Firesign Theatre

With their education, artfulness, attention to detail, and full use of the newly emerging multitrack technologies, the four members of The Firesign Theatre—Peter Bergman (1939—), David Ossman (1936), Phil Proctor (1940—), and Phil Austin (1947)—were the Beatles of recorded comedy. Writing and performing their own material, they created multi-layered surrealist satires out of the very stuff of popular culture: television shows, the Golden Age of Radio, old movies, commercials, literature, music, etc. At a time when the Who was pioneering the rock concept album, Firesign was pioneering the comedy concept album. Their humor reflected the times; complaints about their occasional drug references may be misplaced, since it would be difficult to represent southern California in the 1960s and 1970s without mentioning drugs. But their comedy was much more than an amalgam of cultural references. One 40-minute album might be as tightly structured as a one-act play, achieve real poignancy, and convey new ways of looking at things, new connections; the first cut on their first album, for example, presents a brief aural history of the United States from the Indians' point of view. The group's comedy albums are among the few that can be listened to repeatedly and still be enjoyed, each new listening revealing subtle asides, missed connections, and hidden messages.

Bergman and Proctor first met while studying playwriting at Yale, and Bergman went on to work on a British radio show with Goon Show alumnus Spike Milligan. While in England, Bergman saw the Beatles for the first time, and vowed someday to become part of a four-man comedy team. The foursome came together in 1966 as part of "Radio Free Oz," a free-form late-night FM radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles, hosted by Bergman. Guests included Andy Warhol and Buffalo Springfield, but the show developed a cult following because of the group's improvisations. No one was aware of the size of their following until the group began promoting a Love-In (a word coined by Bergman) in Elysian Park in Los Angeles, and 40,000 hippies showed up. Seeing the commercial potential, CBS record producer Gary Usher signed the group to a record contract. Their first four albums for CBS remain the core of their work, include their best albums, and show the group's evolution: the transition from shorter pieces to album-length fantasies, and the emergence of the Fifth Crazee Guy. The Firesign Theatre's publishing company is called 4 or 5 Crazee Guys Publishing because the group found that, when all were contributing and when each had ultimate veto power (if anyone of them didn't like a line, it was out), a tangible entity emerged that was much more than the sum of its parts: the Fifth Crazee Guy. According to Austin, "It's like, suddenly there is this fifth guy that actually does the writing." And who is the Fifth Crazee Guy? He's Clem riding the bus, he's George Leroy Tirebiter, he's Mr. and Mrs. John Smith from Anytown, USA, he's the audience's laughter, he's an everyman (and everywoman) reflecting our culture and our collective unconscious. To begin to grasp how the Fifth Crazee Guy manifests itself on Firesign albums, imagine someone who had The Goon Show and the Beatles as parents but grew up in America, and then, at some point, was sucked into an alternate universe.

Their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968), contains several short pieces on Side One (including the Indians'-eye view of American history and some drug humor), with all of Side Two taken up by a comic nightmare journey through Turkish security, complete with the now-classic game-show sendup Beat the Reaper. That album sold poorly, but their sophomore effort,How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All (1969), benefitted from the emergence of FM radio as a significant force and the willingness of FM deejays to play long cuts. The title piece is a sonic delight that puts you behind the wheel of a motor home with climate control that changes the climate as no car ever has before. And Side Two contains the piece that is most likely to convert the uninitiated: Nick Danger, Third Eye, a pun-filled satire of noir radio dramas involving a Peter Lorre soundalike and bizarre time-travel convolutions. Their third and fourth albums, considered to be their best, each contain one long cut (interrupted only by the pre-CD need to turn the album over). Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (1970), the first of their albums recorded on 16 tracks, mingles the recollections of film producer George Leroy Tirebiter with footage from one of his teen comedies, "High School Madness," to produce a moving nostalgia piece loaded with laughs. But nothing could prepare fans for the total sonic immersion of I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus (1971), a sensurround trip to and through the Future Fair—a cross between Disneyland and a World's Fair—complete with clones, computers, and holograms, where our hero, Clem, eventually breaks the president and has a showdown with the computer controlling everything. Repeated listenings reveal hidden subtleties. The fourth time through the listener may realize that, while passengers are warned to pump their shoes before walking across the water, Clem gave up shoes years ago. And the sixth listening might reveal that, when Clem talks about how he's going to just "sink in" to his bus seat and the P.A. says to get "in sync," the words "sink" and "sync" are, in fact, in sync. At the end of the millennium, Firesign was still going strong, producing the album Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death (1998), set at Radio Now (a station so cutting-edge that it changes formats every commercial break) on the last hour of the last day of 1999. And individual troupe members continued to lend their vocal talents to everything from The Tick TV series (1995) to A Bug's Life (1998).

—Bob Sullivan

Further Reading:

"Firesign." www.firesigntheatre.com. February 1999.

Smith, Ronald L. Comedy on Record: The Complete Critical Discography. New York, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988.