But Lenz’s wife and young son were on the grounds. He waited until the comedian walked off the stage, then read him his rights. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” Lenz said. “I couldn’t see why nobody was doing anything about it.” Behind the many rows of logs and railroad ties laid out as seating for the main stage, there was a carnival midway, where nine-year-old Kelly Carlin was going for rides on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Ferris wheel, accompanied by a volunteer from the Summerfest staff. The main stage had a powerful amplification system, says Schwall (“If you heard the band Chicago play there, you could pick out the individual horn parts from the back of the crowd”), easily carrying Carlin’s voice beyond his immediate audience to the fairground attractions. There’d been no indication that he should curb his language, Carlin recalled: “No one said to me, you know, ‘Your voice is going to carry over to the cotton candy dispenser, so we don’t want you to do that.’”
As the comedian, wearing faded jeans and open-toed sandals, was being escorted away, Brenda collared Schwall and whispered a few terse words in his ear, something about George’s denim shirt in a desk drawer in the dressing room. “I knew what she meant,” Schwall says. “She didn’t have to spell it out.” The guitarist slipped into the dressing room, pulled out the shirt, and quickly pocketed the contents—a small envelope of cocaine. Moments later, the police searched the room. Though Carlin later joked that he’d made lifelong fans of the Siegel-Schwall Band when he left them with his blow, Schwall says he gave it to a Summerfest staffer later that night, after checking to be sure that Carlin would be bailed out. “When he gets out, he may want this,” he said to the assistant, pressing the package into his hand.
Clearly Carlin had reverted to using cocaine, after temporarily quitting on his German doctor’s recommendation. “Brenda and I laid off of everything for two months and then all of a sudden, we decided to celebrate the Carson thing and the Carnegie thing by getting high,” he said that summer. “So now we know we can stop and be off everything and then all of a sudden we might say, ‘Hey, let’s have another one of those weeks of getting high.’” It was an attitude that would catch up with him soon enough.
When the assistant district attorney refused to file a state criminal charge against Carlin, Lenz and his colleagues turned to the city offices, which charged him with disorderly conduct, then released him on $150 bail. The promoters, meanwhile, tried to cover their own asses. Summerfest executive director Henry Jordan, a former Green Bay Packer, told one local newspaper that he “had no idea he was like that. I have seen him many times on the Johnny Carson show and I had no idea he would use that kind of vulgarity. Summerfest is supposed to be a family show.”
Yet Carlin was not in the mood for apologizing. “I wouldn’t have changed anything I did if I had known there were children in the audience,” he told a local television station. “I think children need to hear those words the most, because as yet they don’t have the hang-ups. It’s adults who are locked into certain thought patterns.” (Schwall maintains that Carlin, having arrived at night by limo and performing in the bright glare of floodlights, in fact may not have realized that there were carnival attractions nearby.) The whole episode was rife with irony: “I find it kind of funny to be hassled for using [the seven words] when my intention is to free us from hassling people for using them,” he said.
Variety
gave the story little attention, running just three paragraphs in a lower corner on an inside page the following week. Someone on the staff, however, couldn’t resist a bit of editorializing. The last paragraph ran as a parenthetical editor’s note:
(Hinterland managers have expressed themselves to
Variety
that they just can’t understand why comedians, who feel that “the kids loved it at the Bitter End and at Carnegie Hall,” do not understand that provincial family tastes differ from what the hypersophisticated audiences will accept in the metropolitan centers.—Ed.)
Following his arrest Carlin contacted the law offices of Coffey, Murray, and Coffey, who were known in the Milwaukee area for their defense of Father James Groppi. Groppi, a liberal Catholic priest raised in Milwaukee’s white, middle-class Bay View neighborhood on the city’s South Side, became nationally known during the late 1960s for his vigorous civil rights activism. Campaigning for school desegregation and fair housing practices, he led numerous marches across a viaduct that stood as a symbol of his city’s racial segregation. In 1969 Father Groppi led a sit-in at the Wisconsin state legislature in Madison with a group of about a thousand welfare mothers, protesting proposed welfare cuts. Charged with contempt of the legislature, Groppi retained Coffey, Murray, and Coffey. “Our firm represented him all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,” says former defense attorney John Murray. “We lost in every court we appeared—the state courts, the federal courts, the Federal Court of Appeals. And the U.S. Supreme Court reversed unanimously in our favor. It was big news at the time.”
Murray was the firm’s attorney on duty the night of Carlin’s Summerfest arrest. Around midnight he got a call from his partner, William Coffey. Murray quickly went down to the city jail, where he told Carlin he’d have him out in minutes. In fact, the comedian was held for nearly two hours. “They jacked us around, I recall vividly,” Murray says. The police insisted on running a National Crime Information Center check on the comedian, “which was absurd,” says Murray, “because he was nationally known.” Finally released in the wee hours of the morning, Carlin and Murray regrouped at the posh Pfister Hotel downtown, meeting Brenda and William Coffey and his wife there to discuss how to proceed. The next morning Carlin appeared with his lawyer in the city attorney’s office and was formally charged.
Though his defense team recommended he pay the fine, Carlin chose to fight the charges. Because the case involved a city ordinance, Murray advised Carlin that he could waive his right to appear in court.
Carlin’s case, after being adjourned several times, finally came up for trial in mid-December. The prosecuting attorney was Theophilus “Ted” Crockett, a longtime member of the city attorney’s office. “They threw the chief deputy city attorney at me,” says Murray. “The police were very upset, in particular this Lenz. He wanted to bury [Carlin]—he was very, very angry.” But Murray was familiar with the judge who drew the case, Raymond E. Gieringer, an out-of-town reserve from Adams County. “I felt very good after I knew Judge Gieringer was going to be the trial judge,” says Murray. “Nothing much bothered him. He was pretty world-wise, even though he was from a smaller county in Wisconsin.”
The city called one witness, a Catholic schoolteacher named Donald Bernacchi, who had attended Summerfest that night with four boys. Though he testified that he had been offended by the comic’s language, when asked whether he had seen any disturbances caused by the performance, he admitted that he had not. One of the defense’s two witnesses was a young assistant DA named Tom Schneider, who had been present at Summerfest. He was also the on-duty DA who had declined to charge Carlin criminally the morning after the show. Schneider, says Murray, “was a reasonable DA who saw nothing but trouble with that case.” Had Schneider seen any disturbance that would amount to a disorderly conduct charge? No, he had not. What did he see when Carlin uttered the seven words? “I saw people laughing,” he replied.
Murray argued that the show had been intended for a late-night audience (Carlin had gone on around ten o’clock), and that it had been clearly promoted as an adult-themed performance. He and his colleagues were well-versed in constitutional law, having handled many free-speech cases (including one concerning the first topless establishment in Milwaukee). Carlin’s routine, they felt, was a textbook example of speech protected by the Bill of Rights.
The case was effectively decided when the judge permitted Murray to play the “Seven Words” routine from Carlin’s new album,
Class Clown
, which had been released in late September. In Carlin’s own voice, the humorous intent of his social commentary was unmistakable. When the defense set up a record player in the courtroom and put the needle down on the last track on side two, even Gieringer had difficulty keeping his composure. “The judge laughed through the entire thing,” says Murray.
“Jeepers creepers, you can imagine,” Gieringer recalled years later. “I tried to maintain as much dignity as I could under the circumstances.”
For Murray, the trial was a bit of a good-luck charm. Several years later, having left the firm to pursue a career in civil law, he auditioned in Milwaukee to become a contestant on the game show
Tic Tac Dough
. Asked to offer a personal detail about himself, he mentioned that he had defended Carlin in the Summerfest case. The producers’ eyes lit up. “I went to Hollywood and was on the show for two weeks,” he says. “I made thirty-five thousand dollars.”
Carlin wasted no time exploiting the notoriety surrounding his arrest. He joked about the incident on
The Tonight Show
, giving the persecuted words a group name, like the Chicago Seven or the Little Rock Nine—the “Milwaukee Seven.” On the set of
The Dick Cavett Show
, he walked on to the strains of “On, Wisconsin,” the official state song and the fight song of the Wisconsin Badgers. After Gieringer dismissed the case, Carlin told Carson he was indebted to “the swinging judge from up north.” Even if the Seven Words themselves remained forbidden on the television airwaves, alluding to them was good for an easy laugh or three.
Despite the objection of vigilantes such as Officer Lenz, the “Seven Words” worked because Carlin made them go down easy. Six years after Bruce’s death, the nation was a very different place than it had been in 1966. Carlin was becoming an unofficial ambassador of the counterculture, representing the hippie fringe to the mainstream. Bending the show business forum to his own devices, he was helping to explain the younger generation’s changing attitudes to the alarmists from the moral majority. If people behaved badly and treated each other poorly, it wasn’t the English language that was responsible. “There are no bad words,” he argued, ever so gently. “Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And
words
.”
“It wasn’t a rant. It was a shrug,” says musician Chandler Travis, who met Carlin in 1971 at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. “He was such a fan of Lenny Bruce. I think he did take some pride in being the guy who picked up that baton. I think he took that responsibility seriously, to the extent that he took much seriously. . . . George’s natural proclivities led him to take [what Lenny did] and push it in a much goofier direction, much more benign.”
Typical of the stages Carlin was then playing, the Main Point was a folkie coffeehouse serving gingerbread and brownies and, for those who needed a meal, plates of baked beans and bread for eighty cents. The talent the cramped space attracted was considerable—Cat Stevens, Dion, and Curtis Mayfield all played there in 1971. (A couple of years later, young New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen made several appearances.) Travis and his performing partner, Steve Shook, were a frequent opening act with their musical comedy shtick, Travis Shook and the Club Wow. On one booking, they were scheduled to support a summer weekend for folk-blues guitarist and singer Dave Van Ronk, Greenwich Village’s “Mayor of MacDougal Street.” When Van Ronk had to cancel, club owner Jeanette Campbell booked Carlin as an emergency replacement; he had just spent a well-received Fourth of July week there opening for Tom Paxton.
En route to the gig, Travis and Shook were stopped by police in Fishkill, New York, where they were detained for possession of marijuana. Searching for more illicit substances, the cops found the musicians’ Band-Aid canister, but somehow missed its contents—several tablets of MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine), the narcotic then enjoying some popularity as “the love drug.” When they finally got to the Main Point, Travis and Shook shared their remaining stash with the headliner, who in turn shared his own grass. It was the beginning of a professional relationship that would last nearly ten years. Travis Shook and the Club Wow became a regular opening act for Carlin, warming up the comic’s third appearance at Carnegie Hall in October 1974 and enduring Groucho Marx’s discouraging assessment—“These guys have been on way too long”—at the Roxy in Los Angeles. Carlin also helped get them booked on
The Tonight Show
a few times.
Like P. D. Q. Bach, the musical comedian Peter Schickele’s fictitious son of a better-known Bach, or the concert pianist Victor Borge, who peppered his playing with gags, Travis Shook played a daffy mix of music and slapstick that appealed to Carlin’s lighter side. “He liked the nonsensical nature of what we did, the anarchy of what we were doing,” says Travis. “By any modern standard, there wasn’t any anarchy in it, but it sort of felt that way at the time.”
Another colleague who became one of Carlin’s longstanding opening acts was the songwriter Kenny Rankin, a soft-rocker whose song “Peaceful” was about to become a Top 20 hit for Jeff Wald’s wife, Helen Reddy. The artists on the tiny Little David roster looked out for one another whenever possible. Singer Dan Cassidy had made his lone
Tonight Show
appearance alongside Carlin in June. (After a short career in music, Cassidy went on to found a collegiate Irish studies program in San Francisco, where he wrote a book called
How the Irish Invented Slang
.) And Little David would soon release
Pure B.S.!
, an album of sketches by Carlin’s old partner, Jack Burns, and his Second City cohort Avery Schreiber. Following on the heels of the comedy team’s summer variety hour on ABC,
Pure B.S.!
featured the same kind of premise-driven humor, heavy on generation-gap satire, that Burns and Carlin had explored on their lone album together years before.
Whereas
FM & AM
was a validation, Carlin’s next album was a true cultural event. The cover featured a photo of the bare-chested comic, in jeans and an unbuttoned denim shirt, sitting on a stool in front of a blackboard, pretending to shove a finger up his nose.
Class Clown
came out in late September 1972 and took off immediately. Curiously, given the comedian’s prolonged effort to break with his past, the material focused in large part on his Catholic school upbringing. Routines such as “I Used to Be Irish Catholic” and the three-part title track were infused with nostalgia for the knockabout years of Carlin’s childhood and adolescence, when he thrived as class clown. “You’d be bored, and you’d figure, Well, why not deprive someone else of their education?” he joked. Instigating inappropriate laughter had been the great joy of his childhood. Now he was making a career of it.