Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums
University of California Press 2024
Association for Recorded Sound Collections: Best Historical Research on Record Labels or General Recording Topics, Certificate of Merit.
A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and '70s told through the story of the period's most important forgotten comedy group.
This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. At the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock explores how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture.
He deploys a vast range of material sources, drawing on numerous interviews and writing in tune with the group's obsessive and ludic reflections—on multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and more—to focus on Firesign's work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975. This ebullient act of media archaeology reveals Firesign Theatre as authors of a comic utopian pessimism that will inspire twenty-first-century recording arts and urge us to engage the massive technological changes of our own era.
reviews
“The Firesign Theatre sought to redesign reality, and they did. In this detailed and scholarly history, Braddock tells you how.”
Jon Savage, author of England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock
"Braddock’s focus on technology and culture gives him an excellent means of discussing how Firesign’s albums were constructed and received. […] It’s easy to understand the appeal of such a wide-ranging approach. […] Braddock recreates many of their recording and mixing sessions, showing in extensive detail how their albums’ rich sound worlds were built. […] Firesign covers nearly everything that made the group’s albums possible and created an audience for them. It provides sharp interpretations of Firesign’s side projects and later Columbia records, which always deserved wider recognition. […] It also explains the wider forces that caused Firesign’s audience to disperse.”
“A sophisticated, wide-ranging, and original analysis of this understudied but influential media collective. Jeremy Braddock pulls off an impressive intellectual achievement by recalibrating multiple discourses in media theory and media history via his object of study. The result is a striking and innovative book with resonance across several academic fields. Trust me—I was right about the comet!”
Jacob Smith, author of Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves
“Jeremy Braddock has done absolutely astonishing work in putting together this history of the group, how it leveraged the technology of the moment in real time (as it was released), and all the obscure references and connections in it from history, current affairs, and pop culture. An enormous achievement.”
David Wineberg's The Straight Dope
“not just a welcome publication, it’s a significant addition to the literature […] of the Long Sixties.”
“a more compelling book of this kind could hardly be imaginable”
“Braddock's engaging, multilayered study befits the multitracked sonic pleasures of Firesign Theatre's album-oriented sound art. Working his own brilliant mix of media and sound studies, rock-music history, archival research, and technical knowledge, Braddock takes the reader on an archaeological trip through nine albums densely packed with satirical allusions to past, present, and future entanglements of media and politics. This book will inspire you to listen to the albums (again), and the albums will send you back into this book (again and again!) to discover the many facets of these countercultural gems. It's a must-read for scholars and fans alike: so lock your wigs, let the air out of your shoes, and say yes to knowing it all.”
Judith A. Peraino, author of Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig
“In the Reagan years, the stepfather years, I swam out to the nine Firesign Theatre LPs as if they were island refuges. Now this book reveals the world under the waterline: the massive cultural seamounts on which those albums sit, the submarine canyons teeming with obsolete media forms. Whether you're returning to the far-flung Isles of Langerhans after a long absence or paying them your first visit, Firesign is written with your mind in mind.”
Paul Saint-Amour, author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form
“This deeply researched and ambitious book will do much to keep alive the legacy of a group whose work, I am now convinced, needs to be well remembered. We are still very much in the process of giving popular culture of the late 1960s and 1970s the second draft of history that it deserves, and Firesign stands as a worthy model for others trying to work with challenging multimedia sources and networks.”
Eric Weisbard, author of Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music
“tremendously informative and enjoyable … to apprehend the richness of those […] psychedelic assaults on the senses and on the idiocracy of its times, you will need to read the book and listen to the recordings”
". . . perceptive and well grounded. Braddock delivers his analysis with clarity, precision, and, as the title suggests, at least a dose of humour."
"This book argues for Firesign’s spot in the canon of classic comedy troupes and album-makers, if only for how it also used technology creatively, brought back Surrealism, and briefly made literate comedy popular."
interviews
Mindplex magazine with R.U. Sirius
Peoples & Things podcast with Lee Vinsel
KBOO-FM Portland with David Ossman
WBAI-FM New York City, Arts Express —> part one and part two
KSQD-FM Santa Cruz with Phil Proctor