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By Root 882 0

long gone by the time the Cellar was forced to move to a new location in late 1960, after a fire. The new venue, one of several that Pat Kirkwood opened across Texas, from Houston to San Antonio (always on Pearl Harbor Day), would become notorious as the place where several of President Kennedy’s Secret Service agents congregated on the night before the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald, Kirkwood claimed, worked as a dishwasher at the short-lived Cellar in San Antonio for two weeks before committing his crime, and his killer, Jack Ruby, a fellow nightclub proprietor, was known to the Cellar’s owner as “a Jewish wannabe hoodlum and speed freak who was like all the other joint owners from here to Casablanca.”

Kirkwood knew how to build a legend and how to keep it in business when the goings-on attracted an inordinate amount of unwanted attention. “All policemen, all reporters, all pretty girls, all musicians, all doctors, all lawyers, and all our personal friends come in free and get free drinks forever,” he instructed his staff, which typically consisted of a small pool of waitresses often clad in bras and panties and a couple of ruthless, no-nonsense bouncers. Though he welcomed eccentricities of all kinds, Kirkwood nevertheless instituted several iron-clad rules—“no troublemakers, no queers, no pimps, no blacks, [and] no narcotics.” The cover charge was a dollar, unless a member of one of the offending groups appeared at the door, in which case the door-man would point to the sign claiming the cover was actually a thousand dollars.

With one bare red bulb constituting all the lighting the place could muster, jazz tapes playing over the speaker system in the absence of live entertainment, and many customers sitting on pillows on the floor, the original Cellar, Carlin recalled, was “pre-hippie, but definitely post-beatnik.” For a New Yorker, the idea of hipsters in dark shades gathered in a dank hovel, addressing each other as “daddy,” was a bit musty by 1959. Several years too young to have participated first-hand in the bohemian renaissance of the early 1950s in New York and San Francisco (Jack Kerouac was born in 1922, Allen Ginsberg in 1926), Burns and Carlin were sufficiently removed to see it through the filter of popular culture. By 1959 that meant Maynard Krebs and sensational pulp novels and movies about promiscuous young people in black turtlenecks—the “beatniks,” as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen had labeled them a year earlier. Though the comedians were undoubtedly drawn to the freaky, arty underground and the footloose freedom the Beats represented, beatniks were an easy target by 1959.

In Fort Worth, however, the freewheeling vibe of the Cellar was unprecedented. With a clientele made up largely of return customers who came back night after night, eager to see what kind of fresh debauchery Johnny Carroll could rustle up, Burns and Carlin were obliged to think fast on their feet. “We became very inventive and creative,” said Carlin. In one “vignette,” as Burns labeled it on the act’s album, the pair skewered what was by then the universally familiar caricature of the Beat Generation—the angry poet, railing against inhumanity with excessive use of the adjectives “naked,” “dirty,” and “stinking.” Haphazardly crediting Kerouac and “Arnold” Ginsberg for inspiring the archetype, Burns played the shrill performance poet Herb Coolhouse, the fertile mind behind the epic verse “Ode to a Texaco Restroom on Alternate U.S. 101 South.” Carlin, sucking greedily on an imaginary roach and talking in a wise guy’s nasal clip, identified himself as Coolhouse’s sidekick, Amos Malfi, a “fairly salty bongo player.”

The comedy team had bigger, more mainstream ambitions. After several months pinballing among the KXOL studio, the Cellar, and the bachelors’ apartment in Monticello, the two friends packed their meager belongings and headed for Hollywood. On the air Carlin told his listeners that he and his newscaster were hitting the road as soon as he signed off. Hearing that, listener Pat Havis drove over to the station