Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [30]
By 1964 Bob Dylan, the Village folk scene’s most visible representative, had become a national phenomenon, with versions of his songs performed by Peter, Paul, and Mary and his onetime girlfriend, Joan Baez, introducing the shy guitarist’s thorny music to the mainstream. Aging radicals and self-serious campus philosophers rubbed elbows in the cafés and dive bars of Bleecker Street and the surrounding neighborhood with thrill-seekers from the outer boroughs and stifling small towns across the country. Folk mainstays such as Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, and Fred Neil shared the stages at the Gaslight, Café Wha?, Gerde’s Folk City, and Bitter End with such future pop stars as Jose Feliciano, John Denver, and Emmylou Harris.
The neighborhood was crawling with creativity. At the Village Vanguard, Max Gordon’s long-running jazz room on nearby Seventh Avenue, contemplative musicians such as Bill Evans and John Coltrane settled in for long residencies. The Vanguard, the Gaslight, and other clubs had featured plenty of spoken-word acts during the heyday of the Beats. By 1964, however, the spoken-word acts were more apt to be angling for laughs.
“Greenwich Village was a way of looking at the world,” says comic actor Larry Hankin, who, with his odd-duck style, opened for the Blues Project during the band’s long residency at Café Au Go Go. “I would imagine it was like Montmartre when the Impressionists were there.”
The daytime show at Café Wha? was “an extravaganza of patchwork,” Dylan recalled, “a comedian, a ventriloquist, a steel drum group, a poet, a female impersonator, a duo who sang Broadway stuff, a rabbit-in-the-hat magician, a guy wearing a turban who hypnotized people in the audience, somebody whose entire act was facial acrobatics.” Musicians working the Village included a ukulele player and distinctive falsetto vocalist named Tiny Tim and a one-of-a-kind everyone knew as Moondog, a blind poet who played bamboo pipes and whistles in “a Viking helmet and a blanket with high fur boots.”
Weird was the norm in the Village, and the comedians represented it well. In his oversized spectacles and checked newsboy cap, a local legend named Stanley Myron Handelman made self-deprecation an art form. Bill Cosby, a student athlete from Philadelphia, broke in at the Gaslight in 1962 with an imaginary conversation between Noah and the Lord. David Frye, who did uncanny impressions of movie stars (George C. Scott, James Mason), liked to warm up in the bathroom before his sets. Sitting in a toilet stall one night, he startled a customer with his steady stream of familiar voices. “What kind of place you running here?” the disturbed patron asked the owner.
Another newcomer, raised by his grandmother in the brothel she ran in Peoria, Illinois, was a jittery young man named Richard Pryor. He made his Village debut at Manny Roth’s Café Wha? in 1963. Soon he was opening at the Village Gate for Nina Simone, who rocked the quivering comic like a baby to calm him down before his set each night. “In 1963, the Village was alive,” Pryor recalled. “Full of cats similar to me. A bunch of hobos looking for work.”
Carlin dove right into this cacophony of voices. He began by plying his trade at a handful of hootenannies, the folk crowd’s quaint name for an open mike night, at Café Wha? and the Bitter End. Across the street from the Bitter End was a red canopy advertising the entrance to Café Au Go Go. Down a flight of stairs and behind a full-length curtain, the good-sized room (capacity 350) featured a semicircular stage surrounded by butcher-block tables, with benches lining the walls. Murals depicting show folk hung on the brick walls. When Carlin first appeared at Café Au Go Go, the club had just been the target of a sting operation, with the New York district attorney’s office bagging the man who was butting heads with law enforcement officials across the country—Lenny Bruce.
The bleary-eyed Bruce had first been arrested for his use of language in October 1961, at Art Auerbach’s Jazz Workshop in San Francisco