Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [71]
“Jeepers creepers, you can imagine,” Gieringer recalled years later. “I tried to maintain as much dignity as I could under the circumstances.”
For Murray, the trial was a bit of a good-luck charm. Several years later, having left the firm to pursue a career in civil law, he auditioned in Milwaukee to become a contestant on the game show Tic Tac Dough. Asked to offer a personal detail about himself, he mentioned that he had defended Carlin in the Summerfest case. The producers’ eyes lit up. “I went to Hollywood and was on the show for two weeks,” he says. “I made thirty-five thousand dollars.”
Carlin wasted no time exploiting the notoriety surrounding his arrest. He joked about the incident on The Tonight Show, giving the persecuted words a group name, like the Chicago Seven or the Little Rock Nine—the “Milwaukee Seven.” On the set of The Dick Cavett Show, he walked on to the strains of “On, Wisconsin,” the official state song and the fight song of the Wisconsin Badgers. After Gieringer dismissed the case, Carlin told Carson he was indebted to “the swinging judge from up north.” Even if the Seven Words themselves remained forbidden on the television airwaves, alluding to them was good for an easy laugh or three.
Despite the objection of vigilantes such as Officer Lenz, the “Seven Words” worked because Carlin made them go down easy. Six years after Bruce’s death, the nation was a very different place than it had been in 1966. Carlin was becoming an unofficial ambassador of the counterculture, representing the hippie fringe to the mainstream. Bending the show business forum to his own devices, he was helping to explain the younger generation’s changing attitudes to the alarmists from the moral majority. If people behaved badly and treated each other poorly, it wasn’t the English language that was responsible. “There are no bad words,” he argued, ever so gently. “Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And words.”
“It wasn’t a rant. It was a shrug,” says musician Chandler Travis, who met Carlin in 1971 at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. “He was such a fan of Lenny Bruce. I think he did take some pride in being the guy who picked up that baton. I think he took that responsibility seriously, to the extent that he took much seriously. . . . George’s natural proclivities led him to take [what Lenny did] and push it in a much goofier direction, much more benign.”
Typical of the stages Carlin was then playing, the Main Point was a folkie coffeehouse serving gingerbread and brownies and, for those who needed a meal, plates of baked beans and bread for eighty cents. The talent the cramped space attracted was considerable—Cat Stevens, Dion, and Curtis Mayfield all played there in 1971. (A couple of years later, young New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen made several appearances.) Travis and his performing partner, Steve Shook, were a frequent opening act with their musical comedy shtick, Travis Shook and the Club Wow. On one booking, they were scheduled to support a summer weekend for folk-blues guitarist and singer Dave Van Ronk, Greenwich Village’s “Mayor of MacDougal Street.” When Van Ronk had to cancel, club owner Jeanette Campbell booked Carlin as an emergency replacement; he had just spent a well-received Fourth of July week there opening for Tom Paxton.
En route to the gig, Travis and Shook were stopped by police in Fishkill, New York, where they were detained for possession of marijuana. Searching for more illicit substances, the cops found the musicians’ Band-Aid canister, but somehow missed its contents—several tablets of MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine), the narcotic then enjoying some popularity as “the love drug.” When they finally got to the Main Point, Travis and Shook shared