Monday, June 23, 2008
Quick Pause to Salute George
When I was in eighth grade, the cutting edge techology in school libraries (which were in the period of transition when they were starting to be called media centers) were listening centers. Big banks of plastic headphones that could be connected to a cassette player. KINK used to have Album Preview each weeknight at 10pm. I used to take the Panasonic cassette recorder that I had earned from berry picking profits and record their selection first with microphone carefully placed 4-8 inches from the speaker and later through the miracle of patch cords. In January or February of 1972, I had a tape I just had to share with my friends: George Carlin's AM & FM, which paved the way for his far more successful and famous, Class Clown, with the infamous Seven Words... . Carlin had been a comedian for 10 years. We all knew the Hippy Dippy Weatherman, but none of us had heard anything like this.
It didn't take long for us to get busted. Picture a bunch of eighth grade boys laughing their guts out because of a comedian using the word shit in all kinds of artful and funny ways. Somehow I remember getting the tape out of the machine and everyone scrambling off in a different direction when the librarian zeroed in on us.
FM & AM prepared me for Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor's That Nigger's Crazy. But I was never a super nut fan who used to do Carlin's bits. I know from experience that those folks existed. If his HBO specials or hosting of SNL were on you kept him on the room, but I never sought him out. I remember when Second City did a parody of a Carlin in real life who totally alienated his family and friends because he would launch into bit voice and ramble on with some stoney revelation and all would groan or leave.
I felt differently when I saw him in Kevin Smith's Dogma and Jersey Girl. He seemed a perfect choice for these films. In the first, his character came out as the perspective he brought religion in his humor. In the second, you really believed him as Ben Affleck's working class pop, the old man from the hippie daze. Mr. Smith should feel honored to have had this icon in his flicks. And I think it was great that George Carlin was headlining in Vegas a couple weeks past as he has been for decades.
And tonight I got pretty choked up when I saw John Stewart's brief tribute to Carlin: "I'm getting pretty tired of people we need leaving us" He went on to call Carlin a personal hero and the moment of Zen was a brief clip from 1992 where Carlin said that you could learn everything about the Persian Gulf war from the names of two guys in charge of it: DICK Cheney and COLON Powell. Here's the rest of that performance to help say goodnight to George here at the buffet:
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:22 PM
Comments:
My best friend and I used to raid his older brother's record collection when he wasn't home. We listened to Class Clown until we had it memorized. This is the same record collection that hipped us to the Mothers, the Allman Brothers, Cheech and Chong, Black Sabbath, the Dead, etc. There was something about surreptitiously 'sneaking' our listening sessions that made the content so much more meaningful. Years later, watching Carlin's cable specials, I still got a little of that forbidden fruit buzz that made Class Clown such a treat. I will miss George Carlin.
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