Wow—had Mary been dropping a little acid too?
There was no turning back. Of its own volition hair was sprouting all over me. Two weeks later—newly bearded—I did the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. Nixon was there. His reaction to my new beard is unrecorded.
On the talk shows that I did, Steve Allen, for example, or Della Reese, I began to be quite open about my changes and new values and what I saw as the government’s omissions and inconsistencies. Virginia Graham had a terrific show, which I guested four or five times. She was a great character. Didn’t give a shit about what people thought and loved to stir things up. She was always saying sweetly, “Let’s you two fight”—in other words: “Why don’t you two guests of mine rip each other to shreds?”
I did once. I ripped up Representative Bob Dornan, the redheaded maniac from Orange County, when he’d just become a congressman. He talked about “these hippies desecrating the flag” and “the violence of people who are blowing up math buildings” and protested about protesters getting violent. So I called him on it: “Wait a minute. A flag is supposed to represent everything that a country does. It doesn’t only represent the good things. If you burn the flag, you’re burning the flag for what you perceive to be the bad things the country has done. It’s only a symbol. It’s only a piece of cloth.” And “The violence of the Left is symbolic, the injuries are not intended. The violence of the Right is real—directed at people, designed to cause injuries. Vietnam, nuclear weapons, police out of control are intentional forms of violence. The violence from the Right is aimed directly at people and the violence from the Left is aimed at institutions and symbols.” I got him mad as hell. It was a nice turning around of his own words. Which was great: “Take that, you cocksucker.”
David Frost was great too. I did two of those. First time, John Lennon was on and I got bumped because Lennon went long. Backstage I got to talking to Lennon, and I guess I wanted to tell him something because I ended up asking: “How can I call you?” So he gave me his number. I still have it in his own handwriting, “John Lennon and Yoko,” someplace on Bank Street. I’m really proud of that. That goes along with my Charlie Parker autograph. Second time I did a whole show. And Frost was good—he gave you questions so you could take off and wail for a while.
The other change that took place was my starting to play coffeehouses and folk clubs. There wasn’t yet much new material, but what I did was simply talk about the changes and make the point that I had to stop working from the surface of my brain and get into the middle of my gut. Talk about who I was and how I felt. The coffeehouse ethos lent itself to that first-person, quasi-confessional approach. And this was a crucial difference, because talking directly to the audience rather than performing for them in character as I always had would soon evolve into a completely new kind of material.
But mainly I had to explain myself to me. What had been pulling at me all this time, dragging me away from the old approach and toward the new, was the lack of my voice in my work. The absence of me in my act. I would say, “I wasn’t in my act. I was all these other people.” And I would introduce them all, the old familiar characters, one by one, to make the point.
I was stumbling across the difference between being an entertainer and being an artist. Even more basically I needed to authenticate myself by hearing what I was thinking said out loud. The best way I know to clarify my thinking is to hear and see what I think I’m thinking. Because however clear it may seem to you internally, it’s never clear exactly what it is, until you speak and hear the words. You are your own first-night audience.
More disasters—at least in the conventional sense—were ahead. At the end of August I was to return to the scene of my former crimes at the Frontier Hotel in Vegas. I gave a pretty cocky interview to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: “The way my act is growing the censorship [of the word “ass” the previous year] has given it direction instead of it being vanilla custard. It gives me many more chances to test the willingness of an audience … I’ve always felt a comic is a potential social critic; a philosopher or evangelist.”
I didn’t test the willingness of the audience for several weeks (I was playing with the Supremes), but then came a night when I threw in a thought about the double meanings of that fine little word “shit,” and by extension about my own previous problems with the Frontier. This time it wasn’t golf assholes who did me in, but business assholes—Chrysler salesmen.
I said, “I don’t say shit. Down the street Buddy Hackett says shit, Redd Foxx says shit. I don’t say shit. I smoke a little of it, but I don’t say it.” And I’m off onto something else. When I leave the stage, I’m informed that I’ve been relieved of my duties. A spokesman for the hotel later told the papers that I had “apparently been unsatisfied [sic] with the reaction of the audience and began belaboring them with four-letter words … We estimate that at least 70% of the show was of fensive.” They closed me down five days early, paid me pro rata (I was making $12,500 a week at the time), and canceled me forever. That was it for the foreseeable future for George Carlin and Las Vegas.
But what was in conventional terms a third major professional disaster was in fact another turning point. The experience became the first line in the routine that kicked off the “FM” side of my next album and was in many ways its trademark—the shit routine which went by the name of “Shoot”:
I got fired last year in Las Vegas for saying shit. In a town where the big game is called craps. That’s some kind of a double standard. I’m sure there was some Texan standing out in the casino yelling, “Oh SHIT! I CRAPPED!” And they fly those guys in free. Fired me. Shit.
Get into as much trouble saying shit as you can smoking it down there. Shit’s a nice word, friendly happy word. Handy word. The middle class has never really been into shit as a word. Not really comfortable. You’ll hear it around the kitchen if someone drops a casserole. “Oh shit! Look at the noodles. Oh shit!! Don’t say that, Johnny—just hear it.” Sometimes they say shoot. But they can’t kid me. Shoot is shit with two o’s.
The use of shit is always figurative speech: “Get that shit outtahere, 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: “Lookit 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 standards 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 off 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!
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 used 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 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 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 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 & 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 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 cliché.) 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.
So it was really disturbing when the time came to record FM & 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.
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