Really — it’s been, like, Thou shalt not… and Stay thy hand… and all the rest of those Biblical-sounding injunctions. I’ve been strong. I’ve cared. Ultimately, alas, although I wrestled with the angel, s/he has overcome me. It was never easy.
And in the end, it was not even possible.
Yes. It’s time I mentioned The Firesign Theatre.
If you’re not a regular reader of RAMH and reading this post, you’ve probably landed here because, like me, you already know who they are. You’re just looking for more. You might want to skip through this post.
If you don’t know who they are, here’s how Wikipedia starts its article:
[Note variant spellings of Theatre. The -re is right.]The Firesign Theatre is an American comedy troupe consisting of Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor…
The Firesign Theater employ a stream of consciousness style that links direct references to movies, radio, TV, political figures, and other cultural sources, intermingled with sound effects and bits of music. The resulting “stories” are quite bizarre, including the theft of a high school, a fair full of clowns and holograms, and aliens who use hemp smoking to turn people into crows. The stories are often interrupted by commercials that may be a “send-up” of a real product…
The die-hard fans of Firesign Theater tend to rehash and rehearse the scripts, quoting them randomly to each other… the stories on the first side of many of the albums ran together into one long zany diatribe.
Aside: Before proceeding further, note the phrases “die-hard fans,” “rehash and rehearse the scripts,” and “quoting them randomly.” Just as with certain movies, like The Wizard of Oz, This Is Spinal Tap, and 300, the work of Firesign Theatre can seem most appealing to those who’ve experienced it enough to quote from it verbatim. This leads to much long-suffering eye-rolling among spouses and other family members, friends, and often complete strangers who, alas, recognize the symptoms but have never themselves been infected. All of which explains both why I resisted confessing the Firesign obsession, and why I eventually have found myself succumbing.
Anyway, right out of the gate, you know much of what you need to know to decide if you might actually, like, laugh at a Firesign bit. Comedy. Free-wheeling and somewhat amorphous, despite the routines’ basis in actual, tightly-controlled and well-rehearsed scripts. Cross-referential, to various elements in pop culture (even, as it happens, to other Firesign works).
A couple other factoids might be useful:
- Firesign Theatre is a product of the 1960s USA counterculture, though the group remains active here and there. And now and then.
- Although Firesign has dabbled in other media, their biggest succes has come via radio and albums (vinyl, transferred to tape, transferred to CD, transferred to MP3 and other digital form). Like Garrison Keillor, Jean Shepherd, the producers of the British Dr. Who radio show, and so on, their primary medium is sound, and their favored canvas, the imaginations of their audience. (The members of the group were fans of the British Goon Show, whose influence pervades Firesign’s dialogue, rhythms of speech, and dramatic setups (such as they are).)
My friend (and future brother-in-law) and I donned our respective sets of headphones and settled in for what I was sure would be some sort of crazy experimental-rock recording… and promptly fell down the rabbit hole.
On first listen, I couldn’t make any sense at all of Side 1. It overwhelmed me, bombarding my ears — easily confused under the best of circumstances — with one-liners, awful puns, hilarious puns, scraps of TV game shows and radio ads turned inside-out, parodies of commercial jingles, bizarre accents and dialects, street signs which read themselves aloud, a little riff on what I recognized from math classes but didn’t yet know as Zeno’s “dichotomy paradox”, people falling into commercials and vice-versa…
I could grab onto a narrative in bursts of maybe 10 or 20 seconds at a time, but these were separated by 30 seconds or more of chaos as the main character — or was he? — changed radio stations at random.
Of course, I had to listen to it again.
But first, my friend looked at me and I at him. We were both grinning, both a little perplexed. He flipped the album over.
Side 2 of the How Can You Be… album (or HCYB) is unlike Side 1. It’s a full half-hour narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s even a recognizable genre, a parody of old-time radio noir mysteries featuring a hard-boiled detective, a sleazy weasel of a villain, a beautiful (and perhaps deadly) woman, a police detective at odds with the private eye, and a butler who may or may not have done it. (The “broadcast” is even interrupted by commercials and public-service announcements.) For this reason, it’s among Firesign’s more accessible (and popular) recordings.
Don’t expect to find The Shadow or Dick Tracy here, at least as you’ve ever found them before. And listen — listen hard, and probably more than once.
Below, then, is (are?) The Further Adventures of Nick Danger.
And can you do me a favor? If you give it a listen, please add a comment letting me know how far you got into it. (I won’t be insulted if you don’t finish — just curious!)
P.S. If you’re interested, although I don’t have all of Side 1 online, here’s a clip from it — the so-called “Ralph Spoilsport Motors” segment. Among other things, it’s a takeoff on a real used-car dealer’s radio ads, which played played all over the western US. Here’s an (approximate) transcript of the opening, which may serve to anchor you a bit before the boat goes skittering away across the surface:
Hiya friends! Ralph Spoilsport, Ralph Spoilsport Motors — the world’s largest new used and used new car automobile dealership — Ralph Spoilsport Motors — here in the city of… Emphysema! Let’s just look at the extras on this fabulous car! Wire-wheel spoke fenders and two-way sneeze wind vents, star-studded mud guard, sponge-coated edible steering column, chrome fender dents and factory air-conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped air-conditioned factory! It’s a beautiful car, friends, with doors to match! Birch’s Blacklist says this automobile was stolen but for you, friends, a complete price: only two-ninety-five hundred dollars in easy monthly payments of twenty dollars a week, twice a week and never on Sunday!
_______________________
* The title of this post is the name under which most (all?) of Firesign Theatre’s work is copyrighted.
marta says
Oh, just say no to the Rabbit Hole. You tossed in that tiny Doctor Who ref. just to snag me. Well, you’ve snagged my curiosity for sure, but I won’t have time to explore for a few days. I might even like them though they are American and not British!
The name does ring a bell, but I can’t honestly say I know them. We’ll see.
kelly says
I’ll be back to check this out. You have definitely caught my interest.
John says
marta: It did occur to me that “Doctor Who” might have that effect just as — though the jury is still out — I thought the Goon Show reference might sound a chord in froog.
kelly (and marta, for that matter): If a half-hour at the computer isn’t convenient, let me know. I do think you’ll like them (I want to say almost anyone word-tuned would), but I realize time (and proximity to a computer) can be an issue.
s.o.m.e. 1's brudder says
Maybe this would help Marta and Kelly with their listening opportunities:
“They could wait there in the sitting room, or sit here in the waiting room….”
I think the recaptcha may also be a quote from those 3 or 4 Crazee guys….cording ashrams
froog says
Agh! Your embedded audio and video clips will never play on my computer – not sure why. Very frustrating!
The melange of pop culture references sounds similar to the Abrahams brothers’ Kentucky Fried Theater which came along a few years later (although they, of course, were more physical in their comedy, performing their madcap skits at first on stage, and then moving on to films and TV), and I would guess that Firesign was one of their influences.
You put me in mind of a ‘lost classic’ of British ‘radio’ comedy – a one-hour detective story spoof from the early ’80s called Glompus van de Hloed’s ‘Tales from the Crypt’. I had imagined it might have originally aired on BBC Radio 4 (the home of a lot of great comedy around that time), but I only ever knew it from a vinyl album I discovered by happy chance in the bargain bin of a record shop in a small town in SW England (I believe it was Barnstaple). The only reference to it I can find online is here, but with your superior Web-searching skills you may well be able to find out more.
Glompus was a Belgian (thus, with outrageous accent) “supernatural” detective who had fallen on hard times and was trying to make ends meet by running a one-man minicab company. The mystery story was regularly interspersed with his advertising jingles, which hinged on increasingly outlandish rhymes with ‘cabs’:
“De Hloed Cabs!
We’re so much cheaper than the rest.
Weddings, stations, airports –
We’re definitely the best.
Or even if you just want to go down to the chemist’s
To get some ointment for your scabs,
You know what to do –
Ring De Hloed Cabs!”
Glompus was played by the great English character actor Andrew Sachs (best known as Manuel, the bumbling waiter from Barcelona in Fawlty Towers); he was joined by some other great English comedians of that generation, Rory McGrath (as the detective’s rather sinister Cornish manservant, Creephole), and Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones (as the moronically inept policemen, Inspector Bribeasy and Sergeant Porno, and various other supporting characters).
Wonderfully silly stuff. The opening narration paints a gothic picture of a desolate moor, concluding: “Somewhere, a wolf howls…. It’s in Tokyo Zoo; so, we don’t hear it.”
Later, over the body of the first murder victim….
Doctor: This man died of Dutch Elm Disease.
Inspector: I’m going to need a second opinion.
Doctor: All right, then. He died of scurvy.
Sergeant: If you ask me, sir, he died of Dutch Elm Disease.
Inspector: Why do you say that, Sergeant?
Sergeant: Well, look, sir – he’s got no leaves!
froog says
The Goons, I have to say, left me relatively cold. I just wasn’t ‘of that time’. Although, strangely, I do find a lot of other ‘vintage’ comedy – Round The Horne, Hancock, even ITMA – accessible and funny. I think there was a problem of too much pressure from your elders: these other golden oldies I was able to discover for myself, but teachers were always trying to ram The Goons down your throat and expecting you to like them. Offputting.
A great, great ReCaptcha here:
worriers variation
John says
brudder: “cording ashrams” does sound like a phrase from “Marching to Shibboleth,” doesn’t it?
froog: Unlistenability of audio clips… check the email account you use to sign in here; there’s an alternative. Thanks for alerting me to the problem; near as I can tell, it must have something to do with Flash, because other elements of your configuration seem to match mine (at least what I can glean from the Sitemeter account of your visit).
[Anyone with similar problems, please let me know. “There’s always a way.” :)]
Found this scrap from Glompus:
[scene: interior of pub]
“I’ll get em in.”
“Let’s go dutch”
“Ok. Barman! Pint of tulips, please.”
“I’ll have a large windmill.”
Also found a 50+MB MP3 audiobook (?) for download — an episode, maybe? — but can’t access it from this PC. Will try again later tonight. But yes, that show seems about the right speed. “Look, sir – he’s got no leaves”: ha!
Somewhere, someone must have assembled an encyclopedia of British comedy. To an outsider, it looks something like a map of the former Soviet republics. In Urdu.
Kate Lord Brown says
Curiouser and curiouser :) But then you’re in good territory (Brit and wrote my thesis on surrealism, 3 year old’s fave bedtime song the Ying Tong Song).
PS you’ll love this I think. JES sign off on WKDN – the 7 year old peers over shoulder. ‘Is that Jesus who’s writing?’ ‘No, John Simpson’ ‘OH! Is he related to Homer??’ (far more exciting than son of God :)
John says
Kate: There’s something not quite this-worldly in the notion that serious theses can be written on surrealism, and I say that as a fan of Dali and de Chirico.
(A couple years ago, my brother and I attended an exhibit on the Dadaist movement, at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. (Our Two Missuses chose to see Mamma Mia! instead; a little symmetry going on there, too.) This gave me an excuse to trot out an old favorite joke about the rock song, “Your MOMA Don’t Dance and Your Dada Don’t Rock’n’Roll.” Don’t worry, nobody else laughed, either — either then, or when I first came up with it.)
If you’d like, I’ll happily send the 7-year-old a loaf and a fish for his next birthday. That ought to confuse him! (I have to admit, though: that *was* a funny story. :))
cynth says
Recapcha: Work chanted…
Antelope freeway, 100 miles, Antelope freeway, 25 miles, you have just passed Antelope freeway
He’s no fun, he fell right over!
I recall many evenings of sitting side by side with aforementioned friend, then boyfriend before husband and listening intently to their all-over dialog/soliloquies, rantings and ravings and thinking, How do you keep track of where this is going???
I’m glad you wrote about them, their words still resonant even after all these years and no longer wearing headphones!
John says
P.S. to Kate: I’m afraid I’d never heard of the Ying Tong Song before. You do know it’s on YouTube, right? :)
[Oh, my, a touching recaptcha here: “grammies coats.”]
John says
cynth: According to my recollection, your favorite bit was the one from Everything You Know Is Wrong — the excerpt from an old journal about the alien at the Swiss picnic (?) who didn’t know what milk was and repeated everything anybody said. (“Sounds like a real nice fella!”)
You say you always wondered how anyone kept track of “where this is going.” I myself think that’s possible only by repeated listenings, ’cause if you stop to think about the overall direction you’ve just lost the next bit. So you grab what you can, and hold onto it in the next pass through while you attend to things you missed. (No wonder fans are so obsessive: they’ve probably devoted entire weeks of their lives to memorizing each album. :))
Uh Clem says
It feels like cheating but if you read their scripts (available for purchase in book form) they’re a whole lot easier to follow. And you realize that every word was well planned. rehearsed and
John says
Yeah, the books are great! My brother has them both (er, assuming there are just the two?); I “borrowed” them for a few years but he selfishly asked for them back.
They were hilarious while we thought it was all improvised, but my regard for them went way up the more I read about their planning/rehearsal/etc. process. True professionals — anything like them is almost guaranteed to pale in comparison.
Uh Clem says
Currently there are at least two books of scripts being sold. The larger one is”MarchingTo Shibboleth” which contains all of the classic lps and more. Perhaps even more interesting is “Fighting Clowns of Hollywood” which contains excerpts from many of their lesser known scripts such as “Joey’s House”, “Lawyer’s Hospital” “History of the Art of Radio”, “Nick Danger and the Case of the Missing Shoe”, “Fighting Clowns” and many more.