Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [20]
Heading west in Carlin’s new Dodge Dart Pioneer, the partners listened to the KXOL signal as long as they could, until it faded into the night sky over west Texas. In a salute to his departing colleagues, “Captain” Mike Ambrose, the overnight disc jockey, played Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” then a Top 10 hit, several times during the hour after Carlin signed off. It was February 1960. The pair felt sure they were destined for stardom.
Earle Fletcher, KXOL’s station manager, had heard such plans before. He was annoyed; he’d just spent a good deal of money having fan club cards printed for the host of the Hi-Fi Club. “A lot of people, young boys like yourself, have left to go to Hollywood,” he told Carlin. “Between you and me, most of them came right back.”
BURNS AND CARLIN had $300 saved up. Their plan was to live off that until they could round up some nightclub appearances in Los Angeles. They were determined not to fall back on menial labor. “We’re not gonna park cars, we’re not gonna wash dishes, we’re not gonna wait tables,” Carlin recalled them saying to each other. “We’re gonna do the comedy.” In Los Angeles they went straight to Dean Martin’s place, Dino’s Lodge, which they recognized from 77 Sunset Strip. The popular detective series featured a character named “Kookie” Kookson, a valet parking attendant and street-smart informant whose rock ’n’ roll slang and constant hair-combing made actor Edd Byrnes a teen idol.
The newcomers immediately blew some of their savings hanging around Dino’s and the Brown Derby, hoping to spot someone famous. They were soon panicked to find that someone had lifted the rest of their cash from a drawer in their new apartment. Hastily canvassing for emergency jobs in radio, they dropped in on an R&B station with the call letters KDAY, then located on Vine Street in Los Angeles. As it happened, the station was looking for a new morning-drive comedy team. Burns and Carlin auditioned, were offered the job on the spot, and began punching the clock two weeks later.
Originally owned in part by Gene Autry, the “Singing Cowboy,” KDAY was “the leading Negro and foreign-language station this side of Chicago” by 1953, when it was sold to the owners of the Santa Monica Times. In the spring of 1960, just after Burns and Carlin’s arrival, the fifty-kilowatt station would become the new home to disc jockey Alan Freed. According to Bob Dye, then KDAY’s chief engineer, Freed’s hiring marked a period when the station’s owners were “trying anybody and everybody to make the station go”—including the new morning team. At the time, KDAY was experimenting with a playlist that relied heavily on doo-wop, which was enjoying a modest resurgence in popularity following the tumultuous emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s. (Carlin, of course, was a doo-wop fanatic, going back to his days on the street corners in “White Harlem.”)
Freed was a legend on his way down, a nationally recognized promoter of rock ’n’ roll from Cleveland—credited with popularizing the term—who had become persona non grata in the New York market following a series of scandals. His short-lived network television program was canceled in 1957 when the teenage black singer Frankie Lymon danced on air with a white girl, infuriating many of ABC’s Southern affiliates. Two years later he was named a primary defendant in the government’s case against “payola,” the music industry’s kick-back system for getting new records played on the radio. Freed had come to KDAY at the invitation of program director Mel Leeds, his former boss at the Manhattan station WINS. On the air Freed pounded on his trademark telephone books and clanged his cowbells, gamely trying to re-create his famous exuberance for the youth music he’d helped popularize just a few years earlier.
In their three brief months at KDAY, Burns and Carlin went by an alias, the Wright Brothers. The station promoted them as a hot new