One thing I remember is that this record album was pretty much the first thing the four of us ever formally wrote together. It actually preceded the stage and radio shows we were to create over the next few years. The fact that we were to concoct a national - even international - reputation based on audio recording could barely have been foreseen by any of us and had we known it, we might not have been as loose as we were, although I remember the writing process as certainly being difficult. Each of us was used to radio improvisation, but the formality of writing something down was daunting. We proceeded with the first three pieces which were based primarily on work originated by one or the other of us, or perhaps two in combination, then rewritten by all four. They are simple and straightforward, or so they seem to me now, remarkable for their strict audio construction and use of available technology. Multi-track recording was in its infancy as we journeyed down into the world of the musicians in the Columbia Studios in Hollywood.

There was such an incredible stir in the air that it is difficult to convey the feelings and influences that were surging through us at that time. The world had turned dangerous, full of shootings and riots and ambushes and assassinations and distrust. It seemed as if an entire generation might be sacrificed on the altar of pacifism and integration and human rights and it seemed to be our job, suddenly, to make that generation laugh.

We believed in audio. We were from the radio. We each had spent many midnight hours in smoky studios sending our fantasies out into the nights. We particularly enjoyed each other's timing. On the radio, we occasionally seemed to set sail into group improvisation that would have the flickering of something that was worth pursuing for its own sake. We were very much our own audience, and that came to influence the way the four of us began to solve the problems of writing it down. Writing sessions were oftentimes of sheer entertainment. I can remember falling to the floor, rolling around with laughter, at least once a day because of this association that we were beginning to think of as The Firesign Theatre.

We considered Waiting for the Electrician itself to be something of a throwaway, something we could stretch out and wax self-indulgent about. The other pieces fulfilled - generally - the record company's expectations of comedians doing comedy sketches, and as we worked on the last, longest piece, we didn't feel any of those constraints. The result is the first of the longer-form writings that would make our reputation as artists. We had been fooling around with something by that title in a one-time mprovised appearance at UCLA and on our radio show we had introduced it as a film. Both of these visions were dark, rather Bulgarian satires of European avant-garde plays and the real restrictions of Communist societies of that time. We wanted the piece to stand as a slap at the many proto-fascists on both sides of the psychedelic barrier who had come to the fore in our own country. As we wrote for the recorded version, we found that the Electrician himself appeared as the electricity needed to drive the record itself and in the title, but not much of anywhere else. The theme - power and electricity, power and politics - was to insinuate itself into the body of our work that was yet to come. If a switch can be turned on, it can presumably be turned off -

PHILIP AUSTIN
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 1991

Here're a couple of stories I've heard ... When Electrician arrived at WBAI in New York City, Bob Fass played it on his show, "Radio Unnameable," over and over, all night, first side one, then side two, then side one, then side two, then side five ... The next day the Whole Town Was Talking ...

A portable stereo blasted Electrician onto the rooftop of a downtown Saigon hotel during the Tet Offensive, while a gaggle of stoned newsmen stood around listening and watching bomb bursts and artillery flashes in the suburbs ... The record had been bought at the PX ...

Not to mention that in 1968 my back-door neighbor, David Grimm (who went on briefly to be Nick Danger's organist), offered any visitor to his humble cottage the opportunity to drop acid, watch Super 8 home movies projected onto Janis Joplin posters and listen to Electrician, through earphones, very loud ... Many of his visitors did many of those things (if not all at once ... )

A quarter of a century ago, when the four young men who wrote and performed this record album were known (if only to themselves) as the "Oz" Firesign Theatre, radio had suddenly, thanks to rock-and- roll, become a revolutionary force and a direct channel of communication to youth, to the anti-war movement, to the emerging counterculture. This seizure of the ether happened on both coasts and at various temporarily "safe" undergraduate havens in between.

In LA, the big rockers KMET and KRLA finally got themselves "hippified" in time for the Summer of Love, but where it all started was KPFK, when Peter Bergman arrived on a late-night motorcycle in the Spring of '66, fresh and flowery from Berlin and Turkey, with his own 16mm movie, starring his own bald self, stuck in his pack. Within a few months half the town had joined "The Wizard" on his late-night phone-in rap-time psyche-trip, "Radio Free Oz."

The three of us who were around at the right time (the Summer of 1967) to make a record with the Famous Peter Bee, an album based on the new kind of comedy we had been creating for "Oz," were Phil Proctor - a musical comedy juvenile from Yale with a trick for falling off couches an possibly a promising future in films; a cheerful KPFK announcer-producer and good-looking Hollywood hopeful named Phil Austin; and yours truly, a "published poet," and former radio personality, just over the hill at 30 and about to Drop Out in a big way. Our photos were, I guess for recorded history, pasted on the album cover in a "naive collage," all over an old print of bored Indians being preached at by a now four-headed orator. Probably he, or we, is (or am) not The Electrician, for whom, possibly we are all still waiting.

Being the first album, it is probably the most astonishing. It is as noir as Lenny Bruce, as hip as Lord Buckley, as full of funny voices as Stan Freberg. It does for the tie-die T-shirt what Newhart did for the button-down collar, but it has more in common with Redd Foxx than with Shelley Berman. It is Sgt. Pepper multi-tracked with The Lone Ranger, Gangbusters and "Hear It Now!" It takes our childhood memories of radio as a powerful stimulus to our imaginations and surrealizes them into a form you can take home and listen to again and again.

The quotable quips are endless: "This is our sacred antenna." "It's a beaut." "No, it's a mound." "Just what you need for a better education - French horn, Italian, water polo." "Say, man ... got any pie-oh tee?" "Scalpum, Tantric!" "Ranger's on a bum trip again." "Meditate on the pure white light of stupidity." "He's groovy. All spades are groovy." "Take him away for Re-er-Grooving!" And what great sounds! A hydrogen bomb blast, a huge toke, a horse that snorts LSD and turns into a fundamentally better elephant, the Enola McLuhan cruising over rebel Nigeria.

Have you heard? The word is "love" ...

Something was happening, but it wasn't happening to you yet, was it Mr. or Ms. Jones? Not until you played Side Five. Not until you arrived at the Turkish Border ... "Is this your bar of soap?"

The theme is Power. Power and Death. The stuff of great comedy. Kafka's K. as filmed by Welles. Beckett's Existential Clowns as observed by Hitchcock. Brecht's sinister underworld adapted by Kubrick. A Modernist Satire of the Rise to Leadership ending with the rimshot clang of a Warner Bros. prison door. Fred Astaire tap dances on the telephone. The Electrician waits by his Chair. Then the twist!

You, thanks to TV, now viral with the Plague, you, Mr/Ms Black Death, you have become just what everyone Wants - the contageous object of desire, pursued, taxiing away from the dying who sing by the riverside, tearing off your infectious clothes, crashing across another Border in time for coffee and a sweet. it's all a B movie ... a bum trip ... a nightmare ... pull the plug on it ... Death to Power ...

Chronologers have a hard time placing The Firesign Theatre. "Jesters for the Rock Generation." "The Marx Brothers of the Sixties." "A notorious early-'70s counterculture audio-theatre satirical troupe." Let it be explained here that Electrician is an album of the Sixties. If there had been no more from us, Electrician would still sum up Amerika as of that historic summer. And it's still pure Underground Radio. Tune in, turn on and pump up the volume!

Remember, what ya don't mean won't hurt ya ...

DAVID OSSMAN
WHIDBEY ISLAND, WASHINGTON
DECEMBER 1991