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Harris, and told them both he needed to let them go. “At a time when he really should’ve been happy, he obviously was not at all pleased with how things were going,” says Golden. “I understood totally why he was unhappy, yet as a manager, you know—if it wasn’t broke, don’t fix it. Finally it got to a point where it was like, ‘Hey, let’s part friends.’ I knew I was not capable of selling what it was he now wanted to do.” Golden went on to manage a few musicians and entertainers—guitarist Kenny Burrell, flutist Hubert Laws—before becoming the talent and marketing director for the Blue Note Jazz Club.

Harris tried to take the split in stride, too. “The first thing you learn is that everybody leaves,” he says. “At some point, they get unhappy, and they shoot the people around them. You’re kind of conditioned to that.” Still, he couldn’t help but think he’d failed his client. “I felt very bad. I maybe felt I didn’t do a good enough job.”

Carlin’s new manager was Bill Brennan, the Racquet Club owner from Dayton, Ohio, whose wife was a close friend of Brenda’s. In June Carlin did a week at Bimbo’s near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, a plush cocktail room just up the avenue from the hungry i and the Beat bookstore City Lights. A month later he appeared on The Joey Bishop Show, ABC’s short-lived answer to Carson, featuring Carlin’s fellow Cardinal Hayes alumnus Regis Philbin in the sidekick role. It was just weeks after Bishop had conducted an uncharacteristically solemn show, on the night after presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death at the Ambassador Hotel. His guest that night was a Los Angeles radio reporter who had an audiotape of the immediate after-math of the shooting.

In August Carlin returned to the Frontier for three more weeks. Another Sullivan, another Gleason, and another week at Paul’s Mall in Boston rounded out a relatively quiet last few months of the year, which closed with rehearsals for an upcoming role on an episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

In their third (and what would prove to be final) season for CBS, the folk-singing comedy team of Tom and Dick Smothers was becoming a flashpoint for the counterculture, grappling with the network’s Standards and Practices Department over their program’s socially and politically charged content. The brothers and their writers, including Rob Reiner (soon to be known as Mike Stivic, aka “Meathead,” on All in the Family), part-time composer Mason Williams (“Classical Gas”), and a then-unknown Steve Martin, were testing the public’s capacity to confront the polarizing issues of the day—the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the emergence of the pill—with humor.

Though guests during the show’s inaugural season in 1967 were hardly controversial—Jack Benny, the Turtles, Nancy Sinatra, and Frank Sinatra Jr.—by the time Carlin appeared, the Smothers Brothers were feeling besieged. In Pete Seeger’s first network television appearance since the days of the Hollywood blacklist, the veteran folk agitator savaged the war effort with his song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which was cut from the broadcast. CBS then demanded that the producers submit completed episodes several days before airtime, so the network would have time to review the content. At the beginning of the third season, Harry Belafonte sang “Don’t Stop the Carnival” accompanied by a montage of clips from the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police in riot gear had clashed violently with protesters. That segment was removed, too, as was a biblical satire by stand-up newcomer David Steinberg.

Carlin was familiar to the Smothers Brothers. He’d been a guest in July on the awkwardly titled The Summer Brothers Smothers Show, a replacement series hosted by Glen Campbell. “We met him in the early sixties, when it was still Burns and Carlin,” says Tom Smothers. “We kept bumping into them in Chicago.” While Carlin was showing faint signs of letting his hair grow out during the December rehearsals—he had sideburns and the makings of a ducktail—other performers