Not Insane '72

The Firesign Theatre's first presidential convention

Hi and thanks for reading Giant Slide Nineteen Holes Underground Parking.  This is my first foray onto Substack, which I hope won’t be too obvious.

I’ll be using this space for short pieces related to my book about the Firesign Theatre, due out at the end of October from the University of California Press.  I’ll write to some extent about the group themselves (the so-called “Beatles of comedy”) but more often about the many things that shaped the amazing albums that they made for Columbia Records between 1967 and 1975: they were stoner comedy, they were literature, they were media critique, they were media archaeology … listening to them now is like hearing a cultural history of the peak and then the collapse of the student movement and counterculture, and it probably sounded that way at the time too. Because of their position in LA and their Columbia contract, they had astonishing access to obsolete and to cutting-edge media technologies; that’s the principal throughline of my book I’m sure I’ll write about it here too.  It was a period of immense change in the making and recording of music, and of listening. I’ll also try to use this space to share sounds and images that show how this was the case (and which couldn’t be a part of the book).

In the spirit of the day, though, I feel I should lead off with the Firesign Theatre’s first foray into electoral politics: the George Papoon / Nat’l Surrealist Light People’s Party / Not Insane! presidential campaign of 1972.  In truth, I don’t think this was the group’s most amazing idea (I have plenty to say about the amazing ones). It wasn’t even entirely original. In 1968, the button-down comedian Pat Paulsen hired a political consultant and staged a satirical presidential run with the collaboration of Smothers Brothers (the initial 50-minute mockumentary is still very much worth watching).  The same year, the activist comedian Dick Gregory ran more seriously (though also performatively) as a write-in candidate for president for the newly-founded Freedom and Peace Party.  And for good measure the Yippies nominated a pig at the Chicago DNC (though apparently there was some controversy about which pig).

The Firesign-sponsored Papoon campaign was not exactly a retread, though. Nor, probably, could it have been, born as it was of the political despair of 1972. By the spring of that year, the Nixon administration had survived the Kent State protests and the ominous revelations of the COINTELPRO program. With both Nixon and the Vietnam War seemingly impervious to protest, a crushing landslide seemed inevitable (and so it proved to be). Not unrelatedly, 1972 was also a period of low morale (and exhaustion) for the Firesign Theatre. The album that would contain snippets of the Papoon convention, Not Insane, was universally regarded as a disaster (“shit sandwich” was Motorbooty’s 1990s assessment) and the group split up for more than a year.

Coming as it did after four successful albums — two of them masterpieces by any measure — the badness of Not Insane did not prevent the ensuing months from becoming the period of Firesign’s greatest saturation in the culture. This was expressed most of all through the Papoon campaign, which became something of a meme twenty years before the Internet, and was visible everywhere from John Lennon’s lapel to the front page of the University of Michigan’s student newspaper.

April 1, 1973: John Lennon wears a Papoon for Resident button at the Nutopia press conference, and the Michigan Daily announces: Papoon takes city in mudslide; heavy non-human turnout cited.

These coded gestures of affiliation made (semi)public the insider economy of Firesign fandom that had been steadily growing over the previous five years.

What was the Papoon campaign? Their imminent semicollapse notwithstanding, Firesign was riding high as “the only rock band in the world that doesn’t need music,” as a Columbia ad put it. They had just signed a second a five-year contract with Columbia, and along with it were granted a budget — three 16mm cameras and a 16-track remote truck — to record a performance at the new performance space at KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, where the group had first formed. 

Titled The Martian Space Party, that performance was the seed of what would have been Firesign’s fifth studio album, and all the surviving evidence suggests that it would have been a densely-plotted multilayered extravaganza much closer in spirit to the group’s second and third albums, than to the previous year’s more straightforward album about AI, I Think We’re All Bozos on this Bus.  As Firesign’s David Ossman remembered, its goal was to “personify satellite communication, as if programs themselves and their creators were orbiting around the Earth.”

As a step on the way, The Martian Space Party comprised several discrete plots, all of them meant to be television broadcasts airing simultaneously on different channels.  Two of these were keyed directly to the presidential election.  One mocked Nixon’s stagey and historic trip to China (cunningly timed to the election), by providing
television coverage of the unnamed president’s state trip to “Monster Island.” Mirroring and finally intersecting with the Monster Island broadcast was live coverage of the Surrealist Party convention, whose inanity and boredom could only be heard as the obverse of the televised chaos of the 1968 Chicago DNC.

Phil Austin and Philip Proctor as “Walter” broadcasting from the Nat’l Surrealist Light People’s Party Convention in The Martian Space Party (March 1972)

Both of these plots underscored the way satellite television had been thoroughly accommodated within the techniques of the political establishment. In 1968, satellite had enabled both the Yippies’ political theater and the mainstream networks’ dissemination of gruesome images of the war.

The other thing that is notable about The Martian Space Party is the audience became a part of the fiction of the convention, addressed from the stage as the convention delegates. While Papoon remains a Godot-like absence, the final sounds on Not Insane are the KPFK crowd singing the Surrealist Party’s campaign song:

Papoon, Papoon for President
There is no one to blame
Papoon, Papoon for President
You know he’s not insane!

The invitation to participate in Firesign’s world-building fictions cued the fans’ grassroots dissemination of Papoon propaganda, something that was also enabled by the introduction of the group’s first fanzine, Tom Gedwillo’s Chromium Switch.

Bumpersticker for the George Papoon campaign, 1972

Amazingly, the fans’ cooperation, production, and extension of the George Papoon fiction would be elaborated an entirely different scale in 1976, the election period that also coincided with the Firesign Theatre’s loss of their contract with Columbia Records.

Campoon ’76 would see the formation of dozens of “Cocoons for Papoon” across the United States and Canada, which produced fanzines, audiotapes, several species of paraphernalia, and live as well as televised (via cable access) television programs.

which could now feature live appearances by fans appearing as the candidate — instantly recognizable by the paper bag he now wore.

Images from the 1976 Papoon campaign

These culminated in two nominating conventions — in Santa Barbara and in Lawrence, Kansas — organized by the fans and featuring guest appearances by Firesign’s David Ossman as Papoon’s running mate, George Tirebiter. Among the most enthusiastic of the Lawrence delegates was a young filmmaker named Douglass St. Clair Smith. Assuming the persona of the Reverend Ivan Stang. Smith would take the addresses of the ’76 Papoon cocoons and use them as the mailing list for his next project, the Church of the Subgenius.

That story, as well as the story of Smith’s elaborate piece of Firesign fan art — the forty-minute dystopian film Let’s Visit the World of the Future — is for another day.