Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking Podcast

Hi everyone. I hope you all enjoy this conversation with Phil Vellender, one of the five minds behind the London fanzine Trailing Clouds of Glory . I shared their fantastic 1974 multipart Firesign Theatre piece last week (linked here in case you missed it). A transcript of our conversation follows below. One other piece of Firesign news this week: a four-hour compilation of Nick Danger pieces is n...

The final entry in this series on the Firesign Theatre’s radio sources has to be FDR’s December 1941 Pearl Harbor address — Firesign’s inspiration for the famous travesty that interrupts “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” (at 25:20) and concludes the hour-long How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All: We have reached our rendezvous with destiny! It is our unanimous...

Last week I said I thought that The Adventures of Philip Marlowe was probably the primary model for Firesign’s Nick Danger. I still think that’s right, but you wouldn’t get far into side two of How Can You Be without recognizing another important source: The Maltese Falcon . Phil Proctor’s Rocky Rococo is clearly modeled on Peter Lorre’s performance as Joel Cairo in the famous 1941 Warner Bros. fi...

Yesterday I posted the first of the Gerald Mohr episodes of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe . That’s the one that begins with the detective “getting tired of reading Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator backwards on the ground glass of my office door.” Firesign’s Nick Danger would take that line to its logical conclusion. Today I’m posting one more Philip Marlowe episode, one that contains many m...

Today we’re finally flipping over to the second side of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All . Though the first side of How Can You Be is as far out as anything Firesign ever did, the flip side was much more conventional, a parody of old radio detectives called “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger (Third Eye).” Foregoing (for the time being) the A-side’s multitrac...

We’re about halfway through this series of radio sources for the Firesign Theatre’s 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. Today’s entry would not have directly informed How Can You Be in Two Places at Once — Firesign had just finished recording the “War of the Worlds” side of the album by the time of the broadcast — but I can’t resist including it in this...

The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast — directed by and starring the inevitable Orson Welles — is the most legendary radio drama event of them all, so it should not be surprising to find it a point of reference for the Firesign Theatre. David Ossman (who named one of his sons Orson!) has often compared Firesign’s first on-air improvisation to the “War of the Worlds” b...

The second in this series of the radio sources for Firesign’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once is “On a Note of Triumph,” Norman Corwin’s dramatic celebration of the Allies’ World War II victory over Nazi Germany, which broadcast on CBS live from Columbia Square in Los Angeles on VE Day, May 8 1945. (Like this post if you’d like to see CBS recommit to pro-democracy practices!) Firesign knew th...

On September 10, I’ll be giving a talk from my Firesign book at the Cornell University Library (you can watch it remotely: pre-register here ). Since I’m being hosted by the Library, I decided to present the part of the book that’s most about information (or, more explicitly, propaganda). That comes in the chapter on the Firesign Theatre’s 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’r...

More Firesign promotional doings. Hi everyone. I’ve got a few pieces in the pipe — on Allen Ginsberg’s 1965, on the phenomenon of the comedy rock single (with maximum Cheech and Chong), an opening salvo on the Pynchon-Firesign Theatre connection. But for now I’m posting a few recent interviews that I’ve done for Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything . * Last week I was on KBOO-FM in...

Here’s something I wish I had more of: walking through the Firesign Theatre’s voluminous, amazing archive with David Ossman. In the short clip above, he’s reading and commenting on a few pages written for Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers but later excised from the final script (folks who know the album will recognize where this sequence would have gone). As David walks through these few p...

Firesign officially hits the streets this Tuesday, October 29. Many, many thanks to all who have pre-ordered. I look forward to hearing what you think. Sharing something a little different today: an excerpt from the Firesign Theatre’s Dear Friends radio show, which broadcast on KPFK from September 1970 to February 1971, between the release of Don’t Crush That Dwarf and the recording of I Think We’...

In late 2017, when I was first figuring out how to write about the Firesign Theatre , Andrew Leland offered me a space (and a producer, Myke Dodge Weiskopf) on his excellent podcast, sponsored by KCRW and McSweeney’s, The Organist . Early on — before I decided that media archaeology would be the book’s through line — I was thinking a lot about the way people listened to Firesign Theatre albums: al...