COMIC CARLIN BOUNCES BACK INTO PUBLIC EYE

The hardest part of success isn’t getting there, it’s staying there through the bum times that unfailingly mix in with the good times.

George Carlin, who appears Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre, recalls the period in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when “I had it pretty much all to myself.”

Along with Cheech & Chong, Carlin was the ‘60s counterculture’s principal comedy spokesman. His first four albums went gold. He was ubiquitous on the TV talk-show circuit. He developed a huge and steadfast following that prized his quirky voices, his linguistic play and his pungent evocations of early adolescent braggadocio.

Then things changed. “I went into what an objective observer would call an eclipse,” he said. “Whenever someone says to me, ‘I thought something happened to you somewhere,’ I know what period they’re referring to.”

There was, for example, a period when he felt such alienation from his audience that he began considering it “the enemy.” More than once he saw the sweetheart face of his ultimate dream--an acting career--stare him down into terminal flop sweat. By 1976 the edgy despond of cocaine overuse had a heavy grip on him, he said. In 1982 he had a heart attack and two subsequent open-heart surgeries. Then there was that nettlesome matter of the IRS and its $2-million claim on his earnings.

If all this weren’t enough, Carlin was fighting off the deep chill of anxiety that seeps into every artist or public figure who has been too closely identified with a historical moment and becomes lashed to its passing. Though his skills were undiminished, he saw his career fading with the tie-dye shirt.

But Carlin held on by doing what any self-respecting pro would do who for one reason or another has been cut out of a major movie or commercial TV career: He hit the road. In addition to a steady output of albums and HBO cable specials, he’s played 100 concerts a year in 3,000-seaters and up all over the country. At 50, he’s learned that talent without knowledgeable discipline and emotional resiliency leaves you with nothing but a load of scrapbooks and faded invitations to vanished industry galas.

Today, Carlin claims to be out of debt, off drugs, possessed of a heart’s “arteries of a 10-year-old,” and ready to reposition himself in the public eye.

“I’ve said this in a number of interviews: I’ve always had a plan from the time I was a kid,” he said recently, alone in his Westwood office building. “In the fifth grade we were asked to write an autobiography, which is a very good age to do something like that. But it had to have a conclusion about what you wanted for the future. I said I wanted to be either an actor, a comedian, an impersonator, a radio announcer or a trumpet player. So you can see I needed some way to get attention in my future.

“I grew up in Morningside Heights in Manhattan. I was a street kid. I didn’t take with authority and regimentation and discipline in school. I was a disruptive force in class, a troubled kid. My father, who was a killer raconteur, was very successful in advertising. So was my mother, who was also good with voices and liked to tell stories. He was absent a lot. Eventually she left him.”

Carlin is still uneasy relaying this period in his life in which the pain of parental separation, compounded by being Irish-Catholic, forced him into feeling very much on his own (perhaps the vividness of that recollection is what makes his childhood evocations so effortless; in some respects, he’s never left the neighborhood that gave him his early awakening).

“My plan was to quit school as soon as possible, go into the Air Force, come out and become a disc jockey on the GI Bill. That’d lead me to stand-up, and stand-up would lead me to the movies. I was making adult decisions at 16.”

He stuck to his plan. He quit high school after his freshman year and joined the Air Force, where he wound up in Shreveport, La. Earlier, through the use of a bulky old Webcor tape recorder, he had learned to tone down his New York accent in favor of what he calls “a standard American non-regional accent.” He polished his radio technique on a station in New Orleans. Later he met another radio announcer and aspiring actor from Boston named Jack Burns. Together they decided to form a comedy team, keeping their day jobs while playing coffee houses and nightclubs. One afternoon, while sitting in their underwear in a Fort Worth radio station and dreaming up comedy bits, they mused on what it would be like to do the Jack Paar show. Eight months later Paar booked them.

“We lasted two years together, trying to be hip, topical and trendy, using those buzzwords like ‘KKK,’ which today seems tame,” Carlin said. “At the same time, we were these cold, green guys who found a niche for ourselves at the right time and made money. Then I got married, and my desire to be a single (act) took prominence.”

Carlin quickly became a success on the TV talk-show circuit, which led to steady spots on variety shows such as “The Jimmy Dean Show” and as a summer replacement for Jackie Gleason called “And Away We Go.” He had a lucrative Vegas gig. He was ready for his next step--the movies--at which point the Peter Principle kicked in, and his confidence and sense of purpose began a long, slow process of unraveling.

The movie was “With Six You Get Egg Roll,” with Doris Day and Brian Keith. “I’d always assumed that these great instincts would take over and I’d just be able to do this stuff,” Carlin said. “But I discovered I was incompetent. I had no training, no technique to fall back on. I did auditions, commercials, and a ‘That Girl’ that’s still floating around out there somewhere. But I was embarrassed and afraid. I felt alien, and eventually I didn’t want to contemplate acting at all.”

That sense of failure rebounded back into his comedy, something he had only considered as a means to a different end, which is another way of saying that his heart wasn’t in it.

“All my friends in the counterculture were espousing freer ideas, and here I was in nightclubs entertaining businessmen in suits and women in beehive hairdos. I was playing a game that was out of step with what I was feeling inside. I grew resentful about entertaining. I felt I was consorting with the enemy.

“But I had a residual feeling for the counterculture before the word was coined, based on the earlier work of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May. All these young people investing their music with their feelings, and ideals and politics. It seemed wonderful that you could express your point of view. The change with me was gradual, but eventually I stopped feeling out of step with my own psyche. I let my hair grow. I felt my delayed adolescence coming through--remember I’d been making adult decisions since 16. My breakthrough coincided with America’s deferred adolescence finally expressing itself. I realized that I belonged, and that comedy wasn’t just a flyer. It was real. You could still express your rage in it.”

Carlin’s records were hot sellers and in 1975 he was a natural to host the premiere segment of “Saturday Night Live.” But by 1976 Carlin was trying to wrestle down a drug habit. “I’d always done pot and beer, but in ’74 I started with cocaine and by ’76 I knew I was using too much. It took me more to get high, the good feeling lasted for less time and the bad hung on longer. I realized this stuff was making me feel bad. I was paying money to get depressed. I realized I had to stop. I’m one of those people who values the meaning of experience and can draw lessons from it.”

No longer a hot comedy property, Carlin once again had to reappraise his career. His emphasis was less on the primacy of self-expression now than it was on forging a link with his public. “I realized that though there was the flurry over my scandalous attitudes (his routine on The Seven Dirty Words was featured in an FCC suit that was heard by the Supreme Court in 1978), there was always a flavor in my comedy that was not threatening. There was a humane and intelligent base to it. People began to see and accept that.”

Despite his “eclipse,” which continued through 1981, his frequent guest calls from comedy’s Vatican--”The Tonight Show”--and his cable specials enabled him to rebuild.

The years have given Carlin an analytical view of comedy as a metier--after all, what was once a performance device eventually became a means of survival--and he’s able to speak thoughtfully of its theory and application.

“I’m not an improviser. I add to a thing bit by bit until it fills out a finished pattern, then I keep it until something better comes along. An example is a segment called ‘People I Can Do Without.’ I started with eight, such as ‘Guys in Their 50s named Skip,’ and have about 60 or 70 now. Twenty-six work beautifully. Some take 20 tries to work on stage. For example, ‘People who pay for vaginal jelly with Exxon credit cards’ was once ‘People who pay for contraceptives with credit cards’--jelly better than contraceptives, Exxon better than credit card. It has more emotional bite, and there’s a subliminal link about petroleum. You look for the word that creates an image. You avoid words that people have to think about.

“ ‘A proctologist with poor depth perception’--that grabs them. A phrase like ‘depth perception’ gives them the credit. You like to give an audience self-pride.

“Following your intuition almost all the time will take you where you ought to be. Even if it’s toward the aggression that’s popular right now. Comedy is the only art form where you can express outright aggression in public. Someone like Sam Kinison validates my anger. We live in a time when there’s a mounting environmental and social assault on human sensibility. The comedian is only responding. Humor is a healing art.”

Comedy is also the art of perpetual immediacy, of which Carlin has obviously never tired. “I don’t mean to give you a Tony Orlando number, but once you get out there on stage, it starts all over. It’s all new again.”