Firesign Theatre is Weirdly Cool on PBS

Proctor says that aura of professionalism was there at Studio City, something that had kept them from doing anything on tape for a long time. "We were offered really low-budget deals from Comedy Channel and HBO and all that. And they’d say, ‘We’ll drive a truck up and we’ll shoot your show live and edit it together and that’ll be it.’" Proctor says they turned the networks down.

"It’ll be spontaneous," says Proctor. "It’ll have a lot of spirit of the radio show we do. It’ll be localized to the area we’re in and perhaps our new piece, The Bride of Firesign, as an aural piece in front of everybody’s ears. It’s a new experiment, but it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time."

Proctor says, "The inspiration for Weirdly Cool came from David Rubinsohn at WHYY in Philadelphia and his partner David Rice. "We have assigned the role of management to Austin and Bergman. They are the point men, or "Mouse" and "Mouse" as Proctor calls them. Rhino Records also got behind it. KCET was also extremely helpful in allowing us to use their rehearsal facilities."

Would the Firesign Theatre like to do something like this again? "We hope that if this draws good numbers and if it is a successful special for us that we have a couple of other ideas lined up for a follow up," Proctor says. "We certainly know that the people in Philadelphia would like to collaborate further with us. I think it basically depends on whether the PBS network is excited by the money that might come in as a result of this just like all television."

Where did the name, The Firesign Theatre, come from? "We’re all fire signs. I’m a Leo, two Sagittarians and an Aries and you’ll see us in our Zodiacal manifestations on the cover of Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers," says Proctor.

Some of the most memorable characters were spawned out of Nick Danger. Proctor recalls, "We originally wrote Nick Danger to be a half hour skit on the Radio Free Oz show when it was on KRLA Radio. That afternoon we came out to get ready to do the show to learn that we had been fired. That they had a new manager decided to change the format. And we were doing this record, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, and we said ‘why don’t we just put in on the other side.’ When we originally wrote it, Rocky Roccoco is a combination of Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet from The Maltese Falcon. What we did was dip into the folklore of all of the classic detective noir movies and novels and tried to create a detective of our own who was a surrealized version of all these stereotypes and icons combined. And that’s why Rocky’s a kind of bloated sloth.

"On our latest album, The Bride of Firesign, we brought Nick Danger back," says Proctor. "We brought these characters back and they’re a little more refined now. They’ve gotten a little older. Rocky’s running for mayor. He’s trying to pass himself off as a politician and he’s trying to use his criminal background as an asset to help him get elected. He can pull more strings than the law and order candidate, Bradshaw, whose always had tremendous ambitions."

The characters have taken on a life of their own says Proctor. "We’ve enjoyed playing with them and bringing them back into our body of work whenever we felt it was necessary, you know, it would help the product.

"Ralph Spoilsport, I created from Ralph Williams, a real guy selling cars all over the air back in the 60s. He was the stereotypical huckster. The whole pitch, the rhythm of his pitch, the rapid fire hypnotic quality of his sales technique, a lot of double-talk" are what made him appealing to Proctor. "He could sell anything."

Proctor also does a lot of voices for animated TV and movies. "I’m Howard of the Rugrats, father of Phil and Lil. I also do a character in Monster, Inc. I play the manager, I think my name is George, of a monster who becomes contaminated with an object from the real world. I’ve been all the Pixar products and most of the major Disney features starting with Beauty and the Beast. And Dave Ossman and I were both in A Bug’s Life. He played the right-hand ant to Phyllis Diller, the queen, and I played a grasshopper and other subliminal roles."

The creation process goes through several stages with The Firesign Theatre. Says Proctor, "When we’re recording the material, its fresh. We’ve struggled over the writing of it. We’ve spend an intense period of time writing, usually two weeks to a month. We invariably never finish the album. We usually get about half way or three quarters through and then we say, ‘Well, lets’ go into the studio.’ We know that once we stand it up on its feet, or its ear if you will, the characters will begin to speak for themselves and the plot will begin to reveal itself to us and we’ll know how its going to end. We’ll work it until we’re ready to do a take and then we’ll do the take and very often, that’s it. But the rewriting is extensive. If you could see the pages of our script, they’re extensively written on and sometimes we have to stop and retype the pages because we’ve done such an extensive rewrite based on the characters suddenly speaking to one another, another funny line popping into our head, or a new idea takes focus. Sometimes, we actually just read the pages as they’re written. Once we have done that, that transcript becomes the material that we do on stage."

Firesign Theatre has been far ahead of its time. "When we did Bozos, for instance," says Proctor, "we realized that we were predicting viruses and hacking. My character, Ah Clem, his last name is Hacker, Clem Hacker. We didn’t know that. If we had, we’d have coined the word. Planting this virus, we didn’t call it a virus, but by God that’s what we were doing!"

Phil Austin Notes:

Austin credits the same individuals for the new show. "An executive at WHYY named John Rice, called Rhino records about two and half years ago just feeling them out to see if The Firesign Theatre was actually around and about. I happened to pick up the letter by chance and went back to him and between the two of us we began to work out the idea for what originally was going to be a half-hour show that was going to be largely computer graphics. Over the next two and half years it became a partnership between Rhino and WHYY. John Rice left the station and was replaced by a guy named David Rubinsohn and David has carried it through with Rhino.

Outside influences certainly have an effect on the show, notes Austin, "PBS national gets involved gets involved at a certain point and they very strongly wanted us to really not do anything except a greatest hits show and one in which we’re seen in front of a live audience. So, with those restrictions, That’s what we came up with."

Austin echoes Proctor’s interest in further projects. "Yeah sure. We have two DVDs out right now, in fact, three if you count a DVD a from Rhino. We are like everybody else in the business looking to move in there as much as we possibly can."

Austin writes a great deal. "I have a book a short stories that’s available from our website, firesigntheatre.com, Go the the Lodestone area, and in there somewhere is Phil Austin’s Tales of the Old Detective. I’m currently writing a novel."

Who created Nick Danger? "The official answer is The Firesign Theater," says Austin. "We had to fill up one side of an album, our second album, fill up the other side. It was before we’d really hit on the idea of combining both sides into one story which seems logical now, but in those days when you turned a big old flat vinyl platter over. The first idea of us playing around with the record having two sides happens between Nick Danger and the piece on the other side, How Can You Be. You begin to see through that hole in the middle a little bit. We knew we wanted to do that. We knew we wanted to do a parody of the kind of detective fiction that was so much admired on the radio clear up into the early fifties, which is kind of noir, California, Chandler, Johnny Dollar kind of way of looking at things. Nick was invented with the four of us sitting around in a living room at a place in LA that used to be called The Farm just out of nowhere."

"We do a lot of writing that way, where the four of us are staring at each other and making a bunch of suggestions and when everybody thinks something is funny, we write it down. I was assigned to play the part. I generally played those kinds of parts on our radio shows. He instantly became a character who was an extremely bad actor, a stunningly bad actor," laughs Austin. "So much of what we revere in terms of radio acting and audio acting and audio theatre and so forth is, by most actors standards, overacting. Nick embodies overacting to a ‘T.’ If something is going to happen, you’re gonna know it," pronounces Austin in an authoritative voice.

This show is sort of a 35^th anniversary. According to Austin, here’s how it was to get the group together. "What The Firesign Theatre is based on, or where we all met, was on a radio show on an alternative radio station in LA, KPFK where Peter was the star and I was the producer of a show called Radio Free Oz. He and I worked together for a good three or four months in 1967, I think it was. At KPFK we really initiated what’s become standard, which is pledge breaks, or pledging on the air. I think the first one of those ever on radio happened with us at KPFK. We did a couple of them.

"On the second one, I was paired on the air with David Ossman, who had held my job at KPFK before me–we were both directors of drama and literature–we were on the air with each other for hours and hours begging for money to keep the station on the air and Peter Bergman came in to us as a guest. He was a young filmmaker from Germany and had a film he was trying to peddle around town. He and I got along well on the air. Immediately the station decided that this kind of talk we were doing late at night on these pledge breaks would make a good show. Then Radio Free Oz happened.

"Peter becomes quite well known and David starts coming back onto Radio Free Oz maybe three months after it starts. I’m starting to chip in comedy phone calls and stuff from the booth where I’m physically producing the show. Proctor wanders into town somewhere around there because he’s on the West Coast looking for acting jobs and recognizes Peter from an article about Peter in the Free Press and gets in touch. But literally within minutes we were somehow all on the air together and getting along well.

During a period of about 15 years prior to 1997, Austin says, "We were not tight, but did record a lot of stuff during that time. Working in various combinations, we made two videos, one for RCA Columbia and the other for Cinemax. We made another odd project also for RCA Columbia. We put out at least three or four records during that time all of which are very obscure and not very well known. When the four of us came back together in 93, it took us then another five years to get a record contract and make the first studio album that we’d really made together in I think 13 or 14 years."

Getting that record contract was a hard sell, according to Austin. "The hardest sell was selling me that it was that we were going to be able to get along with each other and survive. We had a wonderful kind of national reunion tour in 93 and 94. We did another series of shows the next year and then promptly began to fall into our old horrifying habits of argument and upset. At a certain point, Peter and I made a huge decision that we were going to bury a number hatchets. The fights between me and Peter were always the worst for The Firesign Theatre. Peter and I have completely changed ourselves around to the point that we are partners now. Essentially we kind of manage The Firesign Theatre. Since all real managers find us unmanageable," he says, laughing.

Austin says The Firesign Theatre is valuable and needed caretakers. "We’re all hitting the age where it slowly began going through all of our brains that we better start taking care of The Firesign Theatre, that it wasn’t going to change, it wasn’t going away. There was this big fan base out there and a lot of history that we couldn’t let go. And we’re sitting here getting along with each other better than we ever have in 35 years and having more fun with each other than we have in 35 years. It’s really weird for a bunch of guys in their 60s. To me, that’s the big story."

Austin mentioned that in creativity, there are always differing opinions as to how a scene plays out. "It’s a small business. It’s as if we were four Italian brothers who have been left a restaurant by our dead father and everybody has different ideas. Plus we have these four, if I may include myself, big brains and these four huge egos. None of us playing by any rules other than that Firesign Theatre is an absurd democracy."

Austin also says that they have learned valuable lessons over 35 years. "We’re all very verbal and we all know each other very well. We had to learn that Firesign Theatre wasn’t some accident."

"We’re just trying to find the people who do get it, and God bless the people that don’t. We bear them no ill will," he says.