Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [22]
KDAY was another “sundowner” station, going off the air each night at dusk. Its offices were used after hours by various freelance characters circling the entertainment industry—song pluggers, mostly, and managerial types. Burns and Carlin took advantage of their access to the building, rehearsing their act in the studio. Becker was one of the hustlers working the angles in the station hallways. He watched the two comics from the Northeast tinkering with their act and announced that he wanted to become their manager. “He didn’t have a lot of connections,” Carlin recalled. “He was just a really dedicated guy. He really cared about us.” And he was encouraged that the comedians, although intentionally confrontational, could also work “clean,” as necessitated by their new radio gig. “That was big. ‘They work clean,’ he’d tell people.”
Becker started pushing his new clients, and he soon cut a small-time deal with Herb Newman, owner of the independent, locally based Era Records. For a $300 advance, Burns and Carlin hastily recorded their act one night at Cosmo Alley. Era had scored a surprise number one pop hit back in the spring of 1956 with Gogi Grant’s cinematic ersatz Western, “The Wayward Wind,” written by Newman, and the label would soon have its biggest hit with Chris Montez’s “Let’s Dance.”
Comedy albums had been a reliable niche market since the advent of long-playing records in the late 1940s, with “party” albums by raunchy comics such as Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, and the classically trained, sexually outrageous comedienne known as the “Knockers Up” gal, Rusty Warren, reaching devoted customers through under-the-counter transactions. By 1960 recordings by the new wave stand-up acts were becoming bona fide mainstream hits. Berman’s debut, Inside Shelley Berman, was the first comedy album officially awarded a gold record, and the stuttering Chicago straight man Bob Newhart would soon be named Best New Artist and presented with Album of the Year honors at the Grammy Awards for his own debut, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, which beat out Elvis Presley and the cast recording of The Sound of Music to top the Billboard charts. Still, no one had illusions of a chart-topping comedy record coming from the two upstarts in skinny ties at Cosmo Alley. The idea was to use the release as their calling card for future nightclub and, ideally, television bookings.
Era did not actually issue the album until 1963, the year after the team broke up. To capitalize on the success of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs, the label took the liberty of releasing the record as Burns & Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight. The hit-and-miss track listing was a representative sample of the pair’s green act, featuring “Mothers Club,” in which Burns portrayed a series of blueblood society ladies in falsetto, and “War Pictures,” a half-baked Hollywood send-up, as well as “Killer Carlin”; the beatnik bit; the satire of Edward R. Murrow’s interview program, Person to Person; the “Capt. Jack and Jolly George” routine; and Carlin’s Bruce and Sahl impersonations. The verbose liner notes, perhaps written by Becker, were typeset on the back of the record jacket in the shape of a womanly hourglass figure.
“The world has known many teams—Adam and Eve, Stanley and Livingstone, Sears and Roebuck, spaghetti and meatballs,” read the punch-drunk copy. For those not yet hip to the latest addition to this “lustrous list,” the anonymous writer pointed out that Burns and Carlin were comedians,