Editor's Note: Frederick C. Wiebel, Jr. edits Firezine. "He has released many great Firesign Theatre-sanctioned bootlegs for sale at his site," says Richard Metzger. "He has some really good ones, especially the Let's Eat 5CD box set (it's a mini-repro of the original 10 LP set syndicated to radio stations in 1974). It's excellent, you can't believe how quick these guys are, it's like the Marx Brothers doing improv."

The name The Firesign Theatre evokes many mental images. A nostalgic warmth for the good old days that never were. Of thousands of Americans gathering around their citizen radios listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's weekly fireside chats. Zodiacal puns for the pot smoking patrons of the psychedelic sixties and seventies, trying to escape from a club swinging world gone mad with war and political upheaval. Guerrilla Theatre in the streets, humorously deprogramming a populous from the narcotic of pop culture. Fighting clowns against the powers that be. Of Shakespearean comedy in a time of Orwellian tragedy. A Theater of the Mind, built with the bricks of politics and poetry on the solid foundation of the golden age of radio. The images pile on and on, and on, with double, triple, quadruple entendres and non-sequiturs, layering a baklava of subconscious surreal and blatantly silly humor acting as a political poultice for the wounds of a sick society. The Firesign Theatre is all of things and none of these things.

The Firesign Theatre really is a group of Media Magi on the cutting-edge of technology and satire. Four or five crazy guys with their fingers poised to push the buttons: Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Phil Proctor, with the fifth being the collective entity conjured by communal thinking. The Firesign Theatre is a comedy troupe, but not a band in the sense of musicians that practice what they preach everyday. These highly creative individuals put their personal lucrative commercial careers on hold, to occasionally come together to give testimony to the masses, in the form of concerts and recordings. Not willing to rest upon their laurels of almost thirty-five years of collective reasoning purveyed on over thirty albums of recorded comedy, generating millions in sales, sold-out nationwide concert tours, dozens of syndicated radio shows and TV appearances cast into the ether, gaggles of videos, motion picture scripts, books, plays, poetry, magazines, newsletters, newspaper columns, comic strips, photo ops, voice overs, commercials, and you name it: they have now opened the windows of the Microsoft world of computers, CD-ROM and DVDs to breathe fresh air, and revive the undying Theatre of the Absurd.

The Firesign Theatre had its humble beginnings in the fledgling LA Pacifica radio network affiliate station KPFK during the 17 November 1966 broadcast of Peter "The Wiz" Bergman's five-nights-a-week underground hit radio show Radio Free Oz. Under the pretense of "The Oz Film Festival", the four improvised a series of imaginary movies projected and narrated by pseudo filmmakers. There was an instant unique chemistry formulated that continues to attract and combine their diverse elements to this day. The Firesign Theatre began a series of roundtable discussion writing sessions to script out the hours of open-air play, filling any vacuum or space that was offered to them. They were their own best audience with the ultimate result and the highest compliment, being to make each other laugh. From the very beginning, Firesign employed the truest sense of democracy: only material that they all agreed to incorporate became part of their compositions. The one-man veto and the filtration system of four high intellects stimulated a group built on trust and a handshake of legal anarchy.

They threw the flotsam and jetsam of their own daily lives into the stream of consciousness, free association humor of their audio mind movies, churning out surrealised versions of classic radio. They developed a continuing theme of power, paranoia and populism, running the entire political gauntlet of American culture.

Their rise in popularity and cohesive writing skills caused Columbia Records to sniff them out with an off handed, uncensored recording contract to book unlimited studio time, with the only stipulation that they make a profit. The initial album, Waiting For The Electrician, Or Someone Like Him (1968), was expanded from their first formally written performance piece and largely patterned after Stan Freberg's History of America Part 1 LP. It heralded the anti-culture's response to the institution and disintegration of the counter culture and straight America's manifest destiny of destruction of the land and the indigenous people. A series of short sketches satisfied Columbia's concept of a comedy album, leaving the entire second side free for the title cut's Bulgarian satire of European avant-garde plays. The 'Electrician' was power, power to drive the turntables of political activism, and power to fix the broken dreams of the burnt out circuits of idealistic youth. The theme - power and electricity, power and politics, a rondo, ever continuing with the automatic tone arms returning to the beginning of the record until the plug is finally pulled.

But this was not the first recording released by the group. Electrician's basics were recorded in the spring of '67, but the final mixes weren't done until the fall, when Bergman returned from a sojourn to Turkey. In the meantime the rest of Firesign were used by producer Gary Usher to provide voices for Chad and Jeremy's Of Cabbages and Kings second side psychedelic pre-Sgt. Pepper's extravaganza, "The Progress Suite", and to provide gunshots and battlefield sounds for The Notorious Byrd Brothers LP cut of "Draft Morning", put out by The Byrds.

After a rocky start, several break ups, flat record sales, threats from the Columbia top brass to drop them, and being fired from their long running radio show, the reformed Firesign Theatre apprehensively approached the new year of 1969 by recording their second album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All?. The side 1 title was another performance piece from the previous summer. How Can You Be . . . is a nightmare odyssey on the highway of life guided by a psychedelic Homer in the mantra of a used car salesman. It was run on writing transferred to the recorded form, using readings of James Joyce's Ulysses interspersed with dope deals, acting as the gods or fates tempting our traveler away from the rightful return route to home and family.