improvised mock interviews, Bob and Ray style, with a repertoire of oblivious blowhards.
By the time they felt ready to go public with their act, Burns and Carlin had developed a stable of wrongheaded, inflexible stock characters of the kind that would later achieve infamy with All in the Family ’s Archie Bunker. As local radio personalities, the pair went from fantasy comedy duo to actual stage time almost literally overnight. The place to be in Fort Worth in 1959 was the Cellar, a basement-level “coffeehouse” just opened beneath a hotel at 1111 Houston Street. Serving vodka and whiskey on the sly in paper cups, the Cellar was the open-mike playroom of Pat Kirkwood, a race car driver who, according to local legend, won the room in a poker game, and Johnny Carroll, a true rock ’n’ roll lunatic who was good friends with rockabilly star Gene Vincent and had once been signed by Sun Records. Thrashing at his electric guitar while seated behind a drum kit, stomping on the kick drum and the high-hat pedal, Carroll was a howling, overstimulated one-man band. Fueled by Desoxyn tablets hidden in a metal ashtray stand, the rockabilly wildcat ran the club as an anything-goes showcase, paying amateur dancers with booze and frequently giving the stage over to “King George Cannibal Jones,” an eccentric junk percussionist named George Coleman who later recorded as Bongo Joe. “You must be weird or you wouldn’t be here,” read one scrawl on the blackboard-style wall of the club.
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
By the time they felt ready to go public with their act, Burns and Carlin had developed a stable of wrongheaded, inflexible stock characters of the kind that would later achieve infamy with All in the Family ’s Archie Bunker. As local radio personalities, the pair went from fantasy comedy duo to actual stage time almost literally overnight. The place to be in Fort Worth in 1959 was the Cellar, a basement-level “coffeehouse” just opened beneath a hotel at 1111 Houston Street. Serving vodka and whiskey on the sly in paper cups, the Cellar was the open-mike playroom of Pat Kirkwood, a race car driver who, according to local legend, won the room in a poker game, and Johnny Carroll, a true rock ’n’ roll lunatic who was good friends with rockabilly star Gene Vincent and had once been signed by Sun Records. Thrashing at his electric guitar while seated behind a drum kit, stomping on the kick drum and the high-hat pedal, Carroll was a howling, overstimulated one-man band. Fueled by Desoxyn tablets hidden in a metal ashtray stand, the rockabilly wildcat ran the club as an anything-goes showcase, paying amateur dancers with booze and frequently giving the stage over to “King George Cannibal Jones,” an eccentric junk percussionist named George Coleman who later recorded as Bongo Joe. “You must be weird or you wouldn’t be here,” read one scrawl on the blackboard-style wall of the club.
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
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