Tuesday

It took a walk in the rain to a bus to a train to a walk in the rain to a ferry to Whidbey Island to another bus to see the Firesign Theatre perform. Along the way, I discovered that a relaxed and certainly prerecorded "Doors Closing" has replaced "All Aboard!" as the announcement of preference before the train takes off in the year 2010. It was a beautiful trip, the Sounder train from the King Street Station in downtown Seattle hugs the coast north to the ferry terminal in Mukilteo, passing the Edgewater Inn, the entrance to Hempfest and the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, and Myrtle Edwards Park and wham,  a train going in the other direction, blocking your view of Magnolia and the bluffs, passing the locks, crossing a salmon ladder, water, bridges, water, more bridges, the Golden Gardens, the marina, winter, dark early, hard to differentiate between sky and land, all in the rain, a whacked out watercolor of mayhem occasionally blitzed by car lights into fragments of kaleidoscopic splendor, intensifying my total bogglement that the original Firesign Theatre, the comedic masters of surrealism and anarchy, are still together after 43 years, will be performing tonight, and I'm lucky enough to get to see them.

The train allows me to plug in and log on. I Google the Firesign Theatre on a train to the Firesign Theatre and discover to my horror that a lot of people don't know the difference between the words THEATER and THEATRE, so let's get this over with. It's not just one of those British vs. American spelling differences for the same word like "favor" and "favour," the two words actually mean something different. When you enter the theater, you're going into a building. When you enter the theatre, you're going into a profession. This is important to know if you're going to see the Firesign Theatre, four performers creating a theatrical event, but thinking you're going to see the Firesign Theater, a building used to put on theatrical presentations. You can have a "theatrical" experience outside a "theater," but "theaters" would be ridiculous places if there weren't any "theatre."

Further diving into the Firesign online reveals vast universes of fandom and minutia. The troll in me wants to start a not-so-raging debate concerning whether The Firesign Theatre or Monty Python are the Beatles of comedy. Never one to lose an argument with myself, fully believing it's Firesign all the way, I am unsettled to discover there are arguments to be made both ways. Monty Python was British. So were the Beatles. There are only four members of the Firesign Theatre. There were only four Beatles. Someone less twitchy might just call it quits right there but not I.

Born out of radio, where nothing is more evil than dead space, the boys learned to just keep talking and talking and talking, each capable of a multitude of voices, getting precise and calculated and subtle and over-the-top with references meant for MENSA, their mastery of recording finally culminating in genuine theatrical events for the mind.

Released in 1970, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is the first concept comedy album meant to be heard from the beginning of side one to the end of side two and is easily the Firesign's Sgt. Pepper. "Their next release, I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus is easily their Magical Mystery Tour," says Fred Further of Further Analogies 'R' Us, specialists in dead horse beating.

Before the Firesign Theatre, comedy albums were Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby and Lenny Bruce and Allan Sherman, comedians being funny in what were essentially recorded stage shows. Firesign Theatre albums showed up just as stoners were discovering the insane pleasure of listening to Sgt. Pepper with the headphones on, picking up every nuance. For the very first time, there were COMEDY albums worth listening to with the headphones on, which means the Firesign Theatre did for comedy albums precisely what the Beatles did for rock. Listening to them for the first time was revelatory, comedy was too weak a word, comedy just one of many things the Firesign Theatre embraced. If I ran the record store, I would have filed them under Irony or Surrealism. It was mindfuck comedy, the jokes and sound effects and music and voices combining in such a way as to almost but not quite add up to a visual picture that made the slightest shred of sense. Two people listening to the same track on headphones with their eyes closed were sure to conjure up entirely different retina movies since it's all from a non-linear dream state. When everyone on the bus in Bozos goes "whoa," you're forced to picture SOMETHING that made them do it, and your picture can't be the same as mine. Deprived of visuals, the Firesign create theatre that dares you to figure out what's going on, where you have to PAY ATTENTION because missing one little thing could make it all incomprehensible.*

* Not that hearing the whole thing perfectly will make something comprehensible that wasn't meant to be so in the first place. Another section my mythical record store owner might file his Firesign records is under Symbolism, a theatre where it's possible to read everyone's thoughts and there's no turning back, wherever they take you, whether a missing Sherlock Holmes episode or an amusement park in the future, it's all a dream within a dream within a dream, a world where the mere mention of the words "Hideo Knutt's Boltadrome" sends paroxysms of pleasure through the cerebral cortex, where Burroughs' random cut-up act reigns supreme, albums full of precognition. (When the announcer in Bozos instructs everyone to let the air out of their shoes, what was completely ridiculous in 1971 would make a modern listener just think they were all wearing Air Jordans.)