Firesign is out today
Here's how the book starts (includes receipts).
Today is the official release date for Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. Renewed thanks to all who preordered.
I begin the book with a list of covert references to Firesign Theatre albums that I found distributed throughout culture beginning in the early 1970s. As I was working on the book, I was surprised by the extent and variety of these references, and this is a selective list. Please add your own references in the comments!
Here is the book’s first paragraph:
A postpunk band from Bristol, UK. A 1976 issue of the Marvel comic book Defenders. A line in a John Ashbery poem. A Chicago Tribune recipe for Zucchini Mushroom Casserole (submitted by Mrs. George Tirebiter). A psychedelic jazz album on the Impulse! label. Greg Tate’s review of the first De La Soul album. A button John Lennon wore to a 1973 press conference. Sixteen tracks from the hip hop auteur Madlib. Each of these is a reference to the Firesign Theatre, a sui generis Los Angeles comedy group that recorded nine virtuosic albums for Columbia Records between 1967 and 1975.
The postpunk band was Shoes for Industry
Shoes for Industry took its name from a line on Firesign’s 1970 album Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers. The line itself was taken from an anarchist slogan for industrial sabotage (sabot = a clog worn by industrial workers); sabotage was the workers’ practices of “willfully damag[ing] workplace machinery by throwing their sabots into the works.” This John Peel session is great:
“I Think We’re All Bozos in this Book!” was the title story of the April 1976 issue of the Marvel comic book The Defenders
Written by Steve Gerber, and illustrated by Sal Buscema and Jim Mooney. In the story, the Nebulon takes the form of a science nerd who recruits Earth inhabitants to a “Free Seminar in Celestial Mind Control” at the Park Plaza Hotel as a part of his evil plan to remake the world. With their Defender colleague Nighthawk already (for the moment) reduced to a zombie, Dr. Strange, the Incredible Hulk, and Valkyrie disguise themselves as Bozos and interrupt the event, revealing Nebulon’s true identity — and not a moment too soon!
John Ashbery quoted the Firesign Theatre in his poem “Text Trek”
Legendary Firesign Theatre fan John Ashbery finally quoted Firesign in this 2016 poem, later published in his last book, Commotion of the Birds. Bonus points for the first reader who spots the reference, and connects it to the album it appears in. The poet John Koethe talks about Ashbery’s obsessive Firesign fanship in this podcast episode I did for the Organist, and in his own poem “Ninety-Fifth Street.”
The recipe appeared in the January 13, 1973 issue of the Chicago Tribune.
I heard lots of anecdotal references to Firesign characters hiding in plain sight throughout the 1970s: phone book entries for Nick Danger and George Tirebiter, for instance. A few years ago when I was appearing on a roundtable (at the Barnes Foundation, of all places), there was an audience member who wanted to tell me that in college towns of the 1970s the Nick Danger phonebook entry was widely known to be the way of booking a seat on the underground bus company Grey Rabbit. I couldn’t find evidence of this (and believe me, I tried!), and am eager to know if there’s anyone other there who can confirm.
I will send a free copy of Firesign to the first person who tries this recipe and sends me a picture of the results.
The jazz album is Howard Roberts’ Antelope Freeway (Impulse!, 1971)
The Antelope Freeway is a real thing, the southern end of California State Route 14, which runs from LA north to the Mojave Desert. The funky postproduction effects on the album, though, show that Roberts is shouting out to the famous talking road sign sequence on Firesign’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969). Roberts riffs on Firesign with the voiceover: “Antelope Freeway, 2.8 light years.” Stream the whole album here.
Greg Tate’s approving Village Voice review of De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising (1989) compared the album to the Firesign Theatre, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Sly and the Family Stone.
Greg Tate always had his ear to the ground, and he was a fantastic writer. I reread his game-changing essays on Miles Davis’s electric period while I was writing Firesign too. Here’s the relevant passage from the De La Soul review:
They extend the tradition of We're All Bozos on This Bus, Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, and There's a Riot Goin' On, none of which were well-trodden paths.
When he was booking for Chocolate City's 9:30 Club, my brother Brian returned ecstatic from auditioning a band of 14-year-olds he'd fallen in love with because they had the greatest love all: Fear of No Music. They'd listen to and play anything. De La Soul got that polyglot ardor for music too, and unlike Fishbone they know that being an off shade of black does not mean you have to be afraid of the funk.
Greg Tate, “Yabba Dabba Doo-Wop: De La Soul” Village Voice, 1989. Rpt. Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) 137-41.
John Lennon wore the Firesign Theatre button to the Nutopia press conference on April 1, 1973.
Lennon and Yoko Ono were performatively protesting the Nixon administration's efforts to have them deported, punishment for their activism against the Vietnam War. At the press conference they declared themselves ambassadors of the newly founded nation of Nutopia, requesting recognition from the United Nations and diplomatic immunity. I wrote a bit about this in my first Substack post about the Firesign Theatre fans’ extension and appropriation of Firesign’s 1972 Papoon for President campaign, and I talk about it more in chapter two of Firesign, where I get into Firesign’s complex and revealing identification with the Beatles.
After that first Substack post, Steve Gillmor — a Firesign friend and collaborator — reached out and gave me further confirmation that the Beatles were Firesign fans. Steve was with Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman at a Columbia Records event in 1972 when George Harrison passed by and said “Civilization, ho!” — a line from Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968).
You can see Lennon wearing the “Not Insane” Firesign pin in this footage from the Nutopia press conference.
The great DJ Madlib has sampled the Firesign Theatre more than a dozen times
As I discussed a couple weeks ago, in a post that excerpts the last chapter of Firesign, Firesign Theatre albums have been extensively — even bibliographically — sampled by the most recondite DJs in the history of rap music. The discography comprises an encyclopedia of Firesign references that can also be read as a history of how sampling practices developed over the course of thirty years. My YouTube playlist compiles them here.
Inevitably, Madlib sampled them most of all. Richard Metzger told me in an email that he took Madlib and J. Rocc to meet Firesign at one of their final performances together in Los Angeles.
If you’ve read this far, you probably know some that I’ve missed. Hit me up in the comments with your favorite references — “doors close in five seconds.”
Listeners who already felt the Firesign Theatre was really deep will find even more depth to their work in Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. I recommend it highly.