To see George Carlin at his greatest CLICK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nvbetio4fI
Bye George
Digital Journal — 22 June 2008 — by Stuart Hutchison — “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.
— Click the pics to read the rest! —

I asked for 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, a 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, and he 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 became 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 will come together and simple, human decency will prevail, and both our American commonwealth, and our world’s commonwealth, will be realized.

I feel lonesome now that he’s gone.

Here’s the obituary from The Times:
New York Times — 24 June 2008 — by Mel Watkins & Bruce Weber — George Carlin, Comic Who Chafed at Society and Its Constraints, Dies at 71 — George Carlin, whose astringent stand-up comedy made him an heir of Lenny Bruce, who gave voice to an indignant counterculture and assaulted the barricades of censorship on behalf of a generation of comics that followed him, died on Sunday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 71 and lived in Venice, Calif.

The cause was heart failure, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. Mr. Carlin, who performed earlier this month at the Orleans hotel in Las Vegas, had a history of heart problems.

“By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth,” read a message on Mr. Carlin’s Web site, GeorgeCarlin.com, and he spent much of his life in a fervent effort to counteract the forces that would have it so. In his always irreverent, often furious social commentary, in his observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and in groundbreaking routines like the profane “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” he took aim at what he thought of as the palliating and obfuscating agents of American life — politicians, advertisements, religion, the media and conventional thinking of all stripes.

“If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?” he asked in a 1980s routine, taking a jab at the Reagan administration’s defense of the Nicaraguan Contras.

During a career that spanned five decades, Mr. Carlin emerged as one of the most popular, durable, productive and versatile comedians of his era. He evolved from Jerry Seinfeld-like whimsy and a buttoned-down decorum in the ’60s to counterculture hero in the ’70s.

By the ’80s, he was known as a scathing social critic, wringing laughs from the verbal tics of contemporary language like the oxymoron “jumbo shrimp” (and finding another oxymoron in the term “military intelligence”) and poking fun at pervasive national attitudes. He used the ascent of football’s popularity at the expense of the game he loved, baseball, to make the point that societal innocence had been lost forever.

“Baseball is a 19th-century pastoral game,” he said. “Football is a 20th-century technological struggle. Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.”

Through the 1990s and into the 21st century, Mr. Carlin, balding but still pony-tailed, prowled the stage — eyes ablaze with intensity — as the comedy circuit’s most splenetic curmudgeon, raging over the shallowness of a “me first” culture; mocking the infatuation with camcorders, hyphenated names and sneakers with lights on them; lambasting white guys over 10 years old who wear their baseball hats backwards, baby boomers “who went from ‘do your thing’ to ‘just say no’ ” and “from cocaine to Rogaine”; and foes of abortion rights. “How come when it’s us it’s an abortion,” he asked, “and when it’s a chicken it’s an omelet?”

George Denis Carlin was born in New York City on May 12, 1937. His mother, Mary, a secretary, separated from his father when he was an infant, and he grew up with his mother and his older brother, Patrick, on West 121st Street in Manhattan.

“I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio,” Mr. Carlin said. “My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally, and my mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.”

He dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force, and while stationed in Shreveport, La., he worked as a radio disc jockey. Discharged in 1957, he moved to Boston for a radio announcer’s job, then to Fort Worth, where he was a D.J.

Along the way he met Jack Burns, a newscaster and comedian. They worked together in Fort Worth and Los Angeles, performing on the radio and in clubs and even appearing on “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar. The comedian Mort Sahl, whose penchant for social commentary Mr. Carlin came to share, dubbed them “a duo of hip wits.”

Still, the Carlin-Burns team was only moderately successful, and, in 1960, Mr. Carlin struck out on his own.

He made his first television solo guest appearance on “The Tonight Show” in 1962, in the interim between Paar’s departure and Johnny Carson’s arrival; the host that night was Mr. Sahl. His second wasn’t until 1965, when he made the first of 29 appearances on “The Merv Griffin Show.”

At that time, he was primarily known for his clever wordplay and reminiscences of his Irish working-class upbringing in New York. But there were intimations of an anti-establishment edge. It surfaced, for example, in a parody of television newscasts, for which he invented characters like Al Sleet, “the “hippy-dippy weatherman”: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning.”

Mr. Carlin released his first comedy album, “Take-Offs and Put-Ons,” to rave reviews in 1967. He also dabbled in acting, winning a recurring part as Marlo Thomas’s theatrical agent in the 1960s sitcom “That Girl” and a supporting role in the 1968 movie “With Six You Get Eggroll.” He made more than 80 major television appearances during that time, including on the Ed Sullivan Show and Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show;” he was also regularly featured at nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas.

He was one of America’s most popular comedians, but as the convulsive decade of 1960s ended, he’d had enough of what he considered a dinky and hollow success.

“I was entertaining the fathers and the mothers of the people I sympathized with, and in some cases associated with, and whose point of view I shared,” he recalled later, as quoted in the book “Going Too Far” by Tony Hendra (Doubleday, 1987). “I was a traitor, in so many words. I was living a lie.”

In 1970, Mr. Carlin staged a remarkable reversal of field, discarding his suit and tie, as well as the relatively conventional and clean-cut material that had catapulted him to the top. He reinvented himself, emerging with a beard, long hair, jeans and a routine steeped in drugs and insolence. A backlash followed; in one famous incident, he was advised to leave town when an angry audience threatened him at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., for joking about the Vietnam War. Afterward, he temporarily abandoned nightclubs for coffee houses and colleges, where he found a younger, hipper audience that was more attuned to both his new image and his material.

By 1972, when he released his second album, “FM & AM,” his star was again on the rise. The album, which won a Grammy Award as best comedy recording, combined older material with his newer, more acerbic routines.

One, from “Class Clown,” Mr. Carlin’s third album, became part of his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” with its rhythmic recitation of obscenities. It was broadcast on the New York radio station WBAI. Acting on a complaint about the broadcast, the Federal Communications Commission issued an order prohibiting the words as “indecent.” In 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the order, establishing a decency standard that remains in effect; it ensnared Howard Stern in 2005, precipitating his move to satellite radio.

Mr. Carlin refused to drop the bit and was arrested several times after reciting it onstage.

By the mid-’70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr. Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade. In addition to his jests about religion and politics, he talked about using drugs, including LSD and peyote; he kicked cocaine, he said, not for moral or legal reasons but because he found “far more pain in the deal than pleasure.”

Three of Mr. Carlin’s comedy albums of the 1970’s — “Class Clown,” “Occupation: Foole” and “An Evening With Wally Lambo” — sold more than a million copies. In 1975, he was chosen to host the first episode of the late-night comedy show “Saturday Night Live.” And two years later, he found the perfect platform for his stinging and cerebral, if sometimes off-color, humor in the fledgling world of cable television: the first of his 14 HBO comedy specials, “George Carlin at U.S.C.” was aired in 1977, the last, “George Carlin: It’s Bad for Ya,” in March.

During the course of his career, Mr. Carlin overcame numerous personal trials. His early arrests for obscenity (all of which were dismissed) and his problem with cocaine were the most publicized. But he also weathered serious tax problems, a heart attack and two open-heart surgeries; his health problems cost him five years of productivity between 1977 and 1982. Though he had been able to taper his cocaine use on his own, he said, he continued to abuse alcohol and also became addicted to Vicodin. In December 2004 he entered a rehabilitation center.

“Stand-up is the centerpiece of my life, my business, my art, my survival and my way of being,” Mr. Carlin once told an interviewer. And while it did always take center stage in his career, Mr. Carlin also acted in films, among them “Car Wash” (1976), “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989), “The Prince of Tides” (1991), and “Dogma” (1999).

He also wrote books, expansions on his comedy routines, including “Brain Droppings” (1997), “Napalm & Silly Putty (2001) and “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?” (2004), all published by Hyperion. A 1994 sitcom, “The George Carlin Show,” lasted a single season. He also did a stint narrating the children’s television show “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends.”

Mr. Carlin won a total of four Grammy Awards. He was recently named the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which he was to receive in November at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The Kennedy Center said Monday that the prize would be given posthumously and that the evening would be a tribute to his life and work.

In addition to his brother, Patrick, Mr. Carlin is survived by his wife, Sally Wade, and a daughter, Kelly Carlin McCall. His first wife, Brenda Hosbrook, died in 1997.

Mr. Carlin’s most recent work was especially contentious, even bitter, full of ranting against the stupid, the fat, the docile. But he defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society.

“Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting. Copyright © 24 June 2008 The New York Times Company