DRIVIN’ HIS OWN BUS : George Carlin Still Seeks Truth, but Lets the Rest Come to Him

George Carlin’s latest comedy album--his 15th in 30 years--is titled “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics.”

“The cover of the album is an enlarged replica of the warning stickers that (many) record companies have elected to put on their records,” said Carlin, who records under his own label, Eardrum Records. “I thought as long as they wanted me to do that I would mock the people who insist on that stuff.”

The album contains the material from Carlin’s most recent HBO special aired last June.

“It is an awful lot of politically and socially edged material because that’s a part of me I keep alive,” he said. “I keep finding it and nurturing it.”

It has been two decades since George Carlin underwent one of show business’ most dramatic make-overs. In 1970, he shed his clean-cut suit-and-tie image, abandoned his safe, middle-class material and burst forth with a hipper, more honest, more biting comedy steeped in, as one ‘70s critic put it, “drugs and bawdy language.”

At the time, the newly bearded Carlin, who opens a three-night stand at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight, was christened the comedic Voice of the Counterculture.

“That’s the way the world describes it,” Carlin said in an interview. “I’d say I just started being true to my own values instead of just pretending.”

Twenty years, four gold comedy albums and “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” later, the irreverent and whimsical George Carlin is still being true to himself.

But times have changed and so has Carlin, who was arrested in 1972 for reciting the controversial “Seven Words” on stage in Milwaukee.

“Because we all live and change, the product is coming out in sort of a different person every 10 years,” said Carlin, who survived cocaine dependency in the ‘70s and a heart attack and two open-heart surgeries in the ‘80s.

At 53, he says, “I’ve learned more, acquired more information and have just seen more things happen. I have a better backdrop against which to work. And there are skills involved in this that get better when you use them: verbal skills and work habits. You drop the inefficient stuff and you begin to learn the most economical way to get things out.”

Carlin, who grew up in New York City wanting “to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio,” has been paying more attention to his acting career in recent years.

Last fall, he starred in a Fox-TV Movie of the Week, “Working Trash.” He has a non-comedic role in the upcoming Barbra Steisand-Nick Nolte film, “The Prince of Tides,” and he’s currently reprising his role as the extraterrestrial Rufus in the sequel to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

The veteran comedian views acting as a way to achieve more “balance” in both his professional and personal lives. Carlin still does about 110 shows a year and, he said, making movies will allow him to spend less time on the road and more at home with Brenda, his wife of 29 years. (Their daughter, Kelly, is a communications major at UCLA.)

Carlin said he had to defer his “acting urge” for a long time “because the comedy took off so well and because I wasn’t as comfortable with the acting when I was in the position to get some parts in the mid-’60s.

“Now I’m older, different, more seasoned, and life has changed me, I guess. To be terribly California about it, I think I have more access to myself--he said, with heavy tongue-in-cheek.”

But don’t think the personal changes are the result of some sort of midlife crisis.

“No,” he scoffs, “I don’t believe in that stuff. That’s all magazine and television fodder. I happened to get a heart attack, but that also did not have a big effect. I just grew and changed. That’s what nature does.”

Despite his increased attention to his acting career, comedy is still Carlin’s primary thrust. Proclaims the bearded one: “Standup is the centerpiece of my life, my business, my art, my survival and my way of being alive.”

And, yes, after all these years he still gets a charge from being on stage.

“It never gets old because it’s what I choose to do,” he said. “I don’t work for anybody--I’ve always driven my own bus. For that reason, it’s a joy, but I’d like to have more balance.”

Carlin, who develops 90 minutes worth of new material every two years, still enjoys playing with the language, finding the precise word or phrasing to convey his ideas. (“Jumbo shrimp,” he once observed. “Now, is that a large shrimp or a small jumbo?”) He’s been interested in the nuances of language since he was a kid.

“There’s genetics involved,” he explained. “My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally.” In fact, he said, his grandfather, a New York City policeman, “wrote out, in longhand, Shakespeare’s works in his lifetime because it gave him a certain joy. My mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.”

Carlin, who doesn’t particularly care for his old media-created “Voice of the Counterculture” label, views himself simply as an “observer, writer, performer.”

“My whole raison d’etre is to see stuff, have an idea about it and say it,” he said. “I’ve always been a person who’s been out of step with authority. The fact that I got hot at a time when a lot of people were being nonconformist is a little misleading. It was a lucky time for me to find myself, but I would have done it in spite of that.”

Asked if he was influenced by the controversial Lenny Bruce, Carlin prefers not to name just one comedy influence, lest it “skew” the truth. The print media, he said, “has that limitation.”

Pressed for a more complete answer, he quickly listed Spike Jones, Danny Kaye, Jonathan Winters, Bruce and Mort Sahl. “Over a period of years, I’ve learned how I’d like to answer things,” he said, offering to point out the differences in each comedian that appealed to him.

And then, speaking slowly and precisely, as though he were a professor talking to classroom of diligent note-taking students, he did just that:

“Spike Jones, anarchy; Danny Kaye, verbal facility; Jonathan Winters, weirdness; Lenny Bruce, honesty; Mort Sahl, from him I’d use the word intellectual: Comedy that makes people think a little.”

But those aren’t the only ingredients that have gone into the Carlin comedy stew.

“Then you have to add all the things I ever saw in my whole life,” he said. “That’s the magic thing about the human mind: We don’t come by anything in our minds on our own. Everything has come from the outside and then we made bigger things out of it.”

Carlin balks at answering questions about how his comedy has evolved over the past decade.

“What’s really important about your style, work and content is how it’s seen by others,” he said. “Analyzing myself makes me feel I’m in the wrong territory.”

But after pausing, he continues:

“What I’d say in answer to that question is there are phases that come and go, and there are three ingredients in my comedy I notice a lot. Those three ingredients will also come and go in degree.” He paused again. “I feel real inarticulate this morning,” he said before pressing on in his professorial mode:

“Those three things which wax and wane in importance are English language and wordplay; secondly, mundane, everyday observational comedy--dogs, cats and all of that stuff; and thirdly, sociopolitical attitude comedy.

“In the last five years the sociopolitical tide has risen in my work back to where it was in the mid-’70s. I don’t try to account for these things. They’re just natural waves. I try to be as Zenlike as I can. I let things come to me.”

Carlin wouldn’t say much about the content of his Coach House show.

“Generally, I always feel unprepared to answer that,” he said. Another pause, then:

“Here’s what I’ll say about the show: Right now I’m in what I call my coasting period, which comes about six months after an HBO show. And that means I’m putting in some new things for the next time around.

“I’m doing a few things from (his 1989 HBO) show and then I reach back and do a couple of things from, say, the last five or six years like ‘Baseball and Football’--an analysis of the language of the two sports.

“Another thing that will be in there that people might care about--if they care--is, hmmm. Well, just put down ‘Golf Courses for the Homeless’ because I have this piece of material I did on ‘Comic Relief.’ It’s an attack on golf, really, which people really love or hate.

“There’s very little middle ground on this one.”

Who

George Carlin.

When

Thursday, Jan. 17, at 8 p.m.; Friday, Jan. 18, at 8 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, Jan. 19 at 8 and 10:30 p.m.

Where

The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano.

Whereabouts

Going south on the San Diego Freeway, take the San Juan Creek Road exit, turn left on Camino Capistrano. Turn right at first signal (Avenue Aeropuerto) and immediate right into shopping center.

Wherewithal

$32.50.

Where to call

(714) 496-8930.