New Jersey Impeach Groups — “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” — WAYNE NJ — IN 1988, AFTER A COUPLE DOZEN PHONE CALLS, AN APPOINTMENT WAS SET, AND I GOT TO INTERVIEW GEORGE CARLIN. We met at 11 on a pretty summer morning at his small apartment in one of Leona Helmsley’s hotels on Central Park South. I was working radio at the time, and I didn’t have good equipment and no engineer was with me. Instead of the state of the art Marantz most people in radio used at the time, I was lugging an old cassette recorder set in a box the size of an overweight attaché case. This is not a picture to excite anybody on Carlin’s level of success, who’s used to the best technology in his work. Still, he greeted me very polite and cordial, and I set up the microphones in his kitchen. I was nervous; I was hoping for 20 minutes of usable audio, tops. What a surprise I was in for. My method for pre-taped audio in radio was always first to ask the subject, “How much time can we record?” Experience taught me that reps of talent can say one thing, but the person you’re recording might have other ideas, or may not know the plans at all. Most of the time the person knows what the reporter expects in time, but many times other factors play in the equation: other things come up, or maybe the person’s hung over or just in a lousy mood, hey you never know ‘til it happens. I said, “An hour would be terrific,” and George said, “Sure, no problem!” in his best Brooklyn voice. I asked his biography, the stuff you know every notable person has at the ready, really like pushing the play button on his internal tape player, the stuff that comes out automatic from being said hundreds of times during a career, with some of his favorite lines punctuating his narrative. People in the show business tend to wait to see if the interviewer can spark some excitement in them, coming out of an usual or an actual perceptive question. He put me at ease immediately, of course. Laid back. “Tea? Seltzuh??” So we went through his life chronological, the kid living with his mother in Manhattan, and the great influence she had on him by challenging him on the meaning of words he used, and how she commanded him to ‘check out what it really means in the dictionary.’ It reveals him early on, learning to divine how language is used to conceal or manipulate, as much as it is to communicate straightforward and simple. And George as class clown who rebelled against the crazy nuns at Catholic school, and then the more interesting stuff after high school, when he went into the Air Force and saw bureaucratic paper shuffling and other nonsense first hand. He got excited by doing radio in his time off duty from the Force while stationed in Louisiana. He liked to shock radio listeners with “talking bawdy” in a way nobody ever heard in those days in the 1950s. Then he partnered with Jack Burns, who was a sort of soul-mate for Carlin, and together they developed a radio act persona that was sort of like “Bob and Ray Gone Really REALLY BLUE.” Carlin practically blanched at his memories of those times. “We did some really raw stuff,” he said. I wanted to talk about the artistic aspect in his work, and he blanched at that too. He understood where I was going, that he made an effort to both entertain his loyal fans and to raise political consciousness at the same time. Now this is interesting stuff. He knew he was on to something in his performances and in the characters he created. His fan base is huge, in the millions. At the time I spoke to him, he was playing between 275 to 300 dates every year, and in almost every venue he played, with only small quarter or eighth page display ads in papers, he sold out the house. His average at the time was around 95% attendance everywhere he worked. He knew he had to do the stock stuff in his repertoire, talking about getting laid, car driving, car radios getting SO LOUD! — and of course all the stuff about stuff, and what do you do with all your stuff? My all-time favorite is his routine comparing football and baseball. To my dying day, the replay of it still gets me hysterical, and the first time I saw him do it I really did fall on the floor laughing at it. This is the one to show people who don’t understand Carlin’s popularity. We acknowledge George was an equal opportunity offender. What’s really remarkable about the guy is the consistency of his progress artistically — artist, another word he chafed at — as you see him in the 1960s making a comfortable living wearing the suit and tie and doing the traditional shtick of comedians then, impressions, amusing but predictable lines about the news of the day. . . And then he shed all that, said ‘To hell with it!’ and turned his back on it, went “radical” and started to speak to what excited him, including the hypocrisy towards drug laws, the insanity of pushing the world “to democracy” at the point of a gun, and how politicians and cultural czars alike mutilate language to pull the wool over your eyes. “If a fire fighter fights fire, and a crime fighter fights crime, what does a freedom fighter fight?” Yet his fan base was composed of people who tend to the right, the same kind of crowd that you see at the parking lot at Giants stadium before the football game. “Reagan democrat and full-tilt right wing types.” And Carlin could seduce them with his material and fashion his performance so perfect that suddenly the audiences found themselves cheering Carlin’s attacks on the power elite and the whole sick oligarchy that despises humanity so. FOUR HOURS LATER, he said, “Hey, you gotta get outta here.” I told him how grateful I was, but I had one more request, can I have his permission to bring a tape machine with me, into the audience at his concert, and actually record him from my seat, so I could get the real ambiance of the crowd and its reactions to him. Now you know this violates every protocol in the show business. “Why the hell not,” Carlin said. “Talk to my manager Jerry Hamza and tell him I said it’s okay.” So I did — this time with a good Marantz — and from about 10 rows back in the center, people saw this guy hold up a microphone from his seat, and I recorded about 5 minutes of the concert. It was great. I never expected to hear from him again. About 2 years later, I was on air on WBAI-FM in New York, playing a bunch of old blues records from the likes of Victory Spivey, Big Joe Williams, Lonnie Johnson and a bunch of others. On my way out of the studio to leave, as I passed the front desk, Fred the receptionist piped up and said, “Hey, George Carlin called you.” The note read, “Really love the music, can you send me a copy on cassette?” Now that was a thrill. And a couple months after I sent him the 90-minute tape, I got a check from him for $30. Unbelievable. As time passed, he was more out front in his denunciations of the criminals who afflict our commonwealth. His public line became, “I look forward to watching the world come to an end. It’s going down, and I’m gonna enjoy it.” I know the line was his half-truth. He knew the deck is stacked and the game’s rigged, and he expected that all the good angels cannot overcome the forces of single selfishness and compulsive greed. I know for a fact he also hoped fervently that somehow, the good souls would come together and simple, human decency will prevail, and both our American commonwealth, andour world’s commonwealth, will be realized. I feel more lonesome now that he’s gone. To read more CLICK George Carlin.

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