| The Firesign Theatre | |
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Surviving
members of the Firesign Theatre paying tribute to the late Peter
Bergman on April 21, 2012; left to right: Austin, Ossman, Proctor
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| Medium |
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| Nationality | American |
| Years active | 1966–2012 |
| Genres | |
| Subject(s) | |
| Notable works and roles |
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| Members |
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| Website | www |
The Firesign Theatre (also known as The Firesigns) was an American surreal comedy group who first performed live on November 17, 1966 on the Los Angeles radio program Radio Free Oz, first on station KPFK FM, then on KRLA 1110 AM, then on KMET FM through February 1969. They produced fourteen record albums and a 45 rpm single under contract to Columbia Records from 1968 through 1976, and had three nationally syndicated radio programs: The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour [sic] in 1970 on KPPC-FM; and Dear Friends (1970–1971) and Let's Eat! (1971–1972) on KPFK. They also appeared in front of live audiences, and continued to write, perform, and record on other labels through 2012, occasionally taking sabbaticals during which they wrote or performed solo or in smaller groups.
Firesign Theatre material was conceived, written, and performed by its members Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor. The group's name stems from astrology, because all four were born under the three "fire signs": Aries (Austin), Leo (Proctor), and Sagittarius (Bergman and Ossman). Their popularity peaked in the late 1960s and 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". The group received Grammy Award nominations for Best Comedy Album for three of their albums: The Three Faces of Al (1984), Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death (1998), and Bride of Firesign (2001). In 2005, the US Library of Congress added one of the group's most popular early albums, the 1970 Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, to the National Recording Registry and called the group "the Beatles of comedy."
Before Firesign
Peter Bergman 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 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 Program, More a Way of Life and met surrealist comedian Spike Milligan. While there, he saw the Beatles in concert, which inspired him 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. According to Bergman, the show "featured everybody who
was anybody in the artistic world who passed through LA." Guests
included the band Buffalo Springfield and Andy Warhol. There, Bergman worked with producers Phil Austin and David Ossman. 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
(Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius), and debuted them on his November 17,
1966 show. He had to drop "Oz" from the name after legal threats from
MGM, who owned copyright to The Wizard of Oz.
Radio Free Oz
The Firesigns were strongly influenced by the British Goon Show. According to Ossman:
We all listened to The Goon Show, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, at various times in our lives. We heard a lot of those shows. They impressed us when we started doing radio ourselves, because they sustained characters in a really surreal and weird kind of situation for a long period of time. They were doing that show for 10 years, all the way through the 1950s. So we were just listening to them at the end. It was that madness and the ability to go anywhere and do anything and yet sustain those funny characters. So when we first did written radio, where we would sit down and write half hour skits and do them once a week, which we did in the fall of 1967, we did things that were imitative of The Goon Show and learned a lot of voices from them and such.
The Firesigns initially chose an improvisational style. According to Proctor:
We each independently created our own material and characters and brought them together, not knowing what the others were going to pull. And it was all based on put-ons; that is, we were assuming characters that were assumed to be real by the listeners. No matter how far out we would carry a premise, if we were tied to the phones we discovered the audience would go far ahead of us. We could be as outrageous as we wanted to be and they believed us—which was astonishingly funny and interesting and terrifying to us, because it showed the power of the medium and the gullibility and vulnerability of most people.
On nights when he had no guests, Bergman would have the Firesigns
come on the air and pretend (including himself) 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; 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.
In September 1967, the Firesigns performed an adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges' short story "La Muerte y La Brujula" ("Death and the Compass") on Radio Free Oz.
In 1969, they created a number of improvised television
commercials for Jack Poet Volkswagen in Highland Park, California, with
the characters of Christian Cyborg (Bergman), Coco Lewis (Proctor), Bob
Chicken (Austin), and Tony Gomez (Ossman).
Golden age
Start of recording career
Bergman coined the term "love-in" in 1967, and 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 the desire to make a Firesign Theatre record, and this led to a
recording contract with the label. Usher also used the Firesigns' audio collages on songs by The Byrds ("Draft Morning") and Sagittarius (the 45 RPM version of "Hotel Indiscreet") 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.
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" to copyright their work.
Electrician 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 [sic] aired for two hours on Sunday nights on KPPC-FM in 1970.
The Firesign Theatre produced three more Columbia studio albums from 1969 to 1971: How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All; Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers; and I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus. Each grew technically more sophisticated, taking advantage of more tape tracks and Dolby noise reduction.
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.
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 30, they performed a live KPFK broadcast, 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.
1973 sabbatical
Proctor (left) and Bergman (right) started working as a duo in 1973 on TV or Not TV.
The Not Insane album performed poorly, and the Firesigns would
later claim to be disappointed with it. In the liner notes to the
group’s 1993 greatest hits album, Shoes for Industry: The Best of the Firesign Theatre, Bergman criticized Not Insane,
saying it "was when the Firesign was splitting apart; it was a
fractious, fragmented album." Ossman called it "a serious mistake" and
said it “was incomprehensible, basically”, and “it was not the album it
should have been and I think that caused us to slope off rapidly in
sales."
The four decided to take a break from the group in 1973 to work in separate directions. Proctor and Bergman decided to perform as a duo, and made a separate record deal with Columbia, producing TV or Not TV: A Video Vaudeville in Two Acts. They turned this into a vaudeville-type show which they played on tour. While promoting the show, they did a radio interview with disk jockey Wolfman Jack.
Meanwhile, Ossman wrote a solo album How Time Flys, based on the Mark Time character he created for a Dear Friends
skit. He co-directed the album with Columbia producer Steve Gillmor,
and the other three Firesigns starred on it, along with several guest
personalities including Wolfman Jack, Harry Shearer of The Credibility Gap, and broadcast journalist Lew Irwin.
Austin penned the solo album Roller Maidens From Outer Space, based on a hardboiled detective in the same vein as his Nick Danger character introduced on the B side of How Can You Be In Two Places.... Roller Maidens, released in March 1974 on Columbia's Epic label, also featured all four Firesigns, and included actors Richard Paul and Michael C. Gwynne.
Reunion
The group reunited in late August 1973 to produce the Sherlock Holmes parody The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, released on vinyl in January 1974. This was followed in October 1974 by Everything You Know Is Wrong, which satirized the developing New Age movement. The Firesigns made a film lip synched to the album and showed it in a live appearance at Stanford University. The film was released on VHS video tape in 1993.
In 1975, they released the black comedy album In the Next World, You're on Your Own, penned by Ossman and Austin. This album, like Not Insane, also sold poorly, and Columbia declined to renew their contract beyond 1976.
Second split
As
Austin looked back on this period, he wrote in September 1993 that he
saw Proctor and Bergman wanting to take the Firesign Theatre in a
different direction than he did, moving away from intensely written
albums released one per year, to more live performances with lighter
material. Proctor and Bergman turned their attention in 1975 to producing a live show and Columbia album, What This Country Needs, based in part on material from TV or Not TV.
The Firesign Theatre closed out their Columbia Records contract with a greatest-hits compilation Forward Into the Past in 1976. Meanwhile, Austin and Ossman toured the west coast, billing themselves as "Dr. Firesign's Theatre of Mystery". They produced a live stage show Radio Laffs of 1940, which included "School For Actors", another episode of the private eye character Nick Danger
introduced in their second album, and a soap opera "Over the Edge".
This was performed at the Los Feliz Theatre in Los Angeles in May 1976,
and at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco in June.
The Firesigns took it easy for the rest of the 1970s, producing a 1977 album Just Folks... A Firesign Chat based largely on unreleased Dear Friends and Let's Eat radio material. Proctor and Bergman appeared as regulars on a 1977 summer replacement TV series hosted by the Starland Vocal Band. Proctor and Bergman gave up their road performances after witnessing the September 4, 1977 Golden Dragon Massacre, and in 1978 released another studio album Give Us a Break, which lampooned radio and television. The Starland Vocal Band also performed short comic radio breaks on this album.
Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin's Tandem Productions bought the rights to Nick Danger for a TV series to star George Hamilton; and in 1978, New Line Cinema began negotiations to make a movie starring Chevy Chase. Both projects ended in development limbo, and rights to the character reverted to the Firesigns.[16] In December 1978, they began writing five short (2:24) episodes of Nick Danger: The Case of the Missing Shoe for a possible syndicated daily radio series. When the syndication went unsold, Austin approached Rhino Records and secured a deal to release the five episodes in 1979 on a 12-minute extended play (EP) record.
Austin called Bergman late in 1979 to make peace and reunite the
Firesigns. This resulted in their last album of the decade, the 1980
live Fighting Clowns, consisting largely of comic songs written by the group.
Reagan Era
...there was something about the Eighties – the anti-surrealist politics of the Eighties – that was wrong for the Firesign Theatre.
— David Ossman
The popularity of the group seemed to cool off after 1980 as the
social and political climate of the United States changed with the election of President Ronald Reagan. In 1982, they produced the album Lawyer's Hospital from a collection of live appearances, National Public Radio (NPR) performances, and the Jack Poet Volkswagen commercials from Radio Free Oz. They also expanded their 1972 Shakespeare parody into a road show and album, Shakespeare's Lost Comedie. This would be expanded again and re-released in 2001 as Anythynge You Want To.
Ossman left the group in early 1982 to take a producer's job for NPR in Washington DC.[7][16] The remaining three Firesigns produced a new album in 1984 with the further adventures of their Nick Danger character, The Three Faces of Al, which received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. This was followed in 1985 by the album Eat or Be Eaten.
In 1988, Austin was signed by John Dryden to produce over 50 short Nick Danger pieces for his radio satire show Daily Feed. These were published on cassette tape as The Daily Feed Tapes, and later formed the basis for a 1995 book authored by Austin, Tales of the Old Detective and Other Big Fat Lies.
1990s revival
I dreamed it back. Sure enough, when we kicked the fascists out of office it was time for the Firesign Theatre to come back
— Peter Bergman
Following the 1992 presidential election, and with Ossman back in the group, the Firesign Theatre reunited in 1993 for a 25th anniversary reunion tour around the US, Back From the Shadows, starting on April 24 in Seattle with an audience of 2,900. The tour, consisting of live performances of material from their first four Golden Age albums (Electrician, Two Places At Once, Dwarf, and Bozos), was recorded on CD and a DVD video released in 1994. They also released a 1993 greatest hits album, Shoes for Industry: The Best of the Firesign Theatre containing original material from the first nine albums, TV or Not TV, and Roller Maidens From Outer Space. This was followed with the 1996 album Pink Hotel Burns Down.
In 1996, Bergman revived Radio Free Oz as an Internet-based radio station, www.rfo.net, calling it "the Internet's funny bone."
The Firesigns satirized the turn-of-the-millennium Y2K scare with the 1998 album Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death, in which they revived some of their classic characters such as used car salesman Ralph Spoilsport (Proctor) from How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, news reporters Harold Hiphugger (Ossman) and Ray Hamberger (Proctor) from Everything You Know Is Wrong, and game-show contestant Caroline Presskey (Proctor) from Don't Crush That Dwarf. This earned them their second Grammy nomination, and they developed it into a "millennium trilogy" with the 1999 Boom Dot Bust and 2001 Bride of Firesign, which received a third Grammy nomination. Characters from Give Me Immortality were used on the 2001 live album Radio Now Live.
In December 2001, the Firesigns appeared in a 90-minute PBS television show Weirdly Cool. This contained live, updated performance material based on Waiting for the Electrician, How Can You Be in Two Places..., and Don't Crush That Dwarf; and included interviews and two Jack Poet Volkswagen commercials.
The Firesigns appeared on the NPR show All Things Considered from July 4 to December 31, 2002. These appearances were compiled on a CD, All Things Firesign.
In 2008, they released a four-CD boxed set The Firesign Theatre's Box of Danger, compiling most material which featured their most famous character, Nick Danger, including a bootleg recording of a 1976 live performance.
Their final album was the 2010 Duke of Madness Motors: The Complete "Dear Friends" Radio Era, a combination book and data DVD comprising a complete compilation, totaling over 80 hours, of their 1970s radio shows Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour, Dear Friends, and Let's Eat
(the last two in both original broadcast, and syndication-edited form).
Their last live performance was on November 19, 2011 in Kirkland,
Washington. They claimed to be the longest surviving group from the "classic rock" era to still be intact with the original members (45 years).
Bergman died on March 9, 2012, from complications involving leukemia, and Austin died on June 18, 2015, from complications of cancer.
Firesign members
Peter Bergman (born under the fire sign Sagittarius in Cleveland, Ohio on November 29, 1939; died March 9, 2012) started his radio career on his high school radio system during the Korean War;
he got kicked off the air by the principal when, as a prank, he
announced a Communist takeover of the school. He studied economics at
Yale (class of 1961), and was managing editor of the university's comedy
magazine. In his second graduate year he became a fellow in
playwriting. Later, he considered attending medical school, and helped
produce a machine for viewing angio cardiograms and measuring blockage
of the arteries of the heart. He had a deep voice, and frequently took African American roles in Firesign Theatre and Proctor and Bergman works.
Philip Proctor (born under the fire sign Leo in Goshen, Indiana
on July 28, 1940) was a boy soprano in a children's choir, and studied
acting at Yale. He became a professional actor, with a role on the soap
opera The Edge of Night, before contacting Bergman and joining him on Radio Free Oz in 1966. Proctor's adult tenor voice enables him to do a convincing female voice without using falsetto;
therefore he usually did most of the female roles in the Firesign
Theatre and Proctor and Bergman works, though the other three Firesigns
occasionally did female voices. He also has done celebrity voice
impersonations on Firesign material, including W.C. Fields (Waiting For the Electrician and How Can You Be In Two Places...), Robert F. Kennedy (Waiting For the Electrician), and a Peter Lorre-like voice for the Nick Danger character Rocky Rococo (Box of Danger). Proctor has also acted and appeared as a voice actor on many television shows and several feature films.
Phil Austin (born under the fire sign Aries in Denver, Colorado
on April 6, 1941; died June 18, 2015), was the youngest Firesign. He
attended college but never graduated. He was an accomplished lead guitarist,
and was responsible for adding much of the music to Firesign works. He
also appeared as an actor and voice actor on television.
He used his natural, sonorous baritone voice for Nick Danger, but
affected a phony Japanese accent for his "Young Guy, Motor Detective" self-parody of Danger in Not Insane, and a stereotypical, tough-guy voice and accent for the similar hardboiled detective Dick Private in Roller Maidens From Outer Space. He also could do an old-man voice as Doc Technical in the Dear Friends radio "Mark Time" episode, and applied his impersonation of Richard Nixon as presidents in several Firesign works (Bozos, Everything You Know Is Wrong), and How Time Flys and Roller Maidens. He also used an Elvis Presley impersonation singing the news in the Roller Maidens track "The Bad News".
David Ossman (born under the fire sign Sagittarius in Santa Monica, California
on December 6, 1936), the oldest Firesign, is known as the intellectual
of the group, and is known for doing an old man voice (most famously as
Catherwood the butler in the original Nick Danger story, George
Tirebiter on Don't Crush That Dwarf, and as the elder ant Cornelius in Disney Pixar's 1998 A Bug's Life.)
He used his natural voice as astronaut Mark Time and newsman Harold
Hiphugger. Outside of the Firesign Theatre, he has performed several
voices on The Tick animated TV series, and worked extensively as a producer and on-air narrator on National Public Radio and several affiliated stations.
Associate Firesigns
Several
people have been accorded unofficial "associate Firesign" status over
the years, by virtue of performing on several records with the group.
Austin's first wife Annalee performed in support of the group on
several "golden age" albums. She is credited as a member of "the St.
Louis Aquarium Choraleers" (singing the hymn "Marching to Shibboleth")
and as "the Wake-Up Lady" and for birdsong on Don't Crush That Dwarf; as "Mickey" and with keyboard stylings on I Think We're All Bozos; with film footage on the Dear Friends album; and organ, piano, and vocals on Not Insane.
Ossman's first wife Tiny (Tinika)
performed as a St. Louis Aquarium Choraleer and as part of the
"Ambient's Noyes Choral" (singing the Peorgie and Mudhead theme song) on
Don't Crush That Dwarf; as "Ann" on I Think We're All Bozos; as Nurse Angela and news reporter Chiquita Bandana on How Time Flys; and vocals and percussion on Not Insane. She and Ossman co-hosted a Sunday night radio program of pre–World War II music on KTYD.
Austin married his second wife Oona Elliott in 1971. She is credited as an anonymous extra in I Think We're All Bozos; was photographed as one of the Roller Maidens From Outer Space and sang backup vocals for the Austin solo album; and appeared as a Reebus Caneebus groupie in the film version of Everything You Know Is Wrong. She is the model for the blonde femme fatale on the cover art of the Box of Danger CD set, and is credited with performing support functions such as photography and catering on several of the later albums.
Timeline
Cultural influence
In 1997, Entertainment Weekly ranked the Firesign Theatre among the "Thirty Greatest Comedy Acts of All Time". In 2005, the US Library of Congress added Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers to the National Recording Registry, and called the group "the Beatles of comedy."
Comedians George Carlin, Robin Williams, and John Goodman enjoyed the Firesigns' comedy, and lent their comments to the 2001 PBS television special, Weirdly Cool. Williams referred to Firesign albums as "the audio equivalent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting."
Beatle John Lennon was photographed wearing the Firesign's "Not Insane – Papoon for President" campaign button they had made for Martian Space Party (Not Insane album).
Musical satirist "Weird Al" Yankovic paid homage to the Firesigns by giving the title "Everything You Know Is Wrong" to an original song on his 1996 album Bad Hair Day.
Steve Jobs paid homage to the Firesigns' I Think We're All Bozos album by programming an "Easter egg" in Apple's Siri intelligent personal assistant. Siri responds to the prompt "This is worker speaking. Hello" with "HELLO AH-CLEM. WHAT FUNCTION CAN I PERFORM FOR YOU? LOL".
Copyright infringement
In Madison, Wisconsin in 1974, a pair of University of Illinois students opened the first of a regional chain of pizza restaurants they named "Rocky Rococo" after the Nick Danger character, without any mention of connection to the Firesign Theatre. They hired an artist to design as their logo, a moustachioed Italian with a white hat and sunglasses, suggested by the White Spy from Mad Magazine, and hired comic actor Jim Pederson to portray this "Rocky Rococo" wearing a white suit.
The Firesigns visited the first Rocky Rococo Pizza when on tour
in Madison in 1975, and reacted with good humor, joking around with the
owners and giving them pictures that said, "To Rocky, from Rocky" which
were hung on the wall. But in 1985, by which time the chain had grown to
62 restaurants and the Firesigns had passed their "golden age", they
sent the owners a letter claiming ownership of the name. The pizza
chain's lawyers found a similar case where an Austin, Texas pizzeria
named Conan's ran afoul of the copyright owners, producers of the 1982
film Conan the Barbarian. Since the creator of the Conan the Barbarian comic had similarly endorsed the restaurant by drawing Conan on its walls, the suit lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. So the Firesigns settled out of court.
Mark Time awards
Ossman and his second wife Judith Walcutt formed Otherworld Media Productions in 1985 to produce audio theatre.
They created an annual "Mark Time award" for best radio science
fiction, named after Ossman's astronaut character. In 2015, they added
three new awards named after Firesign Theatre characters:
- Nick Danger prize for best mystery/detective fiction
- The Bradshaw prize (after Bergman's cop character) for "service to the field"
- The Betty Jo (But Everyone Knew Her as Nancy) prize, judged by Phil Proctor and his wife, for best "multi-gender" vocal performance
