Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [63]
With a recording truck parked outside the Cellar Door, Carlin spent two nights opening for the Dillards, the traditional bluegrass band that had portrayed a fictional act called the Darlings on The Andy Griffith Show. The Dillards had earned themselves some rock ’n’ roll credibility by adopting electric instruments, a move that inspired the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and many of the other groups of the Southern California country-rock movement of the late 1960s.
Carlin was back in familiar company, among the banjo players, collegiate juicers, and bohemian night owls. Still, he was unsure of himself. He worried that the audience he sought, many a decade or more younger than he, might think of him as “a counterfeit,” a calculating entertainer “trying to cash in on the hippie craze.” As eager as he was to turn the page, he could not quite bring himself to bury some of his old standbys just yet. The routines he cut for FM & AM included an update on “Wonderful WINO” featuring Willie West’s successor (a new Carlin character called Scott Lame) and the vapid housewife Congolia Breckenridge, who joined her husband on an imaginary game show called Divorce Game (“Welcome to Divorce Game, brought to you by National Van Lines!”). There was also a primer on doing an accurate Ed Sullivan impression and, of course, a mock newscast. After Al Sleet bumbled through the weather report for the umpteenth time (“Tonight’s forecast—dark”), Carlin’s high-tenor anchorman remarked with a knowing giggle, “I think we know by now, Al’s been into the mushrooms.”
Those familiar bits would appear on the record’s B side—the “AM” side. Carlin hoped to capture his old persona “in its final form,” contrasting it with his new social perspective. If AM radio was “now being thought of as hokey and old-fashioned, full of commercials,” he said, FM was hip, underground. The album’s “FM” side made Carlin’s metamorphosis unmistakable. Right out of the gate, he went autobiographical, recounting his dismissal at the Frontier—“for saying ‘shit,’” he noted, “in a town where the big game is called crap.”
Buddy Hackett said it; Redd Foxx said it. Now Carlin, too, was saying shit, without qualms or apology. It might have been seen as an act of defiance, if the bit weren’t so deliberately congenial. Shit, he noted, is “a nice word—a friendly, happy kind of word.” The middle class, he continued, has never been too comfortable with it, though it does slip out on occasion. Mimicking a homemaker who’s just dropped a casserole, he squawked, “Oh, shit! Look at the noodles. . . . Don’t say that, Johnny. Just hear it.”
It was the debut of the new Carlin, the self-taught stoner linguist who instinctively recognized that the key to culture lies in how people communicate with one another. Observing that shit is almost always used in the figurative sense, he rattled off a series of common expressions—Get that shit out of here, I don’t have to take that shit, you’re full of shit. Like Bruce before him, Carlin was demystifying a taboo. Soon he would become notorious for it. The routine was called “Shoot,” after the popular euphemism. “They can’t fool me,” he joked. “Shoot is shit with two Os!”
Other material on the “FM” side covered a broad range of hot-button issues, from the “Hair” poem and “Birth Control” to double standards about drug use and sexual innuendo. If it was easy to identify the subliminal messages of so many television commercials, Carlin joked, sometimes the intimations were bizarre: In his favorite dirty-old-man’s voice, he croaked, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”
After the second night of taping, he walked out of the club while Doug and Rodney Dillard and their