Here’s something I wish I had more of: walking through the Firesign Theatre’s voluminous, amazing archive with David Ossman. In the short clip above, he’s reading and commenting on a few pages written for Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers but later excised from the final script (folks who know the album will recognize where this sequence would have gone). As David walks through these few pages, he’s also commenting on how they would have recorded it, with prerecorded sequences dropped in later. Of all the Firesign albums, Dwarf is the one that most relies on tape edits, employing them as a mode of the storytelling. David would call the next record, 1971’s I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, “our first razorblade-less album.”
As I was in the very early stages of what would become Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums, David and Judith Walcutt welcomed me to their place north of Seattle, put me up in their son’s old bed, and endured two weekends of questions as I was beginning to figure out what kind of book I was going to write about the Firesign Theatre. I knew that I wanted to learn as much as I could about how the albums were recorded — how did they get specific sounds, how did they work with their engineers, what about performing vs. postproduction and mixing, old school radio techniques and new technologies — and that was what we talked about most on my first visit, listening to the albums together at David and Judith’s kitchen table.
By the time of my second visit, a couple of years later, I had been informed that David had meticulously maintained a personal archive, purportedly full of materials relating to the Firesign Theatre. I wondered if that meant the albums. That Saturday morning, I cautiously suggested to David how interested I might be to have a look. When I woke up the next morning I found five or six boxes left for me in the kitchen. David and Judith slept in, and I began to peruse the archive as quickly and as carefully as I could.
It turns out that David had kept extensive records related to the Columbia albums and, interestingly, that each of them had a somewhat different paper trail. For Everything You Know is Wrong (1974) and In the Next World You’re On Your Own (1975), for instance, there is a huge amount of primary material and notes — newspaper clippings (including some directly quoted on the albums), advertisements, notes from a sociological study of violence — all of which seem to have been about describing the desert world those two albums share.
Among the papers for Bozos I found this sheet, where you can see all the rhyming variations of the question Clem uses to access the “Dr. Memory” computer (Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?) This is how Firesign generated the words Dr. Memory speaks as it momentarily crashes. When I described this document to the poet John Koethe, he said “that’s exactly the way poets work.”
For most of the albums, though, there are multiple iterations of the scripts, typed and often including notes in Ossman’s hand, marking either corrections or (on the final draft) notes for recording and mixing. Here’s an image I included in the book: the end of side one of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once in which Ralph Spoilsport famously changes into Molly Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses. You can see their last-minute corrections on the script (which reverse the gender of the speaker — but only part of the time) as well as notes for ambient sound in the margin: TRAFFIC —> SEA. And you can also see a few ideas that were edited out (“cosmic laughter”).
All of this material — as well as the archives of the other four Firesigns — is now cataloged and available for study at the Library of Congress. Phil Austin also kept multiple versions of the scripts, but there is lots of other material there too. Check out the finding aid here.
In the short time I was able to spend with the papers at David’s place, and in a last-minute trip to the Library of Congress a year ago, I noticed lots of sequences like the one David narrates above — pieces written but then excised from the canonical Columbia albums. There is a lot of material that would support what literary scholars (my line of work) would call a “genetic study.” Anyone able to spend that kind of time would be able to write what Nurgi Clockwork Films calls “an alternate look at an alternate history for an alternate culture.”
Share this post