Saturday Sounds - The Firesign Theatre - I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus

The Firesign Theater were perhaps the premiere comedy troupe of the pyschedic era. Their best work was complex, funny, very twisted, and aimed squarely at the stoner counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

The Firesign Theatre was the brainchild of Peter Bergman, and all of its material was conceived, written, and performed by its members Bergman, Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman. The group's name stems from astrology, because all four were born under the three "fire signs": Aries (Austin), Leo (Proctor), and Sagittarius (Bergman and Ossman). Their popularity peaked in the early 1970s and ebbed in the Reagan Era. They experienced a revival and second wave of popularity in the 1990s and continued to write, record and perform until Bergman's death in 2012.

In 1997, Entertainment Weekly ranked the Firesign Theatre among the "Thirty Greatest Comedy Acts of All Time". Their 1970 album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers was nominated in 1971 for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation by the World Science Fiction Society, and their next album I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus received the same nomination in 1972. Later, they received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for three of their albums: The Three Faces of Al (1984), Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death (1998), and Bride of Firesign (2001). In 2005, the US Library of Congress added Don't Crush That Dwarf to the National Recording Registry and called the group "the Beatles of comedy."

I've not listened to their albums in a long time, but I still remember their earlier work with fondness. I'm linking here to I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, which is probably the most accessible album to modern ears.