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
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
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