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Yet the seventies were also clearly a decade of hedonism. Years of high tension over civil rights, Vietnam, and the generation gap were giving way to cultural fatigue, and seemingly relentless bad news such as the 1973 energy crisis and Watergate made many disgusted citizens long for oblivion. And comedy reflected that feeling. Occupation: Foole was nominated for a Grammy, alongside Cosby’s Fat Albert, Klein’s debut, and albums from National Lampoon and the impressionist David Frye. The award winner, however, was Los Cochinos, the third album from the stoner comics Cheech and Chong.

For his fourth album with Little David, Carlin moved away from the boyhood nostalgia that had dominated Class Clown and Occupation: Foole. Toledo Window Box, named for an imaginary strain of homegrown dope, had a cover image of the comic in a T-shirt illustrated with a bushy pot plant. On the back, the picture on the T-shirt was reduced to two barren stems, and Carlin had a bleary-eyed, blissfully vacant expression on his face. (The T-shirt drawings were by Drew Struzan, an album-cover artist who would soon be widely noted for his iconic movie posters for George Lucas and others.)

Recorded in July 1974 at Oakland’s art deco-style Paramount Theatre, a lavishly designed former movie house, on Toledo Window Box the comedian was idly thinking up “goofy shit,” with little design or theme. Other than brief bits on “God” (a primitive draft of the skeptic’s rant that would end up as one of Carlin’s last notable routines, “He’s Smiling Down”) and “Gay Lib,” social issues were almost entirely absent from the set. With one eye on the new kings of comedy, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, Carlin riffed at length on drug use, poking around in nursery rhymes and fairy tales for illicit references. Snow White’s Seven Dwarves, he suggested, were all users: Sleepy was “into reds”; Doc was “the connection.” Carlin, encyclopedically knowledgeable about comedy, surely knew that Murray Roman had explored the same premise a few years earlier.

Though he spoke often about finding the real George Carlin in his material, on Toledo Window Box he relied more than usual on his stock voices, lapsing repeatedly into his seasoned New York accent and throwing in a little Wolfman Jack for good measure. He aired out a category that would become a Carlin staple, the absurdity of oxymorons—jumbo shrimp, military intelligence. And he frittered away much of the album on juvenilia such as snot (“The Original Rubber Cement”) and, once again, farts. The album went gold, Carlin’s fourth in a row to do so. Still, it was uninspired. The rush of his successful transformation was wearing off, and his binges were wearing him down. And Brenda was fighting her own battle, with alcoholism. She was involved in multiple incidents of drunk driving; at one point, before she went through rehab, her weight plummeted below ninety pounds. On a trip to Hawaii the couple were both so out of control that their daughter, not yet a teenager, felt compelled to write up a pact, demanding that they agree to stop using drugs. Putting Kelly in the middle of his and Brenda’s addictions was his “biggest regret,” Carlin recalled.

Within a few years Carlin would really be struggling to find a new direction for his work. “When I look back on those years,” says Chandler Travis, “as much fun as we had—and we did have a good time—I felt like if I’d been smoking a little less pot, I probably would have produced more and the music would’ve changed quicker. I think that’s true for George’s stuff as well. He got into the whole hippie thing. There were some years there when he didn’t know what was next. He wasn’t that anxious about it. I think if we weren’t all doping it up so much, he would’ve changed quicker.”

With the exception of a few staples—The Tonight Show, Mike Douglas—Carlin’s TV gigs were drying up. He did an appearance on Dinah Shore’s daytime show, and another on a Gladys Night and the Pips special that also featured Vegas regulars such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Robert Goulet. Worst