When I was 10 years old, and my brother was almost 13, my parents ( meaning my Mom ) bought us a comedy album for Hanukkah. No doubt she was polling her teacher colleagues for ideas.
Put into our hands was “George Carlin: Class Clown”. This amazing LP included a parental warning label that said, "This record includes the routine “The Seven Words You Cannot Say On Television”. "
My brother quickly turned the LP over as we unwrapped it, hoping our Dad wouldn’t see it. Mom? She bought and wrapped it but never heard it. To this day, I believe she has never heard it.
The following is the list of those Seven Dirty Words:
Shit, Piss, Fuck, C**t, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits. ( I cannot remember the SDMB rules for the different Fora on the use of the C word, so I chose to be cautious. You all know what it means. )
In terms of smart political humor, I cannot recommend this live album more highly. Just a great, if slightly dated, listen.
Do you have any memories of buying a record with a Parental Guidance sticker of any kind? MIND you, that was a 1972 LP release. So, the Warning Label is both accurate and amusing. Likely written BY Carlin.
My version of the album had no label because it was purchased in the 70s, before warning labels were a thing. In 1990 when the labels were mandated by the RIAA, Carlin released Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. The label was most of the album cover, and I thought it was hilarious.
Yeah, the red one that you can’t read even if you screenshot the image and zoom it in. But it still has the 1990s version of the Parental Advisory label in the bottom right corner. My copy of the album had neither of these. I presume the red one was put there by the record label at some point, but mine never had it (unless it was on the plastic wrapper and got thrown out immediately).
I never heard of anyone relying on the warning labels. The type of people likely to get their dander up over someone hearing a rock band use the kind of language that every 12-year-old already uses in private generally were opposed to “secular” music (and comedy) in its entirety and had no interest in buying any version of these albums.
Those who followed the PMRC debate probably also remembered incidents such as the retaliatory labeling of Frank Zappa’s Jazz From Hell album as having “explicit lyrics” after Zappa spoke out against censorship. Jazz From Hell is an instrumental jazz album that has no lyrics. That sort of things tends to undermine the credibility of the labeling program pretty fast.
Retailers did, which goes to show it was little more than a marketing ploy to increase sales while placating Tipper Gore. Big box stores like Target and Walmart demanded “clean” versions with no advisory label. Not surprisingly, the clean versions didn’t sell as well as the ones with the labels. Bear in mind that there is no law that required them - it was implemented by the record companies, much like the movie rating system was implemented by the motion picture industry.
That’s not surprising. As I said earlier, the original warning label was probably put there by the record company and stuck onto the plastic wrapper. The copy I had as a kid belonged to my mom before it made its way to my collection, so the warning label was long gone before I got it. These days, album art generally comes from the record company, so you would probably have to scan or photograph an old album cover to get an image without it. Unfortunately, my vinyl collection is long gone.
WARNING: THIS RECORD CONTAINS "SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY ON TELEVISION. HEARING IT COULD INFECT YOUR MIND, CURVE YOUR SPINE AND LOSE THE WAR FOR THE ALLIES.
That being the case, I think you may be right that it was written by Carlin, and it may well have been incorporated into the album art. I don’t remember ever seeing it on my copy of the record, but that was over 50 years ago and the record itself was destroyed nearly 40 years ago.
If it was in the trunk of my 1963 Lincoln Continental when I drove through Arizona in 1988 it came out the other end looking like a Pringles potato chip. There were no Disco records in there.
And here I thought that the only records that were destroyed were Disco.