The Firesign Theatre
The Firesign Theatre was an American surreal comedy troupe who first appeared on November 17, 1966, in a live performance on the Los Angeles radio program Radio Free Oz on station KPFK FM. They continued appearing on Radio Free Oz, which later moved to KRLA 1110 AM and then KMET FM, through February 1969. They produced fifteen record albums and a 45 rpm single under contract to
Columbia Records from 1967 through 1976, and had three nationally syndicated radio programs: The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour in 1970 on KPPC-FM; and Dear Friends and Let's Eat! on KPFK. They also appeared in front of live audiences, and continued to write, perform, and record on other labels, occasionally taking sabbaticals during which they wrote or performed solo or in smaller groups.
The Firesign Theatre was the brainchild of Peter Bergman, and all of its material was conceived, written, and performed by its members: Bergman, Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman. The group's name stems from astrology, because all four were born under the three "fire signs": Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius. Their popularity peaked in the early 1970s and ebbed in the Reagan era. They experienced a revival and second wave of popularity in the 1990s and continued to write, record and perform until Bergman's death in 2012.
In 1997, Entertainment Weekly ranked the Firesign Theatre among the "Thirty Greatest Comedy Acts of All Time". Their 1970 album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers was nominated in 1971 for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation by the World Science Fiction Society, and their next album I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus received the same nomination in 1972. Later, they received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for three of their albums: The Three Faces of Al, Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death, and Bride of Firesign. In 2005, the US Library of Congress added Don't Crush That Dwarf to the National Recording Registry and called the group "the Beatles of comedy."
Before ''Firesign''
and Philip Proctor met while attending Yale University in the late 1950s, where Proctor studied acting and Bergman edited the Yale comedy magazine. Bergman studied playwriting and collaborated as lyricist with Austin Pendleton in 1958 on two Yale Dramat musicals in which Proctor starred: Tom Jones, and Booth Is Back In Town.In 1965, Bergman spent a year working in England on the BBC television program Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life and went to see surrealist comedian Spike Milligan in a play. Bergman went backstage and struck up a friendship with Milligan. Also that year, he saw the Beatles in concert, which gave him the inspiration to form a four-man comedy group.
On returning to the US, Bergman started a late-night listener-participation talk show, Radio Free Oz, on July 24, 1966, on listener-sponsored KPFK FM in Los Angeles, working with producers Phil Austin and David Ossman. According to Austin, the show "featured everybody who was anybody in the artistic world who passed through LA." Guests included the band Buffalo Springfield and Andy Warhol. In November, Proctor was in Los Angeles looking for acting work and watching the Sunset Strip curfew riots. When he discovered he was sitting on a newspaper photo of Bergman, he called his college buddy, who recruited him as the fourth man for his comedy group.
Bergman originally named the group the "Oz Firesign Theatre" because all four were born under the three astrological fire signs, and the group debuted on his November 17, 1966 show. Bergman had to drop "Oz" from the name after legal threats from Disney and MGM, who owned movie rights to The Wizard of Oz and other associated works.
''Radio Free Oz''
The Firesigns initially chose an improvisational style and carried it to a level which revolutionized radio comedy. According to Proctor:On nights when he had no guests, Bergman would have the Firesigns come on the air and pretend to be outrageously interesting guests. On their November 17, 1966 debut, they pretended to be the panel of an imaginary "Oz Film Festival": Bergman was film critic Peter Volta, "writing a history of world cinema one frame at a time"; Ossman was Raul Saez, maker of “thrown camera” films, who had just won a grant to roll a 70 mm film camera down the Andes Mountains; Austin was Jack Love, making "Living Room Theatre" porn films like The Nun and Blondie Pays the Rent; and Proctor was Jean-Claude Jean-Claude, creator of the "Nouvelle Nouvelle Vague Vague movement" and director of a documentary Two Weeks With Fred, which lasts a full two weeks.
By 1967, Bergman had the Firesign Theatre appear regularly on Radio Free Oz. The Firesigns were strongly influenced by the British Goon Show; Proctor, Austin, and Ossman were big fans since the NBC program Monitor broadcast Goon Show episodes in the late 1950s, and Bergman became a fan after forming the Firesigns. According to Ossman:
In the fall of 1967, the Firesign Theatre was broadcasting Sunday nights from The Magic Mushroom, in Studio City, formerly a Bob Eubanks' Cinnamon Cinder. In September 1967, they performed an adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges' short story "La Muerte y La Brujula" on Radio Free Oz.
In 1969, they created improvised television commercials for Jack Poet Volkswagen in Highland Park, California, with the characters of Christian Cyborg, Coco Lewis, Bob Chicken, and Tony Gomez.
Golden age
Early recording career
Bergman coined the term "love-in" in 1967, and he promoted the first Los Angeles Love-In, attended by 40,000 in Elysian Park, on his program. The Firesigns performed there, which led to Radio Free Oz moving to KRLA 1110 AM, which had a much wider audience than KPFK FM. This event also caught the attention of Columbia Records staff producer Gary Usher, who sensed commercial potential for the Firesign Theatre and proposed to Bergman they make a "love-In album" for Columbia. Bergman countered with a proposal for a Firesign Theatre album, and this led to a five-year recording contract with the label. Usher also used the Firesigns' audio collages on songs by The Byrds and Sagittarius in 1967 and 1968.The album was given the non sequitur title Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, from Bergman's undeveloped 1965 idea for a comic film. The Firesigns changed their improvisational style, producing tightly scripted and memorized material. According to Bergman: "There was no leader." The Firesigns always billed themselves alphabetically on their album jackets and other printed materials. "Everything was communally written, and if one person didn't agree about something, no matter how strongly the other three felt about it, it didn't go in."
The resulting synergy created the feeling of a fifth Firesign; according to Austin: "It's like, suddenly there is this fifth guy that actually does the writing. We all vaguely sort of know him, and a lot of the time take credit for him." This resulted in the group inventing the name "4 or 5 Krazy Guys Publishing" to copyright their work. Their contract with Columbia, in exchange for a low royalty rate, gave them unlimited studio time, allowing them to perfect their writing and recording.
Electrician revolutionized the concept of the comedy album: it consists of four radio plays. Side one is a trilogy of pieces: starting with "Temporarily Humboldt County", a satire of the Europeans' displacement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas; followed by "W. C. Fields Forever", a satire of the 1960s hippie culture; leading into "Trente-Huit Cunegonde ", a projected future in which the roles of the hippie counterculture and the Establishment culture are reversed. Side two, the title track, is a stream-of-consciousness play about an American tourist to an Eastern Bloc country, who ends up in prison and is rescued by the CIA. It was recorded in CBS's Los Angeles radio studio from which The Jack Benny Program and others had been broadcast; the original RCA microphones and sound effects devices were used. It was released in January 1968, selling a modest 12,000 copies in its first year.
The Firesigns continued to work on the radio and began performing in folk clubs such as the Ash Grove. Radio Free Oz moved again to KMET FM until February 1969. The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour aired for two hours on Sunday nights on KPPC-FM in 1970. They concentrated their writing on the folk-club material and produced improvisational skit material for the Radio Hour and its successors.
The Firesigns almost lost their recording contract after their first album. According to Bergman: "Columbia was going to kick us off the label, so we scripted the next record and the old guard at Columbia took a look at the script and said 'This isn't funny—this is dirty!' And to our rescue came James William Guercio
and John Hammond." Austin says, "With Hammond backing us up, CBS came around." They went on to produce three more Columbia studio albums from 1969 to 1971. Each grew technically more sophisticated, taking advantage of up to 16 tape tracks and Dolby noise reduction by 1970.
How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All, released in 1969, consists of a stream-of-consciousness play on side one about a man named Babe who buys a car and goes on a road trip that turns into a parody of Norman Corwin's 1941 patriotic radio pageant We Hold These Truths. Side two, The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, is a parody of 1940s radio, about a hard-boiled detective who became possibly the Firesigns' most famous character.
Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is a single play centered around an actor named George Tirebiter, who gradually ages into an old man while watching his old movies on television: a Henry Aldrich parody High School Madness, and the Korean War film Parallel Hell. Dwarf marked a high point in the Firesign's use of blue comedy: Porgie has explicit sex with a housemaid as creaking bedsprings are heard. This album was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1971 by the World Science Fiction Society,
Dwarf brought a level of success to the Firesigns that started to spoil them. Bergman said, "We toured after Dwarf and we began to realize the extent we were influencing people. We realized that FM radio was playing our albums whole, and that people were memorizing them." Austin said of this period, "At that point we began not to get along with each other that well, and the being taken so seriously — Rolling Stone did a long article on us, and we were being compared to James Joyce — there was a prideful attitude that took over. But we weren't making money; we might as well have been teaching school somewhere and worrying about making tenure for all the money we were making. So in some sense we didn't really understand what we were doing, which is why we were never able to make a second Dwarf, which to me is a real disappointment."
Their fourth album, I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, also a single play, centers on a young, early-technology computer hacker and an older "bozo" with a large nose that honks like a clown's, who attend a Disneyesque Future Fair. The blue comedy was dialed back from explicit to suggestive, as a scientist invents a machine that mimics sexual intercourse. This album also received a Hugo nomination in 1972.
Meanwhile, from September 9, 1970 to February 17, 1971, they were performing a one-hour weekly live series on KPFK, Dear Friends. These programs were recorded and then edited into slightly shorter shows and syndicated to radio stations across the country on 12" LP albums. Their fifth album, Dear Friends, was a double-record compilation of what they considered the best segments from the series, released in January 1972. Dear Friends was followed with the KPFK show Let's Eat! in 1971 and 1972. Both titles came from lines uttered by televangelist Pastor Rod Flash on his "Hour of Reckoning" program in Don't Crush That Dwarf.
In 1970, the group had performed a live stage show, the Shakespeare parody The Count of Monte Cristo, at Columbia University. In January 1972 they decided to expand this and retitle it Anything You Want To for their next album. On March 9, Columbia signed them to a second five-year contract. On March 30, they ended Let's Eat! with a live broadcast titled Martian Space Party, which was also recorded on 16-track tape and filmed. The Firesigns combined parts of the two shows with some new studio material to produce their sixth album, Not Insane or Anything You Want To. But before releasing the album in October 1972, they had discarded their original story line idea and some newly written scenes.