At the risk of having this blog turn into an obituary page, I am sad to report that Peter Paul Bergman, co-founder of the Firesign Theater, succumbed to leukemia this morning at the age of 72.Born in Cleveland, OH, Bergman's talents for political humor and satire came early with school newspaper columns and a single, "Attention Convention," parodying the 1956 Democratic convention and made in a cut-up style similar to that of Buchanan & Goodman's humorous sound collages, that was released under the name The Four Candidates. He also lost a job as announcer over his high school's PA system when he announced that Chinese Communists had taken over and that a "mandatory voluntary assembly" was to take place immediately. He pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale, did six months in the Army, and toured Europe. He worked with Tom Stoppard, Spike Milligan, and the Living Theater, the latter two forming two poles of influence between which the art of the Firesign Theater was to take shape.
In 1966 he did a nightly free-form radio show in Los Angeles, Radio Free Oz, where he began to work with poet and broadcaster David Ossman and actors Philip Proctor and Philip Austin, and under the name The Firesign Theater (so-called because all four were, astrologically speaking, "fire signs") the four recorded their first album, Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him, in 1968. In this and subsequent albums such as How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, the Firesign Theater explored a form of surreal, stream-of-consciousness audio comedy-drama that incorporated the techniques of old-time radio, a counterculture sensibility, puns and wordplay, full of recondite references and allusions to high culture and low, absurdity and dystopian science-fiction and utilized the resources of the multi-track recording studio.
I first heard the Firesign Theater in college when one of the local radio stations played a few of the albums (I believe I remember hearing excerpts from Don't Crush That Dwarf, I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and In The Next World You're On Your Own) all in a segued, free-form mix that was hilariously funny and terrifying at the same time. I wasn't high at the time, but I could have been. It was one of those transformative moments, but I didn't know who the artists were until a year or so later.
To many, The Firesigns' humor was "head humor" and a lot of people lumped them in with acts such as Cheech & Chong, but their albums were mostly full-length plays for the medium of the long-playing record. If radio drama was the "theater of the mind," the Firesigns made full-on avant-garde movies for the mind, with a cinematic sensibility exquisitely translated into audio that somehow never got garbled in the presentation and always rewarded repeat listening.
In addition to Firesign, Bergman worked widely in radio and embraced the creative possibilities of high-tech and the internet early. He also worked in film and television, co-writing and appearing in the cult film J-Men Forever, which incorporated a great deal of footage from old movie serials, and Americathon, a dark satirical comedy about a future America attempting to stave off complete bankruptcy by holding a telethon. In recent years he worked as a speaker and lecturer and revived his old Radio Free Oz as a podcast. A dyed-in-the-wool progressive, his opinions were as fiery as his sign and his wit caustic.
