Firesign Theatre - Biography
By Kevin Ausmus
In a 1991 episode of "The Simpsons" entitled "Stark Raving Dad," Homer arrives to work in a pink shirt, is pegged by Montgomery Burns as a troublemaker and eventually shipped off to a mental institution where he meets a stocky bricklayer who claims he's Michael Jackson. Upon release Homer proudly flashes a certificate that assures everyone he is "Not Insane."
Whether the writers intended this joke as a tribute to the Firesign Theatre or not, the episode aired almost 25 years to the day after the comedy group made their first informal appearance on a public radio station in Los Angeles. The improvised conversation (channeling collective influences that included Bob and Ray, Stan Freberg and Spike Milligan) that ensued that night in 1966 between the four men -- Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor, Phil Austin and David Ossman -- would soon change the course of modern pop culture forever. In less than two years they would be signed to a major record label and on the precipice of becoming the first legitimate "rock star" comedians.
Forty years later, with over four million records sold, the Firesign Theatre continues to amaze, befuddle, confuse and bedazzle their audience. Robin Williams has said of the Firesign Theatre: "they are the audio equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting." They are truly American icons of comedy.
The Firesign Theatre is deeply embedded in American pop culture, yet very few people know about them. If you have ever seen a sign off the freeway that reads "If you lived here, you'd be home by now!", read an item in the paper that claims "Everything you know is wrong!" or heard an old hippy reminiscing about a "Love-In," you are being treated to tiny bits of Firesign's ubiquitous humor and influence.
Their wildly kinetic, spontaneous and druggy improvisation comes honestly. "We were bathed in a drug culture," admitted David Ossman to the Marin Independent Journal in 2005, when asked if drugs were important in the evolution of the Firesign Theatre. Though often compared to their British counterparts Monty Python, Firesign was initially a radio-only treat. It was 1966. Ossman had just left KPFK, where Austin was working as an engineer for "Radio Free Oz," which was hosted by Bergman. Proctor was an actor and friend of Bergman's from Yale. On Nov. 17, they made their first on-air appearance together. It was quickly apparent the four had a special magic. Bergman commented to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2001, "I was into astrology at the time and I found out that they were all fire signs. So I named it the Firesign Theatre. We got on the air and did a fake film festival. They were the filmmakers and I was the host, and that's how the team was born."
Once hatched, Firesign quickly developed a cult following that eventually led to an invitation by Gary Usher, the surf-band impresario best known for his early 60's collaborations with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, to record an LP of their own material, which he would produce. Usher got FST a contract at Columbia Records, whose new president Clive Davis was working to convert it into a more hip rock label. The LP, Waiting For The Electrician (Or Someone Like Him), was released on Cloumbia in February 1968. (Usher also utilized Firesign sound effects on a Byrds song he produced called "Draft Morning.")
Electrician was unlike any comedy record that had ever been released, centering its subject matter on topics not generally considered humorous -- the American Indian, mescaline-addled gurus, "hip" fascists. The title track was an 18 minute Cold War send-up with Turkish language instructors, a German ice show that deteriorates into a rocket attack, long-forgotten political prisoners aspiring to be novelists, and a hapless Hitchcockian protagonist constantly on the run.
Electrician was not a big seller and Firesign was almost dropped by Columbia. Fortunately, one of their biggest fans and supporters was James Guercio, best known for working with the bands Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Guercio got Firesign back in the recording studio, where they laid down the tracks for the LP that would catapult them into recording history and make them national stars.
How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, released in August 1969, again on Columbia, was a classic if only judged by the album cover. Huge pictures of Groucho Marx and John Lennon are wrapped by a quasi-Communist admonition to "ALL HAIL MARX LENNON." On the back side, Phil Proctor can be seen stepping on Phil Austin's shoe.
How Can You Be was a quantum leap forward for Firesign. Fast and furious, increased production values allowed multi-tracked voices and sound effects to explode from the speakers like fireworks. The title track, a 28-minute epic loosely centered on American history, morals and fascism (a common theme for Firesign in those days), channeled such disparate elements as an L.A.-area late night used car salesmen, Homer, W.C. Fields, military conscription, patriotic Hollywood musicals, film noir and James Joyce. It was humor that barely accommodated its listener. If you could keep up with the obscure references, fine. Otherwise, you had to be content with listening over and over again to comedy that followed no rules and bounced over the time/space continuum at will. This was not Bill Cosby!
Side Two, however, radically shifted gears with a softer and primarily character-driven spoof on 1940s radio serials entitled "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger." "Nick Danger" mostly incorporated silly humor, stinging organ riffs and hokey sound effects with numerous Beatles and I Ching references. Danger and his wacky cohorts -- ditzy female foil Nancy, nosy old man butler Catherwood, sleazy weasel Rocky Rococo and ambitious yet hapless cop Lt. Bradshaw -- quickly became permanent members of the Firesign ensemble, appearing again and again over the years in future projects.
During this time, Firesign expanded its local influence in Los Angeles, continuing its radio program (which bounced from KPFK to KRLA to KMET to KPPC), making live appearances at the Magic Mushroom and the Ash Grove, writing and producing many radio and TV advertisements, most notably for Jack Poet Volkswagen, and even finding time to ink a Hollywood screenplay, an "electric western" called Zachariah which was released in 1970 and starred Don Johnson.
Firesign then went on an east coast performance tour of colleges and universities, solidifying their hold on the emerging FM-oriented youth market. When they returned from the tour, in mid-1970, Firesign wrote and recorded what is generally considered their masterpiece, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers (Columbia).
Dwarf takes a familiar Firesign motif, that of channel-switching, and uses it to weave an ultra-complex story of a movie character, George Tirebiter, reliving his life as it plays out during a late night television broadcast. As in much of Firesign's early material, Dwarf is a statement on Cold War politics, and quite often the whimsy of their earlier recordings is replaced by real and ferocious social commentary occasionally softened by frat boy hi-jinx. Religious TV revivalists, Korea and McCarthy-era blacklisting are the backdrops for much of the record, and the standard media narrative devices of old movies, TV ads, political campaigns and twisted game shows jump-cut with each other toward a conclusion that finds Tirebiter (in reality, a four-legged mascot for the University of Southern California) humbly watching his career sold out from under him, and then leaving his house to pursue an ice cream truck.
In 2006, the National Recording Registry, a division of the Library of Congress, added Dwarf to its list of "culturally, historically or aesthetically important" recordings. It should be noted that despite its innovation and national popularity, Firesign was never nominated for a Grammy Award in their time at Columbia Records.
Dwarf represented a pinnacle for the group that they would find hard to top. The crush of work and opportunities presented Firesign by this time started to chip away at their sanity, hindering the creative process, and pulling them apart. The first sign of their decline was the reaction to their highly anticipated 1971 release I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus (Columbia).
Bozos was Firesign's most ambitious project to date and the first that looked forward into the future instead of drawing upon the past. In Bozos, the "Future" is an amusement park staffed by singing vegetable holograms like Artie Choke, whose fun-loving nature belies their Orwellian programming. Some fairgoers like Barney the Bozo are content to go with the flow and submit themselves to the fascist robots running the show. Another, Uh Clem, discovers he can short circuit the whole enterprise by hacking (years before the term was coined) into the core of the "Mainspring." As prognosticators, Bozos represents Firesign's greatest achievement. Systems technology programming would soon be big business. As a phenomena, however, Bozos became the first step into Firesign's career "black hole of space."
Expected to be their biggest seller, Bozos underperformed at record stores and shipment boxes wound up being returned to distributors, even as the album title became a signature catch-phrase in the media. Just five years after its first radio performance, the Firesign Theatre had seemingly peaked.
After Bozos, projects came and went. Firesign was still doing a weekly radio program called variously "Dear Friends" or "Let's Eat." As Firesign readied its first theatrical movie release, Martian Space Party, Columbia issued a double-record of radio highlights called Dear Friends (1972). It was the first non-linear Firesign LP. Though the excerpts are typically hilarious, it was criticized for being the first album to try to capitalize on Firesign fans.
The next release Not Insane or Anything You Want To (1972 Columbia) was an almost incomprehensible pastiche of Martian Space Party, Shakespeare spoofs and the cultish "Papoon for President" campaign. Not Insane represented the nadir of Firesign creative output and shortly thereafter, the group splintered into cliques and for the first time ever, pursued projects outside the group.
In the 1970s, like true rock stars, all the Firesigns recorded individual albums of their own material. Some, like Ossman's How Time Flys (1973 Columbia) and Austin's Roller Maidens From Outer Space (1974 – Epic), utilized all the players and explored familiar Firesign territory. Proctor and Bergman, longtime friends, released a series of mostly light and pun-filled LPs, although TV Or Not TV turned out to be a prescient augury of cable television. Then, as American comedic tastes changed and the political winds shifted, Firesign sunk like a stone.
If the Firesign Theatre story was to end abruptly right here, they would still be considered the most influential and top comedy team recording artists of all time. Thankfully, like many great artists and supergroups of the 60s and 70s, Firesign survived numerous premature reports of its demise and occasional hiatuses to continue strong well into the 21st century.
"We became extremely unfashionable in the late '70s and '80s," Phil Austin told the Hartford Courant in 1993. "I think we were strongly associated with smart people, with the counterculture and certain attitudes and styles of things that became passé, and we suffered along with it." Peter Bergman elaborated on this theme in the Washington Post later the same year. "We saw the whole country go into this extraordinary denial -- I think we joined it to a certain degree -- and we felt that the field for our kind of comedy had just disappeared."
However, despite getting dropped by Columbia in 1975 and despite the increased tension within the group, they continued to make live appearances and records all throughout the 70s and 80s, even after David Ossman permanently left the group to pursue radio work in 1982. Several projects are noteworthy.
In 1974, Firesign released Everything You Know Is Wrong (Columbia) as both an LP and a movie (the cinematographer for which, Allen Daviau, later filmed E.T.). It remains one of the most underrated comedy albums of all time, with conspiracy theorists, daredevil motorcyclists, nude trailer park managers, Russian psychics, overzealous Army generals and local TV news commentators struggling to fend off wayward comets and extra-terrestrial attacks.
In 1984, the third Nick Danger LP, released on the Rhino label and entitled The Three Faces of Al (1984 Rhino), garnered Firesign their first-ever Grammy nomination. And in 1986, a project called Eat or Be Eaten (1985 Mercury) wound up being the first CD release to feature interactive graphics. Additionally, two highly-regarded movie mash-ups -- new dialogue dubbed over old movie footage – appeared: J-Men Forever in 1978, produced by Proctor and Bergman, and Hot Shorts by Proctor, Bergman and Austin in 1983.
All the while, Firesign members continued to thrive individually, outside of the group. Ossman became a prominent producer/engineer in the 80s, re-adapting and staging a 50th Anniversary performance of Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast in 1988 that featured Jason Robards, Steve Allen and Phil Proctor. Proctor has an extensive voice-over resume, which includes Howard Deville of the Rugrats TV program. In 1986 Bergman created "P.Y.S.T.," a video game spoof of the popular "M.I.S.T." game, that features John Goodman in a bathtub. In 1994, Austin released the audio book Tales of the Old Detective and Other Big Fat Lies (Audio Partners).
In April 1993, after years of inactivity, the Firesign Theatre staged a 25th reunion performance in Seattle. It was only supposed to be a one-off, but the reaction of the crowd, which included Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Harry Anderson and members of Pearl Jam, turned the affair into a Rocky Horror-esque screening, with crazed fans screaming out classic lines ahead of the performers. It convinced the group that the time was right for a comeback. By the end of the year, Firesign was doing a full-fledged national tour.
A much-anticipated new CD of original material was released in 1998. Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death (1998 Rhino) was the Firesign's unique take on the impending millennium Y2K crisis. Nominally, it's a story of the final hour of 1999, as broadcast over Radio Now, a radio station that changes its format virtually every commercial break. It manages to skewer the Princess Di media circus, Joe Camel, the Art Bell show and corporate TV ads, while bringing back a variety of Firesign characters mixed in amongst newer ones like "Weirdly Cool" DJ Bebop Loco and celebrity stalker Danny Vanilla. The response commercially was tremendous and the CD was also nominated for a Grammy.
Firesign's return to form brought them back to radio. Regular appearances on NPR's "All Things Considered" were compiled into the All Things Firesign CD (2003 Artemis), and they did a year-long stint on XM satellite radio as well. (A short bit of their radio work can be seen in the special features section of the Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room DVD.) Two more well-regarded CD's --Boom Dot Bust (1999 Rhino) and The Bride of Firesign (2001 Rhino) (yet another Nick Danger adventure, also nominated for a Grammy) -- have followed as well as several tours.
To this day, Firesign remains an acquired taste for many. Even after coming back, many critics have dismissed the quartet as being too specifically reliant on old material, too dense to understand, or merely irrelevant. Yet, when you look back to their roots, how a hastily prepared and random improvisational three hour broadcast on public radio in 1966 brought "Four or Five Crazee Guys" together, and all that has followed in 40 years, Firesign Theatre is truly without peer in comedy, in radio, and in rock music.
