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The Firesign Theatre's Big Book of Plays

We need a term for all those expressions we utter so commonly these days: little soundbites, references drawn from films or commercial ads, that sum up so many situations, so perfectly, that they get used over and over again and enter common parlance. "Where's the Beef?" is an example. These references obviously don't just serve to succinctly express a sentiment; they reinforce our sense of belonging to the community of people who get the reference. I am a member of one such community, for whom the works of FT remains a mother load of these kinds of expressions; I literally use them daily. When I utter one of these expressions half-consciously at a party, and someone I don't know recognizes and riffs the next line out, there is a bond revealed, as strong as those between veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. Still, this is not even the central genius of FT.

Neither is it to be found in their unequalled mastery of the subtlest details of the aural landscape of the late 20th century, as filtered through it's various media: the distinct equalizations, dynamics compression and fidelities of various radio and TV talkshows, news programs and ads, the educational 16 mm film with its invariably bad framing loops. FT's ear for such textures, and their perfect mastery at reproducing them, is simply instrumental: this is a vehicle, as is their vaudville humour, for something much more important.

The legacy of this troupe will be how perfectly they realized the attitude of my generation toward its own culture: that we found (and still find) its reality and portend so surreal, so alien, and so odious, that the only way to adequately represent it was with social criticism in the form of psychodelic satire. FT brought precognition to that effort as well, although prophesy is not much appreciated by subsequent generations, because the world that was prophesied is now their context, their backdrop, and they find it unremarkable that their reality was once presented as just one disturbing, even improbable, possible future.

Given that during the late sixties, pop music defined (not expressed, defined!) the historical moment, the Record Album was the only possible medium for this literature. And yes, for many of us, FT played a significant role in that moment-definition.

These days, music rarely even truly expresses the historical moment, much less defines it. So if you manage to find and read a copy of FT's Big Book of Plays, and you've never heard the performance of these pieces, you may very well not get it. Instead, buy "Dwarf" or "Bozos", put on a good set of headphones, drop a hit of something clean, and enter their world. Later, when you're "grounded, safe and sound...trailing clouds of glory..." you can get out that Big Book and marvel at all the scripting that subliminally zipped left by you. By then, hopefully, you'll be changed forever.

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