Into this den of iniquity Burns and Carlin brought their makeshift comedy team, performing excessively raunchy routines—“dirty, filthy things,” as Carlin himself admitted. Some took the form of imaginary interviews with their television hero, the silly sophisticate Paar, which they often sprang on each other in the apartment: “How did you two meet?” Burns, playing Paar, would ask Carlin, representing the duo. “Well, I was fucking Jack’s mother, and. . . .” Other sketches, deliberately steamrolling into the realm of bad taste, would within a year end up on the duo’s only album together, including a manic routine that proposed a mail-order “Junior Junkie” kit for “hip kiddies” from those lovable corrupters of children, Captain Jack and Jolly George. (Besides the “U.S. Army Surplus 12cc hypodermic needle” and other supplies, they joked in aggressively gruff voices, the first 250 buyers would also receive an eight-by-ten glossy of Alexander King, then a
Tonight Show
regular who’d written a book about his struggle with morphine addiction.)
Burns and Carlin were long gone by the time the Cellar was forced to move to a new location in late 1960, after a fire. The new venue, one of several that Pat Kirkwood opened across Texas, from Houston to San Antonio (always on Pearl Harbor Day), would become notorious as the place where several of President Kennedy’s Secret Service agents congregated on the night before the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald, Kirkwood claimed, worked as a dishwasher at the short-lived Cellar in San Antonio for two weeks before committing his crime, and his killer, Jack Ruby, a fellow nightclub proprietor, was known to the Cellar’s owner as “a Jewish wannabe hoodlum and speed freak who was like all the other joint owners from here to Casablanca.”
Kirkwood knew how to build a legend and how to keep it in business when the goings-on attracted an inordinate amount of unwanted attention. “All policemen, all reporters, all pretty girls, all musicians, all doctors, all lawyers, and all our personal friends come in free and get free drinks forever,” he instructed his staff, which typically consisted of a small pool of waitresses often clad in bras and panties and a couple of ruthless, no-nonsense bouncers. Though he welcomed eccentricities of all kinds, Kirkwood nevertheless instituted several iron-clad rules—“no troublemakers, no queers, no pimps, no blacks, [and] no narcotics.” The cover charge was a dollar, unless a member of one of the offending groups appeared at the door, in which case the door-man would point to the sign claiming the cover was actually a thousand dollars.
With one bare red bulb constituting all the lighting the place could muster, jazz tapes playing over the speaker system in the absence of live entertainment, and many customers sitting on pillows on the floor, the original Cellar, Carlin recalled, was “pre-hippie, but definitely post-beatnik.” For a New Yorker, the idea of hipsters in dark shades gathered in a dank hovel, addressing each other as “daddy,” was a bit musty by 1959. Several years too young to have participated first-hand in the bohemian renaissance of the early 1950s in New York and San Francisco (Jack Kerouac was born in 1922, Allen Ginsberg in 1926), Burns and Carlin were sufficiently removed to see it through the filter of popular culture. By 1959 that meant Maynard Krebs and sensational pulp novels and movies about promiscuous young people in black turtlenecks—the “beatniks,” as
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen had labeled them a year earlier. Though the comedians were undoubtedly drawn to the freaky, arty underground and the footloose freedom the Beats represented, beatniks were an easy target by 1959.
In Fort Worth, however, the freewheeling vibe of the Cellar was unprecedented. With a clientele made up largely of return customers who came back night after night, eager to see what kind of fresh debauchery Johnny Carroll could rustle up, Burns and Carlin were obliged to think fast on their feet. “We became very inventive and creative,” said Carlin. In one “vignette,” as Burns labeled it on the act’s album, the pair skewered what was by then the universally familiar caricature of the Beat Generation—the angry poet, railing against inhumanity with excessive use of the adjectives “naked,” “dirty,” and “stinking.” Haphazardly crediting Kerouac and “Arnold” Ginsberg for inspiring the archetype, Burns played the shrill performance poet Herb Coolhouse, the fertile mind behind the epic verse “Ode to a Texaco Restroom on Alternate U.S. 101 South.” Carlin, sucking greedily on an imaginary roach and talking in a wise guy’s nasal clip, identified himself as Coolhouse’s sidekick, Amos Malfi, a “fairly salty bongo player.”
The comedy team had bigger, more mainstream ambitions. After several months pinballing among the KXOL studio, the Cellar, and the bachelors’ apartment in Monticello, the two friends packed their meager belongings and headed for Hollywood. On the air Carlin told his listeners that he and his newscaster were hitting the road as soon as he signed off. Hearing that, listener Pat Havis drove over to the station and parked in the deserted lot. As Carlin walked out of the building and got in his car, she stood there forlornly against her bumper and watched him leave.
Heading west in Carlin’s new Dodge Dart Pioneer, the partners listened to the KXOL signal as long as they could, until it faded into the night sky over west Texas. In a salute to his departing colleagues, “Captain” Mike Ambrose, the overnight disc jockey, played Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” then a Top 10 hit, several times during the hour after Carlin signed off. It was February 1960. The pair felt sure they were destined for stardom.
Earle Fletcher, KXOL’s station manager, had heard such plans before. He was annoyed; he’d just spent a good deal of money having fan club cards printed for the host of the
Hi-Fi Club
. “A lot of people, young boys like yourself, have left to go to Hollywood,” he told Carlin. “Between you and me, most of them came right back.”
BURNS AND CARLIN had $300 saved up. Their plan was to live off that until they could round up some nightclub appearances in Los Angeles. They were determined not to fall back on menial labor. “We’re not gonna park cars, we’re not gonna wash dishes, we’re not gonna wait tables,” Carlin recalled them saying to each other. “We’re gonna do the comedy.” In Los Angeles they went straight to Dean Martin’s place, Dino’s Lodge, which they recognized from
77 Sunset Strip
. The popular detective series featured a character named “Kookie” Kookson, a valet parking attendant and street-smart informant whose rock ’n’ roll slang and constant hair-combing made actor Edd Byrnes a teen idol.
The newcomers immediately blew some of their savings hanging around Dino’s and the Brown Derby, hoping to spot someone famous. They were soon panicked to find that someone had lifted the rest of their cash from a drawer in their new apartment. Hastily canvassing for emergency jobs in radio, they dropped in on an R&B station with the call letters KDAY, then located on Vine Street in Los Angeles. As it happened, the station was looking for a new morning-drive comedy team. Burns and Carlin auditioned, were offered the job on the spot, and began punching the clock two weeks later.
Originally owned in part by Gene Autry, the “Singing Cowboy,” KDAY was “the leading Negro and foreign-language station this side of Chicago” by 1953, when it was sold to the owners of the
Santa Monica Times
. In the spring of 1960, just after Burns and Carlin’s arrival, the fifty-kilowatt station would become the new home to disc jockey Alan Freed. According to Bob Dye, then KDAY’s chief engineer, Freed’s hiring marked a period when the station’s owners were “trying anybody and everybody to make the station go”—including the new morning team. At the time, KDAY was experimenting with a playlist that relied heavily on doo-wop, which was enjoying a modest resurgence in popularity following the tumultuous emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s. (Carlin, of course, was a doo-wop fanatic, going back to his days on the street corners in “White Harlem.”)
Freed was a legend on his way down, a nationally recognized promoter of rock ’n’ roll from Cleveland—credited with popularizing the term—who had become persona non grata in the New York market following a series of scandals. His short-lived network television program was canceled in 1957 when the teenage black singer Frankie Lymon danced on air with a white girl, infuriating many of ABC’s Southern affiliates. Two years later he was named a primary defendant in the government’s case against “payola,” the music industry’s kick-back system for getting new records played on the radio. Freed had come to KDAY at the invitation of program director Mel Leeds, his former boss at the Manhattan station WINS. On the air Freed pounded on his trademark telephone books and clanged his cowbells, gamely trying to re-create his famous exuberance for the youth music he’d helped popularize just a few years earlier.
In their three brief months at KDAY, Burns and Carlin went by an alias, the Wright Brothers. The station promoted them as a hot new thing in town, taking out full-color ads in
Variety
. The partners did scripted comedy on-air, for which they scoured the topics of the day and wrote furiously. “We were insane,” Carlin remembered years later, “and it was a funny show, but we had to open the station at six a.m., which was a drag. Sometimes we’d be as much as fifteen minutes late, all hung over, so we’d break in like, ‘—oudy today, chance of drizzle in the late afternoon,’ so the listeners would just assume there was something wrong with their radios.” It was a ploy they borrowed from Bob and Ray, whose bumbling newscaster, Wally Ballou, had an unbreakable habit of starting to talk a beat before his microphone went live.
The brief KDAY gig was just enough to get the partners’ feet in the door of the LA nightclub scene, the goal they’d set for themselves when they left Texas. Years after they quit the station, Carlin requested that his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame be placed outside the former KDAY studio.
In May they took a weekly engagement at Cosmo Alley, a quintessential Beat coffeehouse in Hollywood. The waitresses wore black tights and long hair combed down their backs; some of the customers wore stereotypical berets. The club was opened in 1957 by Herb Cohen, later known as an artist manager of Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, and many others. Cohen had previously managed the Los Angeles outpost of the Purple Onion, and he and the actor and folk singer Theodore Bikel had partnered in the opening of the Unicorn, the first folk café of its kind in Los Angeles when it opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1955.
For Cosmo Alley, Cohen took over a room that had been an Armenian restaurant—“sort of a back room to the Ivar Theater,” he says. “When they moved up to Sunset, I took over the space.” Named for the side street it was on, Cosmo Alley was on “a narrow street with nothing else on it. No big entrance, just a door. You couldn’t find it. There was no front to it.” The mystery of the place, of course, was what drew people in. When 150 people were in the room, it was packed. Cohen took down the plaster walls, exposing the original brick, and had the overhead pipes painted—“very sparse, very industrial, which is what I wanted it to look like. At the time, it was very hip. It was black and dark, candles, very intimate.”
In addition to folk and jazz music, Cosmo Alley featured comedy, and the trendy club attracted a Hollywood clientele—Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda. The place had a caged mynah bird, and one headliner, Lenny Bruce, labored for weeks to teach the bird a short phrase: “The pope sucks.”
At Cosmo Alley, Burns and Carlin put in their own hard work, fine-tuning the routines they’d conceived in Texas and developing several more. One bit was about Edward R. Murrow interviewing a bigoted senator, and another was about a boxing palooka (“Killer” Carlin) with a voice like a rusty saw blade. They also had Carlin’s uncanny impersonation of Bruce doing one of his own earliest recorded bits, “Djinni in the Bottle.” Their humor was biting, often flirting, as in the “Capt. Jack and Jolly George” routine, with outright tastelessness. But the two comics were also working out their social consciences. “We took positions,” Carlin recalled. “We did jokes about racism, about the Ku Klux Klan, about the John Birch Society, about religions. . . . We felt connected to that sort of movement that was starting then”: comedy about “values, the world, and, in a lot of cases, self.”
Not that they drew much in the way of a following. “They were booked when there was time available, when I couldn’t get Maya Angelou [then a calypso singer] or Lenny Bruce or the Limelighters,” says Cohen. “The act was not great. If you heard Lenny Bruce once, you were mesmerized. If you heard Mort Sahl, it was so unique, it was brilliant. . . . I’m not trying to denigrate what they did. It’s just that they weren’t in that category yet. I have this visual image of them in suits. It was a very straight comedy act. I’m not saying it wasn’t good—it just wasn’t anything special.”
Still, their introduction to Hollywood could hardly have been more propitious. They quickly picked up an agent, a Tinseltown operator named Murray Becker, who’d been a road manager with Rowan and Martin, future hosts of NBC’s zany, lava-lamp-style sketch comedy show
Laugh-In
. Dan Rowan and Dick Martin were already familiar to a national audience by 1960, having alternated with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin as weekly hosts of NBC’s
Colgate Comedy Hour
. Hired to assemble a summer replacement for
The Dean Martin Show
in 1966, the duo parlayed that success into
Laugh-In
, which would debut in January 1968.
KDAY was another “sundowner” station, going off the air each night at dusk. Its offices were used after hours by various freelance characters circling the entertainment industry—song pluggers, mostly, and managerial types. Burns and Carlin took advantage of their access to the building, rehearsing their act in the studio. Becker was one of the hustlers working the angles in the station hallways. He watched the two comics from the Northeast tinkering with their act and announced that he wanted to become their manager. “He didn’t have a lot of connections,” Carlin recalled. “He was just a really dedicated guy. He really cared about us.” And he was encouraged that the comedians, although intentionally confrontational, could also work “clean,” as necessitated by their new radio gig. “That was big. ‘They work clean,’ he’d tell people.”