the stage door. Summer night, and I'm thinking, "Gee, here I am,
where I used to stand waiting to get Gene Krupa's autograph." And
now I'm going to come out the same doors where I once got his autograph, twenty years before.
Gene Krupa was my hero. I have had very few heroes in my life—
mostly they're people who've been arrested. But when Gene Krupa
came out those doors, he had on a fucking camel's-hair, wraparound
overcoat, he had the forelock hanging down in all its marvelous arranged casualness and he had a terrific-looking blonde on each arm.
With a big smile and chewing gum. I got his autograph and all the
other guys'. Jazz at the Philharmonic. I still look at those autographs
and play the music from that night.
I yelled out during the show because I knew they were
recording—there was a sound van outside the stage door. My pal
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Doug and I were there and we were loaded. It was the midnight
show during a slow ballad medley and Charlie Shavers was taking
a really romantic solo. Right in the middle, at the top of my lungs,
I yell, "Make me cream, Charlie." That way I figured I'll be on the
record.
Later, when I'd be recording, it was done to me. Many times.
Carnegie was a completion of a loop, a coming back to a beginning. It was also something of a trauma for my mother. This was
Carnegie Hall, after all—just as much a pinnacle for her as it was for
me. And here I was at my very hottest, doing "Seven Dirty Words"
and all the other stuff, making light of the Church and God and of
the business world she loved. And they gave me a standing ovation.
She was profoundly shocked that in a place like that what I was saying would be so rewarded by approval. When she came backstage
after the show, she was ashen. Brenda and I often used that word
about her face that night. Ashen.
But she soon had the approval of Holy Mother Church, thanks
to the Corpus Christi nuns who loved what I was doing, and roses
returned to the cheeks of the Rose of Tralee.
As usual, a price had to be paid for all this pleasure. I discovered
in July of '72 that not only could you not say the Heavy Seven on
television, you couldn't say them in Milwaukee either. Here's how
the AP reported it:
Comedian George Carlin was taken into custody Friday night and
charged with disorderly conduct after he allegedly used profanity during a performance at Summerfest, a ten-day festival on the
city's lakefront. Henry Jordan, executive director of Summerfest,
said, "Carlin got up on stage and . . . he used a lot of profanity. The
police went up on stage after he had finished his act and arrested
him." Jordan said he supported the police, adding that many in the
crowd of 70,000 were children.
According to the arresting officer and complainant, Patrolman
Elmer G. Lenz, about forty of the many thousands of children
were "youths in wheelchairs who were physically unable to leave
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the showgrounds even if they found the show was in bad taste." Of
course, wheelchairs are so named because they include wheels with
which their occupants can propel themselves wherever they wish
to go, but that wasn't foremost in Patrolman Lenz's mind in bringing their presence up. When it came to words, he knew right from
wrong.
What Lenz didn't know was how close he came to really nailing
me. While I was out onstage at Summerfest, Brenda came on under
the pretense of bringing me a glass of water. She says: "There's police backstage, and when you come off they're going to grab you and
arrest you." Now, I have a lot of cocaine in my jacket pocket. I have
at least a full vial, probably a vial I'm working from and whatever
else I have in a little bag. It's all on me out there onstage. I can't give
it to her, so off she goes. She comes back on a little later and says:
"We'll all make like you're coming off one side. Then you come off
the other side and Corky or Jim (two of the musicians from the band
who were opening for me) will be over there and take your jacket."
So I come off the side where the police weren't and handed my
jacket to these guys. I'm clean and they're happy as hell. They have
all my drugs.
Throughout the trial I was represented by the distinguished
civil-rights attorney William Coffey—who had also represented
the Milwaukee activist Father Groppi. Five months later, one
Judge Gieringer threw out the complaint, saying that while he
had no doubt indecent language was used, he didn't believe anyone was violently aroused. Interesting, because at the concert, I
had been talking about "fuck" meaning loving and at some point
I'd told all these people that I'd like to fuck them. You'd think that
would have aroused at least one or two Milwaukeeans in a crowd
of seventy thousand. I'm a nice-looking guy. And I had more hair
then.
Actually, it wasn't a recording of the concert that was played in
court for the judge but the cut from Class Clown. "During the recording," wrote the Milwaukee journal, "Judge Gieringer grinned
and laughed softly, though self-consciously." Patrolman Lenz was
incensed by the judge's ruling and said the hearing was a "railroad
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job"—although the only person who eould've been railroaded was
me, and I hadn't been.
Judge Gieringer's decision sidestepped the little matter of the
First Amendment and its pesky guarantee of free speech. That
wasn't the case in my second "bust." By now what I used to refer
to as the Milwaukee Seven had spawned an equally mind-rotting,
spine-curving, peace-without-honor sequel called "Filthy Words,"
which first appeared on Occupation: Foole:
The list is open to amendment. Lots of people pointed things out
to me, and I noticed some myself. The first thing that we noticed
was that the word fuck was really repeated in there because the
word motherfucker is a compound word; it's another form of the
word fuck. If you want to be a purist, it can't be on the list of
basic words. Also, cocksucker is a compound word, and neither
half is really dirty. The word sucker is merely suggestive. And the
word cock is a halfway dirty word; f i f t y percent dirty, dirty half
the time, depending on what you mean by it. Remember when
you first heard it in sixth grade, you used to giggle, "And the
cock crowed three times! Heyyy! It's in the Bible! Cock is in the
Bible!" And the first time you heard about a cockfight, remem-
ber? "What!" "Nooo! Are you kidding?" "It's chickens, man."
Then you had the four-letter words of old Anglo-Saxon fame-
slut and fuck. Shit is an interesting word because for the middle
class it's still a rude, dirty, gooshy kinda word. But the word shit
is okay for the man at work—he can say it like crazy:
"Get that shit outta here, will ya?" "I don't wanna see that shit
anymore." "I can't cut that shit, buddy." "I've had that shit up to
here." "I think you're full of shit m y s e l f , man." "He don't know
shit from Shinola." (I always wondered how the
Shinola people
felt about that. "Hi! I'm the new man from Shinola!" "Hi, how
are ya? Nice to see ya") "I don't know whether to shit or wind my
watch. Guess I'll shit on my watch." "Boy, the shit is gonna hit
the fan!" "Built like a brick shithouse." "He's up shit creek." Hot
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shit, holy shit, tough shit, eat shit. Shit-eating grin. (Whoever
thought of that was ill.) "Shit on a stick." "Shit in a handbag"—!
always liked that—"He ain't worth shit in a handbag." Shitty.
"He acted real shitty, you know what I mean? I got the money
back, but a real shitty attitude." "Yeah, he had a shitfit! Wow!
Glad I wasn't there!" And all the animals: bullshit, horseshit,
cowshit, ratshit. Batshit! First time I heard batshit I really
came apart. Guy in Oklahoma said it, man. "Awww, batshit!"
Snakeshit. "Slicker than owlshit." "Get your shit together." "Shit
or get o f f the pot." "I gotta shitload fulla them." "I got a shitpot
full, right?" Shithead, shitheel, shit in your heart, shit for brains,
shitfaced—heyyy! Always t r y to think of how that could have
originated . . . the first guy to say that. Somebody got drunk and
fell in some shit, you know? "Hey... I'm shitfaced! Shitfaced
today!" Anyway, enough of that shit.
The big one, the word fuck. That's the one that hangs them up
the most. 'Course, in a lot of cases that's the very act that hangs
them up the most. So it's natural that the word would have the
same e f f e c t . It's a great word, fuck. Nice word, easy word, cute
word. Easy word to say: one syllable, short u . . . Fuck! Starts
with a nice soft sound, " f f f f f , " ends with a "KKK"! Right? It
has something for everyone: fffucKKKKK! Good word. Kind
of a proud word too. "Who are you?" "I am FUCK! FUCK of
the MOUNTAINS!" "Tune in again next week to Fuck of the
Mountains.'"
I've also found three more words that you could never say on
television, and they are fart, turd and twat. Those three. Fart
we talked about, it's harmless, it's like tits, it's a cutesy word,
no problem. Turd . . . you can't say, but who WANTS to? The
subject never comes up on the panel, so I don't worry about that
one. But the word twat is an interesting one. Twat! "Right in
the twat!" Twat is the only slang word applying to a part of the
sexual anatomy that doesn't have another meaning to it. Like
snatch, box and pussy, all have other meanings, man. Even in a
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Walt Disney movie you can say, "We're gonna snatch that pussy
and put 'im in a box." But twat stands alone.
On October 30, 1973, WBA1 in New York broadcast this cut during a program called Lunchpail, in the course of a discussion about
society's double standards toward language. The host warned the
audience in advance that, "If you don't like this sort of thing, don't
listen."
"A New York man," said a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court summary, "who, while driving with his young son, heard the WBAI
broadcast, wrote a letter to the F C C complaining about the use of
such language on the air." After some back-and-forth between the
F C C and WBAI, the F C C released in 1975 a declaratory order concerning the broadcast of "indecent" language, defining "indecent"
as words that describe "in terms patently offensive as measured by
contemporary community standards sexual or excretory activities
and organs at times of the day when there is a reasonable risk that
children may be in the audience." The FCC found my routine to
be indecent by that standard and put what amounted to a warning
in WBAI's license file. WBAI—actually the Pacifica Foundation,
which owns WBAI—fought it, won in the U.S. Court of Appeals,
the F C C appealed to the Supreme Court, and in 1978 the Supreme
Court—surprise, surprise—found in favor of the FCC, 5-4.
The Los Angeles Times ran the news as its front-page lead on
July 3, 1978-"Court Bans 7 Dirty Words," blared the headline.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority decision, saying:
"The broadcast media have established a uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans. Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen . . . in the
privacy of the home, where the individual's right to be left alone
plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder." Why
can't the individual reach out his or her hand and turn that little
knob? "To say that one may avoid further offense by turning off the
radio when he hears indecent language is like saying that the remedy for an assault is to run away after the first blow."
I'm no lawyer, but this guy seems to be saying that anyone whose
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language he finds indecent is like a burglar coming into his house
with a gun or a mugger hitting him in the head with a pipe. Which
is a pretty paranoid view of free speech.
Justice William Brennan wrote the dissent: "In our land of cultural pluralism there are many who think, act, and talk differently
from the members of the Court and who do not share their fragile
sensibilities. It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables
the Court to approve censorship of the communications solely because of the words they contain . . . The Court's decision . . . is another of the dominant culture's efforts to force those groups who do
not share its mores to conform to its own way of thinking, acting,
and speaking."
All right, Bill Brennan! We Irish stick together. And he got it
right. Words were the issue. The Court was banning not just words,
but ways of thinking, acting, speaking, communicating with one
another. There was plenty more hypocrisy at work. The original—
and sole—complainant wasn't some average Joe who conceivably
might have been speaking for contemporary community standards,
if there are such things. He was a character named John Douglas, a
member of the board of a big-time right-wing watchdog group called
Morality in Media. John Douglas was, in Nat Hentoff's words, "a
professional offendee." Of course he couldn't turn off the radio, because that would've meant taking his right hand from its ten-to-twoo'clock position on the steering wheel and committing the hideous
sin of reckless driving.
But he could have told his "young son" to change the station. His
young son was actually fifteen, several years older than I was when
I made my original longhair-fucking-music-prick-Kraut-cunt-burlyloudmouthed-cocksucker list, way back in 1950, in a simpler, more
innocent time. Was John Douglas really claiming this angelic midseventies teenager had never heard the word "shit" or "fuck"? Of
course not. Other than turning out another fucked-up, tight-assed
clone of himself, John Douglas's complaint showed not the slightest
interest in his son's welfare, poor kid.
Kids are always the giveaway. "Young sons." "Youths in wheelchairs." The main reason to outlaw indecency, wrote Justice Stevens
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in his majority opinion, is that "broadcasting is uniquely accessible
to children, even those too young to read." Which in turn means
that the only thing you can safely broadcast anytime, anywhere, in
any medium, is material that's suitable for kids. Could this be why
our society shows so many signs of arrested development?
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation has become a standard case to
teach in communications classes and many law schools. I take perverse pride in that. I'm actually a footnote to the judicial history of
America.
The one part of this I really love is that all nine members of the
Berger Court had to sit around listening to the "Filthy Words" cut
from Occupation: Foole. I've often wondered if, during the presentation of the evidence against me, any of them grinned and laughed
softly, though self-consciously.
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HIGH ON THE HILL
Iused to mark my really severe drug use by the years I couldn't
remember who won the World Series. There were three or four
years in there, mid to late seventies. Cincinnati Reds? Twice in a
row? When the fuck did that happen? How the fuck did that happen?
I've always been scrupulous—overscrupulous—about keeping
records of every appearance I made anywhere. But during the breakout success after my changes, roughly 1972 to 1975, the record keeping broke down. Anal became cocainal.
As the period kicked in, we were still living the good hippie life
down in Venice. But when the money began to flow we decided to
move back into a house—in Pacific Palisades, way at the top of a hill.
An area of the Palisades which was at that time almost entirely populated by executives from the RAND Corporation and their families. I was the town hippie—a rebellious weird longhair with a weird
family who screamed at one another all night long and had strange
people coming in and out at odd hours carrying small packages.
One night, Kelly and I sauntered outside at twilight in front of
the house. Across the way, there was an outdoor cocktail party going
on, a gathering of suits. They had obviously come from the RAND
Corporation and were having a little meeting-with-barbecue. They
were drinking, and definitely within earshot. I don't know how
loaded I was but I said, quite loud enough for them to hear, "Hey,
Kelly, look at those assholes over there!" A useful life-lesson for an
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