Written and recorded over an exciting year stretching between 1968 and 1969, this extended entertainment is one of the most complex of the Firesign Theatre's many works. it is a double-edged paean to dualities, as the title more than suggests.

It is made up of two (of course) stories. The first is a stream-of-consciousness tale called "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All?" The other is what might be called a stream-of-self-consciousness detective story entitled "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger." These two stories intertwine with each other in many interesting ways, not the least of which was the fact that the original home to these recordings was that antique form known as the twelve-inch vinyl record album. As you listen on your CD and you hear Nick Danger check "the other side" for his own presence, you will think that he means the "other side," perhaps, meaning the World Beyond. Or perhaps, the other side of the globe from which the Chinese have not fallen. In fact, "sides" were sides of a two-sided disc when we recorded HCYB. (I will continue to use this most common abbreviation of the title.)

Either story might do for a start; each is a mirror image of the other in at least one important regard: each traces a story whose two basic components are War and Peace. The Hero Babe, however, is just that, a baby. He is the Youthful Fool and he emerges out of the muck and mire of the Media Wars to begin the story the way we meant it to be heard. But Babe, for all that we meet him in a welter of warring voices, is at Peace and he will be drawn inexorably into War. In the second story, Nick Danger will follow the opposite course, finally grounding himself upon the peaceful rocks of surrender.

So, let's start with Babe. In many important respects, not all of them foreseen at the time, Babe's story is very much an excercise in literary stream-of-consciousness techniques. Not only James Joyce, but Jack Kerouac had been the heroes of our generation and we felt no qualms at applying run-on writing to the recorded form. We were also quite aware that this was the first of our record albums that might be looked upon as Art, not just comedic sketches.

Our plan - as much as there was such a thing - was to make stream-of-consciousness decisions to bridge seemingly disparate sections of the story, In essence, we would justify anything that happened and when it was over we'd stand back and see what we had. As we worked on both stories over that year, Dualism came to dominate our thinking. Not only the influence of Eastern philosophical thought, very current in California at this time, but our own shared predilections seem to me to have led us to a dualistic view of life. Besides, it suited our purposes. Literary collaboration is usually an unhappy experience for the participants and there's nothing like a philosophy that admits opinions and their oppositions in the same breath for keeping peace in the comedy workshop. In retrospect, it seems to me that we arrived at an interesting stance: we consistently view the swing between opposites as more important than either opposite itself. I suppose this is like saying that our interests were in process, no substance. But I don't think so. I think we were seeing process as substance and it's not surprising therefore, that Nick Danger ends the cycle with the "I Ching." Constant swings back and forth between sexes especially fill HCYB and are mirrored in several of the Nick Danger characters' seeming quite aware that they are not only who they are but also actors impersonating themselves. It's a cheerfully dualistic world.

It has often been correctly noted that the progress of Babe is linked with that of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem, "The Odyssey." Although HCYB does not literally follow the form of "The Odyssey," there are several key meetings between the two stories and certainly, like Joyce's "Ulysses," HCYB derives much inspiration from the age-old story of a man trying to return home. Odysseus (Ulysses) finds himself imprisoned, bound by the spell of the witch Calypso, when his outrages against the gods are forgiven and he is allowed to return home. All we will see of this on HCYB is Babe running across a street, nearly to be killed, and entering the emporium of one Ralph Spoilsport, who may or may not be the god Hermes, sent to sell Babe the instrument of his homecoming. (Some see HCYB as the musings of Ralph, that Ralph is the storyteller and Babe portrays him as a young man. Well...)

In fact, we released "The Odyssey" into our thinking - into the stream-of-consciousness - the same way we released the "I Ching" and all the flotsam of our associated lives. We threw everything into the stream and, as if we were playing "Poohsticks," rushed to the other side of the bridge to see which flotsam would associate with which jetsom, which would even survive.

One happy mating was the sub-theme that became an old godawful 1950's Muscle Movie that is heard briefly at the beginning and end of HCYB. In it we meet Odysseus and his friend Osiris, the Egyptian god whose dismembered body was flung to the far corners of the ancient world. With these two begins an interest in personality fragmentation and sexual confusion that is exhibited equally by Ralph in his many incarnations. Ralph confuses Steve Reeves with Agnes Moorhead at the beginning, just as he confuses Leopold and Molly Bloom at the end. And Osiris is worried about his friend. What has happened to his nose? (Likewise, the Egyptian King is seen as having a "chipped nose.") These fracturings of the normal order of things will become worse and worse, reaching their murderous conclusions with Nick Danger and the multiplying of personalities that nearly does him in, But hey, friends, let's talk automobiles. You have to realize that in Los Angeles, especially in those bygone days when late-night television time sold by the board foot, used-car automobile advertising was long ago elevated in a popular art form. Aficionados will wax tearful over a rare video tape of Ralph Williams for Leon Ames Ford in Studio City, or Fletcher (who featured backing by Motown girl groups) or The Guy With The Dog. And who could describe the cars? Ralph Spoilsport, that's who. He sells Babe the kitchen sink, a kitchen sink with every modern convenience to face life out there on a freeway which is "already in progress." The best feature of this astounding vehicle is its ability to place its driver in various climates or periods of history. It is quite the same as - that is, the opposite of - the Time Machine in which Catherwood catches a ride to the future in "Nick Danger." And almost immediately, the car leads Babe into a Siren-like freeway whose eddies and currents swirl around a kind of black hole in the audio; Zeno's paradox, The distances begin to halve, inexorably. In a torpor, filled with human confidence, Babe begins to fool with the Climate Control. I have always liked to think that this moment is where he is, in fact, "nowhere at all." At this point in Odysseus' journey home, there is a great storm and he and his men are cast up on the land of the Lotus Eaters. In Babe's case, it is a gentle, tropical storm and it deposits him in a slushy world inhabited by the voices we always thought of as just "the Little Guys."

These little guys are expressions of juvenile and adolescent fixations and you can turn the Climate Control every which way, but they will still be there. Their little costumes may change but they are inexorably stuck in corny unseriousness, as is an adolescent of thirteen. And these guys guard a mysterious Hole, ever-widening and shone upon by a reversible gravity and a sun that goes neither up nor down. (Osiris was a sungod, according to many scholars.) What is going on here? We are still, after all, with Babe, trapped in Zeno's paradox. By minutely examining our progress through life, we must eventually seem to get nowhere - as halving of distances will lead one eventually to where he is "nowhere at all." We seem now to be led into Babe's inner life, into his psyche. He must plunge into the Cave of Manhood, shaped so confusingly like the female place from which he came. It is a cave filled with adolescent male nightmares of sexual and scatological confusion, superintended by the voices of Mothers, Fathers, and other biological imperative.

Odysseus, when he reaches his home, hides his treasure and real identity in a cave, before insinuating himself upon the evil Suitors pressing for the hand of his wife, Penelope. Babe, by courageously diving into the Hole, sets himself free of the Paradox, must return home in disguise, in the condition of a blank slate. In Homer's tale, Odysseus will coldly slay the Suitors and win his wife's hand with the help of his son. Something a little different happens to Babe. He returns to his home, and his home is America. Since he was in a car, he is now in a motel. You can't say we're not deep. And this motel is an Americanism Motel, a Disney-like fantasy lodge filled with the pageants and songs dear to the hearts of every American - sort of. The Suitors surround him, their voices cooing, identifying him, stroking him. But Babe is worried. To sign into this motel, he must use a card that's "... already been used, it's dirty!" It has someone else's identity, someone called "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith, of Anytown, U.S.A."

These figures build for Babe a pseudo-historical Folk Operetta in order to fix his own identity firmly in his mind. You couldn't ask more from an adolescent, either.

Unfortunately, the consequences of integration turn out to be war. And not the swift, chilling war of Odysseus against the Suitors, but the ritual drafting of Babe into some vast Army seemingly in service to its own identity. Babe's Penelope is Lurlene D'Angelo, an Ethyl Merman-like figure intent upon something called "bringing the war back home." And she is doing it because all those soldiers out there, all those who have made it safely to the ground of adulthood, all those Boogies, have "Bill's" face. The husband for whom this Penelope waits is a man named Bill, and a kid named Babe passes before her with only a faded glimmer of recognition. He does not kill the Suitors for her hand - he becomes one of them. He will, I think, just start all over again. (Years later, the Firesign Theatre sat down at MGM to write a comedy film adaptation of the original called "The Odyssey." Its modern-dress hero's name is Bill.)

One of two things can happen now: out of the army that ate Babe will arise a new hero, another sucker for a clean automobile who will brave terrors to return to his Penelope; or, something will move us to advance to another world completely, to another Side, through the Looking-Glass, into a place where Someone walks by night ...

"The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" is the companion piece to HCYB. In it, a cliche-bound Hollywood Radio Detective gets taken down a dark street in an adventure that leads him into his own past and, ultimately, his own reason for being.

Nick's life, like that of Philip Marlowe, the soldier" of Raymond Chandler's detective stories, upon whom Nick Danger is based, is war. And as in any state of war, no person, male or female, can be trusted. Women especially must be watched carefully and it is therefore fitting that when Nick falls, it is over an ex-sweetheart named (sort of) Nancy, who is his match and more.

Although Nick and his listeners may think that he is on the trail of murderers and blackmailers, he is really on the trail of the flashback. As writing devices, flashbacks are most sublime in a purely auditory medium. Yet in this little device is hidden the solution to the little mystery upon which he has embarked. Flashbacks are about the Past and the name of this episode, as far as the Writers are concerned, is "Cut 'Em Off at the Past!" It is precisely what happens in this oddball tale. At the beginning we are presented with a clever - if I do say so myself - recreation of the feeling, if not the substance, of what it is like to listen to stories and make up the visuals out of the darkness. The king of our world, the masteriess Samurai of the Absurd, is a cheap Hollywood down-at-the-heels mug named Nick; and in Nick's world, you've got thirty minutes in Radio primetime, so let's move it along. In the parodies - and there are many that make up this piece - can be felt the essential qualities of what so-called Old Radio was like. It was just like Television today, or any other popular, free medium. Time is of the essence. The sponsor must be served. And so Nick's world lurches forward (or back) with a clock always ticking.

Another thing to be on the lookout for as the plot whips you into a maze of incriminations and confusion, is the accumulation of small references to the world of the Occult: the thirteen steps to his office; the fact that he assigns the number "666" to the case; the Third Eye; the use of Chinese fortune-telling. These are deep waters for Nick, as we launch into a plot initially dominated by the voice of the actor, Peter Lorre. He portrays the character of Rocky Rococo, who presents us with the underpinnings of a ramshackle plot, obviously dreamed up by a staff of writers whom Al Bradshaw will try to eliminate later on. The trick is to hang on until you reach Nancy. Here is a Dragon Lady worth getting to know. She is the soul of duplicity, yet she is one of the characters who does not know that this is all just a play on the radio. She is an elusive, murderous foe living in a mansion of Cocteau-like imagery, and whatever sucker she is trying to play Nick for now, it all started with a ring.

Lord knows, in those days of Tolkein-mania, we were aware of Ring symbolism. Luckily, it didn't take hold in us. Indeed, once we are drawn into this world, the Ring loses its' prominent place in the story. Nor did we make up a mythical relationship between Nick and Nancy. He will, in fact, kill her (or at least half of her) in the course of the story.Whatever a listener may make of the ins and outs of the story, it's good to remember that he or she is witnessing a war. You can't believe that anyone and everyone is your potential enemy. Nick is set up for the murder of Rocky, as Lt. Bradshaw wrests the starring role from him as well as control of the show. Suddenly we're being informed that next week's episode will be something called: "Lieutenant Bradshaw, District Attorney." ("Just girls and guys doing nice simple things ... and no Jewish writers.") What becomes increasingly important - and its prime component is Bradshaw - is the compounding duality that begins to entrap Nick. For instance, the alter ego relationship with Bradshaw is based on the fact that Nick used to be a cop, whereas Al, the cop is jealous of Nick's independence.

And so we are brought to one of the most difficult parts of this puzzling adventure, the sudden doubling of everyone upon trying to return from a flashback. Although we were not writing in imitation of stream-of-consciousness epics as we were on HCYB, we continued to write in the fashion invented for the earlier story. We were finding a technique, kind of a free-association style, based on common ownership of material. And we had developed some interesting recording techniques, one of which - spending what at the time was big money locking ourselves into things already recorded - resulted in an even more unforseeable stricture on the ability of any one individual to dominate the writing. Therefore, when we reached this point, the choices were obvious to us - although it may take a bigger stretch to bring a listener there.

The doubling effect of a flashback on top of another flashback on top of a reality that is not very real; duplicity on top of duplicity, mirrors reflecting mirrors; these seemed to lead Nick inexorably toward a solution that is - at best - enigmatic. You had to be there.

The solution was found first in the cut-off phrase that Nick utters just as the Network switches to a special announcement from President Roosevelt, announcing not only the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but the abject surrender of the United States to its enemies, That phrase is:

"All right, everybody! Take off your..."

Take off you what? My vote has always gone for "Take off your... guns!" but I've heard others that were just as interesting. Still, face facts; we've just surrendered to the Japanese. I think Nick's solution is the surrender of deadly force, the abstinence from killing that became a primary theme for our next work, "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers." (Available on compact disc from Mobile Fidelity.)

The second solution, and the most important for us, obviously, is the reference at the end of the story to the "I Ching," that ancient Chinese divining tool, composed of hexagrams of six lines, each capable of a dualistic reversal to its opposite. We vowed that we would follow the instructions for the casting of the Oracle to the letter and that we would faithfully record the results at the end of the story of Nick Danger. We would trust to the falling pocket-change of Chance. You had to be there.

We threw "The Army" with the changing line in a position to lead to the hexagram "Youthful Folly." It was a minor miracle - or at least an affirmation from the Ether that we were on some right track or other. Nick, out of the Army, becomes Babe/Bill, the Youthful Fool. Nick surrenders. The war is over. We all leaned out over the bridge and watched our sticks swirl in the currents. All we had to do now was get through 1969. As history tells the story, we made it.

It is April 25th, 1968. Less than a month after Johnson withdrew from the race. Three weeks after King was killed. Bobby is running hard. The war has been really terrible - Tet, the battle for Hue, Westmoreland on TV, the talk about peace talks, napalm, helicopters. The young Firesign Theatre is about to open a rear guard action at a movie house called the Hilltop Theatre, way behind God's back in Tujunga, California.

The two Phils, Peter and I have changed into our costumes for "The Giant Rat of Sumatra" in the two-chair barbershop next door to the theatre. We've run our lines for "The Indian Piece," nervously. Peter and I are now in the concrete exit corridor to the left of the movie screen waiting out the closing scenes of "Fahrenheit 451." We are double-billed with the picture this week (next week we'll be replaced by the Marquis Chimps), and we are dying. There are ten people in the house and we are related to most of them. Poised to enter, Peter whispers to me, "I've been thinking about our next album. We should call it "How Can You Be in Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All." He sings it in a little jingle, like he does on the record.

"No, that's too long, Pete," I say. "Besides, what does it mean?"

September. Three months since they got Bobby. That leaves Humphrey and Rockefeller and Nixon and Wallace. We are back in the old CBS radio studios in Hollywood, recording the Second Album, and we make the candidates names into a locomotive that rolls over The Little Guys. The album, which started out with Ralph Williams and L.A.'s obsession with vee-hickles, takes a left turn into the "tropical paradise" of Viet Nam. America's obsession. Winning hearts and minds. Strategic hamlets. Body bags.

In a parody of those half-forgotten Norman Corwin worldwartwotime radio pageants we paint new-car-buyer Babe with blackface and draft him. Better some of him than some of us! With The Whole World Watching, we Bring The War Back Home (where it out to have been before!). Yes, Dear Friends, the President of the United States is named Schicklegruber.

Reaching for "Ulysses," we free-associate with James Joyce to fashion a coda for our American Comedy. Click. Click. Through the channels of the mind toward the message, "Yes. Yes. It's gonna be all right! Yes." We croon this from the stage often over the next few years.

Nixon. Nixon in November. The casualty figures are always rising. Astronaut heros reach very close to the Moon. More heart transplants. The White Album is out, and John Wesley Harding. The year turns to 1969. "Sixty-nine" thumbs its nose from souvenir T-shirts and football jerseys. Revolution is fashionable. The Red Guards are busy.

Peter and I are on KMET Sunday mornings, reading from books and spinning our musical picks. We think of Oz as a Religious Program and we preach from the Bible, Castaneda and Winnie-the-Pooh. Revelations. Birthdays. Rebirthdays.

Together again, the Firesign Boys fashion a pilot radio program for Jack Poet Volkswagen, part of which ends up on Side Two of the Second Album when we get fired from the show before we even do it. A slightly dope-crazed parody of a radio dick. Magically, a classic. Nick, on the radio, in two places at once, blends right into, even through, the vinyl. This side comes with funny voices that anybody can do, about 30 Secret Beatles References, a real CBS door, old RCA mikes, David Grimm on the Hammond electric, and contains the Secret of Radio; all you have to do to make a tough transition is fade your voice out and cue the organist. Yep. Never fails. Thanks, Nick.

Nick's L.A. has sure changed. I sometimes still see the lettering on his office window - REGNAD KCIN - in that rundown stucco building at Hollywood and Whitley; but the rural, ramshackle acres called The Farm, where Peter and Phil A. and our producer Cyrus Faryar lived, and where we wrote, recorded and made movies, across the road from Universal City, have been condos a long time now. And, yes, friends, this hand-painted, psychedelic VW Bug is not a collector's item, here, where the freeway murder of your choice is still in progress. Remember, Fantastic Cigarettes have gone to war under the Zero Tolerance edict.

But, as Dan Catherwood said, "Glad to have someone to talk to after all these years. Why don't we sing something?" Join me. I just hope you haven't forgotten the key.