I am a man of many enthusiasms, and one of the things that I am, for certain, the MOST enthusiastic about is Firesign Theatre, the legendary psychedelic “Beatles of Comedy.” I’ve been a lifelong Firesign Theatre freak, having discovered them at a very young age. Oh yeah, I was totally obsessed with Firesign Theatre. Often called America’s Monty Python, they’re better described as America’s acid-drenched answer to The Goon Show. I’d listen to their albums with headphones on, in the dark, practically memorizing them. Studies have shown that young minds exposed to surrealism develop better critical thinking skills and I can honestly say that my own mind was rewired, permanently, by my extreme Firesign Theatre fandom. My love for them is a part of my very identity.
Having said all this—and I have complained about this before—Firesign Theatre is an extremely difficult thing to try to get other people interested in. The reaction tends to be rather muted in most cases. Fifty-year-old comedy albums and radio shows? The assumption is that it must be something like Fibber McGee and Molly or The Great Gildersleeve. Or that it must be dated.
It’s neither.
The Firesign Theatre created extremely complex “theater of the mind” comedy albums that were—unavoidably for obvious reasons—in the form of radio plays. Their comedy is multi-leveled, chock full of puns and time travel. It’s not dated as it exists in a self-contained, self-referential Firesign universe of their devising. In the same way someone can study James Joyce for a lifetime and never tire of it, Firesign Theatre holds a similar place in my life and in the lives of many others. When you meet a fellow Firehead, you become instant friends. And then you’ll both start slipping Firesign references into your conversations. (For a really amazing look at the now almost forgotten cultural importance of Firesign Theatre during the 60s and 70s, from Ivy League dorm rooms to the foxholes of Vietnam, listen to this NPR show. Trust me, it’s fantastic.)
All of this is a preamble to informing you, dear friend, that there is a major new product available at the Firesign Theater website. Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom is a book/DVD rom put together by their archivist and historian, my esteemed pal Taylor Jessen, who deserves a fucking Grammy award for this production, and for all the detective work that he’s undertaken to locate so many long thought lost tapes of the group’s work.
For Firesign fans, THIS IS AN EVENT. Live at the Magic Mushroom collects the fully-scripted plays that the group performed at a Venture Blvd. coffee house which were also broadcast on Peter Bergman’s Radio Free Oz show. These mythical performances have nary been heard in more than 50 years (a few turned up on torrent trackers) and they are a sheer delight. The weekly shows were all written, performed and taped while the group was working on their second release, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. You might assume that they were wood shopping material for that album, but this is not the case and there is almost no overlap at all, although they did debut the changing TV channels device used throughout their Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers album during the Magic Mushroom run.
To a Firesign Theatre fanboy like m’self, these plays are absolutely the Holy Grail of Firesignania. They occupy a space just below the classic studio albums and a little bit above the Dear Friends/Let’s Eat radio series. Firesign on radio was always planned out to a certain extent, but most of it was improvised with the Four or Five Crazy Guys sitting at their mikes looking at each other across a table. The Magic Mushroom plays were tightly scripted and so are more of a piece with their record releases. In other words there are hours of some of their very finest material in the offering of Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom. The collection comes inside of a full color 48-page paperback book. Includes all eleven of the surviving Magic Mushroom plays, plus original promos and the 10/29/1967 episode of Radio Free Oz (“The Bridey Murphy Come As You Were Halloween Party.”)
I asked fab Taylor Jessen some questions via email.
What are the Magic Mushroom plays?
The Magic Mushroom plays were a dozen or so half-hour radio plays that the Firesign Theatre performed between October 1967 and January 1968 live in front of a club audience at the Magic Mushroom Club on Ventura Blvd., Studio City, simulcast on Peter Bergman’s radio show Radio Free Oz on KRLA-AM, Los Angeles. The subject matter of the plays ranged from Arthurian adventures to sword-and-sandal epics to Mexican jungle adventures to an ERPI Classroom Films movie of the 1950s to a pirate musical to a Sherlock Holmes parody to a proto-Dwarf channel-surfing epic.
Were the Magic Mushroom plays, in fact, “lost”?
With the exception of “Exorcism in Your Daily Life” and “The Séance”, not only were they all lost, they still are. No masters exist for any shows but those two. There was a collection of open reel tapes documenting the complete Radio Free Oz from the beginning of the Magic Mushroom Play era in October 1967 to the end of January 1968, and every one of the reels with the plays on them was ripped off by persons unknown. We do not expect to recover them. For the most part this box set was built out of audio sources that came from home recordings of the plays made by fans, some of whose names we know, some of whom remain anonymous. Meanwhile the play “The Last Tunnel to Fresno” is truly unknown in any complete audio form - a few minutes of it survived on tape and the audio quality is so horrifically bad we didn’t include it on the box set, even as a supplemental extra.
How long did it take to find them all?
Leaving aside “The Séance”, it took me just a couple of hours to find them all around 2001 when the first bootlegs hit the Internet and I downloaded them all (as many of us did; anyone who goes looking for torrents of Firesign rarities can still find many of the same sources I did). The difference between those bootlegs and what you’ll hear on the box set is the hundred or so hours I spent cleaning up the audio.
You always have crazy stories about the lengths you’ve had to go to locate a certain Firesign tape—like trawling through a shed that had fallen victim to a mudslide—did anything like that happen when you were trying to track the Magic Mushroom tapes down?
Sadly there was no climactic discovery that lead to the creation of this reissue; exactly the opposite was the case. I simply gave up on the idea that we’d ever find better copies of the material, and concentrated on trying to make it all sound acceptable.
Above, Firesign Theatre at the Magic Mushroom, 1967.
Purchase Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom here.
