Firesign Theatre: The Greatest Satirist of 20th Century Media Culture and its Techno-romanticism were… Not Insane! An Interview with Jeremy Bradock

If you were a college student or Western counterculture person in the late 1960s-70s, the albums of Firesign Theatre occupied more space on your shelf and in your hippocampus than even The Beatles or Pink Floyd. If you were an incipient techno-geek or hacker, this was even more the case. Firesign was the premier comedy recording act of the very first media-saturated technofreak tribe.

In his tremendously informative and enjoyable history of Firesign Theatre titled Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as told in Nine Comedy Albums, author Jeremy Braddock starts by giving us the roots of a band of satirists that started out (to varying degrees) as social activists with a sense of humor. He shows them slowly coming together in Los Angeles while infiltrating, first, the alternative Pacifica radio stations like KPFK in Los Angeles, and eventually, briefly, hosting programs in the newly thriving hip commercial rock radio stations of the times, before they lost that audience share to corporatization.

Braddock takes us through the entire Firesign career and doesn’t stint on media theory and the sociopolitics of America in the 20th century that were a part of the Firesign oeuvre.

For those of us out in the wilds of the youth counterculture of the time, without access to local radio programs, it was Columbia Records albums that captured our ears and minds, starting with Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him in early 1968. Their third album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers sold 300,000 right out of the gate and, in the words of an article written for the National Registry in 2005, “breaking into the charts, continually stamped, pressed and available by Columbia Records in the US and Canada, hammering its way through all of the multiple commercial formats over the years: LPs, EPs, 8-Track and Cassette tapes, and numerous reissues on CD, licensed to various companies here and abroad, continuing up to this day.” As covered toward the end of the book, they have been frequently sampled in recent years by hip-hop artists.

My introduction to Firesign came as the result of seeing the cover of their second album How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All in the record section of a department store in upstate New York. It was the cover, with pictures of Groucho Marx and John Lennon and the words “All Hail Marx and Lennon” that caught my eye.

It was the mind-breaking trip of Babe, as he enters a new car purchased from a then-stereotypical, obnoxiously friendly car salesman, and finds himself transitioning from one mediated space to another, eventually landing in a Turkish prison and witnessing the spread of plague, as an element of a TV quiz show.

The album ends with a chanteuse named Lurlene singing “We’re Bringing the War Back Home.” This was all during the militant opposition to the US war in Vietnam. Probably few listeners would have recognized “Bring The War Home” as the slogan of The Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but Braddock gets it, like he gets the seriousness of Firesign’s satire. Indeed, Braddock notes that several reviewers, writing with appreciation about one of their albums, averred that its dystopia was “not funny.”

Most fans would agree with me that the peak of the Firesign run on Colombia Records was the exceedingly multivalent Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and the futuristic, AI-saturated I Think We’re All Bozos on this Bus, which I note in this interview predicted the future better than any of the self-described futurists of the 1970s. But to apprehend the richness of those two psychedelic assaults on the senses and on the idiocracy of its times, you will need to read the book and listen to the recordings or at least read this interview.
Jeremy Braddock is, in his own words, a literary scholar and cultural historian specializing in the long history of modernism. (What? Not postmodernism!?) He teaches literature in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I interviewed Braddock via email.

RU Sirius: This is not light reading for people who remember the Firesign Theatre as a silly comedy group with a few lines they like to quote situationally. You hit us right up front with references to the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin (heteroglossia) and with a series of left counterculture and avant-garde theater references that were part of their history. These made me swoon (partly with nostalgia.) But all this might not appeal to the old boomer stoner who might by now be pretty reactionary. Your thoughts?

Jeremy Braddock: I get where that question is coming from, because I like the joke about the erector set as much as anyone. The version of that question that someone of my generation would ask is, “Why are you asking us to think that these four old stoners are actually major thinkers about media, technology, and culture, and among the most interesting artists of the late 20th century?” (Which – spoiler – is what I’m saying.)

I definitely don’t want to be policing anyone’s enjoyment, and folks like the “reactionary” person conjured in your question might prefer to read Fred Wiebel’s Backwards into the Future, which is a big collection of interviews he did with the four Firesigns in the ’90s, or just listen to the albums again. But one thing that was very striking to me as I researched the music mags and fanzines of the 1960s and 1970s was that they understood that the Firesign albums were great art and they took them very seriously – they knew that the records were both the White Album and Gravity’s Rainbow, if you like. They also tended not to see a contradiction between being a stoner music fan and being intellectually engaged and reading books. The Creem reviewers especially were way more likely to understand Firesign albums as more frightening than funny, and that is because like so many others they saw the bigger frame that the albums created, and they knew that shouting, “what is reality?” at the principal from the back of a high school gym in the context of Kent State and the Vietnam War was not only hilarious but a very good idea, and even in its way profoundly political, if you think about all the things ‘reality’ might mean.

I wanted to honor that seriousness, and to put as much thought into the book as Firesign obviously did making their records. But I also wanted for my writing to be in tune with the albums’ multilayered playfulness, so I wanted it to be weird and even include some jokes, and at the same time I did not want only to be writing for academics. That might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is what the Firesign albums sound like to me. Firesign knew that the key to a good record was to include things you might not appreciate until the third or tenth listen, and I think that’s true of a good book – fiction or nonfiction – too.

RU: While Dwarf remains my choice as the group’s crowning achievement, it was Bozos that made Firesign’s reputation, as you note, in Silicon Valley and with the tech geeks. There’s such complexity to the history of that album. I like to tell people it’s the most accurate prediction of the future from the 1970s (with the possible exception of the title of Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric.) But for Firesign, it was very much about the present and even about the past. I was stunned to learn from you about the influence of the Chicago Century of Progress Worlds’ Fair 1933 official guide book (and about its slogan “Science finds – Industry Applies – Man conforms.” It’s shocking, to put it mildly). Please say a little about how the various expositions romanticizing technological progress collided with the social and cultural realities of 1971 as understood from the countercultural perspective of Firesign to form the composition of Bozos.

JB: I’m glad you appreciated that, because it’s part of what I try to signal through the book by using the term “media archaeology,” which is a relatively new strain of scholarship in media studies that looks at old technologies – working with the devices when possible – and thinks about, among other things, how things might have developed otherwise. The Firesign Theatre were, without a doubt, media archaeologists. They knew that the Hollywood studio they were recording in was originally built in 1938 for radio and used for antifascist propaganda broadcasts. They thought about what it meant to be using the same microphones and old sound effects devices in the age of Vietnam.

As to Bozos’ conceit of the Future Fair, there’s no doubt that Disneyland (and Disneyworld, which opened in 1971) was one of the things they were riffing on. But they had the Guidebook to the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair with them in the studio, and they took a lot of ideas from it, as you noticed. The background of the World’s Fairs was useful to them because of their history as events that were used by governments to communicate messages about political culture, promote commerce, and exhibit new technologies. The first demonstration of stereo took place at the 1933 Chicago Fair; famously, television was introduced at the 1939 Fair in New York. I don’t think Firesign deliberately chose the 1933 Fair over the others – probably they just picked up the Guidebook at a used book shop – but it was a key moment in the development of World’s Fairs because it was the first time that corporations had pavilions alongside those for different nations, and that comes through subtly in Bozos where the “model government” and the President himself (itself) are exhibits at the Fair, and not the other way around.

As the ominous “Science Finds – Industry Applies – Man Conforms” slogan implies, it institutionalized the idea of technological progress as all-powerful and unquestioned good. I think we’re seeing that play out now in the techno-utopian discourse about the inevitability of AI. Despite the fact that Century of Progress is not as well known as the 1893 or 1939 fairs, I was happy to see that Shoshana Zuboff cites the 1933 slogan in the introduction to her important book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

And yes, I agree that Don’t Crush That Dwarf is more amazing than Bozos, but I have grown to really appreciate that album, especially the sound design.

RU: The early text-based conversational AI program ELIZA was another big influence on Bozos that added to their cred among both early and latter-day tech freaks. Bozos is, in a sense, a collision of AI, VR (the funway is clearly some kind of simulation or partial simulation) and a totally surveilled entertainment space that people enter into voluntarily. It all feels very contemporary. And one of the Firesign’s had some direct engagement with ELIZA, if my reading is correct. Say a bit about how their understanding of ELIZA led them to make something that was and is related to by hackers and other techies and maybe about some of the problematic or complicated aspects of that relationship.

JB: Yes, Phil Proctor interacted with the original chatbot ELIZA at a work fair in LA in 1970. It was entirely text-based, of course, and he took a sheaf of the printouts into the studio as they wrote the album. But they imposed a lot of changes along the way; instead of private psychotherapy (which is what ELIZA emulated), they used it to portray the fantasy of citizens’ access to politicians; they used their presidential chatbot to foreclose conversation, whereas ELIZA is all about keeping the conversation going (which is why it was so popular).

I understand that they had access to other computer culture, too, because according to my friend Herb Jellinek – a Lisp hacker from back in the day – some of the nonsense noises that Dr. Memory makes as Clem hacks into the backend of the ‘President’ are terms that come from the DEC PDP-10 (a computer that would have run ELIZA), but are not found in the ELIZA script. So they had some other source, but I don’t know what it is.

But to answer your question, I think that the Clem character was easily understood by the early Silicon Valley generation – and Proctor has endorsed this reading, too – as a kind of heroic early hacker, and the fact that he succeeds in “breaking the president” would surely have appealed to a strain of political libertarianism that is not necessarily in step with the left counterculture from which Firesign came, but became and remains influential in Silicon Valley.

RU: There’s a note in the chapter about Bozos that indicates that people used to see Clem as the hacker hero of the narrative, but that is no longer the case. I wonder why and how you see that as having changed. The narrative, I think, can be pitched, so to speak, as twisted, very surreal early cyberpunk humor.

JB: This sounds like a question that I’d like you to answer. But I would point out that one trajectory out of Clem and Bozos would be toward something like Anonymous (which appears to be no longer with us) while another is with the hackers who became powerful tech innovators like Steve Jobs, who was a fan of Bozos, according to Proctor. It seems important to stress that Firesign were definitely not Luddites – they were always eager to experiment with new technologies and would certainly have thought more about AI – but they were always skeptical and thought critically as they worked.

RU: Like Firesign’s albums, there are so many thematic streams running through your book, I wonder how you organized the flow. Was it difficult? It’s funny that what they did sort of demands a multivalent response.

JB: Yes, it was difficult. I decided to write the Bozos chapter first, thinking that the album’s linear storyline would be the easiest one to deal with. It was easy to write, but I was not overjoyed with it and ended up substantially revising that chapter when I’d finished everything else.

Writing that chapter helped me realize a couple of things. First, that I wanted to write a book that would interest people who hadn’t heard of the Firesign Theatre, people of my generation who might get interested in what the Firesign Theater did if I drew them in as readers, even if they were never going to listen to the albums. And second, I also wanted to write not only for an academic audience but for a smart general audience too, which included old heads like you, who do know the albums well.

I decided to make the book roughly chronological, so that it read like a history of the group and the times they were working in. But I also chose to give each chapter the organizing theme of a particular medium – book, radio, cinema, AI, television – which showed a second kind of organization that allowed me to weave in other themes, as you said.

What bothered me about the first draft of the Bozos chapter is that it was pretty much a standard literary reading, and kind of boring. It didn’t really convey what was special about the albums, so I decided to try to make my writing weirder and see what happened, hoping that at some level it could convey the experience of hearing the albums for those who had never heard them. So I then turned to Dwarf, deciding to let it rip and see what happened. That chapter took about a year to write and included a lot of material that ended up getting excised – such as a huge long detour about what Allen Ginsberg was up to in 1965 and 1966, which I will not belabor now other than to say that it’s totally fascinating but good that I cut it – but it gave me the confidence that going down other rabbit holes was totally appropriate to the way the Firesign albums worked. Hence the excursions into rock operas versus concept albums, the MGM auction, Firesign’s Zachariah script, and the introduction of Dolby into the recording studio (and Dolby’s uneven history in cinema versus sound recording), which Ossman had insisted was critical for what they were able to do on that album.

RU: One example of a thematic stream is your generous recounting of Firesign’s use of the tools of the recording studio and other aspects of recording technology. Their mastery of the studio should be at least as legendary as Brian Eno’s or any of the other esteemed record producers. I hope your book rouses some attention around that. What surprised or intrigued you most about their uses of recording technology?

JB: Yes, I thought this would be really important if I could get it right, because anyone can see that the sound they are able to get on those Columbia records is a kind of miracle. They did plenty of good work after 1975, but none of it sounds as good as those early albums. I spent a couple of weekends with David Ossman as I was starting work on the book, and this was one of the things I was hoping he would talk about, or find evidence of in his papers, and both those things ended up being true – although sadly the engineers that they worked with at Columbia had all died by then, which might have been a goldmine had I thought to track them down earlier.

Firesign’s tenure at Columbia coincides with a period of massive change in technology and in recording practices, and listening to the records in order can stand in for a history of those changes. Waiting for the Electrician is recorded on 4-track machines, just like Sgt. Pepper was; In the Next World You’re On Your Own is recorded on 24 tracks at the Burbank Studios with the guy who had just engineered Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats.

Ossman stressed that Firesign was able to do something different every time they went in to record, and that they used whatever new device or technique as inspiration for what they were going to write. At the same time, though, they were also learning the radio techniques of the 1930s and ’40s and were excited to discover that Columbia Square still had all the old RCA ribbon microphones which were useful for the kind of spatial effects that are so much a part of the Firesign albums. Ossman talked about “working the mic” as if it was a kind of instrument. All of which is to say that they were swimming in the same water as the pop groups of the time, and apparently doing something quite different. But focusing on Firesign also made me realize the way so many pop acts – the Beatles and many others – were using the recording studio in theatrical ways, like the nonsense in Yellow Submarine and many other places.

RU: I’m glad you brought up media archaeology. Nearly all the Firesign albums are utterly immersed in media, particularly the media that were active during their time. One of the ideas that I believe is contained in your book is that a medium isn’t just the radio, or TV, or record player, and the content that’s available through it – but it’s also the humans who participate in it, even just as consumers. Also, there was a lot of Marshall McLuhan going around during the ’60s and ’70s. What would you say about how Firesign’s work reflects, intentionally or not, any theories of media, and then, specifically, how much did McLuhan influence their work?

JB: Yes, I’m borrowing that idea from Jonathan Sterne, someone who has really charted a new path in thinking about technologies of sound. His first book The Audible Past is about 19th century technologies like the stethoscope, while his more recent stuff is about contemporary things like the mp3 and machine listening.

One point he makes in The Audible Past is that especially at the moment of a technology’s invention, there are many ways things might go. There’s no inherent reason that the technology underpinning radio meant that it should be mainly used for one-way one-to-many broadcasting. What made that become the common sense understanding of ‘radio’ as a medium had to do with other decisions that were made socially – people who invested in transmitters and users who bought radios and listened.

Sterne is inspired in this approach by a scholar named Raymond Williams, who is someone that I am a gigantic fan of as well. Among many, many other things, Williams wrote an early study of television that is exactly contemporary with the Firesign Theatre, which was an incredibly useful coincidence. It even includes a famous description of falling asleep by the TV, just like George Tirebiter!

Both Sterne and Williams are quite critical of Marshall McLuhan, who famously was a ‘determinist’ – his idea was that particular forms of media shape particular kinds of consciousness, whether we know it (or like it) or not, i.e. they unilaterally change what it means to be human.

Sterne and Williams both, and Sterne in particular, appreciate the Very Big Questions that McLuhan asked (so do I), and those questions would have inspired the Firesign Theatre as well.

Whether they read McLuhan carefully or not, he was completely inescapable as a public intellectual in the ’60s and ’70s, and his ideas and mantras – at least in reduced form – were widely known to all. And by the mid-70s, McLuhan apparently knew them! According to Proctor, McLuhan summoned him and Peter Bergman to his chambers at the University of Toronto after they played a show sometime in the 1970s and gave them exploding cigars – and he takes just as much pride in that as he did in Steve Jobs’ admiration of Bozos (and who wouldn’t?).

The way Firesign would depict a broadcast on a car radio, which is a scene in a movie, that is being watched on a television, on the LP album you’re listening to is without doubt a riff on McLuhan’s slogan “the content of a medium is always another medium.” But side one of Waiting for the Electrician ends with 8 million hardbound copies of Naked Lunch being dropped on Nigeria from a B-29 bomber called the Enola McLuhan, and that seems like a devastatingly skeptical critique of McLuhan’s techno-utopian Global Village.

RU: Let’s close out with some politics. Somehow despite being both a New Left Yippie and a Firesign fanatic back in the day I was surprised by their history of, and connection to, political activism and saw them as observers who were laughing at it all (and there was plenty of absurdity to laugh at). On the other hand, as also covered in your book, they were actually excoriated by some (in the early 1970s) for not being enough down for the revolution. Firstly, I wonder how anybody who wasn’t there during that period could even make sense of any of it. And then, how does Firesign’s politics, both left and ambiguous, show up in their albums?

JB: I’m glad that the book rings true to a New Left Yippie who was there. As to your first question: to piece together the context, I had to consult a huge range of sources outside of the albums: histories of the period, of course, but also lots of primary sources like newspapers, the rock press and independent press, fanzines, and plenty of interviews. And I met other people who were working on projects that were adjacent to my project and we shared work as we were writing; my colleague Claudia Verhoeven is writing a cultural history of the Manson murders, and the anthropologist Brian D. Haley just published his fantastic book Hopis and the Counterculture, which has a chapter on Firesign in it.

The question of the group’s politics – both on the albums and in terms of their internal dynamics – is very complicated. I do think they were skeptical about the Yippies’, “you can’t be a revolutionary without a television set” approach (which was very McLuhanite), because they knew that the powerful people would always want to control the media, too.

And more broadly, there were four people in the group, and they did not absolutely agree on everything, and things changed among them over time. But it is obviously meaningful that they all came together on KPFK, which then and now is a station on the left-wing Pacifica network, which meant that they both worked and were heard in that context from the very beginning.

I would also point out that it’s possible to make jokes about things with which you are in sympathy. So one place you can see that is near the end of the first side of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, which was written and recorded weeks after the 1968 Chicago DNC. Lilly Lamont’s USO-style singalong “We’re Bringing the War Back Home” is a travesty of the SDS slogan “Bring the War Home,” which was coined for the Chicago protests. But that whole album is very obviously, and in so many different ways, opposed to the Vietnam War, so it’s hard to see how the song could be seen to be mocking the antiwar activists – even if there were some revolutionaries who thought they should have been more overtly militant. Firesign’s humor is in general not angry or indignant – as with Dick Gregory or Lenny Bruce – and is more about finding a place to make connections, ask questions, and even express anxiety, as the Creem reviewers all understood. For instance, Dwarf is very much about Kent State, but to get there on the album you have to pass through televangelism.

RU: In Pat Thomas’s Jerry Rubin biography, he notes a clear timeline in which 1973 was the year when every participant with half a brain knew that the new left counterculture revolution was not going to succeed politically. And it seems like there might be a similar clear distinction between the Firesign albums before and after that year. I perceive a sort of certainty of purpose pre-1973 that turns more drifty in the later albums.

JB: That’s generally true. Peter Bergman once said that they lost their audience after Vietnam and that they began to lose focus as a result. But I see it a little differently. First, it’s just hard to keep a band working together with that intensity that long. The Beatles didn’t break up because the counterculture failed, for instance, though their breakup was probably seen as a sign of it. And on the other hand, Firesign could be seen as mourning the promise of the revolutionary movement as early as Dwarf in 1970. And by the way, I think their last Columbia record, In the Next World You’re On Your Own (1975) is as good as anything they ever did, and is very political.

RU: Ok here’s a tough final one. You write often about Firesign performing in “blackvoice” (or Asian voice etc.) Could Firesign Theatre exist today? Would they have to include all diverse categories of persons in their group and wouldn’t that also be problematic? So what I often ask myself, and now I ask you… does this situation represent a positive evolution or are we losing our ability to process or allow for nuance and context?

JB: A huge and important question, and I think about it often. The spirit of your question, I think, is that these were four educated middle-class white guys who nevertheless wanted to represent all of society, including racism and segregation, which they were opposed to but decided they could never make the primary theme of their work. It’s more complicated than that, and for good reasons their blackvoice would not be viable today, but I think it is generally true.

My short answer is to say yes of course there could be a Firesign Theatre today, but it would have to be different. Here’s a utopian (but also problematic) thought experiment: what about a multiracial group that also included women, and that they all had the liberty to speak both in their own identities and in those of others? That could create a space to really explore the conflicts and contradictions of social life, but also provide a utopian image of how things could be otherwise.

I actually think that around 1972, Firesign were setting themselves up to experiment, however unconsciously, in that direction as two of their wives (Tiny Ossman and Annalee Austin) were becoming increasingly present on the albums, and in The Martian Space Party performance, and there is at least one photo shoot where they appear to have expanded into a six-member group (albeit still entirely white).

I was thinking about this fun counterfactual when I was watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary a couple of years ago: what if The Beatles had invited Billy Preston and Yoko Ono into the group as full members – going further into Yoko’s avant-gardism and into Billy Preston’s soul and R&B chops, while having Asian, Black, and queer voices in the band?

The Firesign Theatre identified closely from the very beginning with The Beatles – a band that was bigger than the sum of its parts, but composed of four distinct personalities, all of whom were important and (crucially) who all really loved each other.

Could there be a comedy group that looked more like Sly and the Family Stone or Prince and the Revolution, but with the democratic give-and-take of the Beatles? I mean, I know that George began to feel constrained, and Ringo wasn’t really a songwriter, etc. But you see my point: yes it would be possible, and it’s something that it is very much worth wanting. I think the real question is whether there would be an audience that would have the attention to listen to that work again and again – I would hope that there is.

#AntiEstablishment

#cyberpunkaesthetics

#CyberpunkComics

#IndividualFreedoms

Let us know your thoughts! Sign up for a Mindplex account now, join our Telegram, or follow us on Twitter.