Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Firesign Theater
Thinking of the late Peter Bergman & Firesign Theater. Firesign Theater's best albums were popular with college potheads from 1968 to 1973. Multi-layered & cyclical, you never quite got to the bottom of them. The world of Monty Python was absurd. The world of Firesign Theater was absurd & sinister. There was a darkness & paranoia in Firesign's comedy, a response to Vietnam, Johnson & Nixon, assassinations, domestic surveillance of the youth countercultures by the federal government. Firesign Theater introduced me to an intriguing historical concept: The only explanation for the way things were was that The United States of America must have lost World War Two. Meaning the American people; along with the British people, the Russian people, the German people & the Japanese people. We Americans thought we were fighting for the Four Freedoms as well as the right to organize unions & collectively bargain.
So who won? President Eisenhower put a name to the winners: The Military-Industrial Complex, a loose global consortium of corporations & various government defense & security agencies that controls every major government in the world. Individual crazies want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth & bomb Iran back to the Bronze Age, but these end game war scenarios are dangerous & unprofitable. The long war with no clear winner is the ideal now.
The other thing was how easy it was to create visual images in the minds of radio listeners, using the cheesiest effects. If you play a recording of ocean surf & seagulls in the background & say you're broadcasting from the Jersey shore, everyone knows it's a fake, but they'll see beach & gulls anyway. Listeners have no reason to resist seeing it. I'd test it on myself. & since few listeners have ever seen the DJ/host, changing your voice changes whatever image they have of you. I had a very authentic sounding gravel voiced guy from Bayonne I brought on from time to time. His name was Gregory Ginzouac. Using sound to fool with visual images kept me interested in radio during weeks when I really felt like smoking a joint, kicking back & playing Neil Young for three hours & to hell with "free form."
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
So who won? President Eisenhower put a name to the winners: The Military-Industrial Complex, a loose global consortium of corporations & various government defense & security agencies that controls every major government in the world. Individual crazies want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth & bomb Iran back to the Bronze Age, but these end game war scenarios are dangerous & unprofitable. The long war with no clear winner is the ideal now.
The other thing was how easy it was to create visual images in the minds of radio listeners, using the cheesiest effects. If you play a recording of ocean surf & seagulls in the background & say you're broadcasting from the Jersey shore, everyone knows it's a fake, but they'll see beach & gulls anyway. Listeners have no reason to resist seeing it. I'd test it on myself. & since few listeners have ever seen the DJ/host, changing your voice changes whatever image they have of you. I had a very authentic sounding gravel voiced guy from Bayonne I brought on from time to time. His name was Gregory Ginzouac. Using sound to fool with visual images kept me interested in radio during weeks when I really felt like smoking a joint, kicking back & playing Neil Young for three hours & to hell with "free form."
Labels: culture, obituary, WFMU
