NOT INSANE. AND NOT FUNNY EITHER.

“Only now, at the edge of the precipice, is it possible to realize that 'everything we are taught is false.' The proof of this devastating utterance is demonstrated every day in every realm ... We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds, dead sciences. And it is the past which is engulfing us, not the future."

Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins

Back in 1969,1 was, like many of my peers, a laddie who didn’t mind steeping himself in generous bowlfuls of cannabis sativa, for generalized imaginary fructification and as a way of filling up many otherwise fidgety hours. I wasn’t one of these cultists who believes there is no higher form of mystic communal calisthenics than sitting around collectively reciting long sections of Firesign Theatre albums, but I did find that a little bit of boo and a session with side one of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All made my psychic synapses twang like a dobro.

By 1974 I had joined that growing legion for whom the joys of boo were a curious phenomenon from my checkered past, like wondering whether Paul really was the Walrus. Which may be the reason why I no longer had the patience, attention span, consciousness-level, or whatever was required to “get-into” Firesign Theatre albums in the classically accepted fashion. Of course, it could also be that they had with the usual ceremony laid such unredeemably crappy albums as Not Insane on me. Putting it bluntly, I was now a drunk, and my idea of humor was supremely embodied by this spade comic named Dynamite on Laff Records out of East L.A., who was reknowned for such deathless lines as “I’m gon’ blow yo’ ass off, Sister Pitch-aPussy!” “Eat six buckets of catshit and don’t frown,” and the immortal couplet:

“When I die, lay me out in some green grass

And the whole motherfuckin? world can kiss mah black ass!”

So as you may imagine I was not quite geared for the subtleties inherent in the Firesign’s latest disc, Everything You Know Is Wrong, which as usual seemed to be a takeoff on several hundred thousand things including Von Daniken, wacked-out prospectors, Stranger Than Science, and Evel Knievel. I listened to it a couple of times preparatory to appearing as an extra in one of the scenes of the movie they lipsynced up from it, and had to admit that while I could make both head and tail of it that stuff in between threw me clear into the middle of last week. Simply, I didn’t understand a lot of it, and what I did understand didn’t seem very funny.

On the other hand, I always did wanna be in moom pitchers, and the elaborate lengths to which the Firesigns went in set design, props, etc. were highly impressive. Unlike their earlier filmic effort, Martian Space Party, this was going to be a full-scale visual dramatisation of one of their albums, and it looked like it was going to work, multi-level associations and all. Here on a cold and barren hillside in Burbank that looked like the set of Pink Flamingos, they’d rigged up a red-white-and-blue streamer bedecked platform from which Rebus Kneibus, played with appropriate equine smugness by Phil Austin, was going to take a flying leap down a hole to the center of the earth where, of course, the sun was giving off some bluegreen moss which drugged its victims. Please excuse any misinterpretations of the plot, and write them off to the ravages of methyl alcohol and other death drugs. The former being exactly what I was consuming, in the form of a couple dozen cans of Coors, while standing around eyeing the legendary Hollywood girls and waiting for my big scene. I walked up to this thirtyish woman, sexy in a kind of cozzed-out yet hard-edged way, dripping buckskin fringe and looking like she might have been holed up in a Laurel Canyon rabbit hutch since the halcyon days of Buf-" falo Springfield, and tried to engage her in some flirtatious banter. She told me that her name was Mother Moon, and that her beautiful child, whose name would have been Seabiscuit if she had had a sense of humor, was about to make his acting debut on this very spot.

I went and got another beer.

At length the time arrived for me to make my cinematic bow. It was a crowd scene - we were all supposed to surge forward and be battered back by the pigs when Rebus made his great leap.

I loaned Lanny Waggoner, a local writer who was playing one of the cops, my bad Lou Reed reflector aviator shades, which put the pluperfect finishing touch to his image, the cameras started rolling, and we SURGED. And surged, and surged again, until we found a collective surge to the director’s satisfaction. I began to feel as if I were in some perverted mutant Masters & Johnson hothouse. But it was cool, because fortified by my 19th can of Coors I surged so vividly, with such consummate sense of theatre, that I collided with a camera and recieved a mighty gash just below ‘ my right eye. Tiny, who was David Ossman’s old lady and the sexiest little mama within a ten-mile radius, gently ministered to my wound. She was dressed for this scene as a gum-chewing badass biker chick with ratted jet-black hair. I told her she looked better that way. It was a take.

Charley Koplen, the affable and hilarious Columbia flack who had gotten me out here, sauntered up, looked at my gash and said: “I think maybe the story here is in the interview.”

He continued to work In whatever he could of the unusual, discovering In the infinite resources of his voice, in the disparate uses to which it could be put, the various alter egos of human sound. He was forced by When you talk to the Firesign Theatre about their work, you talk to people who are not only not insane but not particularly funny either, except for the occasional bad pun. In fact, they are dead serious, to the point, perhaps, of pretension. Then again, I’ll always remember an article I read years ago in TV Guide, about the writers in a certain stable in Hollywood who came up with the scripts for several of the funniest shows on the tube - they were positively grim.

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radio to seem always to speak from the frontiers of commitment . . . chatter raised by the complicated equipment to the level of prophecy.

Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

The Firesigns are sanguine, but very methodical and occasionally almost pompous in the way they describe their modus operandi. Of the new album, Ossman said: “This is simply a record which proves that everything you know is wrong, and we’ve gone to no great difficulty or expense to search back through the archives of our history and ourselves to prove that many of the things that people have believed for a long time about our country and certainly about the Firesign Theatre are wrong. We want to set them straight on it, so to speak, if you’ll excuse the expression.”

“Well,” I said, still somewhat benighted as to the exact import of Everything, “can you go from the general to the specific?”

“Sure, general, let’s ask this private citizen over here,” turning to Bergman,. who is dressed for today’s shooting in a Hawaiian shirt with green plastic turtle stomach under it (“I’ve been impregnated by the alien village,” as he explains on the record), brown khaki shorts, a little moustasche and a greasy toupee with a big hairpin in the front.

“Well,” says Peter, “one of the subjects we undertake is whether or not our forefathers used drugs. By showing an educational film that your children may have seen, showing the real Ben Franklin, the real George Washington, John Hancock, etc., and what really kindled the fires of the American revolution, which was hemp.”

Right, right. I was in gear: “So far what you’ve said reminds me of a cross between Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Cheech & Chong.”

“Yes, that’s true,” fessed Ossman. “Cheech & Chong . . . currently we’re emulating their sales figures. Cheech & Chong were originally characters on our records, they were a spinoff from Pico and Rivera on Dwarf”

“Don’t you think,” I posed, “that dope jokes are a little, uh, retrograde?”

Ossman asked me when I last smoked dope, I replied that it had been about a year, and Bergman cut in: “For you the jokes may be passe, but for alchemists like ourselves we like to keep fresh with what’s happening.”

“If Cheech & Chong are Henry Miller,” I persisted, “then you would be James Joyce. But Cheech & Chong aren’t Henry Miller.”

“Joyce to the world,” said Dave Ossman.

“Joyce Kilmer, yes,” said Peter Bergman.

“But they don’t cut down as many trees,” continued Dave, “so we have to go to vinyl instead of paper . . .”

“Only god can make a comedy record,” said Phil Austin.

“Only god can make the charts,” riposted Peter Bergman.

I tell you, I about split a gusset.

They asked me for some “good questions.” I mulled a moment. “All right. What is funny, and how and why are you funny?”

“Anything you can’t explain is funny,” said Austin. “Things that are funny aren’t always things that make you laugh. One of the things we do best is write jokes, but we abandoned punchlines early in our career. Everybody else that makes comedy records has to structure their material around punchlines, so it’s the kind of writing that you get in high school skits, where you have to do it this way because the English teacher says so. Because otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. Early in time we decided to stop making any sense, because we thought that was funny. And out of it developed this whole weird artform that’s now gone beyond comedy.”

He tries not to think of the past, tries to forget it. In his heart he knows that it has actually happened, but to think of it makes this life altogether unbearable. Three weeks of life at school have made a gap between him and the Osokin who went to the magician. And now the same gap lies between him and his mother. Get it?

“You have to look at our work as a whole,” said Austin.

“In the middle of the record, anyway,” said Phil Proctor.

“We have to reach people rapidly,” said Ossman. “On one level, what’s funny is often what hits you first, and what’s serious or not funny let’s say, is what’s under the surface.”

I asserted that you could get funny and topical to the point where you take yourself too seriously and preach, like Lenny Bruce in some of his more pretentious moments. Phil Proctor was in drag, getting made up to play half of a couple who have seen the saucer people that pilot their crafts between the waves of Everything You Know Is Wrong. He looked vaguely like Stan Laurel in a black wig, big black and white polka dot bow, green and black Anna Mae Wong dress, black leotards and pink shoes, and he said: “We’ve gotten into the habit of including everything. We don’t restrict anything. We’ve learned how to become totally filled up and still give it some form, whereas most comedians and humorists seem always to be in the process of paring everything down to THE LAOGH. Seriously, we’ve tried to make our work like what’s known as real life ... leaving in the mistakes. We’ve made religion of mistakes.”

I can dig it. I’ve sort of done the same thing myselv. But I think the fatal ^nistake drops like a Damoclean dagger when you try to justify it in any kind of highflown, intellectualized terms. Austin: “Listening to our work as a whole, what endlessly surprises us is the way that the albums link up, how we seem to be endlessly talking about the same thing. For instance, we talk about holes a lot, whether it’s black holes in space or holes in pyramids. The first albums, for instance, dealt a lot with eating and shiting.”

“Yes,” elaborates Ossman, “the repetition of imagery, metaphor, ideas from one work to another of ours is like Dickens’ London. Whatever book he was writing, he could always talk about Fleet Street, or St. Paul’s ... we have learned to build into our work the samq real bases that we can touch, whether it’s exactly the way a corhmercial sounds, or just the way you feel when you’re changing a television channel. These are more familiar landmarks to people now than famous buildings.”

Gaw dayum, jest like McLuhan. But they have indeed changed our percep tion of the voices on the airwaves, which perhaps is their ultimate (only?) achievement. They are in fact masters of Voice. I asked them if sometimes, like Elkin’s Dick Gibson, they didn’t feel like nothing more than a collection of voices, which is certainly no slur because in my book the Firesign Theatre’s form is content. It’s like how I love to listens to Lenny Bruce for his pure sound, like John Coltrane or something. But they, like most artists, had to insist that not only were they most definitely about something, they were around and about a whole lot of things in myriad ways, shattering your skull with their prolificacy: records, movies, radio shows, magazine columns. Proctor summed up their culture-climbing egocentricity best when he bristled in response to my comment that Not Insane seemed like a strained parody of an Elizabethan drama: “That’s not a strained parody, that’s one of our funniest stage pieces, and it is a parody of theatre as it really began, because Firesign Theatre is changing theatre, which is what life is, really ... and that’s why we have fun with the concept of Firesign... no sooner does it flame up than it mysteriously and magically changes into something else ... All of our albums represent our present state of mind, as complex as it is, of four artists who come together to complete one piece of work, and the only limitation I’ve ever felt from the work of the Firesign is the limit of the vinyl disc itself, the vinyl solution as it were. But these are the problems of the phonographic mediutn, which is why we’re branching out constantly into other areas.”

The band wasn’t bad. Really dug their sound. Good beat, strange changes, wild solo work. Couldn’t understand a lot of the words, but it really doesn’t make any difference. I give them at least an 80.