Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [72]
Like P. D. Q. Bach, the musical comedian Peter Schickele’s fictitious son of a better-known Bach, or the concert pianist Victor Borge, who peppered his playing with gags, Travis Shook played a daffy mix of music and slapstick that appealed to Carlin’s lighter side. “He liked the nonsensical nature of what we did, the anarchy of what we were doing,” says Travis. “By any modern standard, there wasn’t any anarchy in it, but it sort of felt that way at the time.”
Another colleague who became one of Carlin’s longstanding opening acts was the songwriter Kenny Rankin, a soft-rocker whose song “Peaceful” was about to become a Top 20 hit for Jeff Wald’s wife, Helen Reddy. The artists on the tiny Little David roster looked out for one another whenever possible. Singer Dan Cassidy had made his lone Tonight Show appearance alongside Carlin in June. (After a short career in music, Cassidy went on to found a collegiate Irish studies program in San Francisco, where he wrote a book called How the Irish Invented Slang.) And Little David would soon release Pure B.S.!, an album of sketches by Carlin’s old partner, Jack Burns, and his Second City cohort Avery Schreiber. Following on the heels of the comedy team’s summer variety hour on ABC, Pure B.S.! featured the same kind of premise-driven humor, heavy on generation-gap satire, that Burns and Carlin had explored on their lone album together years before.
Whereas FM & AM was a validation, Carlin’s next album was a true cultural event. The cover featured a photo of the bare-chested comic, in jeans and an unbuttoned denim shirt, sitting on a stool in front of a blackboard, pretending to shove a finger up his nose. Class Clown came out in late September 1972 and took off immediately. Curiously, given the comedian’s prolonged effort to break with his past, the material focused in large part on his Catholic school upbringing. Routines such as “I Used to Be Irish Catholic” and the three-part title track were infused with nostalgia for the knockabout years of Carlin’s childhood and adolescence, when he thrived as class clown. “You’d be bored, and you’d figure, Well, why not deprive someone else of their education?” he joked. Instigating inappropriate laughter had been the great joy of his childhood. Now he was making a career of it.
Ron De Blasio, his comanager, had booked the show into the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where the legendary concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, featuring the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, and James Brown, had been filmed in 1964. For a time the facility had also been home of the Academy Awards. Other than that, Santa Monica, where the Carlin family was living at the time, was still a lazy beach town. “I called it the last Midwestern town in southern California,” says De Blasio. Though FM & AM was doing well at the time of the taping, De Blasio was nervous about his client filling the auditorium’s 3,000 or so seats with a supportive crowd: “But I’ll be a son of a bitch—we got an audience, and a great audience. They loved him. Absolutely loved him.”
Onstage, Carlin reminisced about the endless ways to get laughs out of your classmates—knuckle-cracking, “Hawaiian nose humming,” and, of course, making fart sounds in every way imaginable. The most basic—putting your tongue between your lips and blowing—has a scientific term, he informed the audience: “bi-labial fricative.” “I was so glad when I found out that had a real, official name to it, man,” Carlin said, sounding either genuinely blissful or especially high, or both. “Bronx cheer and raspberry never made it for me.”
He explained