Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking Podcast

Jeremy Braddock
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audio pieces related to my book on the Firesign Theatre, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums https://www.ucpress.edu/books/firesign/paper jeremybraddock.substack.com

  1. 12/08/2025

    interview with Phil Vellender

    Hi everyone. I hope you all enjoy this conversation with Phil Vellender, one of the five minds behind the London fanzine Trailing Clouds of Glory. I shared their fantastic 1974 multipart Firesign Theatre piece last week (linked here in case you missed it). A transcript of our conversation follows below. One other piece of Firesign news this week: a four-hour compilation of Nick Danger pieces is now available on Bandcamp, courtesy of the heroic Taylor Jessen. This is every Nick Danger piece not released on Columbia (those are all on the streaming services). The 1984 album The Three Faces of Al is especially great. Jeremy Braddock: I am talking here with Phil Vellender, editor of Trailing Clouds of Glory, dateline London 1974. One of the most interesting publications, fan-generated or otherwise, about Firesign Theatre that I discovered while I was doing the research for my Firesign book. And I discovered it really late, but it confirmed to me that I was on the right track. I was super psyched to be able to meet Phil, and we’ve had a number of conversations over the years and he’s agreed to meet up with us and answer a few questions about Trailing Clouds of Glory. Hi, Phil. Phil Vellender: Hi, delighted to be here, thank you. Jeremy: Excellent, I’m delighted to have you here. I’m wondering if you could tell us a bit about the history of Trailing Clouds of Glory. Phil: Well, there were a number of fanzines in Britain at the time, but none of them seemed to satisfy our liking for literature and art and all that sort of thing, which we wanted to try and roll together. And there were five of us who were involved with this, of which three were heavily into Firesign Theatre. And so we came together and decided we’d do a fanzine, but we wouldn’t do a fanzine like, you know, “band mania” fanzine, but it would be more to do with the culture and the politics of contemporary America. We’d all (well three of us) gone to university so we did have an academic background but we didn’t want to make it too obscure. So we tried to not patronize our audience in the Firesign article but actually inform. That was our goal, so that’s hopefully what you found. Jeremy: I think you really did that. Do want to give us the names of the five and briefly tell us what they did? Phil: Well, I went to school with one Steve [Burgess], who did a lot of the artwork in the magazine (and I hope everyone will have an opportunity at some point to see the other pages because they’re rather nice). But I went to school with Steve and he was an incredible know-all about West Coast American music. A band didn’t leave the studio in San Francisco without him knowing all about it. So he was a great guy to be around. And then there was a guy called Richard Kinnoy, who was very keen on Shelley, and he wrote experimental writing, probably would have done creative writing courses now. So I met him in a squat in London in 1975. And then Chrissie Toubkin was my big pal. Chrissie was reading philosophy at the Polytechnic where I was doing my study of history. And we hooked up through humor, really — a few taglines from the Goons and so on. But we then discovered that we both heard of Firesign Theatre. Steve had introduced me to them. He played the Nick Danger side of All Hail [How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All], as I shall short-hand it, first, which I thought was very funny because, I’d been doing all-nighters at the local cinema with Chrissie, and we’d done most of the film noir things, so we picked it up. We’d seen The Maltese Falcon and so on. So that was that. And Chrissie and I said, well, look, we don’t really want to do music. We’d interviewed Steve Miller, which was the centerpiece of the magazine — the Steve Miller Band — and we’d done enough of that, so we wanted to do something more to do with humor. And we all were modestly quite funny people so it seemed fitting that we should tackle a bunch of funny people from America. And that’s precisely what Chrissie and I set out to do really. We found Firesign Theatre, we stumbled on it through luck. And once we got one, we traced [Don’t Crush That] Dwarf, which came out a bit later on. But we all had All Hail. Some of us had [Waiting for the] Electrician. And it was just intellectually challenging. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you listen to it once, like Cheech and Chong, and you’ve forgotten it. Jeremy: And Chrissie did the “Quick Short Circuit Round the Firesign Theatre,” which is one of the things that really blew my mind. Phil: It is mind-blowing, it is. Jeremy: And you kindly allowed me to include it in my book. And so I think we have Steve [Burgess], Phil Vellender, Christina Toubkin, [and] Hamish Orr did the fake advertisements, is that right? Phil: Hamish did the fake advertising. Peter Wynn-Owen, who was a friend of my brother’s, went to art school in London, [and] he offered to do the Firesign Theatre logo [that] we had, which was a battery connected to neon lighting. We modestly thought [it] was better than anything they had on their album sleeves but unfortunately Columbia weren’t interested. Jeremy: Some of their album covers are better than others, that’s for sure. Phil: Oh yeah, but don’t let’s quibble about that. They are generally very funny. Jeremy: So how did you discover Firesign Theatre? I understand the records would only have been available on import in London in the 70s, right? Phil: Well, we were habitués, is the trendy word in the ’68 days, habitués of certain shops in London. Now, quickly to explain to your listeners or viewers, the majority of American music of the psychedelic variety arrived in London in two or three record stores. And unlike in America, where you had to live in Chicago to get Chicago and you had to go to L.A. to get L.A., it was all collected together in one place in those days, which was quite rare. I mean, I want you to think Tower Records kind of thing. They were all there. But we had a marvelously cliquey, elitist view of this. And we would go there. And we would spend our ill-gotten student money from the government on imports. And we all discovered this Firesign Theatre. And I said, do you know what? Let’s do an evening of Firesign. So we did. We got together. And I won’t go into the detail of how the evening progressed, but let’s put it this way: there was a lot of laughter and some of it hysterical. And the Firesign Theatre albums we actually decided to do that evening were All Hail and Dwarf. And Dwarf, we had to play it twice because we just couldn’t believe how good it was. And it reminded us very much of music by the Beatles, like Sgt. Pepper or those kind of multi-tracked albums, which one discovered were only done on four-track stereo (though I did find out fairly early on that the Firesign were using, later on anyway, much more sophisticated recording than that). But anyway, we all got absolutely hooked on Firesign at that point. And Steve said, look, I’m not going to be able to hang out with you guys often enough to do this. So why don’t you go ahead and do it? So he never gave up on Firesign, but he pulled out of that particular angle and left it to us. So Chrissie and I would get together every Saturday night, every weekend. I’d go to her bedsit in Notting Hill, in west London, and we would listen to the albums. And then we started to create this article. And Chrissie said, I think we need a diagram. And that’s what that was. And I left that to her because she had it in her head. And it was like, you know, it was like peeling a glass onion, if you like. She just got it out on paper. Hamish didn’t come in on that. He would have done a lovely graphic job on it because he was a professional graphic artist, but he wasn’t around to do it. So we did it. And that became the kind of key to what we were going to do. And then we decided to split it in two. We’d do a political kind of overview and then we’d look at the albums individually. And then we definitely decided to do our own reading list where we would insert one-liners of our own choice, you know, some funnier than others. But we wanted to show that we could hold our own with Firesign, albeit from the other side of the pond. Jeremy: Right. And so that’s why I remember I asked you, why did you call it Trailing Clouds of Glory — were you quoting Firesign or Wordsworth? And you said, “Oh, we were really interested in the radical republican Wordsworth.” So you said you’re quoting [Wordsworth’s] Intimations Ode. But I think that probably the more accurate answer is that it was as if you were telling Firesign that you knew the reference. Phil: Oh, we love the Firesign line, you know, that “trailing clouds of glory, I’m down, I’m down,” you know, “powerful windshield” and all that. I mean, the whole Korean War stuff just cracked us up. And we obviously had seen a lot of those movies, those black-and-white war movies. So that came in. But the thing about that was that Chrissie had studied the Romantics at A-level, which was pre-university. And Richard was mad on Shelley, so he was saying, you know, “trailing clouds of glory,” isn’t there a Shelley quote?” And I said “No, let’s go with this one” and then Hamish walked in with the mandolin biplane logo [the cover image] and so we thought well that’s it really. I must say I think it was a sensible title. Lots of people asked about it, that’s what was good. And we were all [politically] republicans [i.e. they all opposed the British monarchy and Crown] and we all liked the younger Romantics so that was how that came about. Jeremy: I want to get back to that question of politics in a second. It occurs to me to ask, since you were especially drawn to Dwarf, I’m wonde

    23 min

  2. 09/18/2025

    Firesign sources #8 / FDR Pearl Harbor address

    The final entry in this series on the Firesign Theatre’s radio sources has to be FDR’s December 1941 Pearl Harbor address — Firesign’s inspiration for the famous travesty that interrupts “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” (at 25:20) and concludes the hour-long How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All: We have reached our rendezvous with destiny! It is our unanimous and irrevocable decision that the United States of America unconditionally surrender! In Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything, I talk about the “unconditional surrender” broadcast in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Munich Accord, and The War of the Worlds (also America First, Python at the BBC, John and Yoko’s Nutopia press conference, and the I Ching). To the album’s first listeners, though, Firesign’s comedic disinformation probably sounded, first and foremost, like a coded message for the desired outcome of the Vietnam War. In December 1969, two months after How Can You Be peaked on the charts, that first audience became subject to the new draft lottery. It’s worth listening back to FDR’s original announcements (there were two), both to see how Firesign worked with them in early 1969 and also to give us a point of comparison for the way information, misinformation, and disinformation about political violence has been traveling recently. The first thing you might notice is that Peter Bergman’s FDR impersonation is not very good. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if the badness is intentional. Since the late 1940s, FDR’s December 8 address — the piece that I’ve posted here — had been routinely included on LP compilations of “radio’s greatest broadcasts,” and that practice continued into the Vietnam era. Liberties the Firesign Theatre took elsewhere with both tone and content were likely measures of Firesign’s disgust with the way Second World War nostalgia was being instrumentalized as support for the war in Vietnam. At least one phrase from FDR’s address is close enough to the version on How Can You Be to suggest that Firesign had a recording or transcript of FDR’s speech to hand, and if that’s the case, it’s possible to notice ways Firesign’s emergency announcement deforms FDR’s original beyond their imposition of an American surrender. Notably, Bergman omits the most famous phrase from the December 8 speech — “a date which will live in infamy” — including instead another signature FDR phrase, one whose resonance had recently become significantly volatile. “A rendezvous with destiny” was a slogan first coined in the speech FDR gave as he was accepting his presidential renomination at the 1936 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Coming three years before the German invasion of Poland, the speech was meant to rally American citizens against what Roosevelt called the “new industrial dictatorship” that he found to be promoted both by fascist states abroad and by the “royalists of the economic order” at home. Having majored in what he would call “labor economics” (he wrote undergraduate thesis on the IWW), Peter Bergman likely knew that the “rendezvous with destiny” motto had its origins FDR’s left-wing economic populism. If so, Bergman would have been doubly aware of the irony of Ronald Reagan’s more recent appropriation of the “rendezvous with destiny” phrase, which he used to conclude his pivotal 1964 speech endorsing Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, a militant anticommunist and opponent of New Deal policies and institutions. Two years later, Reagan would win a first term as governor of California, running specifically against the burgeoning student movement. For Firesign to use FDR’s phrase a third time, this time as parodic counterfactual history (or political disinformation), was to ask if Reagan’s co-optation of the phrase was equal parts put-on and propaganda. The December 8 address to congress lasted a very short seven minutes, concluding with a request that congress authorize a declaration of war on Japan. Congress obliged with a positive vote thirty-three minutes later. The following night, December 9, Roosevelt addressed US citizens directly (as Firesign’s FDR pretends to do) in a twenty-seven minute “fireside chat” that was heard by an estimated 81% of the country. The broadcast begins by situating the Pearl Harbor attack as the “climax of a decade of international immorality” perpetrated by Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan: “gangsters [who] have banded together to make war on the whole human race.” It concludes by acknowledging and describing the sacrifices American citizens will be obliged to make, to successfully wage the war against the fascist states. Neither of those statements is surprising to hear today. What might be surprising — particularly given the relative absence of similar statements today — is the sequence between them, where Roosevelt addresses the information environment of 1941. Other than an interesting admonishment against rumor-mongering — emphasizing the importance of word-of-mouth as well as mass-mediated communication — Roosevelt is primarily talking about the radio waves, which he understands to be the common medium both for military communications and for public entertainment (Friedrich Kittler would agree!). The latter (general/public), he implies, quietly becomes a version of the former (military/political) when it is seeded with mis- or disinformation, with the aim of “spread[ing] fear and confusion among us”. To this point, Roosevelt includes advice for how to listen to the news: When you hear statements that are attributed to what they call an “authoritative source” you can be reasonably sure from now on that under these war circumstances the “authoritative source” is not any person in authority. Many rumors and reports which we now hear originate, of course, with enemy sources. If you’ve read the second of the Philip Marlowe episodes in this series, you might notice that what FDR warns against in 1941 literally describes the 1950 announcement of imminent hostilities in Korea (CBS reporting that the AP has heard from an “authoritative source”). The story of what happened between 1941 and 1950 is too long to take up here. Instead, let’s take a moment to reflect on a moment when the US government — albeit in a propaganda broadcast of its own — took time to describe the methods and techniques of wartime propaganda, in a time (today) when the people in authority are perhaps the least authoritative sources. Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com

    8 min

  3. 09/15/2025

    Firesign sources #7 / The Maltese Falcon

    Last week I said I thought that The Adventures of Philip Marlowe was probably the primary model for Firesign’s Nick Danger. I still think that’s right, but you wouldn’t get far into side two of How Can You Be without recognizing another important source: The Maltese Falcon. Phil Proctor’s Rocky Rococo is clearly modeled on Peter Lorre’s performance as Joel Cairo in the famous 1941 Warner Bros. film, and if the vocal impression is not enough, the script gives further cues (which must be dry by now): “you may have seen me around the drugstore drinking chocolate malted falcons,” “I’ve been killed! This hasn’t happened to me since M!,” and so on. Because it’s most famous as a film, I thought The Maltese Falcon would be outside my purview — I’m also resisting posting the late-night used car ads Proctor used for side A’s Ralph Spoilsport (oh ALL RIGHT —  here!). But then I returned to the multipart Firesign precis I’d discovered in the 1970s London zine Trailing Clouds of Glory. As I read that freewheeling piece of citizen scholarship (whereof more later) I was reminded that there were also several radio versions of The Maltese Falcon, each of which would have been understood as a radio adaptation of John Huston’s film adaptation (for Warner) of the original Dashiell Hammett novel, which had first been serialized in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1929, published as a book in 1930, and had even seen a previous film version in 1931. The first radio adaptation — an hour-long broadcast starring Edward G. Robinson as Sam Spade — aired in February 1943 on CBS’s Lux Radio Theatre, a program that specialized in radio versions of recent Broadway plays and films. The other two broadcasts featured Humphrey Bogart (Spade), Mary Astor (Brigid O’Shaughnessy), and Sydney Greenstreet (Caspar Gutman), all reprising their roles from the 1941 film. The version I’ve posted here — a compressed thirty-minute version broadcast on CBS’s Lady Esther Screen Guild Theater in September 1943 — is the only one that includes Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo alongside the other three principals. Though Phil Austin’s Nick Danger is much closer to radio’s Philip Marlowe (Gerald Mohr) than he is to Bogart’s Sam Spade, Firesign’s famous gag about the female lead’s many aliases — Melanie Haber? Audrey Farber? Susan Underhill? What about Betty Jo Bialoski! — seems a fairly straight lift from The Maltese Falcon where “Ruth Wonderly” poses as “Miss LeBlanc” before finally copping to the name Brigid O’Shaughnessy. They could have pulled that from any iteration of Hammett’s story, of course. But since they were the last generation to have been children before television, I think they were as likely to have heard The Maltese Falcon rebroadcast on the radio as they were to have seen the film on TV. The Screen Guild Players’ version is loose and fun in a way that is typical of many live broadcasts, and Firesign appreciatively represent that style throughout “Nick Danger.” At one point, during an ostensibly tense exchange, Bogart (in character as Spade) teases Greenstreet for missing a line. The audience understands what is happening and can be heard laughing as Greenstreet adapts (20:10). Spade: Ok, so I get millions later. How’s about fifteen thousand now? Gutman: Frankly and candidly and upon my word of honor as a gentleman, the ten thousand I gave you is all I can raise right now. Spade (Bogart): But you didn’t say positively. Gutman (Greenstreet): [LAUGHING] Positively. [AUDIENCE LAUGHS] “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” pays homage to, and explodes, these features of live radio in its numerous metafictional gags: Catherwood: Come in out of the cornstarch and dry your mukluks by the fire. [DOOR SLAMS. FIREPLACE EFFECT] Let me introduce myself. I am Nick Danger. Nick: No let me introduce myself. I am Nick Danger. Catherwood: If you’re so smart, why don’t you pick up your cues faster? Nick: Are those my cues? Catherwood: Yes, and they must be dry by now. Why don’t you pull them out of the cellophane before they scorch! Or, my favorite: Catherwood: I assume you’ve come to see my mistress, Mr. Danger. Anticipating the Korean War announcement that delays the last-discussed Philip Marlowe episode, the Screen Guild Players’ radio adaptation of The Maltese Falcon concludes with an appeal from Humphrey Bogart to purchase war bonds — “each of us must dig deeper into our own pockets.” This is further evidence suggesting that the Firesign Theatre saw the two very different sides of How Can You Be — the hectic, psychedelic, Vietnam-identified propaganda travesty of side one and the hard-boiled detective genre parody of side two — as indissolubly linked. A final note: there is another Angelino of the late 1960s who thought a great deal about the unfinished business of World War II in the context of Vietnam. Given the fact that his first novel, V. (1963), is a quest narrative that conspicuously travels to Malta, and that a more recent book (as well as one forthcoming) borrows from the genre of the hard-boiled PI, I expect he was well versed in this kind of radio too. I’ll be talking more about the relationship of the Thomas Pynchon to the Firesign Theatre in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com

    30 min

  4. 09/08/2025

    Firesign sources #6 / The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (2 of 2) "The Pelican's Roost"

    Yesterday I posted the first of the Gerald Mohr episodes of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. That’s the one that begins with the detective “getting tired of reading Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator backwards on the ground glass of my office door.” Firesign’s Nick Danger would take that line to its logical conclusion. Today I’m posting one more Philip Marlowe episode, one that contains many more of the hallmarks that can be heard on the “Nick Danger” side of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. The most obvious of these is the way Chandler characterizes the private eye Marlowe, his hardboiled demeanor famously tempered with sentimentality (often to the detective’s detriment). When Firesign’s Nick Danger is (all too easily) coaxed by his ex-lover Nancy to meet her at the Old Same Place, it’s a scenario familiar from dozens of Philip Marlowe episodes including the one I’ve posted here (“The Pelican’s Roost”). This is rather different from the casual misogyny and off-the-rack machismo typical of Sam Spade, Johnny Dollar and many other radio detectives. I think Firesign also noticed a particular story-telling trick that Philip Marlowe uses again and again in its broadcasts. Though it’s a convention of most radio procedurals for the radio detective both to tell each episode’s story and to act as a character within the story, there is usually a clear break that separates these two kinds of speech (and positions in the story). The storytelling of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, by contrast, bleeds between Marlowe’s narration and his participation as a character, often within the space of a sentence. This happens several times in “The Pelican’s Roost.” At 3:30: MARLOWE: Well, it was 9:30 by the time that I got to Wilshire’s miracle mile that housed Eugene’s Beauty Shop. I drove by, saw no one outside, so I pulled into an alleyway, parked, and walked back slowly. As I passed in front of a show window I winked at a gilt mannequin with purple hair, and when I heard the door open behind me I stopped and lit a cigarette. Lynn Russell hurried by without a word, ran to a cab at the corner and drove away. And that was all there was to it. I turned around headed back to my own car and got as far as the handle on the door —oooff!! [thud] I fell against the car as the blow came again — ohhh! [whomp] — [gasping] it made … syrup of my legs. I oozed down on to the pavement and stayed there. HOOD: I know you, you’re Marlowe, the private detective. At 4:55: MARLOWE: I pulled up in front of a wrought-iron arch labeled Garden Court Bungalows and followed a cool flagstone trail back to number four, which was Lynn’s. I felt almost normal again … until I saw her front door. It was standing half open framing a man in front of the dark interior who was trying his best to see inside. This time the advantage was mine AND I TOOK IT [wham!]! SLOAN: Take your hands off me! And 22:10 [note how this one also moves from past to present tense] MARLOWE: The nickname for the cockeyed assortment of barnacle pilings that complain with every surge of the sea and then complained again with the undertow that followed was no misnomer. At least a thousand sleeping pelicans called it home. And now as I moved out across the splintered lopsided boards that here and there [CRACK!!] GAVE WAY, I, I try to be careful not to wake too many of the birds to flight because that would give me away. There are many more amusing examples of this technique in other Philip Marlowe episodes, and if space permitted I would I want to think about it in relation to Marlowe’s hard-and-soft masculinity. For Firesign’s part, it was a trick they used repeatedly in “Nick Danger,” for both dramatic and comic effect, as with “And then it struck me [whomp!] … what a sap she had!” [13:10]” One final thought: it is tempting to think that Firesign both heard this specific episode of June 25, 1950 and took note of the emergency CBS News bulletin that preceded it: The Associated Press quotes an authoritative source in Tokyo as saying that some United States combat troops have been alerted to go into action in South Korea at a moment’s notice. According to this authoritative source, the deteriorating situation in southern Korea may force the United States to commit ground forces to the battle. By the morning of the next day, the Korean War had begun. As I’ve noticed in previous posts — and talk about in further detail in Firesign — 1969’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once is the Firesign Theatre album that allegorizes most extensively the Vietnam, and its relation to communication technologies in general. It is reasonable to suggest that Firesign’s famous faux-FDR broadcast that comes at the end of “Nick Danger” (which I’ll discuss soon) may refer not only to the present crisis in Vietnam and to previous moment in radio history in which a radio detective paused to allow war to be declared. Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com

    29 min

  5. 09/07/2025

    Firesign sources #5 / The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (1 of 2) "The Red Wind"

    Today we’re finally flipping over to the second side of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. Though the first side of How Can You Be is as far out as anything Firesign ever did, the flip side was much more conventional, a parody of old radio detectives called “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger (Third Eye).” Foregoing (for the time being) the A-side’s multitrack studio wizardry, Firesign chose to track “Nick Danger” entirely live, relearning the techniques of the programs shows that had broadcast from Columbia Square before it was converted to a recording studio. In this photo of the session (in Columbia Square’s Studio B), you can see each Firesign member assigned a vintage RCA ribbon mike, with Phil Proctor also using the studio’s “walking board” to create the sound of Nick Danger’s (Phil Austin’s) footsteps. The detective procedural was such a dominant radio genre that Firesign had dozens of programs to draw on. In interviews, I’ve seen Phil Austin name the shows Sam Spade and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar as models (the latter broadcast from CBS Columbia Square from 1949 to 1962). But I think that the most direct source for “Nick Danger” is clearly The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, in which Gerald Mohr portrayed Raymond Chandler’s famous detective in 114 episodes that broadcast from Columbia Square between 1948 and 1951. In Mohr’s first episode, an adaptation of Chandler’s story “The Red Wind,” you can hear what inspired one of Nick Danger’s — I mean Regnad Kcin’s — most famous gags (1:15 of Philip Marlowe, 1:25 of “Nick Danger”). I’ll talk a bit more about how Firesign drew on the program’s sensibility and narrative style in tomorrow’s post. Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com

    30 min
  6. Firesign sources #4 / Buffalo War of the Worlds (1968)

    09/05/2025

    Firesign sources #4 / Buffalo War of the Worlds (1968)

    We’re about halfway through this series of radio sources for the Firesign Theatre’s 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. Today’s entry would not have directly informed How Can You Be in Two Places at Once — Firesign had just finished recording the “War of the Worlds” side of the album by the time of the broadcast — but I can’t resist including it in this series, for reasons both obvious and less obvious. In 1968, Buffalo’s WKBW was the city’s predominant pop music station, a 50,000 watt AM station that would have been the equivalent of KRLA-Los Angeles, where Peter Bergman’s “Radio Free Oz” had moved in 1967 (before he and Firesign returned to low-wattage underground stereo FM stations later in the decade: KMET, KPPC, KPFK). Unlike the FM stations, KBW and KRLA maintained the tradition of big-personality DJs that had defined the AM pop format (“super box number time!” according to Firesign’s parody on HCYB) while at the same time bending their playlists to include the heavier head music of the late sixties. On Halloween 1968, though, WKBW did something less typical. On the thirtieth anniversary of the original Orson Welles broadcast, KBW staged its own improvised version of “The War of the Worlds,” dramatizing an alien invasion supposed to originate on Grand Island, just north of Buffalo (it was to B-lo what Grover’s Mill NJ was to New York City). Brainchild of program director Jeff Kaye, the broadcast is still quite astonishing to hear, and is all the more impressive and effective because it featured the familiar voices of the KBW news team, who were improvising from cues rather than reading a script (which is what those charlatans in the Mercury Theater had done!). KBW’s massive broadcast range meant that it was heard all across western New York and into the midwest and Canada. The Buffalo ‘68 “War of the Worlds” is, moreover, a remarkable document of its moment in history. As the broadcast turns from the typical broadcasting (Beatles, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cream) to fictional Mars-invasion reports, we hear a final, consequential piece of actual reporting: LBJ’s announcement of a bombing halt in North Vietnam and promise of peace negotiations with the Vietcong. This was an eleventh-hour attempt to boost Hubert Humphrey in thue following week’s election. Unfortunately for LBJ and Humphrey, candidate Nixon had already covertly sabotaged the October surprise. One final point about WKBW: this would not be the last of their special Halloween broadcasts. They would follow up next year with “Paul McCartney is Alive and Well … Maybe” — a sterling contribution to the month-old and rapidly metastasizing Paul-is-Dead rumor. This is something about which I have a lot to say! But you can read some of my ideas about Paul-is-Dead in Firesign; let me also recommend Andru J. Reeves’s sui generis history of the rumor. Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com

    1h 17m
  7. Firesign sources #3 / The War of the Worlds (1938)

    09/04/2025

    Firesign sources #3 / The War of the Worlds (1938)

    The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast — directed by and starring the inevitable Orson Welles — is the most legendary radio drama event of them all, so it should not be surprising to find it a point of reference for the Firesign Theatre. David Ossman (who named one of his sons Orson!) has often compared Firesign’s first on-air improvisation to the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, KPFK experiencing a small-scale version of the panic of 1938 when outraged listeners phoned in to protest the suppression of the (imaginary) films that Firesign was “screening” and then censoring in real time — all of it a put-on. But whereas the citations of Norman Corwin on How Can You Be in Two Places at Once are explicit (if ambivalent), the record’s references to “The War of the Worlds” are embedded more deeply. Recording the album’s first side in the context of Vietnam (and just days after the 1968 Chicago DNC), Firesign seems intuitively aware of the many ways “War of the Worlds” was connected to the World War that would commence in September 1939 (on the false pretense of a captured radio station) and the way the radio would become a crucial conduit for information, misinformation, and morale. The narrative innovation for which Welles’s broadcast is most famous picked up on a broadcast technique that was only a month old: breaking news bulletins were an invention devised for the coverage of the notorious Munich Accord of September 1938. The Mercury Theatre’s “War of the Worlds” begins with bulletins that become increasingly intrusive and increasingly urgent. It then pursues the technique along a series of successive conclusions: live broadcasts, a government takeover of the air, a live feed of military communications, and then a silence that is still shocking to hear today (27:00-31:00). But the broadcast itself also played a role in the way the US would fight the war. The official understanding that the CBS broadcast inspired audience panic across the US swiftly led the government to charge the newly-founded Princeton Radio Research Center to study how public belief in the Martian invasion might correspond with American citizens’ susceptibility to Nazi propaganda (which also circulated on the radio). An entry in one of Ossman’s recording session notebooks reads simply “encyclopedic misinformation,” which to me suggests that they were trying to create a Gesamtkunstwerk about propaganda (and undoubtedly explains the album’s famous final put-on, which we’ll discuss in a later post). Structurally, the first side of How Can You Be also seems to echo “War of the Worlds.” Here’s how I described it in Firesign: Welles's play begins as a simulated evening of radio which becomes interrupted by emergency bulletins, and eventually cedes control of its airwaves to the government; after forty minutes the audience is finally given the consolation of a protagonist. "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once" begins with a protagonist whom it progressively diminishes and eventually abandons; the piece ends with a series of abruptly interrupted media transmissions — television channels surfed by an anonymous, disembodied viewer. There’s a full chapter devoted to this in Firesign, and I’ll have more to say about it in my talk on September 10. Click here to pre-register if you want to attend remotely. Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com

    51 min

  8. 09/03/2025

    Firesign sources #2 / On a Note of Triumph

    The second in this series of the radio sources for Firesign’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once is “On a Note of Triumph,” Norman Corwin’s dramatic celebration of the Allies’ World War II victory over Nazi Germany, which broadcast on CBS live from Columbia Square in Los Angeles on VE Day, May 8 1945. (Like this post if you’d like to see CBS recommit to pro-democracy practices!) Firesign knew that they were recording in the studio Corwin had used for “On a Note of Triumph” and many other pro-democracy propaganda broadcasts, and they (especially David Ossman) were fans of his work even as they were now drawing on Corwin’s techniques to criticize the culture of information now promoting the Vietnam War. Ossman — who would later collaborate with Corwin on an anniversary broadcast of the latter’s Bill of Rights play “We Hold These Truths” (1941) — told me how they read Corwin’s collected scripts avidly, learning not only from the way Corwin handled dialogue and exposition but also from his garrulous notes for production and sound design.Firesign clearly cite the sound and the rhetoric of “On a Note of Triumph” in the “American Pageant” sequence of How Can You Be. In the short excerpts I’m sharing above and below here, you’ll hear Firesign repurposing Corwin’s archetypal “Little Guy” and “far-flung ordinary men” (now the far-flung Isles of Langerhans), as well as Woody Guthrie’s “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” which on How Can You Be is replaced by Phil Austin’s rousing “This Land is made of mountains/This Land is made of mud/This Land has lots of everything/ For me and Elmer Fudd.” Firesign also expertly mimic what Neil Verma has called Corwin’s “kaleidosonic” style: “a shifting sonic world that is accessed through a central point that is itself static. [….] Kaleidosonic plays leap from one mike to another, ‘objectively’ arraying the world before us […] across two dimensions.” That is less audible in the passage excerpted here, but is a hallmark of “On a Note of Triumph” and of Corwin’s oeuvre as a whole, which wanted to be “spanning the nation and binding it together.”Revisiting this work two decades later, Firesign’s point was to show how Corwin’s mystical view of democratic citizenship had come to be exploited by the violent inequality of the draft, and was belied by postwar scrutiny of American imperialism. I discuss this further in Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. For Fair Use considerations, I’m giving a very short excerpt of the Corwin here. The 1945 “On a Note of Triumph” broadcast can be heard in its entirety on the NPR website. Here’s a link to the first in the radio sources series: Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com

    2 min
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audio pieces related to my book on the Firesign Theatre, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums https://www.ucpress.edu/books/firesign/paper jeremybraddock.substack.com

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