Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [75]
One particularly high-profile television gig was nearly disastrous. Dick Clark asked Carlin to host the second annual installment of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. The first, ringing in 1973, had featured the red hot band Three Dog Night, along with Blood, Sweat & Tears, Al Green, and Helen Reddy. For the second year Clark chose to go with a comedian host. With the event expressly designed to appeal to a generation that had no use for Guy Lombardo’s long-running dinner-jacket celebration from the Waldorf-Astoria, the hippie-dippy Carlin seemed the perfect choice. The performers, including musical guests Linda Ronstadt, Billy Preston, Tower of Power, and the Pointer Sisters, were prerecorded from the ballroom of the Queen Mary. Only the countdown to midnight was produced live.
Prerecording turned out to be the show’s salvation. Though Carlin ran flawlessly through his material during dress rehearsal, he returned from his stateroom for the taping all jacked up—“on air,” according to one crew member. In his overloaded frame of mind, the reeling comic attempted to do his act by muscle memory. It was ugly: He lost his place again and again, haphazardly mixing setups from one routine with kickers from another. In a panic, director John Moffitt, who knew Carlin from his days with The Ed Sullivan Show, transcribed the routines as they appeared on Carlin’s records, then hurried into the editing room. Somehow he managed to splice together a reasonably coherent whole from the puzzle pieces he had to work with. Years later Carlin admitted that his only recollection of the show was a frantic Dick Clark, desperately pleading with him to do an acceptable lead-in to a commercial break.
Once he’d gleaned as much insight as he was going to get from dropping LSD and peyote, Carlin knew he was finished with them. “Cocaine was different. It kept saying, ‘You haven’t had enough.’ I became an abuser almost instantly. . . . I started doing coke to feel open, but by that time, the hole had opened so wide that I’d fallen through.” By his own admission, he often went four or five days before crashing, then slept nearly all day for a week or more to recuperate. The manic facial expressions and bodily contortions he struck for the cover of his next album, Operation: Foole, were the spitting image of a coke fiend, he later admitted. He had made the same faces for the cover of Take-Offs and Put-Ons, but those appeared in black and white, with Carlin clean-shaven, short-haired, and in a suit and tie. For Occupation: Foole he wore a multicolored tank top, letting down his hair from its now-customary ponytail. He was becoming the unreliable freak the industry had suspected a few years earlier.
Occupation: Foole was recorded over two nights in March 1973 at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, south of San Francisco. Opening with several minutes on his occupation—foole (“I’d spell it with a final e just to piss ‘em off”)—he joked about how no one goes right to work: “You might get there on time, but screw the company. Those first twenty minutes belong to you.” Much of the material picked up where Class Clown’s autobiographical reminiscing left off, with the comedian showcasing his knack for mimicry as he described the ethnic makeup of his childhood neighborhood. He got some of his biggest laughs the easy way, with fart jokes. And he wrapped up with a lengthy (nearly twelve-minute) update on the “Seven Words,” beefed up by what was essentially a rerun of the FM & AM routine “Shoot.” The original seven words you could never say on television should be expanded by at least three more, he suggested