Firesign's Electrician

So, it's time to get back to Firesign Theatre, and their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, released in 1968. As I noted in my previous posts (Waiting for the Firesigns, Sending Up the 60s, and The Enola McLuhan), side 1 of the album consisted of 3 separate, short (in comparison to most of their releases) pieces. Side 2, on the other hand, is made up of one extended radioplay, the title track, "Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him," clocked in at 17 minutes and 48 seconds. 

This piece is more like the surrealistic journeys that characterize the albums that follow, although it lacks the same amount of textured sound and sense of soundscape as can be found on their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All (see my previous posts, A Nick in Time for Firesign and Of Flip Sides and Firesigns).

"Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him" is framed by a play on instructional record albums, specifically language learning records, a wonderful bit of self-reflexive satire. That the language is Turkish, which then places the subsequent action in Turkey, retrieves the old, radio days/mid-20th century sense of the former center of the Ottoman Empire as an exotic and dangerous place, as well as a crossroads of the world. References to narratives based on the old British Empire and more contemporary (circa 1968) Cold War espionage are also present.

There's also a bit of play with radio eyewitness reporting. And the game show parody, Beat The Reaper, is one of their most memorable segments, generally considered among their best work. But it fits together as part of a larger whole, as you can see, er, hear, here:






The Wikipedia entry on this album refers to this piece as "a Kafkaesque fantasy of paranoia" and there clearly is an influence from The Castle and The Trial in this recording. But I would also point to Hitchcock movies in which an innocent becomes accidentally sucked into a world of intrigue and conflict, such as North by Northwest, and The 39 Steps. 
 
"Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him" employs an acoustic and dramatic variation of stream of consciousness, and an almost Freudian form of free association in humorous form, a real dive into a collectivist unconscious. Following the topsy-turvy logic that their comedy is based on, I guess you could say that their first album was worth the wait.

The Enola McLuhan

Let me start this off by saying that I think it's only natural to look at the world you're living in when you're growing up, and expect to enter that very same world and take your place in it when you finally are an adult. And there undoubtedly is a resulting sense of disappointment that is universal to the human condition, because the adults that we looked up to as children will have almost certainly revealed their flaws and weaknesses, their essential humanity, as we grow up. And more importantly, as there is no way to arrest the passing of time, those adults will have inevitably aged, sooner or later growing weaker, less capable, less healthy, and will ultimately pass on.

No matter what, we cannot enter the world of our childhood as adults, not unless someone invents a time machine of course (something I believe to be impossible, but that's another story). But in traditional societies, there is at least the comfort of entering a world that is more or less the same as the one you grew up in, with the roles essentially the same, just new actors taking filling in for the older ones. The rules don't change, nor does the environment for the most part. With the exception, I hasten to add, of catastrophic events, like natural disasters, epidemics, famine, and of course war.

Another catastrophic occurrence, albeit one that has come with a multitude of benefits, has been the revolutionary changes brought about by technological innovation over the past few centuries, social, cultural, psychological, political and economic changes, and biological, chemical, and physical change as well. The phrase future shock, coined by Neil Postman and made famous by Alvin Toffler, refers to the accelerated pace of change that we live with, in which the future is now, and the world of tomorrow is radically different from the world of today.

The point I would stress here is that the worlds that we moderns enter into as adults bear little resemblance to the worlds in which we grew up. I remember full well watching the 60s unfold as a child, mostly seeing it play out on TV, and finally going away to college in August of 1974, and upon arriving, wondering, where are all the hippies? Where are all the cool counterculture types I had heard about and watched and expected to become a part of?

They were gone, of course. Not entirely, but mutated into freaks (that was the 70s term that we used), similar but not the same. The point being that things had changed drastically over the course of just a few years. So the idea that the hippies would still be around for another entire generation was entirely unfounded. But back in the 60s, there was quite a bit of speculation about what would happen if the counterculture ever took control of the culture, if it ever became the mainstream culture, if the hippies ever took charge, and ultimately, what would happen when they became adults and moved into the leadership roles occupied by the generations that had lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War?

One example of this sort of speculation was the 1968 film, Wild in the Streets, directed by Barry Shear, based on the 60s baby boomer slogan, Don't Trust Anyone Over 30! The film posits a scenario in which a young radical turned rock star gains voting rights for 14-year-olds, and is elected to the House of Representatives, and ultimately becomes President of the United States. He doesn't exactly play fair in his rise to power, and once in charge, establishes a kind of police state where all the members of the older generation are moved into retirement homes and forced to take LSD.






I know, I know, it's hilarious, isn't it? A cautionary tale, the real message being, don't trust anyone under 30. Hey, they didn't call it the generation gap for nothin'! 

And then there were the stories that predicted that the children of the hippies would rebel against their parents and reject their values and way of life, just as the youthful baby boomer had rejected the values and way of life of their parents. This revenge scenario, in some ways reminiscent of the universal argument that parents give their children, just wait until you have children of your own, then you'll see, was amplified and intensified to an extreme by the severity of the generation gap between boomers and their parents. 

Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, is best understood as incorporating just this sort of extrapolation into the future. It is often not recognized as a science fiction film, even though it posits a dystopian future, and highlights the introduction of a major new technology, the Ludovico technique, an advancement in behavior modification, based on aversion therapy. This takes what was in the 60s a relatively new idea that criminal behavior is a mental illness that needs to be treated, the goal being rehabilitation, rather than a moral failing that needs to be punished, and pushes it to its extreme. 








Politically, the future dystopia is based on the liberal to socialist principles ascendant in the 60s, albeit with roots that go back to the New Deal era, with an expanded welfare state, housing projects, and permissive parenting. And whereas the counterculture youth preached peace and love, their children rejected the idea of flower power, as it was known, and that fictional rejection in some ways anticipates the advent of punk rock in the mid to late 70s. But beyond rejection, the children of the future embraced violence of every variety, to the extremes of rape and murder.

Moreover, the hippies emphasized the consciousness-expanding potential of hallucinogenic drugs, notably LSD, but also peyote and its derivative, mescaline, as well as the mild, mellowing quality of marijuana, while some got hooked on the comfortably numbing opiate, heroin. Drug use in general was condoned, but stimulants were generally used either to balance out the effects of depressants, including barbiturates and alcohol (drinking and popping pills was an activity they shared with their parents, albeit engaged in without parental or legal permission), or in the service of consciousness expansion, for example in the form of the psychedelic drug, STP. In A Clockwork Orange, their children favored stimulants, not for their mind-altering qualities, but to enhance their ability to engage in violence and sex. And they ingested them in the form of milk plus, milk being exactly the kind of wholesome, mainstream beverage rejected by the hippies.

The counterculture style was all about color, the psychedelic and the florescent and dayglo, paisley prints and the rainbow (an emblem adopted by Apple Computer, silicon valley being largely a Californian off-shoot of the counterculture, and in politics first by Jesse Jackson in the form of the Rainbow Coalition, an extension of the 60s Civil Rights movement, and later by supporters of gay rights, marriage equality, and the LGBT community generally). In Kubrick's film, their children dressed in colorless white, and black, a stark rejection of the psychedelic style (again, anticipating in some ways the punk style of the 70s).

The rejection of the baby boomers by their parents extended to their music . You might say that the call to arms of rock music was, roll over Beethoven, while in this narrative, their children, or at least the main character, Alex, preferred classical music, and Beethoven above all. 

I should note that the film is an adaptation of the 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, which of course predates the hippies, but not the counterculture itself, which had not fully flowered but was certainly firmly rooted by then. And in the United Kingdom, Burgess being an English writer, the Social Democrats had dominated the political scene since the end of the Second World War.

 And if you've never read the novel, I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than for its highly sophisticated emphasis on language. Burgess was a linguist, putting him in the same class as J.R.R. Tolkien, and much like George Orwell, he included a fictional future language based on English, in this case called Nadsat. In large part, Nadsat consists of words borrowed from Russian, such as droog, meaning close friend, devotchka, meaning girl, and Bog, meaning God. In some instances the Russian words are adapted into more familiar English ones, such as khorosho, which means good, turned into horrorshow, and golova, meaning head, turned into Gulliver. And according to the Wikipedia entry on
Nadsat, the name of this argot comes from the Russian suffix that is the equivalent of the English suffix -teen, implying that it is the speech of the fictional future's youth. Presumably, the use of Russian is a reflection of an increased acceptance and influence of the Soviet Union, in conjunction with the strong left wing political tilt of the dystopia imagined by Burgess.

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I remember reading the novel as a teen, and seeing the film when I was in college, and I just have to note the difference between narratives like this one, and the present day penchant for young adult fiction with simplistic dystopian scenarios.

There's also a bit of the revenge scenario in the character of Alex Keaton, the role that first brought Michael J. Fox into national prominence, on the 80s TV sitcom, Family Ties. Alex's parents were former hippies who remained very much in the liberal, progressive camp, while their son turned out to be, much to their surprise, a young Republican, a conservative, and a Reagan supporter.

But putting all that aside, this has turned out to be a rather long preamble to the main point of this post, which is to continue my series on Firesign Theatre, and most recently on their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. As I've mentioned before, the album was released in 1968, making it a product of the 60s, a product of the counterculture, its humor satirizing both the mainstream culture of the 60s, and the counterculture itself. This is apparent in the first two tracks on side 1 of the album, the focus of my previous posts, Waiting for the Firesigns, and especially Sending Up the 60s.

The third and final track on side 1 could be grouped in the same genre as Wild in the Streets and A Clockwork Orange, as a future scenario based on the present, circa 1968,
extrapolating what things would be like if and when the youth took over, the hippies were in charge, and the counterculture became the culture. And while there is a hint of dystopia in this satire, for the most part it's a comedic celebration. 

The title of the track, "Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde," is a bit mysterious. Cunégonde is a character from Voltaire's philosophical novel, Candide, itself a satire, and perhaps suggests a warning against the optimistic if not utopian sensibility of the counterculture, that the best of all possible worlds as imagined by the hippies might not be the perfection they would have believed it could be. I'm just speculating here, of course, and I have no idea what the reference to 38 in the title (trente-huit) refers to. But it really doesn't matter, as it has not bearing on the piece itself, which is almost 7 1/2 minutes long (one of their shorter bits, like the first two on side 1).





I find it interesting to recall that during the 60s, concern about police brutality was not simply or even mainly a race issue, and that cops were often referred to as pigs by members of the counterculture. The idea of a hippy police force may seem like an oxymoron, but there is a sense in which reform movements, when successful, turn their radicalism into a new orthodoxy.

The roots of 60s counterculture can be found, in part, in the Beat Generation of the 50s, writers and poets who began their careers in the 40s, and rose to prominence during the postwar era. Also known as beatniks, they had a major influence on and were greatly admired by the hippies. Prominent among them was the poet Allen Ginsberg, perhaps best known for his poem "Howl" published in 1955, which begins with the line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." When the woman at the beginning of the sketch asks the cops if they want to hear her rap, back in the 60s the term just meant talk, with the specific connotation of speaking in a sincere and truthful manner, a heart-to-heart. So when she starts to recite "Howl" she is actually not rapping as it was understood back then, plus while she uses Ginsberg's poem to try to demonstrate her hippy credentials, her choice also reflects the fact that she's an old-timer in this brave new groovy world, and therefore not with it, much like her faded body paint.

Dr. Benway is a reference to a fictional character created by another beat writer, William S. Burroughs, who was, among other things, a student of Alfred Korzybski and general semantics. And of course it's 8 million copies of the best known novel by Burroughs, Naked Lunch, that the hippy air force drops on the last stronghold of unhip resistance.


And the name of the plane they drop the literature from? Why, it's the Enola McLuhan, bet you were wondering what the title of this post had to do with all this, weren't you? The Enola reference is of course to the Enola Gay, the name of the aircraft used to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And not to make light of that horror, but it could be said that McLuhan's impact on the intellectual and artistic scene of the 60s was quite the detonation, in and of itself.

It's quite fitting that the Enola McLuhan drops books rather than bombs, and on a third world nation with low literacy rates, as McLuhan had argued that the social and psychological impact of the introduction of writing, the alphabet, and printing has been explosive, and militant in its own right. The medium is the munition! Indeed, arguably, the homogenizing effects of the alphabet and print far outstrips the flattening impact of the bomb.

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As I've suggested in my previous posts about Firesign Theatre (A Nick in Time for Firesign, Of Flip Sides and Firesigns, Waiting for the Firesigns, and Sending Up the 60s), their approach to sound recording has produced a form of comedy that has been compared to music, and that is based on the creation of a soundscape or sonic environment, along the lines of what McLuhan referred to as acoustic space (aka auditory space). The repetition in this particular radioplay of the 60s slang word groovy, by the way, also invokes an acoustic metaphor, as groovy is derived from grooves, which is how music is recorded onto vinyl and earlier recording media such as wax cylinders. So, back in the 60s, you might also say, dig those grooves, man, to refer to a musical recording that you like, and more generally to being in the groove, for settling into a routine in a positive sense (as opposed to being in a rut), for getting into something in depth, having a very positive experience, getting into the zone, etc.

There is also some play with media in this bit, involving telephone and television. But it is the direct reference to McLuhan that, for me, confirms the fact that Firesign Theatre represents a great example of media ecology praxis.

Now all that's missing is a breakfast cereal called Granola McLuhan!

The Medium is the Muesli

Well, I guess this all goes to show I'm probably better off living in this world, rather than the world I thought I'd live in when I was growing up, even if this world is not the best of all possible worlds. Not that I have any choice in the matter, or in the fact that, when it comes to media and technological innovation, it's bombs away, over and over again!

Sending Up the 60s

So, to pick up where I left off on last week's post, Waiting for the Firesigns, which featured the first of three separate tracks that originally appeared on side 1 of the comedy recording group Firesign Theatre's first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, the second track on side 1 is called "W. C. Fields Forever" for reasons that are less than apparent.

Of course, W. C. Fields was a 20th century comedy icon whose career path took him from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood. Here's a scene where he's playing the part of a con man turned sheriff/bartender from the 1940 film, My Little Chickadee:





And of course, "...Fields Forever" is an allusion to The Beatles' song, "Strawberry Fields Forever," originally released in 1967, a song that many would argue defined psychedelic rock (at least that's what it says on the song's Wikipedia entry):





So, put them both together and you get "The 'Lazy O' Magic Circle Dues Ranch and Collective Love Farm," which is where "W. C. Fields Forever" takes place. It all fits together in that California was very much a part of the wild west, the western genre was enormously popular through the 60s so it was a big part of the Hollywood film industry, the Hippy movement at the heart of 60s counterculture was centered in San Francisco, and of course Firesign Theatre was a Californian quartet. 

This track, then, merges various aspects of California counterculture with western generic formulas and conventions (which also were used in the first track), as the Firesigns make fun of Hippy communes, health food, yoga, Eastern mysticism and spirituality, the whole guru thing that The Beatles got into for a while (while also incorporating direct quotation of Beatles lyrics, a practice continued in the Nick Danger radioplay on their second album), and provide the answer to the question Elvis Costello would later pose, what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

And, as you would expect, there's also a good number of references to psychedelic drug culture in this bit, with the commune being led by a character clearly based on Timothy Leary, counter culture leader and former Harvard psychology professor, who was the Johnny Appleseed of tripping via LSD (Leary claimed that his famous slogan, Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out, was given to him by Marshall McLuhan, a claim that McLuhan denied). The character's name is Tiny Doctor Tim, and in case you think this all very obvious, you are probably of a certain age, so understand that when I mention Timothy Leary in my undergraduate new media classes (in the 90s he became a big booster for virtual reality), no one knows who he was.

"W. C. Fields Forever" clocks in at a little over 7 1/2 minutes, so it stands as one of the shorter examples of Firesign Theatre's soundscapes, this one with less of a sense of acoustic space than some of their other pieces, and also less of a coherent radioplay, much more episodic, but certainly an example of how they were able to take the then relatively new innovations of sterophonic sound and multitrack recording on magnetic tape, and the "fun with audio" genre (at least that's what I call all of the 60s recordings that were all about playing with sound) to an entirely new level. It's not their best work, but still worth a listen. And so, away we go...







"W. C. Fields Forever" stands as a send up of the 60s and also a product of the 60s, the album it appears on, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, having been released in 1968. It's a product of its times, the humor is in many ways topical, and by the time I first listened to the album as a college student in the mid-70s, I didn't get all of the references and jokes. But it didn't matter then, or now (although I think I do get all or most of it at this point), because Firesign Theatre's form transcends their content. As I've noted previously, their recordings are more like music, rather than like simple stand-up routines or straightforward comedy acts. But if you like the 60s or are curious about the counterculture, this track is a great way to get a feel for it all.

Waiting for the Firesigns

So, the recent passing of Phil Austin, one of the four members of Firesign Theatre, prompted me to write a couple of blog posts featuring their second, and most popular album. Just on the off chance that you missed those posts, or are in need of a review, the first was A Nick in Time for Firesign, and the second was Of Flip Sides and Firesigns.

Well, now I'd like to turn to their first album, Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him, released in 1968. Like side 2 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which features "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," side 1 of Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him includes some of their more accessible, mainstream material, relatively speaking.

In fact, side 1 consists of 3 short pieces, again relatively speaking, as opposed to "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," which takes up an entire side of the album, and as opposed to side 1 of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which, while listed as several separate pieces, is really one long journey through an insane, hallucinogenic landscape, and mediascape.

So, let's start with the first track of side 1, which is given the name, "Temporarily Humboldt County" for reasons I could not fathom. A quick hop over to the wikipedia entry for the album, however, reveals that, "the group had been told by friends in Humboldt County, California, that the local Indians added 'Temporarily' to the county's name as a way of saying no one could really own the land."

"Temporarily Humboldt County" is a parody of narratives that tell the story of the discovery of the New World, colonization, westward expansion, and our treatment of Native Americans. It's just over 9 minutes long, so here, take a listen:






As I recall, some time ago I was speaking to someone who was teaching a class on audio production, and he used this particular track as an example of what can be done with an acoustic medium and a radioplay format. No doubt, he also used it because it is relatively straightforward as a narrative.

Clearly, this recording also reflects the understanding, still not all that widely held in the 60s, about how Europeans treated the "Indians" (as they are are still officially referred to by the US government), and satirizes not only mainstream, but also the counterculture mythologies. Coming out of California, the Firesigns would have been much more attuned to both the stories of the wild west, and of the Spanish conquest, than us northeasterners.

Waiting seems to be a theme here, whether it's for the electrician referred to by the album title, or someone like him, or the "true white brother" the Indians are waiting for in "Temporarily Humboldt County" (and disappointed to discover it wasn't us). 

Perhaps the connection can be traced back to Waiting for Godot? Certainly, Firesign Theatre can be seen as heir to playwright Samuel Beckett's absurdism, creating sonic environments that place the listener at the center of the play, immersed in the action, spatially rather than sequentially in medias res. Orson Welles referred to radioplays as theater on the air, and the Firesigns also are part of that lineage, creating an acoustic theater of the absurd.

Waiting... what a concept! As much as we live in a temporal environment measured by nanoseconds, even picoseconds, as much as we eschew delayed gratification, as much as we want everything to be available on demand, it seems that waiting is as much a part of our lives as ever, and in some ways, due in large part to all of our technological innovations, more so than ever. It's like sports journalist Tim McCarver used to say when he was calling the New York Mets baseball games, nothing slows the game down more than speed.

Of Flip Sides and Firesigns

So, in my previous post, A Nick in Time for Firesign, I wrote about the significance of the passing of Phil Austin, the second of the four members of Firesign Theatre that we have lost over the past few years. And I wrote about Austin's most memorable character, Nick Danger, and included the audio recording of "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," which appeared on the second record album Firesign Theatre released, back in 1969.

I want to follow up on that post now, and note again that the Firesign Theatre produced comedy audio recordings that were entirely unique, not recordings of stand up routines like most other albums in that category, nor recordings of film and television soundtracks, a la most Monty Python albums. No, what they did, drawing on a background in radio, was to produce spoken word comedy that was multilayered, complex, and comparable to music.

Paul Heyer, drawing on Marshall McLuhan, has written about Orson Welles, and makes references to his media sense, the fact that Welles understood the nature of the particular medium he was working with, and utilized its biases to full effect, whether it was film (e.g., Citizen Kane, generally considered the greatest film ever made), or live theater, or radio, notably the notorious 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. And media sense is as good a way to characterize the Firesigns as any. They understood the concept of acoustic space, and were able to produce elaborate soundscapes that were so much more than simulating the experience of listening to performers up on a stage.

So, now, in that previous post, I explained that "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" was one of their most accessible recordings, as well as their most popular overall, which makes it a great way to introduce the group to anyone not familiar with them. And I explained that "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" took up all of side 2 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, and that there were a couple of references to the other side of the album.

Okay, so now, let's get to side 1 of the album, shall we? If you want to just go ahead and listen to it, here it is, right after the next paragraph. Actually this is the complete album, so once the first side concludes, the second side plays. And that does make it easy to connect the reference in "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" to the segment it specifically refers to on side 1. 

When I reviewed this clip, I noticed it was interrupted by commercials, something new on YouTube, and even less desirable than the other forms of advertising that can be tagged onto videos. The ads show up as yellow bands on the timeline at the bottom of the video, where the red area represents the portion of the video that you have passed and the gray what is yet to come. You can move the marker up and down to access different points on the video, and I found that if I go through the commercials one time, and then go back, the video plays straight through a second time. Since the interruptions ruin the effect of the recording, I recommend moving the marker to each of the ads ahead of time, so that once you've paid the piper, you can listen to the album uninterrupted, the way it was meant to be.







So, now, as I noted in my last post, "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" is more mainstream, in being a single radioplay parody of an episode from an old time adventure series. The other side is more surreal, and also a better example of how their recordings are like music. It's divided into 6 or 7 tracks (depending on whether you go by the original record album or CD reissue), but the tracks are a fiction, not really being separated from one another. Instead, the side forms one long, hallucinogenic, well, trip I guess you could say. But for what it's worth, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on the album, and here's the track listings they had:

Side one

"How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All" – 28:27:

"Drink to Me Only with Thine Fox" (Mr. Catherwood and Ensemble) [CD retitle: "The Ralph Spoilsport Mantrum"] – 4:21

"The Policemen's Brawl" (Officers Bradshaw and Henderson) [CD retitle: "Zeno's Evil"] – 4:34

"Yankee Doodle Came to Terms" (All Fecal People's Chorus) [CD retitle: "The Land of the Pharaohs"] – 2:47

"Über Dubbing Over Alice" ('Arry 'N' Friends) [CD Track retitle: "VACANCY-NO VACANCY"] – 1:34

"You Ain't Got No Friends on the Left" (Babe and the Unknown Soldiers) [CD retitle: "The Lonesome American Choo-Choo Don' Wan' Stop Here Any Mo'"] – 7:34

""We're Bringing the War Back Home!" From Babes in Khaki" (Lilly Lamont*) (*Miss Lamont Courtesy of Paranoid Pictures) – 7:31 [split into 2 tracks on the CD, track titles below]:

"Babes in Khaki" – 3:53

"TV or Not TV" – 3:38

(This side of the vinyl LP was not divided into separate tracks, but the liner notes list the above titles and tracks.)


Side two

The Further Adventures of Nick Danger – 28:11

"From the Archives of the Original Firesign Theatre Radio Hour. As First Broadcast December 6, 1941. Rebroadcast Courtesy of Loostners Bros. Soap Co."

So, the album begins with a parody of a radio ad for a car dealer (the Firesigns started out doing radio in Los Angeles, after all), then slips into a customer being shown a car, buying it, and driving off. If you are new to this sort of listening experience, you have to be a little patient with it, because the next sequence is the one I would especially point to as a brilliant example of creating a sense of acoustic space, as the Firesigns generate the feel of driving down a highway via talk alone, by giving voice to the signs you would see as you pass them by. There is also a wonderful little bit involving Zeno's Paradox included in this segment. They then move into a bit of an Alice in Wonderland sequence that winds up taking us to the "Land of the Pharaohs," and a hotel, where we get a sequence involving patriotic song and a parody of American history straight out of the 50s. That brings us into a parody of an old war movie, set during the Second World War, which then turns out to be broadcast on television, so there's a bit of channel flipping, and a return to the car dealer commercial that somehow slips into the finale of James Joyce's Ulysses!

How's that for a recap? It is truly difficult to do the recording justice with any kind of summary, but I hope this helps to get a sense of it all across to you, if you have not listened to it yet. 

The first side actually does have a reference to side 2, towards the end, when the channel flipping briefly lands on some kind of crime drama, and a couple of guys are talking about how they hate cops, and one of them says he's going to get even with them, the punchline being that he's going to do so by turning in his badge. And the character saying that is named Nick, presumably the same Nick Danger who is the hero on side 2, before he became a private detective. So the album has self-reflexive moments where it acknowledges that it is an album on both side 1 and side 2.

And one last point. Again, in my previous post, I provided a bit of explanation about the significance of record albums having two sides, and I want to emphasize the importance of the concept of the side. I remember it being said that iTunes in some sense retrieved the single, which in the early days of rock and roll from the late 50s to the mid 60s was the format emphasized in popular music. But singles were not purchased as individual songs, but as little 45 rpm records, and you may be buying it for the song on the A side, but it also came with another song on the B side. And that was not the same thing as downloading one isolated song. B sides often held unexpected surprises, and delights. They were listened to.

Anyway, when the emphasis shifted to record albums, sometimes we'd just play one track on the album, but often we'd put the album on and let it play through. But that meant play through the one side. It was quite common to play a side, then rather than flip it over to the other, switch the record to another album, and just play one side from that record. That was how we experienced recordings. The fundamental unit was the side, not the song, and not the album. With CDs, the side as a unit disappeared, except as a notation in track listings.

And I want to point out that sides really were a good unit to use. A side was usually at least 15 minutes, and less than 30 minutes. As a unit of time, it felt just right. So while it was perfectly fine to listen to both sides of an album, a recording like How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All would often be heard as isolated sides. And if you were going to listen to the whole album at one sitting, you would have to get up after side 1 was over, and flip the album over to listen to side 2. You could not help but be aware of the side as a unit.









So, the side as a unit is something that has been lost, for all intents and purposes, with the transition from vinyl records to CDs and MP3s. And so has the idea of flipping the record, and with it, of flipping for the recording (or something or someone else), flipping out over the recording (or something or someone else), and of course, see ya on the flip side, flippity flip, and so, my friend flipper, over and out!

A Nick in Time for Firesign

Another significant loss came back on June 18, when Phil Austin passed away. Austin was one quarter of the comedic fab four known as Firesign Theatre. With roots in radio going back to the sixties, the Firesigns created what many would agree have been the most innovative and simply put, the best comedy produced in a purely acoustic format.

The Four Firesigns

As a baby boomer, most of my rather substantial record collection acquired over the course of the sixties and seventies, and into the eighties, consisted of musical recordings. It was not unusual, however, to also include a few comedy albums in your collection, and I myself had a couple dozen. A few were stand-up recordings. There wasn't all that much of that sort of thing at that time, before the big explosion of stand up in the eighties, but one of them was Woody Allen's double album. Then there were the Monty Python albums, which were great, although most of them were simply soundtracks from the TV show, funny as hell, but not created especially for audio. I'd rate them second to Firesign Theatre when it comes to sound recordings.

The way that I, and many others, explained Firesign Theatre's comedy recordings to others not familiar with them, is that they were like music. That is, for most comedy albums, you could listen to them once, maybe twice, and then they lose their appeal because you already know the punchline, know the entire joke. The Pythons you could listen to repeatedly because of their downright zaniness, the intellectual quality of their humor, and those marvelous English accents. But you'd never call what they did music, as opposed to the Firesign Theatre, who took things to a whole new level. 

Firesign Theatre's humor alone bear multiple listenings, the wordplay is nothing short of superb, but it's the complexity, the rhythm, counterpoint, and polyphony of the four voices, complemented by myriad sound effects expertly deployed, that turned a form of radioplay into something more, something that for lack of a better word can be described as musical.

Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, and Tony Schwartz, along with Edward T. Hall, wrote about a phenomenon their referred to as acoustic space, or sometimes auditory space, and the McLuhan-inspired composer and media ecology scholar R. Murray Schafer extended the idea into the concept of acoustic ecology. And Firesign Theatre truly create acoustic spaces and ecologies through their recordings, immersing the listener in a total environment, albeit one based on the ear alone. In this sense, like music, Firesign Theatre created comedic soundscapes that could be listened to, indeed become immersed within, over and over and over again.

Their most popular album was their second release, back in 1969. We were never exactly sure what the actual name of the album was, because the cover presented two possibilities. The shorter one, All Hail Marx and Lennon, would seem to be the most likely, but in actuality it was the longer one, the improbable How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All that was the actual album title.

It was a title that perfectly captured the new electronic media environment, very much in keeping with Marshall McLuhan's observation that when we appear on television, we become its content, we are sent over the airwaves. The same may be said of our voices as transmitted via radio broadcast, or over the telephone wires. We are, indeed, in two places at once, as well as not anywhere at all. What a perfect way to describe the phenomenon that William Gibson referred to as cyberspace!

By the way, here's the back side of the album cover, featuring the four Firesigns once again:

What made this particular album especially popular was its B side. I suppose I should explain that back in the days of vinyl recordings, every record had two sides, and these sides were designated, you might have guessed, as Side 1 and Side 2, and/or referred to as the A side and the B side. This had particular significance for 45 rpm singles, where it was often the case that that side 1 was the song released as a single, in hopes of making it onto the Top 40 charts, while side 2, the B side, was not. "B side" therefore indicated a recording of inferior quality, or something less mainstream, more quirky, than the A side. Also known as the flip side, not having to conform to commercial requirements often gave "B sides" a charm all their own.

When the emphasis shifted from singles to albums over the course of the sixties, the two sides lost that particular significance, and simply indicated the order in which the various tracks on the album were meant to be played. Now, on How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All the two sides are relatively independent of one another, although there is a reference to "the other side of the record" on the flip side, as well as some additional mentions in an odd little coda that comes at the end. The joke loses its self-reflexive humor on the CD issue of the recording, and when listening to it online, instead morphing into a kind of accidental invocation of nostalgia within a track that is dominated by the intentional invocation of nostalgia.

Anyway, the B side on this album is the one that is more mainstream, and the reason for the recording's special popularity. The title of the track is, "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," and introduces the character of Nick Danger, Third Eye, played by Phil Austin. Running a little over 28 minutes, it takes up the entire side of the record album, and is presented as an episode from a radio program circa 1941, featuring a private detective as the hero. It is at once a parody of the kinds of content common during the good old radio days, and a surreal sixties soundplay with many references to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Beatles songs in particular. There are fans who have all or most of the dialogue memorized, and most of us can recite many of the lines from this recording. So here, why not just listen, and see, I mean hear for yourself (or if you know the album, treat yourself to another replay):





So, the "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" is more accessible than many of their other tracks, including Side 1 of How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which consists of 6 tracks that are woven together in a stream of consciousness kind of flow. And it was successful enough that Firesign Theatre came out with a few other Nick Danger adventures, and Austin also did a solo collection of Nick Danger monologues, none of which lives up to the brilliance of this first and finest recording.













Phil Austin was not the first of the quartet to depart for that great sound studio in the sky. He was preceded by Peter Bergman over three years ago. And over the past half century, Firesign Theatre simply has not received the recognition they so richly deserve. It's time to rectify that, don't you agree?