R.I.P. George Carlin (1937-2008)

by Chuck Eddy

It's become this ridiculous cliché in recent years to pretend that "such and such people were the rock stars of their day," whatever that's supposed to mean. Just over the weekend, I saw the claim bestowed upon both early '60s advertising bigwigs (in a New York Times Sunday magazine piece about the TV series Mad Men) and old-time magicians (on Antiques Roadshow). But this morning, when I learned George Carlin had succumbed to heart failure Sunday evening in Santa Monica at the age of 71, the obits reminded me of something -- back in suburban Detroit, in 1974, when I was fresh out of eighth grade at Our Lady of Refuge, this fellow lapsed Catholic seemed to me like a bigger rock star than any rock star I could name, give or take maybe Elton John. And when you think about it, it was guys like Carlin and Cheech and Chong and Richard Pryor whose Watergate-era bullsh*t-detection and post-hippie potty mouths set the stage for what rock music -- or, even more maybe, hip-hop -- would eventually evolve into. So if George Carlin wasn't the rock star of his day, maybe spouting the seven words you can't say on television made him a rap star, at least.

In high school, I bought copies of Carlin's FM & AM, Class Clown, Occupation: Foole!, and possibly Toledo Window Box before I'd purchased almost any albums with actual music on them. And it's easy to imagine that the Beastie Boys, say, must have been taking notes at some point as well. Between 1972 and 1975, five of his albums made the Top 40 in the United States. And while he never would attain such chart heights again, that probably has as much to do with the evolution of the entertainment industry as with his own work, which in some ways only continued to become more topically focused as time went on. "People used to say albums were hot, then they were cold, then they were hot for comedians," Carlin told Billboard's Chris Walsh, in an interview I edited last year. "There's just too much going on in the popular culture for that to work -- too many things competing for people's attention."

Discussing drugs or Catholicism or the 10 commandments or yeast infections or underarm farts, Carlin's humor was ultimately life-affirming even when he would end up naming albums Life Is Worth Losing; he insisted he was a skeptic, but not a cynic. Last year, according to that Billboard piece, he was still doing 80 live dates a year, after half a century in show business; MPI Home Video commemorated the landmark with a 14-disc DVD box, spanning his career. "It's very interesting to have lived through the golden age of radio, the golden age of television, the golden age of movies, the golden age of American popular standard music," he told Billboard's Walsh. "It's fun to live life."

Carlin, by all accounts, lived a full one. And when it comes to those seven words, "tits" still doesn't belong on the list.