've been on the
inside my whole life." And she looked at me as if she were looking at
another guy. As if she no longer knew who this man was.
But I couldn't change course now. I'd begun in earnest to drive
toward a new way of doing material, in which I would authenticate
what I thought and felt by talking directly to the audience. I had a
set of beliefs and values that gave me all the ironic contrast I needed
to create art. I was rediscovering the Us-versus-Them dynamic from
my old neighborhood and the underdog attitudes I grew up with.
My sense of Us versus Them had been alive and well on the streets
around Columbia; and in the air force, where I rejected everything
they put on me. But it had been submerged when I got into the
nightclubs and the smothering chatter of television. The only thing
that had kept it alive had been pot, which gave me an internal playground where the rebel in me had a place to look at society and disagree. Now I had to redirect that energy outward to the real world,
rediscover why They were Our enemies.
I had ways of stating this cleverly. The key, it seemed to me, was
simply to tell the truth about where I came from, what had shaped
me, made me a class clown, how I had become what I was now.
There was an autobiographical part to this that went along with that
new first-person approach: "Have you noticed . . . ?" "Know what I
think , . . ?" "Do you remember . . . ?"
I would no longer deal with subjects that were expected of me, in
ways which had been determined by others. I would determine the
ways. My own experiences would be the subject. I went into myself,
I discovered my own voice and I found it authentic. So, apparently,
did the audiences in the coffeehouses I was now playing. And while
I was back to making no money, when they laughed now it felt great.
I was getting votes of confidence for the path I had taken. They were
reaffirming something that I felt and now was able to think through
as well as feel. It meant I was right. Which strengthened my resolve
to carry this through.
The means was my new album, FM (5 AM, the premise being
that there had been an old AM George Carlin I no longer was,
from whom a new FM George Carlin was emerging. (FM radio
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THE LONG EPIPHANY
representing the underground and counterculture and AM the
old-fashioned and square.) Not that the material on the AM side
was old-fashioned and square—actually I thought it was too good
to waste. But it clearly demonstrated where I had once been and
defined where I was now going.
I also felt an obligation to explain myself. Not just that I had made
this change but that it was genuine. I knew the progressive part of
the audience would be suspicious of me: "Is he just cashing in on
the times?" ("Ripping off the counterculture" was the prevailing cliche.) The clear contrast between the AM and the FM side was my
way of saying, "If you think that, you'll have to deal with the material. The material disproves that."
There was a lot more than just the success of the material riding
on this album.
& AM in June 1971 and somehow a lot of my confidence had vanished. It was in Washington, D.C. I was opening for the Dillards at
the Cellar Door. I had two shows to do my stuff, but I was convinced
I didn't get it on tape the way it should've been. I was really disappointed, certain that with this golden opportunity to make a coherent statement, after all this sacrifice, conflict and risk, I ' d blown it.
I walked around Georgetown, crying all night. I'd had my
chance; the sound truck wouldn't be back the next night. And the
album wasn't to be released for another six months. So these were
dark and uncertain times.
There were dire financial consequences to the path I'd taken.
And as of June 19711 had no idea where it led, or where I would end
up. No guarantees, nothing.
But far underground, the volcano began to rumble.
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11
WURDS, WERDS, WORDS
Ido love words.
One time when I was about twelve, I was coming out of Muller's Ice Cream Parlor on Broadway, and across the street outside
the University Bar and Grill, my pal Mickey was kicking the shit out
of a Juilliard student. The kid was a classical musician with long
hair. In 1950 that was the only long hair there was. And Mickey's
yelling: "You longhair fucking music prick."
Longhair fucking music prick. Great. I wrote it down. Another
time I heard this guy Chris calling Mrs. Kohler a "Kraut cunt."
Kraut cunt. Also great! I wrote that down.
Some guy came home from the service and I asked him what
it was like being in the army. His reply: "Fine if you don't mind
waking up at five in the morning with some burly, loudmouthed
cocksucker yelling at you." Burly, loudmouthed cocksucker. Great
rhythm to that. Loud burly cocksucker: not the same at all. I wrote
that down. Soon I had a list of about ten of these.
Sure enough, my mother found the list—with dire results: she
threatened me with psychiatry. But twenty years later th
e list bore
fruit. It contained all of the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on
Television," aka the "Seven Dirty Words," arguably the best-known
cut from my breakout album, Class Clown. Which in turn spawned
all the pieces on the ways we use, misuse and abuse words I've done
in the thirty-odd years since.
I needn't have worried myself sick all those months after I recorded
FM (y AM. It came out in January '72 and was an immediate hit.
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It quickly went gold. The AM-to-FM premise seemed to click with
people. In the early seventies, the feeling that something freer and
fresher was emerging from the violence and confusion of the sixties
was pervasive.
That feeling was mirrored by the cover art. Not the usual selfconsciously goofy comedy-album shot, but serious and thoughtful.
It conveyed that I had more than a merely mimic side. I was more
than what I had been up to that point: a string of words that skated
over real meaning and then disappeared into the night.
By the time FM C? AM came out I was already hot to do another
album. The FM part of me was bubbling over with truly authentic material: autobiographical stuff, school memories, first-person,
outward-directed commentary like "Seven Words." All in my voice.
George Carlin was finally front and center in my act.
FM <5 AM by then felt like something I'd needed to get out of
the way, so that I could go ahead to the next generation. I felt good,
knowing that although this album was selling so well, I could put it
on the shelf.
On other people's shelves too, but especially my own. I've always
liked the idea of having a shelf for my stuff. Tangible proofs of the
things I've done. All those videos and CDs stacked neatly together.
If I get a nice big massive stroke and all I can do is watch TV for the
rest of my life, I'll always be able to look over at that shelf and say to
myself: "Good job. Well done. Task completed."
Just four months after FM (5 AM came out I recorded Class
Clown. I realized that these pieces had been incubating and building for a long time, held back by my own uncertainty; now they were