Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [82]
“I wanted to talk a little bit about words,” he said during one segment for the show. “Words are—well, they’re everything. They’re true to you. They betray you. They say too much. They don’t say enough.” From the particular focus of the “Seven Words,” he was unraveling his own clinical fascination with the entire language. For this appearance he stuck to a lighthearted analysis of nonsense words and phrases that we don’t often stop to consider—Kit and caboodle. Odds and ends. This, that and the other. “I’ll take this, and that.” “You gotta get the other—it’s a set.” It was the sort of linguistic deconstruction he would later develop into a comic trademark.
His brief run with Wald and Ron De Blasio was coming to an end. Wald had stepped aside from artist management, concentrating on promoting his wife’s blooming singing career. He still saw Carlin, his fellow New Yorker, socially. They took their daughters to horse-riding lessons in Malibu together. Carlin invested in the farm; one time Wald got testy with the rancher. “I was gonna go up and shoot him on behalf of me and George,” he claims.
De Blasio stuck with Carlin for another year or so. By this time the manager was handling the career of Freddie Prinze, a fast-rising comic who would soon be starring in the NBC sitcom Chico and the Man. (Prinze, who committed suicide in 1977, was once romantically linked to Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty.) De Blasio was also on the verge of signing Richard Pryor. With his manager concentrating his efforts elsewhere, Carlin drifted into an arrangement with Monte Kay at Little David. Jack Lewis, Kay’s right-hand man, handled the day-to-day obligations. Working with Lewis came naturally, as they were often on the road together. “There were no hard feelings,” says De Blasio. “He was very comfortable with Jack Lewis.”
But Lewis was a bit of a wild man, not exactly a great influence. Lewis, says Franklin Ajaye, a budding comedian who signed with Little David after cutting two albums for A&M, was “a very eccentric guy. Monte was very quiet, business-oriented. Very mild-mannered. Jack was kind of crazy and loud.” Rankin, too, despite his gentle singing style, had a wild streak, says Ajaye, who often opened for Rankin when the guitarist wasn’t on the road opening for Carlin.
While a law student at Columbia University, Ajaye had broken into comedy in the early 1970s by studying Carlin, Klein, and Pryor. Booked into the Playboy Club in San Francisco for a week, he had trouble connecting with the clientele. He had quit his job at a clothing store to take the gig. “It wasn’t really a progressive place,” he says. “I could only make the Bunnies and the band laugh.” Told to shave his beard (“Comedians don’t wear beards”), he protested. “George Carlin wears a beard,” he said. “It was exactly the kind of place in those days that George wouldn’t want to play. I got fired.”
Little David had a small carpeted office on Sunset Boulevard, on the second floor of a Tudor-style stucco building that once housed an upscale auto dealership. Kay welcomed casual visits from the artists on his roster, who sat around with their feet up on the desks. “Monte was a very good business man. He cut very good deals,” Ajaye says.
His whole thing was creative freedom. Whatever you wanted to do, he gave you that freedom, and he tried to find the places that made it work. Obviously George couldn’t play the swanky clubs anymore. It was almost like they created a market, which was the college kids. It was a very passionate time to be a