Tuesday, June 24, 2008

George Carlin College Radio Memory

It was sad to hear that comedian George Carlin died this week. I remember listening to him with my parents when I was young and the one routine that sticks in my head was about gross things in the back of the refrigerator, containing the great line "could be meat, could be cake...meat cake."

But....like many who've been in college radio, George Carlin will forever be immortalized in my mind for the seven dirty words that were said out loud (but never over the air) repeatedly during radio training classes for my FCC license (back in the day when individual DJs needed licenses). Some of those words are now heard on broadcast TV, but still feel like "no no's" to me since they're on that list that I've had ingrained in my head for so many years thanks to Mr. Carlin.

So, it was kind of cool to find this blog post from a guy who remembered hearing George Carlin on his campus-only college radio station.

Rags writes:

"I bought his debut album, for which he received the Grammy (and on his second elpee you can hear his reaction as that performance was taped for that album, interrupting the routine that would later get him to the Supreme Court) and went to see him with Sally Mary Atkins with whom I was madly in love for a semester while I was at Rutgers and she went to Boston College. Actually we didn't see him in the student center in New Brunswick because the performance was sold out ten times over but the campus radio station, WRSU-FM, and its program director, my classmate Bob Berman, received permission to 'broadcast' it through the university's buildings (the radio station had no transmitters nor license so there was never a danger children might hear George say words on the radio that their parent said during arguments in their living rooms. Thank goodness!)."

Do you have any George Carlin radio memories? Does your station still ban the same 7 words from his famous routine?

1 comment:

Jon Schleuss said...

Yes, sadly, those are very naughty words [at kscl] that we repeat over and over at DJ meetings. Our mouths are rather like faucets, switching on and off the profane.