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By Root 815 0

’d wake up in the morning and if I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to smoke a joint or not, I’d smoke a joint to figure it out,” he once admitted. “And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, ‘Do you get high to go onstage?’ I could never understand the question. I mean, I’d been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it.” Now he was outwardly identifying with the real-life Al Sleets of the world, acknowledging his predilection for getting high right there in his act. In a guest appearance on the syndicated Virginia Graham Show, Carlin confessed his “secret” dependency on national television. The hostess was delighted to hear it. The composer Henry Mancini had only recently told her the same thing, she said. “Virginia Graham was a real shit-stirrer,” Carlin remembered.

It may have been the admission; it may simply have been his sneaky way of slipping the word “shit” into his act. It may have been the fact, according to the comic, that this particular crowd was largely composed of salesmen from Chrysler and Lipton Tea, some of whom took exception to the comedian’s observations about God and country. In any case, when he strode offstage at the Frontier, Carlin was summarily dismissed from the remainder of the engagement. This time he felt a strange sense of elation. “They did the job for me,” he told Brenda. “They broke it off. This is good.”

Though he’d been renting Phyllis Diller’s Vegas house, he’d never felt a part of the fraternity of Vegas comics. Now he didn’t have to pretend he did. “I never went over to Don Adams’s house for dinner,” Carlin soon told Rolling Stone. “I never bought an alpaca sweater, and I never learned how to play golf.”

His clash with the Vegas audience was mirrored a few weeks later when another comic innovator, Robert Klein, had his own showdown in the desert. With his newfangled style, like a dry-witted social studies teacher, the mildly shaggy Klein was embarking on a career path similar to Carlin’s. He did his first Tonight Show in 1968 and had just completed his own summer replacement TV hosting gig. Opening at the Las Vegas Hilton at year’s end for Barbra Streisand—then Vegas’s biggest attraction, alongside Elvis, both making $125,000 a week—the comic left the stage in a pique one night when a customer threw a pencil at him. Streisand’s manager, Marty Erlichman, was irate. Now his singer would have to go on early. After the show, Streisand consoled her opening act. “She was so sweet,” says Klein. “She completely sided with me, and she made her manager go out and get Chinese food for us.”

On another night Rodney Dangerfield, who had taken Klein under his wing, brought the legendary Jack Benny to see the up-and-comer. When Klein said the word shit in his act, Benny laid down a verdict. “The kid works dirty,” he said.

“That was a heartbreaker,” says Klein. “I had a few rough nights there.” Increasingly the old guard of funnymen, and the slot machines and scantily clad cocktail waitresses that marked their natural habitat, were proving a fatal combination for comic insurgents like Klein, Pryor, and Carlin.

Trusting his intuition, Carlin soon took matters into his own hands. Again ready for new management, he took a meeting with Ron De Blasio and Jeff Wald. The two talent managers had recently left Campbell-Silver-Cosby, a production and management agency owned in part by Bill Cosby. Among other enterprises, Campbell-Silver-Cosby operated a record label called Tetragrammaton, distributed by Warner Bros. The imprint had released albums by the rock band Deep Purple, Carlin’s fellow John Davidson Show alumnus Biff Rose, and an unusual comedian, a Lenny Bruce soundalike named Murray Roman, whose twisted wit included a record with an all-black cover called Blind Man’s Movie. Tetragrammaton also became the U.S. distributor for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins, with its full-frontal-nudity cover photograph, when Capitol Records refused to sell it. Carlin, avid record collector that he was, knew the label well.

Wald was a piece of work. A streetwise product