He’s hungry and looking around for something to eat, but comes up short. The scene pulls back and it’s a guy watching TV. Dwarf begins with a sermon about food from a demented televangelist broadcasting from a biplane, which crashes. In this, I am not alone, as there are probably several thousand other people (99% of them upper age bracket baby boomers) who can also recite Firesign Theatre albums as if they were Shakespeare. In fact, 45 years later, due to the innate musicality of the work, I still have large chunks of it committed to memory. I listened to Dwarf-and the other Firesign Theatre records-as much as I listened to any musical album. I would listen to it over and over again, often with headphones, trying to wrap my 10-year-old mind around it. I instantly became obsessed with that album. Within a matter of days, I convinced my mother to buy me one titled, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers. I recognized this name since there were several Firesign Theatre albums selling for $1 each in the comedy cut out section of the local National Record Mart. It made my young brain cells stand up to attention the same way hearing “Space Oddity” had the first time I’d heard that.Īt the end of the show a zany announcer would tell you who you’d been listening to in a rapidly delivered cascade of names: “On tonight’s Comedy Hour, you heard Lenny Bruce, Albert Brooks, Nichols & May, Franklyn Ajaye, Beyond the Fringe, Moms Mabley, Robert Klein, George Carlin, the Conception Corporation, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor, Phyllis Diller…” etc., etc., and then he listed Firesign Theatre. If the contestant’s self-diagnosis is incorrect- sorry-they are sent home to die. The first time I listened to that show, they played an excerpt from the first Firesign Theatre record, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, a section known as “ Beat the Reaper.” This sketch involved a mock game show where contestants are injected with a fatal disease and have to guess what it is from the symptoms to win the life-saving antidote. It came on Sunday nights at 11pm, right after The King Biscuit Flower Hour, at least on the radio station that I heard it on, Pittsburgh’s WDRE 105.5 FM. I discovered the Firesign Theatre when I was a ten-year-old in 1976, via a long forgotten nationally syndicated radio program called The Comedy Hour which was 60 minutes of short bits from comedy records that were interspersed with bursts of radio static, as if the station was being changed between each selection. So if you are someone who has ever benefited from being introduced to something here that you developed an unhealthy obsession for, pay attention to this, won’t you? This is one of the best things, ever. I’ve even had several small record label owners contact me and tell me that they’d put out this or that reissue of an obscure album that we had covered. In many ways a DM blog post is like a conversation you might have in a record store. I’m certain that we’ve introduced our readers to new things that they, in turn, have become evangelists for over the decade plus since DM launched, because you tell us so in the comments. We’re digital prospectors, panning for gold, not crap. “Hey, smell this, it smells like shit.” There’s no point in that. We almost never write about things we hate. “Here is this great thing, you should check it out” is more or less the editorial policy. We write about stuff we enjoy, in the hopes that our fervor will be contagious. I see Dangerous Minds more as a repository of enthusiasm. “Discovering the Firesign Theatre is worse than trying to get into Frank Zappa for the first time.”Īnyone who has read this blog for any period of time knows that this is obviously not a place to read, you know, rock journalism.
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