Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [14]
Though Carlin’s stint in Shreveport was relatively brief, he was a real asset to KJOE. With Monroe taking the morning shift and Vern Stierman covering the midday slot, Carin brought up the rear, before the station went off the air at sundown. Carlin’s Corner made him a bona fide local personality, with listeners tuning in to hear the latest songs from the Everly Brothers, Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley, and the rest of the era’s chart regulars. “Stick around,” he’d implore his listeners. “Good things happening here on Carlin’s Corner.” A born motor mouth, he was more conversational, more easygoing than the unctuous boilerplate announcing types he later played in his act. “His voice was different—it didn’t sound like a straight announcer, the Tommy Turntables of the day,” says Howard Clark, a hard-partying fellow Shreveport radio novice who was later noted for his tag line—“This is Howard Clark, high at noon”—on San Francisco’s KFRC. “He was very warm, one-on-one sounding, rather than those standoff-ish announcers. That was very intriguing to me.”
Carlin moved in with a friend from the Air Force, Jack Walsh, a Georgia native who had been a navigator in the Strategic Air Command. Walsh, like Carlin and Monroe, had been involved with the theater group, and Carlin began telling his roommate that he should look for work in radio. Walsh, a bright, well-spoken man who shared Carlin’s affinity for jazz and comedy, soon got a job at KRMD, a twenty-four-hour Shreveport station. Though Walsh was five years older than his roommate, he was evidently less schooled in the ways of the streets. According to his widow, Dot Walsh, Jack once asked Carlin why his “cigarette” smelled the way it did. The two bachelors arranged a warning system for each other: If there was a tie hanging from the doorknob of their apartment, the other roommate had a girl inside and needed privacy.
Walsh, who went on to gain some renown in Atlanta on radio station WAKE—under the alias Stan “The Man” Richards, he was inducted into the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame—played a significant role in the development of his roommate’s comic sensibility: He turned Carlin on to Lenny Bruce. One night he brought home a copy of Bruce’s conceptual first album, Interviews of Our Times, pressing his roommate to listen to it.
Despite his youth, Carlin was not a big fan of the new rock ’n’ rollers he was playing on KJOE. He preferred the jazz and vocal music he’d loved in New York. “I grew up with real rhythm and blues,” he said. “I hated when the whites took over the music. . . . I just had that little cultural divide, where I was more of a black-music person and I was playing this hybrid of black music and country that came to be called rock ’n’ roll.” Unquestionably, though, he recognized the new cultural groundswell as a powerful social force—“nothing short of a revolution. You could sense that and feel that, especially in the white South.”
One of those revolutionary figures, Elvis Presley, was well-known to the Shreveport audience, where he’d made his national breakthrough in 1954 on the Louisiana Hayride, a live country music broadcast for flagship station KWKH. Oddly, Carlin’s biggest moment of Shreveport infamy involved the music of the blues-loving poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi. In early 1957 Stan Lewis received a routine shipment of promotional records from RCA. Along with several new releases, the box contained one wayward copy of Presley’s latest recording, “All Shook Up,” not quite due for release. Realizing instantly that he had