Damn. That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard in a very long time.
I managed to find a site that mentions it. “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus” is going into my collection posthaste.
Once upon a time, in the dim and misty past, Dear Friends, Columbia Records would send actual record albums — for free —to radio stations, in the not unlikely hope that if the station would play said albums, it would create a demand on the part of listeners, who would rush to the record store and buy their very own copies.
In the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that even applied to tiny (250 watt AM ) radio stations in the wilds of Oregon. One of my treasures from that era is a copy of “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers,” with a big white “Columbia Records Radio Station Service - Not For Resale” sticker on the front.
It was so subversive and “weird” that the program director was not about to allow it on the air. “No problem,” I said, and took it home.
The other albums I bought, but Columbia got me started.
I once paid to have them burned onto CDs — just a few months before they were officially released on CD. Sigh.
Well, this is a lack that must be rectified. As **Exano ** said there are two books of scripts (I have both) but The Big Book of Plays has the four important ones. Anyone interested in the SDMB Firesign Theatre Annotation project? I’ve got a website to store the working version, but I’m sure it won’t support enough bandwidth for a published one.
Who’s in?
Whoa! Aren’t there some copyright issues involved there? I don’t think you can legally post the entire scripts on a website without explicit permission.
I have the first four albums and Dear Friends, but I always heard that they went into a steep decline after that, beginning with Not Insane. Does the gypsy fade-out at the end of “Bozos” lead into anything on a later album?
The final line of Bozos, “I see you are a sailor,” is followed up by the Shakespeare parody on Not Insane, which begins with a scene at sea.
“Steep decline” is not accurate at all. The FT disbanded around the time of Not Insane, did solo projects (of which Phil Austin’s Roller Maidens from Outer Space is jaw-droppingly brilliant and ranks with the best Firesign albums), and then reunited for The Case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, which is a fine comedy album, if less layered than the early work, and Everything You Know Is Wrong, which is widely regarded as a classic.
I see it more like the annotated Practchett on the L-Space site - references to lines in the scripts (and page numbers in the book) with annotations. That is small enough for fair use, I’m sure.
Yes, the end of Bozos does lead to Not Insane - but since Not Insane is not really a part of the four part saga, I didn’t include it.
Which album had the phrase from a skit (and it might not be exact, it’s been a while…), “And now we’re at the home of Dr. Timothy Leary, made entirely of oleo margarine. Let’s knock! Splat splat splat”
That’s from the first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. The track is “W.C. Fields Forever.” Incidentally, you can download this entire album, including a non-LP bonus track, from iTunes for $4.95.
Thanks, Biffy! I’ll look into that. Sounds like a cheap and easy way to snag the album.
The iTunes listing says “Partial Album” on WFTEOSLH. Not sure what’s missing.
Back in the early days of the iTunes store, I snagged “Don’t Crush That Dwarf” for $2; each side was one track, and was priced at 99 cents. Today, it’s an $11.99 ‘album only’ buy.
Another vote for “Everything You Know is Wrong,” but not because of its accessibilty. It is because, despite its dated Eval Knieval/Rebus Knebus references, it is like “Network” in that they were both so damned prescient. In both cases pop culture has grown more like the future they predicted than we really thought it would in the mid 70s.
What odd timing for this thread. I just downloaded a bunch of these Firesign Theatre albums on to my MP3 from the Napster-to-go plan (why am I feeling like a corporate shrill for them lately?) and we listened to them on a couple hundred mile road trip just this past Saturday. We listened to them for about an hour and didn’t really “get it”. The one amusing thing was that as we were heading out, I had “Zenos Evil” playing and it was perfectly timed as we drove along and merged onto the highway.
I’ve seen other cases where iTunes says “Partial Album” yet all the tracks are there. You just have to buy them one at a time; you can’t click “Buy Album.”
Yeah, they’ve tightened up on selling the longer tracks for 99 cents. The very first thing I bought on iTunes was Art Blakey’s 13-minute version of “A Night in Tunisia”; you can’t buy that track individually anymore. There are still some cheap epics to be had, though, including the 17-minute title track from Waiting for the Electrician.