It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre
Zion, oh mighty Zion, your bison now are dust
As your cornflakes rise ‘gainst the rust-red skies,
then our blood requires we go…
Marching, marching to Shibboleth
On a recent car trip with my high-school-age son, just for fun, I popped into the CD player, Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.
“What is this, something from the seventies?†he offered, after a while.
“Yeah. What do you think?â€Â
“Weird.â€Â
“Well, sure. But don’t you think it’s pretty funny?â€Â
He gave me, in lieu of an answer, that pity-the-old-guy look he wears when I’m singing along with a Bruce Springsteen CD or trying to explain why The Exorcist is supposed to be a scary movie.
“I guess,†he damned with faint praise.
At just his age, I found Firesign Theatre to be wildly, chaotically, subversively funny. I still do. So why doesn’t he – this man-child nourished from the very breast of modern satire, reader of The Onion, viewer of The Colbert Report – get the joke?
I attribute his reaction to three possible causes:
1) When listening to Dwarf at 16, I was likely to be – how shall I say this? – thoroughly and utterly baked to the gills. And for my son, much to his mother’s relief, that’s apparently not the case.
2) He’s not my son, but rather a student at Commie Martyrs High, diabolically disguising himself as a God-fearing American adolescent.
3) None of this truly exists.
Tempted though I am by the latter two options, I think it’s the first that begs the question. Could it be that Firesign Theatre – not unlike that dreaded 2-hour Grateful Dead space jam – is to be appreciated only, as they say, under the influence?
I’m high all right…but not on false drugs. I’m high on the real thing – powerful gasoline, a clean windshield and a shoeshine.
It’s possible, I suppose. There is a kind of low-level paranoia that hums behind the whole disc. And paranoia, strangely enough, is funny.
First, you notice that the cop is staring at you. Then, you laugh at yourself for thinking such a thing. Then, you realize the cop really is staring at you.
Don’t Crush That Dwarf works in that way quite a lot. It’s the art of non sequitor moving at a breakneck pace. At first, you laugh at it for being off-the-wall, but when you think about it, you see it’s not so off-the-wall after all. Is it going to be…all right?
Friends, it’s going to be all right tonight at the Powerhouse Church of the Presumptuous Assumption…
I don’t want to put myself in a confrontatory position, either with the United Snakes or with…them. And you can believe me, because I never lie. And I’m always right.
In Firesign Theatre world, the only thing crazier than you is…them. The real world. The world of people who tell you and sell you and teach you things that don’t quite make any sense.
Shoes for industry, shoes for the dead! What chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good paying job, more sugar and that free mule you’re dreaming of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes. Now you can see how increased spending opportunities mean harder work for everyone…and more of it, too!
It’s been a mighty long month of Sundays since I was a dope fiend. And now, I suppose, them is me. And being them, I now know what’s best for me. What’s been best for me all along…
Hot Dog, Mom, groat-cakes again!
On second thought…maybe I’ll just put that CD away now.
- Valley of the Heart's Delight II
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- "Keepin' Cool" -- A Global Warming Awareness Project
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By the way, my teenage kids were truly disturbed when they watched the Exorcist for the first time with me this Halloween.
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The thing about the Firesign is they were very verbal, very literary, very dense in a good way. They made surrealistic movies in your head. You have to listen to the Firesign Theatre with both ears and both sides of your brain and do some of the work yourself. It's not comedy that happens to you, it's comedy that happens in you. There aren't really set-ups and punch lines. It's more like a symphony of punch lines.
And it also helps to be a little baked.
Groat clusters!
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By the way, vinyl is still the best way to listen to this album. The interval created by needing to "turn the record over" was actually an important part of the timing. I lost my LP years ago, so I downloaded it from iTunes. Not quite the same thing...
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The missing piece isn't the dope, its the media. What FST did was take every standard media trope and cliche, build a bizarrely coherent stream of interweaving stories with them, and present the commonest of media experiences turned inside out. Not only was the team hyper=conscious about the norms and how to violate them, but even seemed to be conscious of their physical existence on vinyl ("going to the other side...").
So rather than needing pot, it *is* a kind of pot---a subversion of mass reality. The reaction has been so successful that this is now just another option, another aesthetic tactic, and no long can carry the same subversive charge. Your son is ok, he's just living in a different era...
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Much appreciated!
Thanks,
- J
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I've only heard it on the Firesign Theater Album, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, hence my use of it in reply to this post. Mr. Tirebiter says it to Mrs. Tirebiter after he's spent the morning exfoliating their Victory Garden, if memory serves me.
-OOC
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We don't explain the phrase (or Firesign Theatre) to our teen-aged cousins. Not that they wouldn't understand- they seem to be twice as smart as we were at that age, and we were not trolls- but the phrase is from another time and place, one that fostered originality, and all our cousins have today is derivatives.
Thus, I suppose, the phrase, taken totally out of context, would appear to be from some other eon, like the song "Alice's Restaurant". Hearing Arlo Guthrie's classic story every Thanksgiving gets weirder and weirder, because it is so stuck in the 60s- for good or for bad- that giving a listen to "Alice" now might be a flagrant violation of Doc Brown's rule against tampering with the space/time continuum- ie, bringing back something from forty years past and facing it today. And, more ominously, hearing the tune just one more time might render the entire universe asunder.