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Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom
05.12.2022
07:33 am
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I am a man of many enthusiasms, and one of the things that I am, for certain, the MOST enthusiastic about is Firesign Theatre, the legendary psychedelic “Beatles of Comedy.” I’ve been a lifelong Firesign Theatre freak, having discovered them at a very young age. Oh yeah, I was totally obsessed with Firesign Theatre. Often called America’s Monty Python, they’re better described as America’s acid-drenched answer to The Goon Show. I’d listen to their albums with headphones on, in the dark, practically memorizing them. Studies have shown that young minds exposed to surrealism develop better critical thinking skills and I can honestly say that my own mind was rewired, permanently, by my extreme Firesign Theatre fandom. My love for them is a part of my very identity.

Having said all this—and I have complained about this before—Firesign Theatre is an extremely difficult thing to try to get other people interested in. The reaction tends to be rather muted in most cases. Fifty-year-old comedy albums and radio shows? The assumption is that it must be something like Fibber McGee and Molly or The Great Gildersleeve. Or that it must be dated.

It’s neither.

The Firesign Theatre created extremely complex “theater of the mind” comedy albums that were—unavoidably for obvious reasons—in the form of radio plays. Their comedy is multi-leveled, chock full of puns and time travel. It’s not dated as it exists in a self-contained, self-referential Firesign universe of their devising. In the same way someone can study James Joyce for a lifetime and never tire of it, Firesign Theatre holds a similar place in my life and in the lives of many others. When you meet a fellow Firehead, you become instant friends. And then you’ll both start slipping Firesign references into your conversations. (For a really amazing look at the now almost forgotten cultural importance of Firesign Theatre during the 60s and 70s, from Ivy League dorm rooms to the foxholes of Vietnam, listen to this NPR show. Trust me, it’s fantastic.)

All of this is a preamble to informing you, dear friend, that there is a major new product available at the Firesign Theater website. Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom is a book/DVD rom put together by their archivist and historian, my esteemed pal Taylor Jessen, who deserves a fucking Grammy award for this production, and for all the detective work that he’s undertaken to locate so many long thought lost tapes of the group’s work.

For Firesign fans, THIS IS AN EVENT. Live at the Magic Mushroom collects the fully-scripted plays that the group performed at a Venture Blvd. coffee house which were also broadcast on Peter Bergman’s Radio Free Oz show. These mythical performances have nary been heard in more than 50 years (a few turned up on torrent trackers) and they are a sheer delight. The weekly shows were all written, performed and taped while the group was working on their second release, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. You might assume that they were wood shopping material for that album, but this is not the case and there is almost no overlap at all, although they did debut the changing TV channels device used throughout their Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers album during the Magic Mushroom run.

To a Firesign Theatre fanboy like m’self, these plays are absolutely the Holy Grail of Firesignania. They occupy a space just below the classic studio albums and a little bit above the Dear Friends/Let’s Eat radio series. Firesign on radio was always planned out to a certain extent, but most of it was improvised with the Four or Five Crazy Guys sitting at their mikes looking at each other across a table. The Magic Mushroom plays were tightly scripted and so are more of a piece with their record releases. In other words there are hours of some of their very finest material in the offering of Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom. The collection comes inside of a full color 48-page paperback book. Includes all eleven of the surviving Magic Mushroom plays, plus original promos and the 10/29/1967 episode of Radio Free Oz (“The Bridey Murphy Come As You Were Halloween Party.”)

I asked fab Taylor Jessen some questions via email.

What are the Magic Mushroom plays?

The Magic Mushroom plays were a dozen or so half-hour radio plays that the Firesign Theatre performed between October 1967 and January 1968 live in front of a club audience at the Magic Mushroom Club on Ventura Blvd., Studio City, simulcast on Peter Bergman’s radio show Radio Free Oz on KRLA-AM, Los Angeles. The subject matter of the plays ranged from Arthurian adventures to sword-and-sandal epics to Mexican jungle adventures to an ERPI Classroom Films movie of the 1950s to a pirate musical to a Sherlock Holmes parody to a proto-Dwarf channel-surfing epic.

Were the Magic Mushroom plays, in fact, “lost”?

With the exception of “Exorcism in Your Daily Life” and “The Séance”, not only were they all lost, they still are. No masters exist for any shows but those two. There was a collection of open reel tapes documenting the complete Radio Free Oz from the beginning of the Magic Mushroom Play era in October 1967 to the end of January 1968, and every one of the reels with the plays on them was ripped off by persons unknown. We do not expect to recover them. For the most part this box set was built out of audio sources that came from home recordings of the plays made by fans, some of whose names we know, some of whom remain anonymous. Meanwhile the play “The Last Tunnel to Fresno” is truly unknown in any complete audio form - a few minutes of it survived on tape and the audio quality is so horrifically bad we didn’t include it on the box set, even as a supplemental extra.

How long did it take to find them all?

Leaving aside “The Séance”, it took me just a couple of hours to find them all around 2001 when the first bootlegs hit the Internet and I downloaded them all (as many of us did; anyone who goes looking for torrents of Firesign rarities can still find many of the same sources I did). The difference between those bootlegs and what you’ll hear on the box set is the hundred or so hours I spent cleaning up the audio.

You always have crazy stories about the lengths you’ve had to go to locate a certain Firesign tape—like trawling through a shed that had fallen victim to a mudslide—did anything like that happen when you were trying to track the Magic Mushroom tapes down?

Sadly there was no climactic discovery that lead to the creation of this reissue; exactly the opposite was the case. I simply gave up on the idea that we’d ever find better copies of the material, and concentrated on trying to make it all sound acceptable.
 

Above, Firesign Theatre at the Magic Mushroom, 1967.
 
Purchase Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom here.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.12.2022
07:33 am
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Firesign Theatre’s ‘Dope Humor of the Seventies’
03.28.2021
10:35 am
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“Discovering the Firesign Theatre is worse than trying to get into Frank Zappa for the first time.”

Anyone who has read this blog for any period of time knows that this is obviously not a place to read, you know, rock journalism. We don’t tend to review things, either. You’ll find scant “criticism” here. I see Dangerous Minds more as a repository of enthusiasm. We write about stuff we enjoy, in the hopes that our fervor will be contagious. “Here is this great thing, you should check it out” is more or less the editorial policy. We almost never write about things we hate. “Hey, smell this, it smells like shit.” There’s no point in that. We’re digital prospectors, panning for gold, not crap.

I’m certain that we’ve introduced our readers to new things that they, in turn, have become evangelists for over the decade plus since DM launched, because you tell us so in the comments. In many ways a DM blog post is like a conversation you might have in a record store. I see it that way. I’ve even had several small record label owners contact me and tell me that they’d put out this or that reissue of an obscure album that we had covered. And that’s fun for us to hear.

So if you are someone who has ever benefited from being introduced to something here that you developed an unhealthy obsession for, pay attention to this, won’t you? This is one of the best things, ever.

I discovered the Firesign Theatre when I was a ten-year-old in 1976, via a long forgotten nationally syndicated radio program called The Comedy Hour which was 60 minutes of short bits from comedy records that were interspersed with bursts of radio static, as if the station was being changed between each selection. It came on Sunday nights at 11pm, right after The King Biscuit Flower Hour, at least on the radio station that I heard it on, Pittsburgh’s WDRE 105.5 FM. The first time I listened to that show, they played an excerpt from the first Firesign Theatre record, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, a section known as “Beat the Reaper.” This sketch involved a mock game show where contestants are injected with a fatal disease and have to guess what it is from the symptoms to win the life-saving antidote. If the contestant’s self-diagnosis is incorrect—sorry—they are sent home to die.
 

 
I had never heard anything like this. It made my young brain cells stand up to attention the same way hearing “Space Oddity” had the first time I’d heard that.

At the end of the show a zany announcer would tell you who you’d been listening to in a rapidly delivered cascade of names: “On tonight’s Comedy Hour, you heard Lenny Bruce, Albert Brooks, Nichols & May, Franklyn Ajaye, Beyond the Fringe, Moms Mabley, Robert Klein, George Carlin, the Conception Corporation, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor, Phyllis Diller…” etc., etc., and then he listed Firesign Theatre. I recognized this name since there were several Firesign Theatre albums selling for $1 each in the comedy cut out section of the local National Record Mart. Within a matter of days, I convinced my mother to buy me one titled, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.
 

 
I instantly became obsessed with that album. I would listen to it over and over again, often with headphones, trying to wrap my 10-year-old mind around it. I listened to Dwarf—and the other Firesign Theatre records—as much as I listened to any musical album. In fact, 45 years later, due to the innate musicality of the work, I still have large chunks of it committed to memory. In this, I am not alone, as there are probably several thousand other people (99% of them upper age bracket baby boomers) who can also recite Firesign Theatre albums as if they were Shakespeare. Dwarf begins with a sermon about food from a demented televangelist broadcasting from a biplane, which crashes. The scene pulls back and it’s a guy watching TV. He’s hungry and looking around for something to eat, but comes up short. He starts talking back to the manic TV evangelist who then starts talking back to him and eventually food comes through the TV screen. The channel changes abruptly. After that there is a This is Your Life-type program with elderly actor George Leroy Tirebiter, and then it morphs into a teen movie play-within-a-play starring a younger Tirebiter called “High School Madness.” Things were going just fine for the students of Morse Science High until their school vanishes, stolen by their rivals, those bullies at Communist Martyrs High School. Porgy Tirebiter and his loveable sidekick Mudhead investigate… you get the idea (hopefully).

Here is a very good description of Firesign Theatre, taken from the pages of Stereo Review magazine, way back in 1993. (Firesign has always been popular with audiophiles.)

A self-contained four-man comedy troupe of writers/actors whose medium was the audio record, they created brilliant, multi-layered surrealist satire out of science-fiction, TV, old movies, avant-garde drama and literature, outrageous punning, the political turmoil of the Sixties, the great shows of the Golden Age of Radio, the detritus of high and low culture (James Joyce meets the found poetry of used-car pitch men) and their own intuitive understanding of the technological possibilities of multi-track recording. Their thirteen albums for CBS, recorded in various group permutations between 1967 and 1975, reveal them to have been at once the Beatles of comedy, the counter-cultural Lewis Carroll, and the slightly cracked step-children of Kafka, Bob and Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Stan Freberg, Samuel Beckett and the Goon Show.

And as you’ll hear when you play the album you now hold in your hands, they were also far ahead of their time, not just of it. In fact, while most self-consciously “hip” comedy from the late Sixties or early Seventies is as dated now as love beads and black-light posters (listened to Cheech and Chong lately?) The Firesign Theatre, satire - which dealt from the beginning with such unexpected subjects as the implication of cable network narrow-casting (“UTV! For You, the Viewer!”) or New Age pseudo-philosophy (one of their albums was called Everything You Know Is Wrong) - today seems eerily prophetic. In particular, the futuristic vision of Los Angeles - sprawling, fragmented, fear-ridden, multi-cultural, both low rent and high tech - that threads throughout their “oeuvre” (in particular their 1970 masterpiece, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers) is not only as poetically detailed as anything in Raymond Chandler, but chillingly on the money in 1993.

Firesign Theatre started to assemble during 1966 at KPFK, a freeform stereo FM radio station in Los Angeles, which was then a very new thing, during Peter Bergman’s “Radio Free Oz” show. Phil Austin and David Ossman worked at the station and would appear on RFO, while Philip Proctor, an actor friend the “Wizard of Oz” (Bergman) knew from Yale, was invited to join a bit later. The name refers to the fact that all four were born under fire signs in the zodiac, and to Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. The late night Radio Free Oz show was so popular—and they were regularly gigging in Hollywood’s folk and rock clubs—that they were quickly offered a record contract.
 

 
There are four undisputed “classics” in the vast Firesign canon, all recorded between 1967 and 1971, titled (in order) Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (which includes their most famous creation, “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”), Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, and I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus. Their first album was recorded in the same CBS radio studio where The Jack Benny Show was taped using vintage microphones and sound effects. By the time of their second record they were using 16-track tape machines in the studio, constructing tightly assembled radio plays with extremely creative sound effects and spatial cues that suggested time travel, watching something at a domed planetarium, being on a people mover, getting into a car where the inside is bigger than the outside and so on. These four records are the ultimate presentation of their unusual artform—literature as much as performed comedy that’s been carefully sculpted in a recording studio—but there are at least 20 other albums, dozens upon dozens of hours of live performances recorded onstage and during their radio shows, and TV and film work. Dear Friends, a 1972 released two record compilation of the best of their syndicated radio show of the same name is also considered to be a classic Firesign album, but being culled from live radio, it’s less elaborately constructed, and more spontaneous and improvisational.

These five albums represent the cream of the crop and they are all masterworks of surrealist “theater of the mind” sci-fi counterculture comedy. There was nothing else like them, and the sole thing I can think of to compare them to would be the Monty Python albums. Firesign Theatre were often called “the American Monty Python,” but this comparison would stop at the Python albums, as Firesign were a strictly audio proposition for the most part, and certainly during their late 60s/early 70s golden years. [They are actually much more akin to lysergic Goon Show, of which all four of the Firesign Theatre were fanatical fans. In fact, Peter Bergman wrote some TV comedy sketches in London with Spike Milligan in the early 1960s.]
 

 
A key element to appreciate in Firesign Theatre is how multi-leveled their humor is. For instance, in their famous “Nick Danger” piece, they constantly drop in references to Beatles lyrics such as Danger describing his old flame, Betty Jo Bialosky, who used several aliases—Melanie Haber, Audrey Farber, and Susan Underhill—but “everyone knew her as Nancy” or creepy butler Catherwood walking out of earshot singing “I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink.” If you had never even heard of the White Album, these jokes were no less funny, but if you were really in on it, you knew how densely-layered all of this was. “Joycean” is an adjective often employed to describe Firesign, an observation no doubt inspired by the way Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses was put into the mouth of manic used car salesman Ralph Spoilsport in his weird rap at the very end of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. The relationship of Firesign Theatre to James Joyce’s work is not glib, or overstated. I like to think of the classic FT albums in the same way I regard Joyce’s published books. When airchecks of their (some thought lost) radio shows were collected in the essential Duke of Madness Motors book, I saw this as being analogous to discovering a full trunk of the avant-garde modernist Irish bard’s notebooks. A hundred years from now there will still be graduate students studying the multiple levels of meaning in Joyce and in Firesign Theatre albums.

Did I mention that Firesign Theatre is comedy for smart people? I can’t imagine a dummy even being able to make heads or tails out of it, let alone thinking it was funny. Comedy is almost always made by intelligent people, but theirs was the most intellectual comedy ever made, by some measure. Fifty years later, with all of the comedy that’s washed under the bridge since then, not a single thing—seriously nothing—compares to what Firesign Theatre created. It’s just that distinctive. Their artform cannot be duplicated. Theirs is a uniquely American artform, one that is recognized by the National Registry, and it is theirs alone. Their archive is now housed by the Library of Congress.

Regrettably it’s not that easy to convince people—and I’m talking about one-on-one with friends of mine—to want to get into 50-year-old comedy albums. No one seems to have the attention span. They think it will be dated, but for the most part Firesign Theatre exists in a much more hermetically-sealed and self-referential space than most comedy. There are very, very few outdated cultural references (even in the radio shows), nods to topical events or names that would fail to ring a bell, and 98% of it is as fresh today as it was in 1971. Comedy usually ages very poorly, but this is not the case with Firesign Theatre. A bright 20-year-old armed with an occasional look at Wikipedia would get the vast majority of the jokes, no problem. (As a testament to the long shelf life of their work, there was a fairly recent-ish weekly show of vintage Firesign Theatre radio on WFMU, during drive-time even. It’s evergreen material, I promise you.)

Over the years I have attempted to attract so many converts to the genius of Firesign Theatre, and almost always I have failed. I tend to send out this short clip, of Phil Proctor utterly destroying the rest of them in “The Chinchilla Show.”
 

 
[Peter Bergman told me that crazed scenario which I hoped you listened to above, came out of Phil Proctor’s head almost completely spontaneously! The rest of them were just trying to keep up with him. Phil is still like that, btw. When I first met him he told me the story of how he was made an honorary “Kentucky colonel” by the governor of the state while he was attending the Kentucky Derby, and within a matter of two minutes, I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes.]

I was able to convince my wife to listen to the four classic Firesign Theatre albums when heavy snowfall saw us (literally) stuck at home for two days, unable to leave. We got high, turned the lights down and listened. She enjoyed all four and told me that she was glad she’d been exposed to it (which was amazingly gratifying to me, I must say.) My other trick is whenever someone is passing through town during a road trip, I’ll burn them some Firesign on a CD-r and tell them not to listen to it until after it’s dark.
 

The back of the ‘How Can You Be in Two Places at Once’ album cover.
 
Sadly, my enthusiastic entreaties have invariably fallen upon deaf ears. Most people suppose it’s some sort of 1940s radio show that I am trying to get them to listen to. “Firesign Theatre? Sounds like some old-timey thing.” With others it’s the attention span thing, not enough hours in the day to listen to an hour (gasp!) of spoken word. It recently occurred to me to compare Firesign’s vast oeuvre to podcasts. These days, everybody is always listening to their favorite podcasts, at the gym, in the car, cooking, whatever, they’ve all got a podcast going on in the background. Why not think of the Firesign oeuvre as the greatest comedy podcast ever made?

Well, you’re in luck as all of the major (and much of the minor) works of Firesign Theatre are streaming from the exact same sources as that weekly true crime thing you always listen to. Spotify, TIDAL, YouTube, Amazon Music, Apple Music, all of them are pumping Firesign Theatre directly into your home. The four (or five) classic albums are super easy for you to listen to. Just a few clicks away from where you are reading this…

If any of this has sounded tempting to you, I suggest listening, preferably in the dark, or better still in the dark with headphones on, and stoned as fuck. If not then Firesign is perfect during your commute. Or when you are painting or doing the gardening. The point is that you MUST PAY ATTENTION or you will be lost. Immediately. You cannot multitask. You can’t surf the internet. You can’t be on Twitter or texting. If you don’t pay attention, not only would it be confusing, it would be annoying. I suggest starting where I did, with Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers. Or maybe with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye.” After that listen to Electrician, the album-length Bozos and the Dear Friends radio show compilation.
 

 
For more advanced Fireheads, there’s a brand new release—the first on vinyl in 35 years—titled Dope Humor of the Seventies. The handsomely designed two-record set—produced by longtime Firesign Theatre associate, my pal Taylor Jessen—includes 83 minutes of material, with a further hour or so that can be downloaded online, or streamed at all of the usual places. The collection was culled from their Dear Friends, Let’s Eat and The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour series, and there’s an insert with excellent liner notes that begins with the (absolutely true) statement I quoted at the start: “Discovering the Firesign Theatre is worse than trying to get into Frank Zappa for the first time.” Yes, it might seem daunting that there are well over 100 hours of Firesign Theatre to wade through, but if you think of these albums and radio shows the same way you think about podcasts, and you start with what I suggest, you might just discover something that you’ll obsess over for the rest of your life. I reckon that a high percentage of you who have read this far will be wondering “where has this been all my life?” unless you are already a Firesign Theatre fan, of course,

Seriously, just spark one up, turn out the lights and listen to this. Do it. Do it now…
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.28.2021
10:35 am
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Dreamboat Annie: Ann Magnuson’s dreams are NOT the dreams of the everyday housewife
09.16.2016
05:41 pm
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Photo of Ann Magnuson by Austin Young

Many of my dearest friends happen to be professional musicians. Perhaps this is because it’s a talent I respect so much and yet possess so little of myself. But this also means that all my life I’ve been put in the position of having a friend send me “my new album” and there is always that moment right before I press play when I imagine what I would say to them if I just don’t like it.

I’ve been good friends with actress/singer Ann Magnuson for half my life. We met when I—a massive fan of her group Bongwater—proposed that I do a video for their song “The Power of Pussy” sometime back in 1991. I’ve seen Ann do her various extravaganzas live probably more than any other performer and have always considered her to be a major, major talent (even if Hollywood has never known quite what to do with her). She can act, sing, write songs, curate museum exhibits and she paints fabulous fake Basquiats. She’s an energetic all-around talent who excels in the DIY arena with a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney-style “let’s put on a show” plucky work ethic. And her work is uncommonly smart and sophisticated.

Allow me to preface the following remarks by letting the reader know that as someone who reads, writes and edits the work of others all the live long day, I can’t listen to radio, TV or music with lyrics (let alone your podcast, random pesky Facebook “friend” who I have never met) during the workday, or else it’s impossible for me to do what I need to do. My wife works from home, too and she won’t have it. So we listen to classical music during the day around the house if we listen to anything at all.

When Ann Magnuson sent me her new Dream Girl CD in the post over the summer, I was pretty confident that it would be something that I would really love, so I immediately popped it on the stereo. The first number, “We’re All Mad” was lovely, a shimmering, gossamer—and eerie—folk song with classic Disney soundtrack dramatics. But the second song, “Be A Satyr,” a rambling drum-led beatnik sex rant reminiscent of “Help I’m a Rock” by the Mothers of Invention (and about as long) tested my patience to the point where I hit eject before the track was over, prompting my wife to remark tartly “Thank you.”

About a week went by. I tried listening to Dream Girl again, but I skipped around, failing to connect with any of it. Then one morning, I grabbed the CD to listen to in the car on the way to the gym. Now I go to the gym pretty early. The sun’s not shining and there are few other cars on the road at that hour. In that context, or enclosed environment, I was completely blown away by the brilliance of the exact same album that had annoyed me as I listened to it casually, with my iPad in hand, surfing Amazon and laying on the couch a few days before.

Now I think Dream Girl is one of the very best things I’ve heard so far in 2016. I listened to it nonstop for two months—for eight solid weeks, every single day—driving to the gym and back in the predawn hours and—this is the important part—giving it my undivided attention.

And that’s my message for you, the reader, who hopefully will take advantage of listening to Dream Girl in its entirety after (after!) you read the following interview with its multitalented creator. You cannot listen to this album casually and “get” it. Like a Firesign Theatre album, there are (apparently) hidden things, jokey multiple meanings and clever punning going on all over the place. It’s musical, but Ann’s vocals are as much spoken word as they are strictly singing. I’ll say it again: You have to pay attention to it, there is no other way to appreciate what she’s doing here.

And if you’re thinking this all sounds intriguing—or if you don’t believe my rave-review-but-with-a-twist approach here—for the next week we’ll be hosting a streaming file of the entire Dream Girl album. DO give it your full attention, it’s massively rewarding I think—and hope—you’ll agree. Try to listen in your car if you can. At least take a break and listen on headphones with your eyes closed and your head down on your desk (put down that mouse!) and dig Ann Magnuson’s dreamy and surreal theater of the mind. Buy the Dream Girl CD here.

I asked Ann Magnuson a few questions over email…

Richard Metzger: When you sent me the CD in the summer you wrote that it was a “return to your Bongwater days” but Dream Girl is super slick, whereas Bongwater was sort of shambolic psychedelia. What did you mean by that?

Ann Magnuson: I was referring more to the lyrical content, as opposed to the musical styles; a return to surreal storytelling via spoken word using my dreams, different voices, characters, sexual personae… and creating much of it through improvisation. But there are a couple of songs that are not unlike the folksy stuff I did on the BW records.

It’s wild that you say Dream Girl is “super slick” because it’s actually pretty stripped down, in terms of instrumentation, except for maybe “Cat in the Sun.” The Millionaire (from Combustible Edison) provided orchestrations on that. I told him to go full on sunshine-pop psychedelic with it and add a massive sprinkling of Yardley folk-hippie chick “Come With The Gentle People” Renaissance Faerie Dust. You, know, wooden wind chimes and flutes; lounging around in Mexican caftans at Nepenthe in Big Sur?

Like with Bongwater, I used my dream journals and a lot of improvisation with this new CD. Mostly, I just had fun in the studio rather than go in with too many preconceived ideas and arrangements. In that way I feel like Dream Girl has helped me get back in touch with my own voice as well as a sense of playfulness. In that way, the entire project was “shambolic.” I think we get pretty psychedelic in a lot of it, just in a very different way than Bongwater did. It’s a gentler trip. Although “Ayahuasca, The Movie” gets pretty wild!

Did “Cat in the Sun” start out as something you would sing to your own cat?

Ann Magnuson: Kind of. That one initially started out as a declaration, “Cat in the sun!” You know, like “Land, Ho!” or “Thar she blows!” Then it became more musical. And yes, I would sing it to our cat.

I’ve sung it to our cat. She liked it. I think she even got the “Band on the Run” joke.

Ann Magnuson: I am constantly making up songs and singing them around the house. 90% of them just disappear into the ether. But “Cat in the Sun” survived. So did “Be a Satyr.”
 

 
Dream Girl is the single most Firesign Theatre-esque thing I’ve ever heard that’s not actually the Firesign Theatre themselves—you’re a one-woman version of them—and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. It’s super smart, funny, nuanced and even though it’s primarily a spoken word collection, it still bears repeated listenings due to its innate musicality and to hear all of the “dog whistles” contained therein. I really think this “theater of the mind” format suits you.

Ann Magnuson: Thank you! I definitely take that as a compliment! I never owned any Firesign Theatre records myself but the older hippie dudes I hung out in high school with played Firesign Theatre records all the time. I heard that stuff at nearly every party we had back in the early 70s (usually when everyone was extremely toasted or peaking on something we shouldn’t have been frying our teenage brains on.) Yes, I love the “theater of the mind” format very much! That’s what I wanted to get back in touch with—simple, albeit “trippy”—storytelling; stories that were like little movies where the listener creates the visuals inside their head.

Didn’t we all grow up doing that while listening to music on headphones (or often with the transistor radio) before the tyranny of the image? (Which is now literally in everyone’s face thanks to cellphones.) One of the earliest memories I have is of a radio show that was actually piped in over the public address system in our grade school—in fact I think it was broadcast to all of the grade schools in West Virginia—back in the early Sixties. I think it was called “Talking Pictures.” The radio host would narrate a story and play a piece of classical music and we would all lay our heads down on our desks and just listen. Then, after it was done, our teacher gave us art supplies and we were instructed to draw or paint pictures, interpreting what we’d just heard. The one I remember the most clearly is Stravinsky’s “The Firebird.” Can you imagine any school—let alone one in West Virginia—doing that today!? I think it only lasted a couple of years. My mom narrated some of them since she was involved in the local radio station as well as community theater. I got exposed to a lot of radio and theater growing up and so this concept of the “theater of the mind” goes waaaaay back!

And yes, I love the ‘dog whistles’. I intentionally sprinkled in some specifically for the Bongwater fans; David Bowie’s toy xylophone being just one example.
 

Bauhaus, David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Ann Magnuson (as vampire Bowie’s soon-to-be victim) in the opening moments of Tony Scott’s ‘The Hunger’—the single best beginning to a film in all of cinema history???
 
There’s another self-referential one related to Bowie, too, when the drummer does the thing from “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” You know, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you what it was like to meet, work with, and even make out with him, which is weird considering how long we go back and what a major Bowie freak I am. So I guess I’ll just ask you that now…

I’m glad you noticed that drum bit! Joe Berardi really created a great percussive soundscape for that track.

The whole experience of doing The Hunger was a somewhat dissociative. There were issues with British Actor’s Equity about bringing over an American to do that role. (There was dialogue in my scenes that later got cut out in favor of the prescient MTV-style editing director Tony Scott was fond of.) I got the part after auditioning but it became an off and on again ordeal. Finally it was definitely off, as they ‘had’ to hire a Brit. Then, suddenly, at the last minute, it was back on! They flew me to London first class—on Pan Am no less—which was quite a treat as I’d only previously flown to Europe on the cheapo flying-bus airline Capitol (remember them?). Then I was there on the set standing next to Catherine Deneuve and Bowie and…. it was truly an out of body experience.

More with Ann Magnuson, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.16.2016
05:41 pm
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‘The Rusty James Show’: The idiot bastard son of Woody Allen and Firesign Theatre, starring Elvis?

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Fifty years ago—in the perfect pop culture year of 1966—Woody Allen did his first film project for American International Pictures, home to Roger Corman, monsters, bikers, acid heads and futuristic Death Races looking way forward to the year 2000. I say film project as he didn’t make his first film, he sort of stole it! Legally.

Basically Allen took the Japanese action film International Secret Police: Key of Keys and re-dubbed the dialogue, changing the plot to make it revolve around a secret egg salad recipe being fought over by rival James Bond-type spy characters. The film became What’s Up Tiger Lily? and was quite well received. The idea had been done before of course, on a smaller scale by Rocky and Bullwinkle creator Jay Ward for his Fractured Flickers TV series in 1963, and surely others had toyed with the concept, but not in a feature length film. The opportunities for juvenile, MAD Magazine humor were endless and very funny.

What’s Up Tiger Lily? created a model that has been followed by some of the funniest people in history. Here is the trailer in which Allen explains to an unsuspecting public what it is that he has done. (The entire film can also be found on YouTube.)
 

 

 
The next one of these dubbed comedies that comes to mind was in fact done by two of the funniest people to ever grace this planet, Phillip Proctor and the late Peter Bergman of Firesign Theatre fame. In 1979 Proctor and Bergman took clips from 1940s Republic Serials and overdubbed and rewrote an extremely stoned cliffhanger entitled J-Men Forever, starring themselves in newly filmed black and white bits that were inserted into the insane mess of rearranged reality. To top this off they used modern loud rock n roll music for the soundtrack.

To quote the blurb under the YouTube clip:

J-Men Forever became the signature for Night Flight’s stoned comedy audience in the 1980’s. This ultimate late night chronic high comedy was the most demanded rerun for the entire 8 years Night Flight was on the USA Network.

After the jump, experience the inspired insanity of ‘The Rusty James Show’...

READ ON
Posted by Howie Pyro
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01.30.2016
03:18 pm
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Comedians on Acid: Hippie madness at the end of the 60s


 
Last week we posted our interview with Kliph Nesteroff about his marvelous new book The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy, which is now available for purchase.

It’s a winner, folks. Simply put, Kliph has carved out an area of research and made it almost entirely his own—I refer to the development of the world of professional stand-up comedy in the decades before Richard Pryor, George Carlin, or even Lenny Bruce. (Not to worry, he also covers everything up to Louis CK too.) Kliph has made it his business to acquaint himself personally with many of the surviving old-school stand ups from the 1950s and also with the bounties of Variety’s archives.

The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy is about the Chitlin Circuit and vaudeville and the Mob and drugs and everything else, in other words, the seamy underbelly of the comedy world. This book will be a staple of comedy book lists for decades to come and is a must for every comedy nerd.

Here’s an exclusive exceprt from The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy.

Chapter Nine: Hippie Madness at Decade’s End

Marijuana and LSD were huge influences on comedy at the end of the 1960s. It was not uncommon for talk show guests to show up high. George Carlin said he took “a perverse delight in knowing that I never did a television show without being stoned.” Paul Krassner dropped acid before a Tonight Show appearance with guest host Orson Bean. Krassner was immersed in his trip when he walked through the curtain. “I kept staring at Ed McMahon because his face was melting into his chest. Orson asked me, ‘Have you taken LSD?’ He meant in a general sense, but I had this thought, ‘Oh, no, he can tell!’”

Phyllis Diller encapsulated the older generation’s ignorance of counterculture elements when a reporter asked her if she would remarry. She responded, “What kind of LSD have you been smoking?” Such cluelessness was common as Hollywood’s gatekeepers struggled to relate to the new hippie demographic. Television shows like Dragnet and My Three Sons portrayed counterculture protestors as morons. Carl Reiner’s son Rob was cast in several sitcoms play-ing such roles. “I did three Gomer Pyles, played a hippie in a couple of them. Did a Beverly Hillbillies, played a hippie in that. I was like the resident Hollywood hippie at the time. I had long hair and they needed somebody. In one of the Gomer Pyle episodes I actually sang ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Gomer.”
 

 
Veteran filmmaker Otto Preminger gave LSD the Hollywood treatment in 1968 with a motion picture called Skidoo. Preminger contacted Rob Reiner to help write dialogue for the hippie characters in his film. “Preminger was a very interesting, liberal guy and he took acid early on,” says Carl Gottlieb. “He wanted to meet The Committee. So we all trooped down to his offices with Rob Reiner.” Reiner said, “I went in and turned out some pages for hippies so that they would say ‘groovy’ in the right place.”

Groucho Marx was cast in Skidoo as an LSD dealer named God. It was surprising he agreed to it, as he was contemptuous of the new social mores (“That Midnight Cowboy. It’s about a stud and a pimp. I hated that movie”). Marx may have hated the counterculture, but he was hip to many of its elements. He subscribed to Paul Krassner’s paper The Realist, which featured articles about the drug culture. Krassner says, “Groucho was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD, which he had never tried but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong, so could I possibly get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on a trip.”

Groucho Marx high on LSD? Some who knew Groucho question the story. “It’s a fucking lie,” says producer George Schlatter. “Groucho never took acid. He didn’t need acid. Everyone else needed acid!” Carl Gottlieb agrees. “I doubt that story, because my contact with Groucho was around the same time. He was pretty infirm. The acid that was around in those days was the Owsley acid—Windowpane. It was brain-breaking.”

“Well, that was the reason Groucho asked me,” Krassner responds. “I have a letter from Lionel Olay, a popular magazine writer. He had interviewed Groucho and Groucho told him he was very curious about LSD. He read The Realist and about my taking trips. Bill Targ, my editor at Putnam, was a friend of Groucho. The writer of the movie Skidoo, Bill Cannon, introduced me to him. Groucho and I had lunch. He asked me if I could get him some LSD. Groucho was not going to go around boasting about this. It was just to prepare for the movie Skidoo. I accompanied him on his trip. We used the home of an actress in Beverly Hills. Phil Ochs drove me there. It was Owsley acid. Three hundred micrograms.”

Skidoo entered production with a cast that seemed plucked from Hollywood Squares. It included Frankie Avalon, Carol Channing, Frank Gorshin, Peter Lawford, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Arnold Stang and Jackie Gleason. It had a soundtrack by Harry Nilsson and an unforgettable scene in which Gleason, high on psychedelics, is haunted by the disembodied head of Groucho Marx.

Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, was not happy with it. “It was a zero on every level,” said Evans after the screening. “The guy [Preminger] cost us a fuckin’ fortune. His new entry belongs in the sewer, not on the screen. He’s such a prick; he gets his nuts off seeing us sink.”
 

Cheech and Chong’s best-selling ‘Big Bambu’ album came with a gigantic rolling paper. For obvious reasons, these rolling papers are rare today…

Several comedians considered their psychedelic trips important, life-changing experiences. “Pot fueled Cheech & Chong during our heyday,” said Tommy Chong. “Pot and to some extent acid. It had changed our world and it put me on a path to artistic and financial success. The spiritual effects and the revelations never leave. The secrets that LSD revealed to me changed my life forever.”

George Carlin felt the same. “I know exactly when I first did acid—it was in October 1969 while I was playing a major, now long-defunct jazz club in Chicago called Mister Kelly’s. Next to my [note-book] record of that booking, which was otherwise uneventful, is written in a trembling hand the word ‘acid.’ Actually in the course of a two-week gig I did acid multiple times, maybe five, maybe ten. Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid.”

Chris Rush was another comedian who came into being with the counterculture. Psychedelics informed his act. “When I took lysergic acid diethylamide I started rapping comedy: full, polished conceptual chunks. It just flowed through me, and I was a stream-of-consciousness comedian. I started doing it for fun in loft buildings and I started doing some clubs. This guy Mark Meyers from Atlantic Records came to see me. He said, ‘This guy talks like George Carlin.’ Bingo, I had a record deal.” His album First Rush sold half a million copies in the early 1970s, mostly to pot-smoking college kids. “They’d get high with twenty of their friends and put the album on.”

Comedy and the counterculture coupled with the new technology of FM radio. During the early 1960s FM radio was mostly used to simulcast aurally superior versions of AM sister stations. In 1967 the FCC passed an ordinance that ended such simulcasts. It forced FM to devise original programming. In order to fill mass spaces of airtime in a pinch, young disc jockeys turned to playing entire sides of LPs rather than just one song. Soon FM was a place where hippie rawkers and their long jams received maximum exposure. Likewise, comedians who aligned themselves with the counterculture found entire sides of their comedy records being played on FM. College-aged kids tuning in to hear their favorite hippie music were turned on to the comedians being played on the same stations—and those comics saw their ticket sales increase enormously.
 

 
Amid the FM scene emerged an audio comedy troupe called the Firesign Theatre. Phil Austin, David Ossman, Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman met at the newly minted Los Angeles FM station KPFK. They worked in various executive positions and eventually left for KRLA and improvised drug-influenced comedy on the show Radio Free Oz. Surf music producer and KRLA employee Gary Usher used his industry connections to secure the boys a deal with Columbia Records. “I’d see The Byrds at Columbia Studios when we were all recording,” said Phil Proctor. “We didn’t realize how much history we were observing or even making. There was very easy access. People were very friendly and the music brought everybody together. Pot brought everybody together. It was a very sociable scene, you know, hot and cold running girls all the time…We were using the Columbia studio where The Byrds recorded, [but] also the radio studio where Fred Allen had been.”

The Firesign Theatre, George Carlin and Cheech & Chong owed their vast success to FM. The radio stations were listened to by thousands of impressionable college students. “FM radio helped expose the records, and that led to our ability to headline shows on college campuses,” said Proctor. “We were asked to go on the road with the Maharishi.”

Comedian Jimmie Walker says FM radio was a platform for comedians who never would have been accepted in traditional circles. “They would never have gotten on Carson or anything like that. Lou Adler from A&M Records came up with these guys from Vancouver—Cheech & Chong. There was a new thing called FM and Lou said, ‘I’m going to make an album with these guys.’ These guys started selling out colleges, and we were stunned. Nobody was doing that. FM changed everything. It changed the face of comedy.”

Jack Margolis, a comedy writer who once wrote for Jay Ward cartoons, composed the seminal counterculture comedy record of the time. A Child’s Garden of Grass was based on his satirical paperback of the same name, the first in-depth comedic look at the effects of marijuana. Released by Elektra, the same label that had Jim Morrison and the Doors, A Child’s Garden of Grass had its advertising turned down by every major magazine, was denied a spot on the shelves of Wallichs Music City in Hollywood and was banned in Washington State. An FCC ruling that forbade “drug lyrics” kept program managers from playing it. Despite the kibosh, it sold four hundred thousand copies. Its only real advertising came from a large billboard on Sunset Boulevard across from the Whisky a Go Go. It is impossible to calculate the number of joints that were rolled on its gatefold surface.
 

 
The longhairs dominated radio. Cinema was maturing rapidly. Battles against censorship were being won on both literary and nightclub fronts. But television, beyond its odd spontaneous talk show moment, appeared unaffected by the times. “There was a real revolution happening in other media,” said comedy writer Rosie Shuster. “There were all these Jack Nicholson movies coming out that reflected that sensibility of the sixties. In music there was Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the Stones and the Beatles. But television was still stuck in some time warp that was more like the fifties.

”Comedians appearing on The Tonight Show still had to adhere to a traditional dress code. “For a long time the rule on Johnny Carson was tie and jacket,” says Robert Klein. “I came on without one once and Johnny didn’t say anything, but it came down through [Tonight Show producer] Freddy de Cordova: ‘Tie and jacket!’ ”

THE COMEDIANS copyright © 2015 by Kliph Nesteroff; used with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Below, the extended trailer for Otto Preminger’s ‘Skidoo’ featuring Dr. Timothy Leary, Sammy Davis Jr. and more…

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy

Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.04.2015
01:45 pm
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‘Nick Danger’ RIP: Firesign Theatre’s Phil Austin, 1941-2015
06.19.2015
03:42 pm
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Oh man. Some very bad, very sad news just crossed my desk in the form of this short email from Taylor Jessen, archivist extraordinaire, of the Firesign Theatre:

I’m very sorry to report that Phil Austin died last night at his home in Fox Island, Washington. Phil had been suffering from multiple cancers and had chosen to keep his condition private, so this was a sad and terrible surprise for us all. At his request, no memorial service is being planned.

Born in Denver, Colorado in 1941, but raised in Fresno, CA, Phil Austin went to Bowdoin College and then UCLA, before joining the staff of KPFK radio in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. It was at KPFK’s North Hollywood studio where he met his future partners in “the Beatles of comedy,” David Ossman and Peter Bergman, and later Phil Proctor, who’d been a friend of Bergman’s at Yale. Together as the Firesign Theatre (each of the troupe was an astrological “fire” sign), they recorded around thirty albums, including their Library of Congress recognized masterpiece, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, and other classics like Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, Everything You Know is Wrong and I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus. He is survived by his lovely wife Oona and their menagerie of pets.
 

 
Below, Phil Austin stars as “Happy” Harry Cox, a trailer-dwelling New Agey conspiracy theorist that Art Bell seems to have based his entire career on in the Firesign Theatre short Everything You Know is Wrong (This will be on the upcoming Firesign Theatre DVD in much better quality. Keep checking their website for the release date.)
 

 
Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.19.2015
03:42 pm
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Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and cheap old Republic serials: the loopy brilliance of ‘J-Men Forever’!
01.09.2015
02:29 pm
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In 1979, a few years after the diaspora of the surrealistic stream-of-consciousness comedy troupe Firesign Theatre, that outfit’s Philip Proctor and Peter Bergman created J-Men Forever, a pastiche film a la What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, from old crime and superhero shorts. They combined footage from several different serials and dubbed in their own dialogue to create a ridiculous plot about evil forces (“The Lightning Bug,” represented by several serial characters including the Crimson Ghost, whose face famously served as the Misfits’ logo) trying to take over the world with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, while the forces of good (“The Caped Madman,” a Captain Marvel figure whose transformation word is SH’BOOM—Sneaky, Hateful, Bigoted, Obnoxious, Obnoxious, and Mean, and yes, I know “obnoxious” is in there twice) fought back with elevator music. It rambles, it barely coheres, and it’s funny as all hell. Given its eminent stoner-friendliness, you’d think it’d have been a natural midnight movie, but it gained its life and audience when the USA Network’s treasure-filled insmoniac’s pal Night Flight played it in its entirety and harvested clips from it to use as interstitials.
 

 

 
In his 15 Minutes With…Forty Years of Interviews, film historian and radio host G. Michael Dobbs spoke with Proctor about the film.

Proctor recounted that producer Patrick Curtis had established a relationship with Republic Studios when he had produced an homage film to B westerns, another genre that Republic had produced.

“We thought it would be fun to do the serials,” Proctor said.

He and Bergman watched the serials and then wrote the new screenplay. They also supervised the new soundtracks, performing some of the voices themselves and casting other performers such as deejay Machine Gun Kelly.

An influx of funding allowed the pair to shoot new wrap-around footage featuring them as federal agents coordinating the fight against the Lightning Bug.

The reception the film received was so impressive that it inspired two spin-offs, a Cinemax special The Mad House of Dr. Fear and Hot Shorts for RCA Home Video, which used other members of the Firesign Theatre.

After Night Flight ended its run, the film was relegated to cinematic limbo.

“For years I tried to get it out,” said Proctor, “but we couldn’t find a good print. It was more important to have it look right. Then [Night Flight producer] Stuart Shapiro came up with a print.”

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Farewell, dear friend: Peter Bergman 1939-2012
More sugar: Firesign Theatre’s ‘High School Madness’ visualized

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.09.2015
02:29 pm
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‘My World Fell Down’: The oddest song The Beach Boys never recorded


 
Yesterday I was listening to a Glen Campbell greatest hits collection (The Capitol Years 1965-77, the one compiled by Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, it’s excellent) and in the liner notes, it mentions that Campbell sang and played guitar on a Gary Usher-produced single called “My World Fell Down” by Sagittarius, that was included on Jac Holzman and Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets collection, which I have, so I checked it out. It’s odd that I had this song in my possession—I’ve played the Nuggets box set many, many times all the way through—but never took much note. How could I have missed it?
 

A be-quiffed Glen Campbell backstage at the Grammy awards with the Beach Boys
 
“My World Fell Down” is the closest thing we’ll ever get to “Good Vibrations”-era Beach Boys meets LSD-soaked psych rock. Sagittarius was basically a supergroup of session musicians under the direction of Gary Usher, a staff producer at Columbia who had also “discovered” The Firesign Theatre and produced The Byrds. Aside from Campbell, who was, of course, briefly in the Beach Boys himself, the secondary vocalist on the track is none other than Beach Boy Bruce Johnston. Also worth pointing out is that Usher had written several songs with Brian Wilson (”409” and “In My Room” among them) and included in the backing group were powerhouse session players Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye, who had both recorded with the Beach Boys. If someone played this for you and told you it was an unreleased—and especially odd—Beach Boys demo, you’d believe them, no problem.
 

Gary Usher
 
Dig the musique concrète bridge section of carnival (bullfight?) noises and a slamming door. This part sounds like something straight off of Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Rolling Stones album that came out the same year, 1967, but is not included in the album version.
 

 
When “My World Fell Down” got to #70 on the Billboard chart, the label wanted Sagittarius to tour, at which point he revealed that Sagittarius didn’t actually exist as a real group and that it was his song, too. Usher moved forward with Sagittarius and recorded a full album leaning heavily on the talents of a young Curt Boettcher. Prior to the release of that record, Present Tense, in 1968, Usher and co. released a second Sagittarius single titled “Hotel Indiscreet” that had another musique concrète bridge section that utilized Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre ranting about… something:

“What for and how long my children? How long will we be made to suffer the utter degradation of everything we hold sacred? My fellow flowers, the time is upon us to open the door and purify the foul and pestilent air within, standing naked before the eternal judge and proclaiming we are all hip! Two three four… Hip! Two three four… zwei drei vier… Sieg Heil! SIEG HEIL!”

That bit was only on the mono version of the song, on the single. Clive Davis didn’t like the weirdo breaks in “My World Fell Down” and “Hotel Indiscreet” so he had Usher cut them out for Present Tense.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.25.2014
09:31 pm
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‘What you don’t mean won’t hurt you!’: Marching to Shibboleth with The Firesign Theatre
01.16.2014
05:39 pm
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Attention Firesign Theatre fanatics, two long out of print books transcribing their surrealist comedy classics, have just been republished. It’s fascinating to see their work in the form of plays. We think of Firesign Theatre as writer/performers, but this puts them in a literary context as well.

I asked their longtime archivist and producer, my pal Taylor Jessen (who promised me he was going to make a Firesign Theatre documentary in 2014) to fill us in:

The Firesign Theatre is one of the greatest Shibboleth manufacturers in history. Fans who’ve heard their 1970 masterwork Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers are aware that we’re all marching to Shibboleth – a Shibboleth being, of course, the original Hip password.

No one in the late sixties crossed the Jordan into Hip society without knowing the good word of Firesign: “Shoes for Industry!” “He’s no fun, he fell right over!” “What you don’t mean won’t hurt you!” “He broke the President!” In short, if a stranger came up to you in 1970 and said “No anchovies? You’ve got the wrong man!”, and you didn’t know the next line, man, forget it.

Rolling Stone’s Straight Arrow imprint published all those lines in 1972 and 1974 in the form of the script collections Big Book of Plays and Big Mystery Joke Book. Out of print for more than three decades, they now return in a new one-volume collection, Marching to Shibboleth, available exclusively from the FireSale store. 354 pages; all the words and art from the original books; all the text re-proofed and re-set to match the design and fonts of the original layout; the photos re-scanned from original source material. It’s Firesign’s classic Columbia period totally transcribed – Waiting for The Electrician or Someone Like Him, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All, Dwarf, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus and The Giant Rat of Sumatra, plus vignettes, miniatures, a 400-year Fyre Sygne historical exegesis with a lot of really impressive footnotes that you should therefore TOTALLY BELIEVE, plus for the first time the complete script to Everything You Know Is Wrong. All this as well as a new introductory essay by Greil Marcus.

Guaranteed to look great on any comedy lover’s shelf next to Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words and The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts.

Get your copy of Marching to Shibboleth, available exclusively from the FireSale store
 

 
Below, eight minutes of The Firesign Theatre’s “High School Madness” cut to the corny Henry Aldrich movies they were riffing on in the first place, via filmmaker Andre Perkowski:

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.16.2014
05:39 pm
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More Sugar: Firesign Theatre’s ‘High School Madness’ visualized
09.18.2012
03:22 pm
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Firesign Theatre fans will be delighted by this. I certainly was!

Video by Andre Perkowski who writes:

In this excerpt from that most paranoid of Paranoid Pictures, “High School Madness,” lovable Peorgie and Mudhead find themselves in a heapin’ pile of trouble at Morse Science High.

Eight minutes of The Firesign Theatre’s “High School Madness” set to the Henry Aldrich films they were riffing on. Don’t crush that dwarf, hand me the cut-ups!

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.18.2012
03:22 pm
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Farewell, Dear Friend: Peter Bergman (1939-2012)
03.09.2012
05:19 pm
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Dear Friends,

It is with a very heavy heart that I post this.

One of my very first heroes in life when I was a kid—and one of my dearest and most valued friends as an adult—Peter Bergman of the legendary Firesign Theatre, died this morning of complications from leukemia. He was 72.

The last time I talked to Peter was a few weeks ago. I’d picked up the Albert Ayler Holy Ghost box set, and there, on one of the live discs recorded in Cleveland in 1966, was Peter introducing the band! I called him up that morning and he excitedly told me about that event and we laughed a lot and I told him that he just HAD to write his autobiography.

“Pete, you’re the ‘Zelig’ of the rock era! You’ve been in a film with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Farrah Fawcett. You coined the terms “love-in.” You smoked a joint with Bob Marley and the Wailers when they were your opening act [True, the Wailers opened for Proctor and Bergman in Boston. Pete told me the joint was “arm-sized”!]. You guys gigged with the Buffalo Springfield. You’ve worked with Spike Milligan, and now here you are with Albert Ayler, for god’s sake! I mean, come on! You have to do this!”

Peter seemed to like the idea of writing an autobiography (a lot) and we talked about electronic publishing and Kindles and stuff like that. I had heard just a few days before, from my best friend, Michael Backes, that Peter was sick, but Mike said he played it off very cavalierly, like “Hey, if you’re going to get leukemia, this is the best kind of leukemia to get!” (meaning the most easily treated and managed with medicine).

I waited for the topic to come up on the phone that day. It didn’t, but just as I was about to broach it, Peter got another call and hopped off the line. It was the last time I spoke to him.

This morning I got a call from my wife, Tara, as I was standing in line with 4000 other people waiting to pick up my press credentials for the SXSW Festival. It’s a rainy, shitty day here in Austin, TX and with that call it got a whole lot worse:

“Honey, I’ve got some bad news for you. Some really bad news. Peter died last night. Taylor Jessen just sent you an email, but I didn’t think you’d heard.”

I stood in a room full of 4000 strangers and and quietly cried to myself, wondering how the rest of the Firesign were handling the awful news.

I’d lost a good friend, but they’d lost their brother.

From the Firesign Theater website:

Peter Bergman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the day after Russia invaded Finland and the day before Winston Churchill (Peter’s hero) turned 65. Peter’s comic career began in the sixth grade, writing comic poems with his mother for library class - a penchant that developed into co-authoring the ninth grade humor column “The High Hatters,” and his own creation “Look and See With Peter B.” for his high school newspaper.

Peter’s audio career was launched in high school as an announcer oh the school radio system, from which he was banished after his unauthorized announcement that the Chinese communists had taken over the school and that a “mandatory voluntary assembly was to take place immediately.” Russell Rupp, the school primciple, promptly relieved Peter of his announcing gig. Rupp was the inspiration for the Principle Poop character on “Don’t Crush That Dwarf”.

While attending high school, Peter formed his first recording group called “The Four Candidates,” turning out a comedy cut-up single titled “Attention Convention,” parodying the 1956 democratic convention. Released on Buddy records, it received air play in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

At college, Peter was managing editor of the Yale comedy magazine. He wrote the lyrics for two musical collaborations with Austin Pendleton, both of which starred Phil Proctor. He graduated as a scholar of the house in economics, and played point guard for the liberal basketball league whose members have since lost their dribble but not their politics.

Peter spent two graduate years at Yale as a Carnegie teaching fellow in economics, and as the Eugene O’Neill playwriting fellow at the drama school. After a six-month stint as a grunt in the U.S. Army’s 349th general hospital unit, he went to Berlin on a Ford foundation fellowship where he joined Tom Stoppard, Derek Marlow and Piers Paul Read at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. There he wrote and directed his first film, “Flowers,” and connected with the Living Theatre - a major influence on his art.

Peter worked briefly in London with Spike Milligan and the BBC before returning to America in 1966. Back in the U.S., he secured a nightly radio show on Pacifica’s KPFK in Los Angeles: “Radio Free Oz,” around which the Firesign Theatre coalesced and gestated.

Peter coined the term “Love-In” in 1967, and threw the first such event in April of that same year in Los Angeles. That event ultimately drew a crowd of some 65,000 people, blocking freeways for miles. This so impressed Gary Usher, a Columbia Records staff producer, that he offered the Firesign Theatre their first record contract.

In the 1970’s, Peter diversified his comic career as the president of a film equipment company. He also helped produce a machine for viewing angio cardiograms and measuring the blockage of the arteries of the heart.

In the 80’s Peter turned to film and tape, producing the comic feature “J-Men Forever” with Phil Proctor, as well as producing television shows that featured various members of Firesign.

Starting in 1995, Peter began touring the country as a “high tech comedian”, delivering lectures and keynote speeches to computer oriented companies and conventions. He worked on publishing the web site for one of the candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles.

His latest venture, in association with David Ossman, started in the summer of 2010: the podcast revival of Radio Free OZ.

I called Mike to commiserate and he said something that was true for me, too, and I’lll end with his words: “I don’t think there is ANYTHING that defines who I was in high school more than being that kid listening to Firesign Theatre on headphones stoned out of my gourd. I think the way I think because of the Firesign Theatre. I phrase things the way I do because of the Firesign Theatre. I look at the world the way I do because of them. There might not be anything that had a bigger formative influence on who I am today when I really think about it!”

Losing Peter Bergman is a great personal loss. Farewell, my dear friend, farewell. And to the rest of the Firesign Theatre, know that I am feeling the same things that you are today.

Below, the Firesign Theatre’s anarchic 1969 TV ads for a local Los Angeles car dealer, Jack Poet Volkswagen.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.09.2012
05:19 pm
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Debit! Debit! Debit! Said the Chinese Machine Gun: New Firesign Theatre shows!
12.01.2011
01:41 pm
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I just found out, by way of the brand new issue of Phil Proctor’s always wonderful Planet Proctor e-zine, that all four members of the Firesign Theatre recently got together in the studio in Washington State to record some podcasts for Peter Bergman’s Radio Free Oz. I haven’t listened yet myself, but intend to partake immediately upon posting this and smoking an incredibly massive joint…

Surreal wordplay, witty banter and liberal kvetching with Proctor, Bergman, Philip Austin and David Ossman, together in one room again! Listen to “The Firesign Theatre’s new recordings “Talking Over Each Other” at Radio Free Oz and subscribe to Planet Proctor here (you’ll get it in your email as a PDF)

Firesign Live! Portland Center For The Arts, Winningstad Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Get tickets here for the shows on December 9 & 10!

The Firesign Theater in Debit! Debit! Debit! Said the Chinese Machine Gun

The Firesign Theater in Faster than the Speed of Light

And here’s today’s installment of Radio Free Oz:
We’ll Occupy The Streets, We’ll Occupy the Courts

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.01.2011
01:41 pm
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Watch Neil Hamburger & Firesign Theatre streaming LIVE from the Everything Is Festival!


 
If you couldn’t make it to Los Angeles this holiday weekend for the INSANE five-day long Everything Is Festival! taking place at Cinefamily, fret not because you can watch today’s festivities live beginning at 2:30 PST.
 

 
At 2:30, America’s funnyman Neil Hamburger will be doing his special tribute to Dora Hall, the septuagenarian grandmother who turned entertainer with TV specials and record albums paid for by her rich husband, who owned the Solo cup company. Not to be missed!
 

 
Then at 4:30, there will be a special Firesign Theatre mini-film festival with Peter Bergman and Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theatre, in attendance. Films include the only film visual record of one of their legendary radio shows, Martian Space Party and a new 5.1 surround version of Everything You Know is Wrong.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.03.2011
04:28 pm
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Martian Space Party: Firesign Theatre mini-film festival


 
On Sunday as part of the grand experiment in entertainment excess that is the five-day long Everything Is Festival! held at Cinefamily here in Los Angeles, there will be a Firesign Theatre mini-film festival starting at 4:30p.m. (just after Neil Hamburger’s Dora Hall tribute, which starts at 2:30).

The event will feature two Firesign Theatre shorts that have not been shown theatrically in many, many years (probably not since the mid-70s, in fact) and that are not currently available on home video (yet), plus other previously unseen goodies and rarities.

First up will be the only cinematic documentation of their legendary free-form radio shows, Martian Space Party. The “Martian Space Party” show was the final program in the “Let’s Eat” radio series of 1972 and was staged for cameras and a small audience.

Everything You Know is Wrong, which is a lip-sync’d visual interpretation of their 1975 album of the same name, will be premiering in a new 5.1 surround sound presentation, prepared from a digital dupe of the film supervised by famed cinematographer Allen Daviau (E.T. Bugsy, The Color Purple).

Plus some other SUPER SECRET Firesign Theatre films and videos and a live Q&A with Peter Bergman and Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theatre, EYKIW director Allen Daviau and Firesign Theatre archivist Taylor Jessen, author of the new book and DVD-ROM Duke of Madness Motors. Yours truly will be asking the questions.

Below, the trailer, which is already in progress…
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.01.2011
09:01 pm
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Firesign Theatre: Duke of Madness Motors
02.23.2011
05:29 pm
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Peter Bergman and Firesign Theatre producer and archivist, Taylor Jessen, discuss the newly released box set of Firesign Theatre radio shows (1970-72), Duke of Madness Motors, featuring over 80 hours of MP3 audio on a DVD-ROM and a 108 page full-color book! Order your copy of Duke of Madness Motors today, because there are only 200 copies left and it’s unlikely to ever be reprinted.

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.23.2011
05:29 pm
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