Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [81]
Schattenfield and his colleagues took to calling the predictable letters of outrage about WBAI’s conduct “the ‘Fuck Complaint of the Week.’” “A guy would say he’d been listening to the station for three hours and heard the word seventeen times,” he says. “Well, why didn’t he turn the goddamn thing off?” In fact, the attorney had an unaffiliated client, a station operator in Iowa, who told him he too had played Carlin’s “Filthy Words” over the air, without receiving complaints.
David Tillotson was a young lawyer who understood the cultural revolution Pacifica represented. While still in law school in the mid-1960s, he had served in a summer program at Arent Fox. After graduating he took a job in the Latin American bureau of the Agency for International Development, but his post was soon abolished because of what his superiors felt were Tillotson’s leftist sympathies. He returned to the law firm in time for the license hearing for the Houston and D.C. stations. The unusual hearing, the attorneys believed, was less an administrative review than a referendum on Pacifica’s pattern of behavior and a blatant violation of the network’s First Amendment rights. Tillotson had his first taste of playing hardball with the commission when he was asked to draft a petition for extraordinary relief from the hearing. To the lawyers’ amazement, the petition was granted. The FCC backed off, and the network got its new licenses.
With Arent Fox on their side, in mid-1975 WBAI and Pacifica appealed the FCC’s ruling in the Carlin case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the reprimand would have a chilling effect on future broadcasts. The FCC countered that its obligation to protect minors from inappropriate subjects took precedence over the station’s First Amendment rights.
At the appellate level, Plotkin and his associates found a sympathetic court. “I don’t remember a tremendous amount of sparring over those arguments,” recalls Tillotson. The young lawyer was especially proud of an appendix to the brief that he had filed, which featured copious examples of “indecent” words used in respectable newspapers and magazines (including the Washington Post, which had recently quoted a White House photographer saying his trip to Vietnam had been “really shitty”) and in literary works, including the Bible (featuring a Latinized version of one of Carlin’s Seven Words, pisseth) and Hemingway (“We had more wire strung than there were cunts in Texas”). The FCC ruling was “overbroad,” two of the three appellate justices determined. The decision set the stage for Carlin’s historical moment—the Supreme Court hearing of FCC v. Pacifica. The comedian’s rhetorical question—What, in fact, does it mean to have freedom of speech in this country?—was going to get a hearing. Better yet, he was not required to participate. Unlike Lenny Bruce, who drove himself to the brink by obsessing over his legal problems, Carlin himself was not on trial. He could sit back and watch, knowing that his comic premise—the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”—had forced the judicial system to interpret precisely what sort of jurisdiction the FCC could claim when it came to taboo language.
THE CASE would not be argued before the Supreme Court until April 1978, nearly five years after the WBAI broadcast. In the meantime Carlin had a career to pursue, much of which still required him to watch his language.
He was making regular appearances on The Midnight Special, Burt Sugarman’s late-night rock ’n’ roll showcase, which aired Fridays on NBC, after Carson. The director was Stan Harris, who had worked on The Smothers Brothers and a short-lived precursor to Midnight Special called The Music Scene. Jeff Wald had leverage with the show, which was an ideal forum for Carlin’s new direction, with its hip musical guests and raspy radio veteran Wolfman Jack at