Colin Marshall reviews Jeremy Braddock’s “Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums.”

IN A 1994 EPISODE of Rugrats, the cartoon series’ one-year-old protagonist Tommy Pickles insists on taking off his clothes and not putting them back on. He soon convinces his twin playmates Phil and Lil DeVille to do the same, just before they’re picked up by their mother Betty, a stocky, voluble woman never seen without her athletic headband and Venus glyph sweatshirt. Scandalized at this scene of infant nudism, Betty explodes at Tommy’s mother: “I don’t know what kind of baby commune you’re trying to run here, but it’s time to face facts. The sixties are over, and we lost!” This line went over my head when I first watched the episode, as it must also have done for the rest of the show’s elementary school–age viewership, but it haunted me nevertheless, hinting offhandedly at a period of bitter, possibly violent sociopolitical turmoil not so very far in the past.

Yet I daresay I had a more vivid sense of what “the sixties” were about than most members of the generation yet to be labeled millennials, and for a reason not entirely unrelated to Rugrats. Even before that show premiered, I was a fan of Philip Proctor, who voiced Phil and Lil’s ineffectual stay-at-home father Howard DeVille. A stage actor who had also played countless one-off television parts, Proctor was then best known as a member of the Firesign Theatre, a four-man comedy troupe that had, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, put out a series of record albums densely layered with elaborate sonic production and laced with topical, esoteric, and absurd countercultural humor. Or so Proctor was known, at least, to a certain turned-on segment of the baby boomer generation to which my father belonged.

My dad remembers having first heard the Firesign Theatre (a.k.a. the Firesigns) at a college party around the turn of the seventies, one of whose revelers sat him down with a pair of headphones and a turntable playing their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969). It opens with a sales pitch by Proctor, as the character of car dealer Ralph Spoilsport, hawking a vehicle with such features as “two-way sneeze-through wind vents,” a “sponge-coated edible steering column,” and “factory air-conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped air-conditioned factory.” A young man named Babe pulls up and declares that he’ll take it, whereupon Spoilsport gives him a guided tour of the ludicrously spacious, elaborately equipped automobile. After setting off down the freeway, Babe tests out the “all-weather climate control,” selecting a setting called “tropical paradise.”

The soundscape, having already transitioned from the media cacophony of the onboard radio and television to a cross-fading litany of billboards (“Giant Slide, 19 Holes, Underground Parking”; “Shadow Valley Condoms: If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now”), suddenly becomes a rumbling, croaking, twittering rainforest. From the jungle emerges a band of wisecracking explorers, whom Babe attempts to shake off by switching the climate to “land of the pharaohs,” but his unwanted companions follow him into ancient Egypt. A nearby pyramid opens up to reveal a modern-day motel. The boisterous party within becomes a flamboyantly patriotic, prewar radio–style revue that recounts the history of the United States, from the arrival of the Europeans to the laying of the transcontinental railroad (“from Bangor all the way to mighty Maine”) to the 1968 presidential election (evoked by a hypnotically locomotive chant of “Rockefeller, Humphrey, Nixon, Kennedy”).

By the end of this semi-coherent pageant, Babe has joined the army. This makes for a thematic and verbal segue into the closing scenes of Babes in Khaki, a World War II musical being broadcast on television. After the film comes a channel-flipping sonic montage of various other late-night broadcasts and advertisements, culminating in Proctor’s reprisal of Ralph Spoilsport, this time selling marijuana instead of automobiles. His words begin to echo, growing densely surrounded by other voices and sound effects, finally turning into Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy from Ulysses (“and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”). Thus ends side one. Side two consists of an elaborately unserious parody of wartime detective serials called Nick Danger, Third Eye: “something completely different,” to borrow the language of another comedy troupe to whom the Firesign Theatre has often been compared.

In truth, one is reminded less of Monty Python while listening to How Can You Be in Two Places at Once than of the Beatles. This is due, in part, to the album’s numerous references to that band-turned-cultural-phenomenon, beginning with the image of one of its members on its cover (placed next to that of Groucho Marx, between the faux Cyrillic legends “ALL HAIL” above and “MARX” and “LENNON” below). The Firesigns were paying not just a comedic tribute to the Beatles but also a technological one. How Can You Be in Two Places at Once came out six months after the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine, by which point the Beatles had for years been recognized for using their studio “like an instrument.” Through multitrack recording, tape manipulation, and vocal processing, they crafted their own sound worlds; so, at the same time and by the same means, did the Firesigns.

None of the resemblances between the Beatles and the Firesign Theatre are accidental. The parallels, as Jeremy Braddock writes in his new study Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums, go back to a vision that came, during a European sojourn, to a young Yale graduate named Peter Bergman. “[S]urrounded by massive billboards for A Hard Day’s Night, at Piccadilly Circus in 1964,” Bergman suddenly knew he had to create “a four-man comedy group that was like a band. That model was given further inspiration in the form of the early mixes for Sgt. Pepper, which were circulating unofficially throughout LA in the spring of 1967.” As luck would have it, Los Angeles was just where Bergman wound up at that point, hosting his nighttime free-form show Radio Free Oz on various local stations after developing it on the Pacifica Foundation’s KPFK.

It was at KPFK that Bergman recruited the other three Firesigns, two of whom worked there. David Ossman had been hired in 1961 as the fledgling station’s drama and literature director; Phil Austin took over that position later, along with such duties as producing and engineering Radio Free Oz, which premiered in 1966. Proctor, who had known Bergman at the Yale Dramatic Association before becoming an actor in New York, drove with a friend out to California for a meeting with Peter Fonda, who was then putting together the movie that would become Easy Rider (1969). When the three went out to research the youth revolution, they got caught up in a protest on the Sunset Strip. On the edge of the fray, Proctor happened to sit on a copy of the Los Angeles Free Press with a picture of Bergman, which identified his old Yale colleague as a KPFK newsman.

Not long after Proctor tracked Bergman down at KPFK did the four—an Aries, a Leo, and two Sagittariuses, all “fire signs”—make their collaborative debut on Radio Free Oz. On the night of November 17, 1966, they improvised an entirely fictional film festival, playing eight different filmmaker characters and describing aloud the bizarre movies supposedly screening before their eyes. Their comedic chemistry motivated further performances on air and onstage: in 1967, their live show at the Elysian Park Easter Sunday “Love-In” (a term Bergman claimed to have coined) drew the attention of record producer Gary Usher, whose work with the Beach Boys and the Byrds made him what Braddock calls the “architect of the ‘California sound.’” Usher signed them to Columbia Records, for whom they recorded their debut album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968)—enjoying unlimited studio time, just like the Beatles had.

Each Firesign Theatre enthusiast, or “Firehead,” has different ideas about which member corresponds to which Beatle. To my mind, Bergman is Paul, who, though not technically the Beatles’ founder, soon became their mastermind. Despite being the first Firesign to shuffle off this mortal coil, Bergman remained creatively productive to the end, hosting the online revival of Radio Free Oz days before his death in 2012. Ossman is John, the group’s poet in more than a figurative sense. Older than the others—in his thirties, already married with children and divorced when the Firesign Theatre debuted—he came of age in time to fall under the spell of the Beat movement in high school and dedicate himself to poetry. Early in his radio career at New York’s WBAI, he interviewed the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, and others on a series called The Sullen Art.

Austin, the youngest Firesign, would naturally be George, albeit without the spiritual beliefs. Having grown up under non-Indian Hindu parents, he brought to the group a counterpoint of skepticism about the realms beyond, as well as an ability to embody the most commercially viable of the group’s countless characters. “For the rest of my life I will be considered to be something called Nick Danger, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” he told Frederick C. Wiebel Jr. in the 2006 interview collection Backwards into the Future: The Recorded History of the Firesign Theatre. This sounds rueful, but not as much as his later remark: “My biggest problem in The Firesign Theatre is getting along with three other guys that all think they’re smarter than I am and they all think they’re funnier than I am.” Like George, Austin, who died in 2015, seems never to have felt accepted as a top-line member of the group.

No such anxieties for Proctor, whom Wiebel credits with an “overwhelming affection for the Firesign Theatre” that “bonds the group together, through thick and thin, providing opportunities to work and communicate, and shedding light in the most positive way.” This, of course, makes him Ringo. So does his having been the only established professional actor among the Firesigns, just as Ringo was an established professional musician before joining the Beatles. “I was a very legitimate theater actor, doing TV and movies on the side, until I met The Firesign Theatre and they ruined my life,” he jokes to Wiebel, though not without conveying a certain truth. In the late sixties and early seventies, he landed roles in films like Boris Sagal’s The Thousand Plane Raid (1969) and Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place (1971); William Friedkin even offered him a part in The French Connection (1971), which he felt he had to turn down.

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By that time, the Firesign Theatre had taken off: released in 1970, their third album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, sold more than 300,000 copies. “Dwarf is often cited, though not by every fan, as the Firesign Theatre’s masterpiece,” writes Braddock. “It was nominated for a 1971 Hugo Award, despite the fact that it was neither a book nor a work of science fiction. It was the first comedy record admitted to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.” More narratively and technically ambitious than How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, it tells a single story over both sides, set in a vaguely dystopian near-future Los Angeles. Ossman plays its protagonist, George Leroy Tirebiter, a B-list actor retired into the Hollywood Hills who spends the wee hours channel-surfing, watching his own performances in old pictures with titles like Parallel Hell and High School Madness.

No listener could be expected to comprehend this narrative the first time through. After what Braddock calls “one of the most disconcerting and abrasive openings in the entire history of Columbia Records”—comprising snatches of studio chatter, fuzzy police radio, and microphone feedback, among other things—comes a booming, organ-accompanied sermon by a televangelist broadcasting from “the Powerhouse Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of the Blinding Light.” It all turns out to be emanating from Tirebiter’s television, whose other channels offer news broadcasts (announcing the final steps “taken in or near Washington to secure the merger of the US Government with TMZ General Corp.”), commercials for discount “whole beef halves” delivery (“offer not good after curfew in sectors R or N”), a This Is Your Life–style reality show and the “Hour of the Wolf Movie” (both featuring Tirebiter himself).

For all its jumps from one milieu to another, Dwarf’s “totalizing, wildly allusive, circular narrative” arguably plays out entirely within the setting of Tirebiter’s home. “The predominant form of movement on the record is travel across and within media rather than in social space,” Braddock writes. “[T]he album’s formal structure emphasizes the general situation of its world, which is a thoroughly mediatized society.” And, in the early 1970s, no medium was doing its job on American society more thoroughly than television, the abiding obsession of the Firesigns’ classic period. But it is Dwarf, more than any other single album, that provides support for Braddock’s contention that these men of a thousand voices, accents, and fine-tuned solecisms “were both virtuosic collective authors of a Bakhtinian heteroglossia and media archaeologists avant la lettre,” discoverers of “the book that ghosts the heart of the LP album.”

Braddock refers here, I believe, to how the Firesigns crafted albums as information-dense “texts” that could profitably be “read” over and over again. (Ossman puts it more plainly in Backwards into the Future: “We felt that if people are going to spend the money for an LP album, we wanted them to play it as many times as they were playing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.”) A specialist in modernist literature and culture at Cornell, Braddock occasionally lapses into prose as easy to follow for a nonacademic as a Firesign Theatre storyline is for a non-Firehead. But his analysis of their first nine albums, released by Columbia between 1968 and 1975, is astute throughout, and in its strongest sections, a more compelling book of this kind could hardly be imaginable, at least for a lifelong Firesign listener with an interest in the interplay of culture and technology such as myself.

In fact, I now wonder if the Firesign Theatre isn’t at the root of that interest—or, indeed, all my other interests as well. Unlike my father, I can’t remember when I heard my first Firesign album, which must have happened when I was Tommy Pickles’s age. No matter how many times I listened to How Can You Be in Two Places at Once in early childhood, I never caught any of its Beatles references, because I hadn’t heard of the Beatles. A few years later, I started spending my allowance on bootleg cassette tapes of Golden Age radio shows like Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (1949–62) and The Aldrich Family (1939–53). When I first heard them, I thought—as recent generations of middle school students learning about the Russian Revolution find it reminiscent of Animal Farm (1945)—that they sounded an awful lot like Nick Danger and High School Madness.

Growing up in the irony-saturated 1990s, I suspected that my love of “old-time radio” was an eccentricity best kept hidden from my peers. But it did give me something in common with the Firesigns, who were born into the world before television of the late 1930s and early 1940s. “We had the ‘Golden Age of Radio’ in common, in the sense that we had listened to the magic of the ‘Theater For Your Ears,’ the ‘Theater For Your Brain,’” Ossman tells Wiebel. “We found that it was, it could be, a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness.” Proctor describes the Firesign Theatre as having produced records in an alternate-media-history mindset, “as if radio had continued into the modern era with the full force of energy it had during its so-called golden age. What would it have sounded like? What would we have done with it? What would it have been?”

In addition to all-American fare like Fibber McGee and Molly (1935–59) and The Lone Ranger (1933–56), the Firesigns also absorbed Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan’s BBC program The Goon Show (1951–60). “Characterized by surreal humor, puns, sound effects, silly voices, and shaggy outré plot lines,” in Braddock’s description, Goon Show also shaped the askew, scattershot verbal sensibility of the Beatles. “Goon humor was cult humor,” writes Beatles biographer Jonathan Gould; this brand of comedy’s essential principle held that “the more obscure the joke, the greater the intimacy that comes from sharing in it.” The Firesign Theatre’s radio audience “heard a Beatlesque intimacy listening to the group’s surreal, almost telepathic improvisations,” Braddock writes. The albums “fostered a parallel mode of sociability among listeners, who often memorized phrases or long sequences from the records involuntarily. Like the Beatles’ shared code, these passages could then be used in public to express secret affinity among initiates.”

The first time I received such a publicly transmitted message for Fireheads’ ears only occurred in my senior year of high school, when my English teacher dropped the line “Squeeze the wheeze; many people like to.” (He later introduced us to Jorge Luis Borges, whose 1942 story “Death and the Compass” was adapted by the Firesigns on Radio Free Oz in 1967.) The most recent was just a few months ago, when I spotted someone on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter employ the phrase “Don’t follow the balls when they make the street.” These are actually some of the most recognizable quotations in the Firesign canon, along with the exhortation “Shoes for industry, shoes for the dead!”; the demand for “more sugar”; and “Not Insane,” the slogan of fictional National Surrealist Party presidential candidate George Papoon (whose campaign button John Lennon wore to a 1973 press conference).

When in need of a deeper cut, I reach for “Tell it to the X-mas bunny,” originally uttered by the gruff protagonist of a cop show on In the Next World, You’re on Your Own (1975). The last Firesign Theatre album discussed in Braddock’s book, it transmits a “disappointed skepticism about 1960s political causes, something that the album tied directly to the phenomenon of the media” (the Firesigns, in his framing, functioning essentially as media critics/archaeologists). Asked by Wiebel why Columbia dropped them after its release, Austin admits: “[W]e failed to understand that the audience was smaller than it seemed to be in ’72 or ’73. I think we sold a whole lot more record albums than the material really warranted because we were caught up in the middle of a kind of craze, a kind of social phenomenon that didn’t have much to do with our work.”

That craze was the much-mythologized counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, less a social phenomenon than a disparate set of social phenomena, all loosely interconnected by opposition to the Vietnam War. With the official end of that war in 1975, Bergman explains, “the whole political landscape changed,” and “the bottom dropped out of the whole raison d’être of The Firesign Theatre. People stopped listening to political comedy, and started putting on white suits and pointing at the ceiling and disco-ing.” In Braddock’s analysis, along with the political transition came a media transition: “[T]he moment the Firesign Theatre lost their Columbia Records contract was also the moment television—the medium about which they had thought so variously and to which they had the least access—became the most important platform for comedy in the United States.”

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The Firesign Theatre forged their own art form in a time I regard as both “the heroic age of the album,” when the artistic and technical ambitions of LPs became practically cinematic, and “the second Golden Age of Radio,” before corporate consolidation drove free-form experimentation from the relatively new FM band. For KPFK, Braddock writes, “Ossman produced documentaries on Brecht in Hollywood, Parisian Dada, capital punishment, the poetry of Mao Zedong, the Warsaw Ghetto, and many other topics.” Austin “oversaw a series of multihour documentaries on the violent colonial history and ominous [prophecies] of the Hopi Indians,” a preoccupation of Firesign albums from Waiting for the Electrician to In the Next World. Along with “rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and Indian ragas,” Radio Free Oz featured “tarot and astrology readings, interviews with scenesters and activists, and, most of all, the participation of LA’s night owls and weirdos.”

It can hardly be irrelevant to the cultural cachet achieved by the Firesigns at their peak that, as Braddock points out, “the number of college English majors tripled during the very years—1950 to 1972—that the high-fidelity long-playing record album came to dominate popular music culture and the recording industry.” This ensured a cohort of listeners prepared not just to approach an LP as a literary object but also to catch a decent subset of their references, at least in theory. “I think that some of the things that we reference now may, in a sense, restrict our audience,” Bergman told Wiebel. “We are cognizant of popular culture, there’s no doubt about that, but we also base it on classical culture. There’s a greater distance now between the classical and the street, than there used to be.”

Not that knowing what the Firesigns are talking about is an absolute prerequisite for enjoying their work, as my five-year-old self could have attested. (This is a group, after all, whose chef d’oeuvre includes a character named Principal Poop.) But it’s difficult to imagine what listenership their work can expect in the long term, with extinction looming over not just the English major but also the album as an art form, or at least what Braddock might call its surrounding practices. “[T]hrough the early 1970s, listening was often a collective experience,” he writes. “This was also true for drugs (an emerita colleague once reminded me), and (eureka) the two experiences usually went well together.” The more isolated, less attentive Americans of the 2020s have strains of cannabis bred to obliterating strength and earbuds for half-listening to customized playlists, if not music entirely generated by artificial intelligence.

Always technologically minded, the Firesigns took on the subject of AI more than 50 years ago, with their 1971 album I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus. Its unusually linear story follows Clem, an amiable proto-hacker played by Proctor, through a garish, somewhat faulty exposition of the future. When prompted by one of its many computers to provide his name, he stammers, resulting in his being automatically addressed as “Ah-Clem” throughout the album. Its premise was inspired, in part, by Proctor’s interaction with the famed computer program ELIZA, the ChatGPT of its day, at a 1970 work fair in Los Angeles; much later, Steve Jobs said that he’d been inspired, in turn, by I Think We’re All Bozos. (Early versions of Siri, the iPhone’s voice-operated assistant function, responded to “This is worker speaking. Hello,” a line from the album, with, “Hello, Ah-Clem. What function can I perform for you?”)

Braddock describes Bozos “as a premonitory allegory of the future social power of the tech industries.” Manifest on another level is what Robert Christgau calls the “basic idea” of the Firesign Theatre, “that the U.S. lost World War II.” This is first made explicit on the Nick Danger side of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, which avoids resolving its plot via a sudden interruption by Austin’s FDR-soundalike “President of the United States.” Immediately after announcing that Pearl Harbor has been bombed, he declares “our unanimous and irrevocable decision that the United States of America unconditionally surrender.” Bergman once told Rolling Stone that “America put on a uniform in 1941—and hasn’t taken it off since.” In various ways, both subtle and otherwise, the albums Bergman recorded with the other Firesigns explore what Braddock calls “the possibility of a fascist United States.”

The Firesign Theatre’s final trilogy of studio albums—Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death (1998), Boom Dot Bust (1999), and Bride of Firesign (2001)—represented a comeback made possible by the goodwill of a listenership in middle-aged prosperity. Throughout these albums, the Firesigns continued to elaborate sonic visions of an entertained-to-death American public under the tutelage of unaccountable corporate-military-industrial powers issuing increasingly bizarre demands through increasingly garbled communiqués. As ever, they did it most incisively through commercial parodies (“US Plus: We own the idea of America”). “The humor in this world is achieved through diction,” writes Christgau, noting that the Firesigns “excel at parodying the stilted speech patterns of not-quite-articulate public figures” (who, back then, were still articulate enough to parody). This was truest of the classically radio-voiced Ossman—who, apart from his hippie hair and mustache, could have passed for an establishment man as easily as Monty Python’s John Cleese.

In Britain as in the United States, the establishment itself survived the 1960s, but “its grandly complacent delusion of immunity did not.” So writes music critic Ian MacDonald in his 1994 book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, whose opening essay constitutes ideal supplementary reading to Firesign. “There was, in truth, little of significance that happened in their time, however foolish or disreputable, which did not almost immediately find its way into The Beatles’ life and work,” MacDonald argues, and the same could be said of the Firesigns. During the long sixties that extended into the mid-seventies, “church-going was falling in inverse relationship to the rise in television ownership.” At the same time, “socially liberating post-war affluence conspired with a cocktail of scientific innovations too potent to resist: TV, satellite communications, affordable private transport, amplified music, chemical contraception, LSD, and the nuclear bomb.”

What happened in the sixties was a technologically driven shift, according to MacDonald,

from a society weakly held together by a decaying faith to a rapidly desocialising mass of groups and individuals united by little more than a wish for quick satisfaction; from a sheltered assumption of consensus, hierarchy, and fixed values to an era of multiplying viewpoints and jealously levelled standards; from a naive world of patient deferral and measurable progress to a greedy simultaneity of sound-bite news and thought-bite politics; from an empty and frustrating moral formality to an underachieving sensationalism.

This is the destructively liberating civilizational transformation reflected in the discographies of the Beatles and the Firesigns, who sensed what MacDonald calls “the multifocal and fragmented techno-decadence” into which the developed world would sink after the counterculture’s “last gasp of the Western soul”—and mined it for comedic material complex enough to reward exegesis to this day.

Growing up in the 1990s, when MacDonald was writing, I lamented that gathering around the wireless had been displaced by flipping TV channels like George Tirebiter. The succeeding three decades have rendered quaint the Firesigns’ critiques of conventional television, given its displacement by forms of digital media infinitely more conducive to addiction and solipsism. Effortlessly transmissible on today’s internet but not effectively “shareable” in the manner of a video or a social media post, the Firesign Theatre’s body of work has become the preserve of a small minority willing and able to attend closely to intricate long-form audio collages laden with often oblique references to events of decades, even centuries, ago. Those not born into the scattered community of Fireheads must somehow seek it out. But then, in the words of one particularly memorable Firesign character, Austin’s desert-dwelling nudist fringe-theory broadcaster “Happy” Harry Cox, “there’s a seeker born every minute.”