Firesign Theatre made lowbrow, high-concept media critique

Somewhere between the virtuosic parodies of Frank Zappa and the screwball wit of Monty Python, the Firesign Theatre reinvented the comedy album in the 1960s and '70s. With a pioneering use of multitrack audio and avant-garde collage, the group's nine deliriously dense LPs released by Columbia Records were a countercultural salvo against the burgeoning information age.

In his new book, "Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums," published this month by University of California Press, Jeremy Braddock, associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences, explores the group's evolution and its legacy.

The Chronicle spoke with Braddock about the book.

Question: When and how did you first encounter the Firesign Theatre? What was your initial impression of them?

Answer: My parents had a stereo, and as a kid I spent a lot of time sitting between the speakers and listening to their record collection. My parents weren't from the '60s generation, but my favorite uncle was, and he started giving me and my brother Firesign Theatre records when we were in our early teens. I'm sure the albums sounded both amazing and confusing to us, and that there were enough lowbrow jokes on them to make us want to listen again.

Q: For the uninitiated, how would you describe Firesign and the group's comedic sensibility?

A: The first thing I would say is that it is "collective" - it is obviously produced by a group that improvised, and then refined those improvisations through writing. The Firesign Theatre also understood that the point of making albums, which was their primary medium, was to make you want to listen to them again and again, so they made sure to include sounds and ideas that you wouldn't hear or understand until the fifth or 20th time you listened. The jokes themselves range from puerile low-hanging fruit to very high-concept comedy that unfolds sometimes over the course of more than one album. They have always cited comedians from the 1950s as influences: Lord Buckley, Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs, Madmagazine and comic writers like Peter Benchley as well as Dada and Surrealist artists.

Q: What made Firesign so unique, and why are they critically/culturally significant more than 40 years later?

A: Like the great literature that could broadly be called comic, their work is about much more than being funny. The most interesting critics of the day (the great music critics who were extremely well-read, and often former English majors) were in fact more inclined to view Firesign albums as frightening than funny. So the short answer to their uniqueness is that they used all the techniques of multitrack recording to create incredibly dense and involved comic narratives that critically investigated the past, present and future of media technologies. But the longer answer has to do with the way they were compelled to write about all the social implications of a rapidly transforming media environment, and that's one reason their work is more relevant than ever.

Q: What is the field of "media archaeology" and how does Firesign fit into it?

A: There's several kinds of work that call themselves media archaeology, but all of them are interested in understanding how the past is embedded in (often obsolete) technical devices, how subjectivity evolves in relation to media, and how - by composing technical genealogies and countergenealogies - things could have developed otherwise.

It has been called "both a method and an aesthetics of practicing media criticism;" the scholar Thomas Elsaesser has described it as guided by "a strong consensus that one should be 'doing media archaeology' rather than using it as a conceptual tool." The Firesign Theatre was working in a Los Angeles in which the first wave of the culture industry (classical Hollywood and the golden age radio) was becoming historical and a host of new media technologies and industries were rapidly emerging. Their records employ and interrogate old technologies as well as ones then being invented - old radio equipment on the one hand and cutting-edge multitrack recording and even early artificial intelligence on the other. There are utopian and pessimistic strains of media archaeology, and those are both audible on their albums, too.

Q: What do you see as Firesign's legacy? Is there a contemporary analogue for their avant-garde/countercultural/technological mashup aesthetic?

A: I think it's fair to say that they had no direct inheritors, though they had many influential fans who obviously took inspiration from them, from the poet John Ashbery to the Simpsons' Matt Groening to the people who founded the Church of the Subgenius. The group that probably has the strongest affinity with Firesign is Negativland, though their work is less theatrical. In terms of collective verbal virtuosity, cultural reference and technological exploration, the other close analogue is the golden age hip hop of the late 1980s and early '90s - and Firesign albums were extensively sampled by DJs from Premier, Mark the 45 King and Steinski to J. Dilla, Alchemist, Presage and (especially) Madlib. I have an appendix that lists all of these samples (though I know there is still one I haven't tracked down).

Q: What most surprised you during your research for the book?

A: I was astonished by how thoroughly Firesign had penetrated the culture by the early 1970s, and by how many different kinds of committed listeners they had, from poets like Ashbery and John Koethe to underground culture workers like Negativland and Madlib to people who worked in the State Department. Given the similarities in their work, I feel sure that Thomas Pynchonwas also a fan. Tracking down the traces of these disparate listeners' fandom was one of the funnest (but also most challenging) parts of this project.

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