The history of The Firesign Theatre now stretches back over twenty years. Of all the record albums, books, films, television and radio shows produced by FST during these years, a seminal work is this recording from the year 1970 called "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers." Before this recording, we had made two albums. The first, "Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him," along with the presentation of three short pieces showed the public the first of our long-form audio works. In it, a Kafkaesque character simply named "P," is subjected to a nightmarish journey of innuendo and misunderstanding through a vaguely European-American landscape of ill-defined mental and physical borders.
The second album, "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All," contained two long pieces: "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" whose leading character operated with great courage in a dreamlike state of mystical hardboiledness and "How Can You Be..." whose hero, Babe, is the enduring optimistic clown.
"Dwarf," then, is the third record album and fourth long work of our early history and is distinguished from the previous works in one important regard; it is longer by far because for the first time it continues a story over both sides of an album. To future generations, large vinyl record albums which had to be manually turned over in order to access both sides will be a charming footnote to entertainment history, but for us at the time the awkward physicist characteristics of the medium pushed us to find ways to take into account an enforced intermission by the listener. That it took us three albums to do it fully is some indication of how unusual the technique was for comic spoken word recordings of the time.
"Dwarf" is the story of the five ages of Man and in particular, the five ages of one George Leroy Tirebiter; a man named after a dog. (The dog, the immortal George Tirebiter, was the doughty unofficial mascot of USC athletic teams in earlier times, renowned for his devotion to attacking the spinning wheels of large American automobiles.)
"Dwarf" was originally called "We'll be Heironymus Bosch in Jest a Minute, but Faust..." which in one sense demonstrates our view that viewing of commercial television is constantly punctuated by interruptions of one sort or another and that as much or more truth is contained in the interruptions as in the so-called program content. In another, "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers" is simply a phrasing analog for "Well be Heironymus Bosch in Jest a Minute, but Faust..." but the two approaches melded as we attempted a scheme whereby the devilish world portrayed in the paintings of Bosch was to find its analog in the electronic barrage of television reception and Faust, a man who sells out his own soul to the Devil for knowledge, was to be mirrored in the cowardly George Tirebiter, an all-too-modern figure who sells his soul to the TV in order to buy a coherent view of his own crumbling psyche. The change of title midway through the recording process shows our deepening appreciation for the little world we had created; a multi-faceted gemlike Hell of transmitted electronic junk controlled by an all too human "Switcher" able to transform simultaneous transmissions into one sequential program as if he was creating his own life out of the levels of his own internal hell. The "Dwarf" of the title becomes the little television screen itself and the overall message exhorts the user not to smash the little Devil, but to fix it.
The five ages of George Leroy Tirebiter are these:
It is, finally, the selling out that is his key to this confusing world. Selling out is a theme that comes to predominate in the story. Adults sell out the kids at both Communist Martyrs Hi and Morse Science Hi, General Klein sells out Lt. Tirebiter and the movie studio itself, George accuses himself of selling out and through it all is the barrage of commercial advertisements whose simplest message is sell, sell, sell. When Tirebiter discovers that he got into this mess by selling out and that he can get out by selling out again he does not find himself returned to his orignial self, but is left in the guise of the old man, pursued by the past, forever striving to become a little child again; an infantile figure forever chasing a receding ice cream wagon.
George Tirebiter is Man forever young and forever old. He cannot hold the middle ground and its peculiar dilemma of salesmanship. In a free market, you're not rewarded unless you advertise that you deserve a reward, but to advertise for your reward is to become immediately unworthy of that reward in a society which deems advertising to be morally reprehensible. The fact that George is unable to solve this conundrum does not mean that solution is impossible, just that Tirebiter's is the story of all those for whom it is impossible and who therefore cannot find a comfortable niche in their own society.
The fable begins with a religious service based on those most basic needs, the need to eat and the need to expel waste material, A disgruntled young man, George Tirebiter Camden N200-R (Camden N200-R is a last name in this world of sectors and restriction), so hungry and so immobile at four in the morning that he must depend for sustinence on the television religion of Pastor Rod Flash and the offer of an electronic Sacrament, a steaming heap of commercially available chicken fingers, sheep dip pies and tubs of slaw to any devotee who will reach into the televison set and partake of this glowing host. Tirebiter partakes and is plunged into his personal hour of reckoning.
He will see himself portrayed as Peorgie, the insipid young hero of a potboiler called "High School Madness" about Communism and its assault on student life, as a vaguely political candidate who cannot confront either side in the mysterious battle between political forces, as a seasoned combat soldier who not only cannot give the order to kill but cannot even say the word, as the actor who plays all these parts and who can finally only walk out of his own business because of his inability to make up his mind about matters of conscience, and as the old director, pursued by the ghosts of his past, a past dominated by what he sees as his fatal mistake, that he somehow "Sold Out" the original comic genius when presumably gave him his start.
Throughout "Dwarf," distinctions are blurred in the same way that dreams blur consciousness itself. Tense and metaphor, time and memory are all smudged around the edges and randomly interleaved. It is the hour of the Wolf and no Man should be up all night watching himself on television.
In preparing these notes for this Compact Disc presentation, I noticed only one possible misunderstanding for the listener. It should be pointed out that Barbara Bobo (later in her illustrious career changed her name to Barbara Babeaux) is the actress who plays the part of "Bottles" in "High School Madness." She is therefore the same woman that George feels is "trying to kill" him. Presumably, there was some awful scandal involving the two, unless George, in his dotage, has come to believe that he really was Peorgie and that therefore Bottles continues to hunt him down just as she betrayed him to the authorities (Dad) in "High School Madness."
Phil Austin
Hollywood, California
1987