And while I was powerfully attracted to the life my rock and folkie
friends led—as a comedian, how did I go about leading that? There
were very few counterculture comedy centers—one terrific group in
San Francisco called the Committee, who'd been on Smothers with
me, but that was about it. I felt inadequate compared to an outfit like
the Committee. I felt I'd somehow stained myself with this middleclass show-business shit.
And however much kinship I had with the counterculture, it
brought up again the eternal dilemma: of longing to belong but not
liking to belong—even though the group I wanted to belong to now
were non-belongers.
Maybe it wasn't belonging that I longed for so much as being
able to fulfill my proper role. I wasn't doing my job. I wasn't using
my mind to produce the external evidence of my inner state. I was
superficially skimming off the top these mild and passable parodies.
The very fact that they were parodies is telling. There was nothing
of me in them.
I looked at what my friends were doing, the music they were making, the doors they were opening, the stands they were taking, the
changes they were acknowledging and instigating. Then I looked
at the people in TV studios and nightclubs where I did my superficially skimming act, mostly for the parents of the people I admired.
I felt like a traitor to my generation.
George Carlin has become a showbiz mystery. One of the very
best young contemporary clowns, he had a splendid comic spirit, a
fresh new outlook on comedy, got the top TV bookings, has been
considered for several terribly remunerative TV-talk-show chairmanships, his material was attractive to teenagers, college kids and
mature marrieds; his records sold friskily and all seemed right in
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his straight future . . . Carlin now seems an artistic drop-out. His
clothes, incensed hangdog demeanor, long pony-tail-style hairdo,
grubby pants, a totally unwashed, shambling, savagely apologetic
aspect as if speaking straight from a hobo jungle, combine in his
new "style," essentially no style at all beyond a belligerent, truculent "statement."
Thus spake Jack O'Brian, the self-described "Voice of Broadway,"
in 1973, following a rowdy concert I'd done at the Westbury Music
Fair in Long Island. I couldn't have been happier with his words if
I'd written them myself. Yes, Jack, you dopey old bigot, you hit the
nail right on the head.
How had I become an unwashed, shambling, savagely apologetic
hobo with grubby pants and an incensed, hangdog demeanor? Well,
it hadn't been easy. I think it all began with that long, pony-tail-style
hairdo.
I once said, I always had long hair—only I used to keep it inside
my head. But letting it come out where people could see it was a
drawn-out process. Looking back on it I'm not even sure where and
when it began. It was a barely conscious decision—almost as if the
hair decided to come out of its own accord. My hair had a mind of
its own.
Terrible things were happening to me. But because of them, my
life began to change. In the fall of 19691 was fired from the Frontier
Hotel in Vegas—where I had an extremely lucrative two-year deal—
for saying the word "ass."
I had been working into my act a little short thing about, "I got no
ass. You might notice, I go right from the shoulders to the heels, like
most Irish guys. No ass. When I was in the service, black guys used
to see me in the showers and say, 'Hey, man, where yo' ass at? Stud
got no ass.' "
That was it. They fired me. Closed me after the very first show.
Here's what happened. The show had been reserved exclusively for
players in the Howard Hughes Invitational (golf tournament) and
their guests. These people, who had been at the Hole No. 19 or
whatever they call that bar thing at golf courses, show up fucking
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half drunk. The Frontier starts the show about an hour late to accommodate them. I come out and they're really unruly. They're not
a good audience. And just as a matter of principle I'm not happy
with these golf cocksuckers anyway.
I do the ass routine and I'm told in between shows that Robert
Maheu, the Mormon who ran the place and was Howard Hughes's
keeper, had gotten complaints from the audience: "The people
didn't appreciate what you said. Don't bother with the second show.
You'll get your money for the rest of the week."
Being fired from the Frontier for saying "ass." A harbinger—don't
you love that word?—of all that was to come.
Then there was acid. I know exactly when I first did acid—it was
in October 1969 while I was playing a major, now long-defunct jazz
club in Chicago called Mister Kelly's. Next to my record of that
booking, which was otherwise uneventful, is written in a trembling
hand the word "acid." Actually in the course of a two-week gig I did
acid multiple times, maybe five, maybe ten. (After the first couple of
trips your numeracy tends to decline.)
Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point
for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More
people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter. Acid finally moved me from one place to the other; allowed change to take
place—change that had been rumbling underground all this time,
but which I still needed to have happen to me rather than initiate.
(I suppose I did initiate it by dropping the stuff but I couldn't know
what would transpire; at least I had the illusion that change had happened to me rather than through me.) Suddenly all the conflict that
had been tormenting me between the alternative values and straight
values began to resolve.
But. This radically different, utterly changed, reimprinted, reprogrammed person had to now go play the Copacabana in New York.
The Copa was the quintessential place I did not belong. I'd only
agreed to do it (long before the acid) when management said: "It's
Christmas. Oliver is headlining (Oliver was a pseudo-folkie who'd
had a number one song). There'll be a lot of people who don't nor1 4 2
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mally go to a place like the Copacabana. So you'll get a younger,
TV-audience crowd. You'll be okay."
The Copa was owned by Jules Podell, an old-line, semi-gangster
type with this big pinkie ring that he would tap loudly on the table
when he didn't like something.
So I did my act: "Indian Sergeant," "Hippy-Dippy Weatherman,"
"Wonderful WINO," all the standard stuff, but less convincingly
than ever. Sometimes midway through the show, not having my
heart in it, with Podell sitting out there, I'd start in on the Copa itself:
"These dumps went out of style in the 1940s and they forgot to close."
Tap tap tap tap.
Some nights I'd lie down on the floor under the piano and describe its underside: "There are vertical and diagonal pieces of
wood with little nails in them and one of them says, 'New York City
00-601.' " Or still lying on the floor I ' d describe the ceiling of the
clu
b—unfavorably. Another time, I brought the Yellow Pages onstage: "I'm now going to read from 'Upholsterers.' " Which I did.
There'd be a few embarrassed, unbelieving laughs. Perhaps there
were some people in the audience who'd heard of Dada surrealism
and thought it was Dada. But not a lot. And always from the table
out there in the darkness: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap!
This went on for three entire weeks, the tirades and Dada shit alternating with the not even halfhearted performances. Every night
I would ask to be fired onstage. I would say, "Please fire me." Podell
wouldn't do it. Just the tapping.
Then, on my next-to-last night, during the first show, in the final
minutes of my final piece . . . they slowly turned down the lights on
me. Ever so slowly, as if the sun were setting. Then, just as slowly,
they turned my volume off. At the end I was standing onstage, in the
dark, in total silence. In a way it was kind of perfect. The lights had
gone down on that part of my life.
It was January 6, 1970—the Feast of the Epiphany. A great start
to a watershed year. I'd now been fired from two of the supposedly
more prestigious and certainly more high-visibility mainstream locations in the country. And while the Frontier could be written off
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as a temporary lapse, a minor infraction, I'd flaunted my disgust and
conflict and unhappiness every night for three weeks in the media
capital of the world.
I got at least one good review from a very unexpected source: my
mother. She wrote me a letter, enclosing reviews of a Samuel Beckett play she'd just seen. This is what devout-Catholic-EisenhowerRepublican Mary had to say to her wayward son about his latest
developments:
Dear George:
I should be on the check-out line at the supermarket but I
must say these words to you. Please read these reviews. You will
someday be a Beckett or a Joyce or maybe a Bernard Shaw. You
seem to have their kind of disturbance . . . Some day you will release what you have down inside of you and it will be listened to and
heard.
They condemn you for idolizing Lenny Bruce—how little they
really know what you see in his courage, sincerity and daring.
Please George insist on being yourself. Don't let anyone change
you or silence you. I am so hungry for a heart-to-heart with you . . .
Why have I got this restlessness—this groping for answers which I
sometimes feel I have passed on to you? Do you follow me George?
Why can't I quiet this undisciplined questioning of what goes on
around us? Why am I caught up by it?
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 Delia
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
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sweetly, "Let 's you two fight"—in other words: "Why don't you two
guests of mine rip each other to shreds?"
1 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 docs. 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
Lcnnon 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 vou 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 1 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
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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 ' v e 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 th
e 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 of1 4 6
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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 stan-
dard. I'm sure there was some Texan standing out in the casino
yelling, uOh SHIT! I CRAPPED!" And they f l y 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 outta-