Thank you for your interest in The Firesign Theatre! Should you need additional information, please feel free to contact cecilia[AT]brightredrocket[DOT]com and we’ll be happy to take care of you.
For a downloadable copy of the press release (as an MS Word document), Click Here.
You can download stills and images for web or print at Firesign’s website. A high resolution TIFF of the DVD cover is here.
About Firesign Theatre:
November 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of The Firesign Theatre, whose founding members Philip Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor came together on KPFK-FM in 1966 on Bergman’s program Radio Free Oz. During their time together they released over 35 albums, including “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers,” called “the greatest comedy album ever made” by Rolling Stone, described by the New York Times as “a multifaceted work of almost Joycean complexity,” and placed in the Library of Congress’ Archive of historic recordings.
Dubbed “The Beatles of Comedy” by The Library of Congress, the four-man Firesign Theatre collaboration wrote and performed together for over forty years. Their early studio work for Columbia Records (1968-1975) remains their best known and most influential. Innumerable phrases from their albums have entered the English lexicon: What’s all this brouhaha? More Sugar! What you don’t mean won’t hurt you! Not Insane! Forward Into the Past! Shoes for Industry! Your brain may no longer be the boss!
The iconic comic voices of the counter-culture generation, Firesign chronicled pop, politics, media, and technology in a tense one listener called “the Future Inevitable.” The Firesign Theatre has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey and Bob Dylan in their original use of language and to the surrealists in their psychedelic story-telling methods, including the time-and-space altering concept of “channel-switching.” The original records, intricately produced in multi-track recording, were designed for multiple listenings and meanings – an audio theatre of the absurd.
The Firesign Theatre’s Peter Bergman passed away in 2012. Philip Austin died in 2015. Remaining Firesigns Phil Proctor and David Ossman have worked since then to preserve the long heritage of their collaboration. Their classic scripts were gathered in the book Marching to Shibboleth in 2013. All their major albums are still in print, some eighty hours of their early radio broadcasts have been released in the book/DVD set Duke of Madness Motors, and two matching volumes preserve their early radio plays (Exorcism In Your Daily Life) and stage plays (Profiles in Barbeque Sauce). A fourth book, Anythynge You Want To, captures three decades of variations of their epic Shakespeare send-up, plus an extensively annotated “scholarly” historical account of the adventures of Ye Olde Firesygne Theatre from 1600 to 2000.