The Firesign Theatre
The Bride of Firesign
Rhino
The Firesign Theatre have a special place in my heart, and it feels sort of nice that I finally get to write a bit about them. My first brush with this off-the wall radioplay group happened roughly twenty-five years ago. I was in seventh grade and home sick. Back then, WHFS (Bethesda, MD/Washington, DC metro area) played cool stuff, see, and at around 10 AM that morning, I was listening to a darn weird story about some guy living in a time when midnight snacks were illegal or you had to bribe an official if you wanted a groat cake delivered to your home, or, in this case, assigned compartment. I was hooked, or at least pretty curious, and thus embarked on a quest to find out more. My quest ended when I found their Don’t Touch That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers album. Giving the entire record a listen introduced me to The Firesign Theatre’s standard of album-length vignettes telling stories of a parallel universe where, in my mind, everyone’s boss wears clown make-up and public transportation providers are usually mad scientists with dreams of going to cooking school. It’s more than obvious that The Firesign Theatre is the product of hard drug use, probably LSD and marijuana. The Bride of Firesign is no exception. It’s almost an album-length Nick Danger (Firesign Theatre anti-hero) vehicle, liberally laced with mildly perverted incoherent tangentialisms. In normal language, there’s songs, odd commentary, and other sketches totally unrelated to Nick Danger or Porgy Tirebiter. A must for fans of Theatre of the Absurd.
Rhino Records, 10635 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025-4900; http://www.rhinorecords.com
