How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All?

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor. Can you hear me?

Loud and clear. By the way, I just finishing my form. I'm filling out here for the Trump administration. I want to get a little piece of that 1776 action.

Yeah.

This government has been weaponized against us ever since Trump took office, so I think we deserve a payoff.

Let's get into a show which is.

Going to be all about Fireside Theater,.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Fire Sign Theater and didn't know where to ask.And our guest, Jeremy Brodick, is a professor of literature in English at Cornell University, and he is the author of Fire the Electromagnetic History of Everything is Told on Nine Comedy Albums.It's a fascinating look at how Firestine Theater revolutionized comedy and how they did it and how they changed culture and added to the lexicon in the process. Welcome, Jeremy. How are you?

I'm well. Thanks for having me.

Oh, it's great to have you. Thank you for doing this book.

It's my pleasure.

First of all, it's an exhaustive look at the entire history of Fire Sign Theater. It's such a sophisticated level of content. What Firesign did, it's hard to reel it in, but you did it. And you largely organized it chronologically.You talk about how everything was distilled into nine albums, but each album represented a different look at culture and media because Fire Sign reflected cinema, radio, television, artificial intelligence, early computation technology, culture, and history. It's amazing the range of information Firesign lampooned over the years and how prescient they were.

I always considered ourselves to be co media ands. Okay, co media ands. Because we were using the media and the technology of the time as it evolved to tell our story.And I guess the most impressive proof that we achieved our goal was that our archives were purchased by the Library of Congress about five years ago because of our effect on the culture of America and the culture of comedy. And one of our albums, Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, is a historical recording in the archives as well. So that said a lot to me.

Mom's away, dad. Morning, Mom. Morning, son. Oh, hot dog. Road cakes again, heavy on the 30 weight. No, don't eat with your hands, son,.

And use your entrenching tool.

Aw, gee, dad, I'm just trying to save time. It isn't every day a guy graduates from high school. How many times have I heard that before? Well, you boys fight it out among yourselves, okay?

Mother,.

Look at the time. I'd like to dress for my bridge clubs, but gee, mom, isn't that bridge built yet?No, son, and it won't be until free hands on both sides of the Big Ditch can press the same button at the same time. Okay, Dad, I give. Oh, boy. Can I eat my breakfast now? Only if you stay out of trouble, boy. Your shenanigans could cost me this election.Oh, come on, dad. No Irishman can stop you from getting to be dog killer this time. You're a natural. Don't wolf your food. Oh. Oh, there's Mudhead.Graduation, here I come. So long, dad. Oh, that son of mine.

He's not your son.

Fred. Stop torturing me. Ethel.

Jeremy, why did you write this book and how did you go about it?

Well, I had wanted to write. I wanted to write this book for like, 30 years. I grew up listening to Firestine Theater.I had an uncle who gave me the records when I was starting, when I was like, 12. Phil, I'm sure you don't remember, but I did meet you all once in 1994 when you were rehearsing in Santa Monica.I definitely didn't know enough then to start writing, but I had the idea in the back of my head for a long time. I knew a few things going in. Which one was that I wanted to write a book that would interest people who didn't know Fireside Theater.So people of my generation and after I've increasingly been teaching them sometimes at Cornell. And I'll say that this year of all years, students were. Were really, really interested in it. Not to digress.I wanted not only to write for the people who knew Fire Sign well, and I. And not being sure of what the reception would be.I also wanted to write for people who maybe never would listen to the records, even though I really want. Was hoping that they would. I wanted to work both internally and externally. So they have an amazing story.And it extends longer than the period at Columbia, but the period of their contract at Columbia lasts from 67 till 1975. And that in and of itself is a time when recording technology and the record industry is changing hugely.So I realized that I could tell that story as along with the Fire Sign story, and to have a kind of, as you pointed out, like a sort of historical thrust, but as Phil pointed out, one that one of the things that's just so amazing about Fire Signs records is that they are really interested in media technologies, not only using them as they did in the studio. And I'm sure Phil will be able to fill in more of the gaps.But one of the things that, that it's clear that they're doing from very early on is relearning old radio techniques because the studio where they're recording first at Sunset and Gower was built in 1937 as sort of the, the, the Louvre of radio broadcasting and the gear was still there.So on the one hand they're really interested in thinking historically, but on the other hand, as you said and as Phil has said many times, there's the records uncannily anticipate some of the things that, that were. That we're living with today. And so that, and so there's a sort of a, a sci fi dimension of their work. And I.The reason that it's so uncanny is that they have a profound sense of, of media's history.

Los Angeles. He walks again by night.

Out of.

The fog, into the smog. Relentlessly, ruthlessly.

I wonder where Ruth is.

Doggedly toward his weekly meeting with the unknown at 4th and Drucker. He turns left at Drucker and 4th, he turns right. He crosses MacArthur park and walks into a great sandstone building. Oh, my nose.Groping for the door, he steps inside, climbs the 13 steps to his office. He walks in. He's ready for mystery. He's ready for excitement. He's ready for anything. He's Nick Danger, Third Eye.

I want to order a pizza to go and no anchovies.

No anchovies. You've got the wrong man.

I spell my name Danger. What.

The makers of fantastic cigarettes, long in the leaf and short in the can bring you another true story from the tattered case book of Nick Danger, Third Eye. Let's join him now in the adventure we call Cut him Off at the past.

So Firestone was really aware that Columbia Square had been the site of all these early radio broadcasts, including sort of anti fascist morale broadcasts from World War II. But they were also aware that they were doing it in the age of Vietnam.And so I think they thought a lot about fighting fascism in different decades and about the meaning of propaganda. And so each of their records really has that kind of resonance.

If you had to explain to people who may be listening, who are not familiar with Fire Sign theater, how would you describe what Fireside Theater was and represented?

Who am I anyway?

Okay, Phil, tell me what you think about this. I guess I would say that it's a four man theatrical group that whose work is based in improvisation.So they begin on, they begin on the radio riffing, but they're also really aware that they have really astonishing sensitivity to language, like the way language means and the way language sounds.And so when they happened to get a recording contract in the late 60s and they realized that the difference between radio and recording is that you can make things really dense because people will be obliged to listen to it again and again. And so I think that it's that point that the work really sounds like writing.And there was recently a review of my book where someone said, fortunately, Braddock doesn't push a Fire Sign Theatre as very literary. But actually, I do think Fireside Theater is super literary.

You quoted some people in the book that said it took about five listens before they started to truly understand it. It is like literature or a very dense movie that you can see over and over again. It got better and better.And this was the era when comedy albums ruled, which was unique in history of the Long Plane record. Yeah, they really took advantage of that.

Yeah. And so I would say that's a nice tinge.Because the one thing that distinguishes Fireside from a lot of the comedy albums from the early 60s, so you have all these Bill Cosby records and Nichols and May and the Stan Freeberg record and so on. There's a review that appears, I think, in Village Voice by Robert Crisco, and he's reviewing a bunch of comedy records together.And he says the thing about a Bill Cosby record is that you listen to it once and you laugh, but do you really listen to it again? And I think that his point was that there was something being left on the table by comedy records of the early 60s.C7 is also the year of Sergeant Pepper, which is this Beatles record where they really not just commit to the. To using overdubs, but overdubs that. That make no pretension of actually sounding like a group playing live. And I think that Firesign is.Is with radio drama on the one hand and with comedy on the other hand. And it's a moment when. When pop music is being. Is the 7 inch single is being displaced by the long playing record album.So there's an audience that's used to listening to albums over and over again.And I think that that would be the other piece that I would pitch is that I think that a lot of Fire Sign's audience was listening to them alongside the music of the day and kind of understood it as music in a way. And when I was doing the research of the reviews from the period, by far the most interesting criticism was by record reviewers.

A couple of things. Number One, we invented the Long form comedy album. The thing about the Beatles was that they told a story with Sergeant Peppers.It created a world, and the fire sign wanted to do the same thing. And you were talking about our relationship to literature. Well, we were all writers. Phil Austin, David Osman, Peter Bergman and myself.We all could write.And what we would do in our improvised radio gigs is that we would often bring in individual material that we had written that sometimes was written for the entire group, and just do them live on the air without any rehearsal or anything.

When you would write it, would you print four copies and distribute or would. How did that work? Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Those were the days, ladies and gentlemen, of Carbon copies. Yeah, David Osman was our Woody Allen. People know what that reference is in regards to your show of shows. He was the one who typed.He was our scribe, and he would type down whatever it was we finally agreed would be the next line or so. And at the end of the day, we'd all have carbon copies of what we'd written so far.And then we could, you know, come back the next day with suggestions.What was really interesting to me was that after our first album, Waiting for the Electrician or someone like him came out, nobody really knew what to make of us.And the suits at Columbia were ready to drop us, and one of the people there decided, who was the head of the spoken arts division, said, no, these guys are geniuses. They're doing something extraordinary and groundbreaking. I'm going to sign them to a spoken arts contract and keep them on the label.Now, what that did for us was it gave us free studio time whenever we could get into the studio. Right.Well, we had a reduced royalty for that, but we had free studio time so we could write, go into the studio, lay it down, massage it, bring it to life, go back to the writing room, write some more. And we could build our albums in an actual interaction with the technology of the time.That was one of the things that encouraged us to make our albums complex and layered. But the other thing about it was we were uncensored. We weren't doing this for radio.We were doing this for home listening, which is why we use, you know, some colorful language in our albums.

Thank you, fellow kids. Quiet in addressing for the assembly this morning.

Thank you.

I am recalling the words of the Foundry, founder of Morse Science High School, Yucaipa Heap, who pressed the first bricks with his own hands. Knowledge for the pup, the people, he said, give them a light and they'll follow it anywhere.We think that is a fair And a wise guy for rule to be guided by. And we're not afraid of it, are we? You bet.

Rah, rah, rah.

That's the spirits we have here.

And the way I used to think of them was these were like disks, like flying saucers, flying discs. And we sent them out into the universe. And if somebody spotted it, it was no longer a ufo, it was a fo.And slowly but surely people discovered this new art form. And they found that they could share it with their friends. At which time they'd probably hear even more of the jokes.Because somebody in the room would get a joke that somebody else had missed. And it became a communal experience. And then with the advent of FM radio, suddenly they were playing us on college campuses.In the radio stations of closed circuit college campuses. And we acquired this incredible intelligent audience.

Fire Sign's been heralded as the spoken word Beatles, the Marx Brothers of the space age. Interestingly, all of this happened as a result of a particular radio station that we happen to be broadcasting on today.

Yeah, let's talk about it.

Kpfk, our beloved KPFK was instrumental in the genesis of Fire Sign Theater. Fireside Theater, in a way, as you write in your book, Jeremy was a product of the emergence of FM radio and Nixon's fcc, the non duplication policy.Because a lot of people were simulcasting with am, which was the predominant medium at the time. And the FM dial was regarded as a money losing experiment. And that's why FM was so creative in the 70s with Freeform and all that.It's when the accountants realized people were going over to fm. That's when everything got homogenized.But in that raw period of time where FM emerged before it was commercialized or commoditized and anything went. And Firesign really slid into that beautifully.

Yeah, I think that's right. And actually I'd be interested to know what you think of this, Phil. Is that it?I mean, it seems like this is a place actually also make up to make a plug for Pacifica. Because the. What became known as the sort of freeform technique, I think really begins on WBAI with Bob Foss's show and Steve Post.They had sort of late night shows where they were doing not just music, but all kinds of things like the phone ins and poetry and sound effects and all this stuff. And Peter Bergman heard that station when he was in New York.And when he came in July of 66 to KPFK Radio Free Oz, I think becomes the sort of the west coast version of that.And it's not until, like you said, January 1st of 1967, that the other FM stations, which up until that point had mostly been controlled by like a larger AM station and often just reduplicated that broadcast that it became the site for these. For this experimentation.So often the fm, the psychedelic underground is thought of as being like Caisson in San Francisco and other stations like that, but the Pacifica stations predate it, and of course, they also survive it.

The time is 8:08, and this is Palooka Radio for all the reds and blues in America. Once again we welcome the Fire Sline Theater and their weekly radio program, Dear Friends. But first, hiya, friends.Bob Dog here Sooner and Soper, operator of Bob Dog, Dog and Dog Hot Dog sun and Foot tires and that mean shoes. And mean shoes means industry. Yes, there's rain on the streets again and where there's rain, there's rain washed streets I ought to know.I'm Bob Dog High chick and it's my privilege to put shoes on your best friend just like he was my own son's car. Here's a pair that'll make the road blush wide, they're wider than the car and safety wrap before their box is stored forever.And that's a long, long time when seconds can make the difference, friends. But don't believe me unless you don't care how much it costs and I like that kind of man.And if you are, you're the kind of man I like and I'm gonna keep it that way even if I have to offer you a deal that had to be turned down to be offered to you. And remember this, tomorrow when you're awake, you don't have to come to Bob Dog. You can drive around on lemons for all I care.Like they say, if you live in the water, you don't need a boat. But if you do, give me the first chance at its feats and you'll drive away a happy toe. Thanks for looking at me. I'm Bob Dog and I'll be back.

In the late 60s, early 70s, FM was so underground. My first car was a 68 Buick and it had AM in it.And I remember going to Radio Shack and I bought a FM converter that you literally had to tap into the wires under the dash to plug in this FM converter. You had to set your AM to a particular frequency and that would receive what this little box was receiving. And you would get FM signals.You had to really go out of your way to get fm, but immediately the sound was better.

Yeah, a stereo.

Ted. Ted, did they give you a secret Dakota ring? It was a world, it was a conduit. It was a secret network. In many ways.

It was anything goes.Even in the mid-70s, working at the last freeform radio station in New York City area, I was able to do whatever I wanted, including having David Osman on every week reporting from the Campoon Trail when he was running for office. You could do that kind of thing, Jeremy. I didn't realize that Bob Fass and Radio Unnamable inspired Peter. Bob was pretty remarkable.He called a be in or something at Kennedy, at JFK Airport.

The fly in.

Yeah, fly in. And he filled up like the TWA terminal. Thousands of people showed up. That was the power of FM radio back then.

Yeah.

He also helped organize the protests at the 68 Democratic National Convention.

Pete came out here and created the Love Inn at Elysian park here in la.

It brought people together. It made you feel a part of a community. And it was a creative, live, surprising environment. You never knew what you were gonna get.Innovative, that's the word I wanted. It was a wonderful source for innovation and a lot of great people came out of it. Frank Zappa and Devo. And just the creativity was amazing.

Radio Free Oz was the radio show that Peter co hosted here on KPFK back in the mid-60s that created fireside Theater. Because David Ostman was the literary director, drama director. And then Phil Austin.

Yeah, they both had that job.

And then Phil, you were last to the party. You knew Peter when you both went to Yale, you.

Peter was writing the lyrics for musicals I was starring in, like Tom Jones and Booth is Back in Town, written by the great Austin Pendleton. It was an amazing time from 59 to 62 at Yale. Full of incredible creativity. That's how I got to know Peter originally.And we actually did some improvisation on Yale radio together, if I remember correctly. But he showed up again in my life after I graduated. I sat on a picture of his face in the lap press interviewing returning war veterans.And it said, KPFK newsman Peter Bergman. And that's when I contacted kpfk, met the other guys. We found out we were all fire signs.Peter's show had evolved into a late night counterculture talk show.

It was a phenom.

Yeah. With occasional breaks for ragas so we could all go outside and have a smoke. Right. He created a whole new media.And you can read about this in my book, Where's My Fortune Cookie? But it really was an extraordinary stroke of good fortune that brought us together and kept us going.

The clip that you suggested we play. Jeremy, set this up. What we're gonna listen to.

Yeah, let me set this up. And Phil, I bet you haven't heard this, so I really want to know what it sounds like to you. All will be revealed.Phil's already mentioned Fire Sign's amazing archive. And it really is an astonishing archive. And there's a lot more to be discovered there. And one of the things that.One of the things that's so amazing is that there are multiple versions of the scripts for all of the albums. And so you can see them. It's what literary scholars would call genetic criticism. You can see a piece emerging.What I was hoping I would find is notes for recording. And there are those things. And David Osman pointed out each of the records really proceeds differently.But one of the things that you can see on several of the records are scenes that were deleted. And I got to hang out with him before the archive went to Library of Congress.So I was hanging out at his kitchen table and we would pull out a folder and read some things together. And I wish I had done more of this. But there is one.There's a sequence from Don't Crush that Dwarf where he's just working through a couple of pages that didn't make it into the record. And that is what we're going to listen to. And, Phil, I would love to hear what this sounds like to you.

Music playing Technical difficulties. We'll return to our future High School Madness Shoes for industry. Meaning we're going to plug in a previously produced element. Yep. Click. White noise.

Click.

Integrated Community Workers. We plugged in a previously recorded Click. Hawaiian sellout. And then we're back to the movie. That's a stupid idea.Porgy, where are we going to get lizard costumes?

That's too bad. That one didn't.

Yeah, I'm really sorry about that.

Let's see.

That's a stupid idea. Okay. Well, it's mighty dangerous. It's mighty dangerous it's mighty dangerous over there at Tommy Martyrs.Once we get under the wall, we're in enemy territory. I know a tough guy who won't be afraid to help us. We'll phone him from the rumble seat. You got a dime?

This is my bad dime.

Drops phone Dial Highway Patrol Theme on Oregon and Oath the Fly counterspy afflictor of justice, able to carry 200 times his own weight, Able to walk on ceilings upside down. Rubs his legs together. The fly relentlessly strikes fear at trembling into the carriers of organized anarchy. He's out right now.But the fly is always open for business. Record your message and speak American. Sorry, he didn't make it. Golly mudhead. There's no time like this left. Graduation at 2 o'.

Clock.

What are we going to do? The Fly says do nothing. I know your problem. Say nothing. This phone has ears. Meet me after nutrition and coffee. Hike.

Okay.

And that didn't make it in.

No, but. But here's. Here's what I have to say about that.We would spend hours quibbling over, well, sometimes downright fighting over where one of the records was going to go and what. What the lines were and who the characters were.And slowly but surely the script would be assembled enough of it that we could go into the studio and lay something down.When we went into the studio, more often than not, this material that we had worked over with blood, sweat and tears for hours, we'd start bringing it up on its feet and we began improvising on it. And it would take on a whole new life in the studio.I always thought of it in terms of a Broadway show where you were doing the out of town tryout in the studio and then opening the show at the same time.And we discovered that again, the art of improvisation, once we had gotten under the skin of these characters, kind of knew who they were, would very often create a whole new writing at the moment that became part of the actual record itself.

The dynamic of four brilliant comedians, writers trying to produce something in unison is no mean feat. I witnessed a rehearsal once that you all did, and I also was in the studio when you were recording one of your last albums.And the intensity was palpable. I left. It was a little less than pleasant, but that was the kind of energy. And the other thing that was really great was minority dissent.I read in Jeremy's book that's how the fire sign operated. There had to be unanimous consent to go ahead with anything. Which I guess is what made it happen.

Yes, that's right. And of course it did create friction.But every relationship, every that's worth its salt has friction, all right, because you've got individuals with. With the wonderful ideas smashing up against other wonderful ideas.Marxism describes it as a thesis and an antithesis which created a synthesis, which was finally the ultimate thesis. And that's kind of what would happen with us.Yes, we would fight for our comedic ideas and often out of that would come a compromise that was a wonderful combination of funny from all the other minds. Yeah, and so it worked for us. Wasn't always pleasant, but creativity isn't always pleasant.

I have a story that I'm actually really happy that I can tell you from when I met you in 94. Whereas, as I said, I was not ready to write a book on Fireside Theatre, but I was really happy to speak with each of you.I had moved to San Francisco to play in a band, and I'd just been booted out of the band. So for reasons that I will not get into now in Santa Monica, I spent a little time with each of you.And I too, noticed the intensity of the rehearsal. And when I was talking to Phil Austin, I said, oh, yeah, you know, I've been in bands, so I know how it is. And he goes, yeah.But he said, but we all play the same instrument.

The people who were running media, who were running MTV and all that, they were all tripping in their Dorms in the 60s and cut their teeth on Fire Sign.

They were all on fans.

They were fans. They wanted to be connected to it. A couple of decades into the future, a lot of people don't know who Fire Sign Theater is.Comedy albums like Fireside Theater gave way to TV specials.Saturday Night Live launched Lampoon, Monty Python, hbo, which premiered Stand up comedy specials that still, as you wrote, Jeremy, are happening in Netflix. Is that a fair assessment, Phil? Jeremy?

Yeah. The comedy special that the Firestine Theater finally did was on pbs. I think that says it all. But David told me this.One of our fans once said, for four years, everybody knew who you were. And it's true. It's really true. There was a period of time, maybe it was more like six years. I don't know where.I remember I was in Oslo with my second wife, Butterbril, and we were at the Munch Museum in Oslo, and there's a couple of American tourists there, and this guy says, are you Phil Proctor? I think so. I know there are many other Phil Proctors, but I'm one of them. He said, Fireside Theater. I said, yes.It was like, my God, our fans were everywhere at a particular period in time. And then because of the complexity of what we did and also the media that we did it on, phonograph records became kind of obsolete. Even though we.We got three Grammy nominations, and I think two of them were for our CDs of comedy. It was a different culture.

You did visual work?

Yeah, we did a movie called Everything, you know is wrong. And yes, we did visual stuff, but basically our work was too political for us to get on mass media and on television.

Jeremy, what's your take on the ultimate result of Fire Sign and its impact, the sort of fading of it.

I think that it passed into other media and projects. I would say one thing that I think is pretty striking. Although, Phil, please contradict me if you think that this is wrong.But I'm not sure that Firesign has any direct inheritors. For one thing, it became, you know, the type of studio contract that Firesign had was nobody else had that.But also, I think the KPFK element is really key as well. Osman said to me, you know, when we lost our radio show, it was hard because we couldn't keep up our craft.He was saying that having that sort of weekly thing where you were on your toes and listening to each other and seeing what would happen, that was also really important. And so there's a lot to say. But I think that you see Fire Sign in lots of places, like not just the Simpsons, but Devo's Sensibility.Negative Land does not sound like Fire Sign, but they are. They are definitely huge fans.And I'm even going to say, although it's a little bit controversial, I think it means a ton that that the really important hip hop Deejays from the mid-80s through the 2000s know their fire Sign really well and sample it on their records.And I think that it's obviously not the same thing, but they are interested in media technology, they're interested in history because they listen to old albums and they really pay attention to language and voice. And so it's not surprising to me that Fire Sign Theater is. Is well represented in the record collections of Madlib and others.

It's as if Fire Sign Theater fit early FM radio like a glove. And there was never a medium that suited Fire Sign's content as the wild west of FM radio at a time of political tumult.And it was just so relevant doing live radio. There's nothing better to keep you sharp.

We were more like a six fingered glove. Right?

But Jeremy Radek, thank you so much. This has really been fascinating to put Fireside under the microscope.

It's my pleasure. Anytime I get to talk to Phil, it's a great day.

Listen to the record. Everything's on YouTube now.

Every Columbia record is on all the streaming services.

I think we're all bozos. On this Bus was a favorite album of Steve Jobs and for a long time he had an Easter egg. If you said to Siri, this is workers speaking. Hello.She would say, hello. A Clem. What service can I perform for you? Lol.Because I played this hacker named Clem and I hacked into the system by saying, this is workers speaking. Hello. And the computer. Dr. Memory. Direct readout Memory responded. Please state your name.

Oh. Oh.

Do you want me to.

Please state your first name. Clem.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I'd like to introduce you to Clem. Hello. Always nice to see you. Now, Clem, you know the springhead of this country.

All right, stop. Mr. President. Mr. President, stop, please. Now listen to me.

This is worker speaking.

Hello.

Hello. How are you? State maintenance. Question.

Fine, thanks.

No.

And that's how much Steve Jobs was influenced. He was really a fan. We came across some pictures of him at a record signing we did in Berkeley with his arm around us, and he was sincerely a fan.

Thank you to all the members of the Fire Sign Theater for everything you did for our culture and our upbringing.

Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you for drawing attention to it and pulling the veil off of some of the mystery that was involved in the creation.

Jeremy Braddock, professor of Literature in English at Cornell University and author of Fire the Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. A fascinating book about the history of fire sign and its reflection of the culture. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. Keep them flying.

You bet. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor.

We'll see you next week. Thank you so much.