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.

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface  Liner Notes  1. ALBUM / Talking Book  WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN OR SOMEONE LIKE HIM (1968) How Did the LP Become a Book? (Archaeology of Contemptible Media) Who Were the Readers of Records? Happenings, December 1966 Listening to the Electrician There’s a Fog upon LA The Dialogic Imagination (Slight Return) 2. RADIO / Duplicity Is the Double of Duality  HOW CAN YOU BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE WHEN YOU'RE NOT ANYWHERE AT ALL (1969) Put-Ons and Propaganda (How to Be in Two Places at Once) Label Troubles Contradictory Space Archaeology Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine (Slight Return) Goons and Beatles Five Years on the FM Band Our Rendezvous with Destiny Is to Unconditionally Surrender 3. CINEMA / Remediating the Studio System in May 1970  DON'T CRUSH THAT DWARF, HAND ME THE PLIERS (1970) Overdub/Edit (How to Be in One Place Twice) TV or Not TV A Head of His Time Studio Systems c. 1970 Stereo and Dolby Stoner Narratology East Coast / West Coast, Radical Juxtaposition 4. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / Up Against the Wall of Science  I THINK WE'RE ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS (1971) Publicizing Mobile Privatization Into the Seventies, for Real (Slight Return) Man Conforms You Have Violated Robot’s Rules of Order and Will Be Asked to Leave the Future Immediately Art and Technology Unhappy MACNAM 5. TELEVISION / What Is Television?  THE MARTIAN SPACE PARTY (1972), THE FIRESIGN THEATRE VS. DREAM MONSTERS FROM EL OUTER SPACE (1972), NOT INSANE (1972), TV OR NOT TV (1973), ROLLER MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE (1974), IN THE NEXT  WORLD, YOU'RE ON YOU'RE OWN (1975) A Transient and Unstable Medium Satellite Cable Reruns, Dreams Ambient Television, Nightmares coda / Run-Out Groove  Not TV and Not Rock Either Campoon ’76 The Church of the SubGenius and Negativland Crate Digging as Archaeology—Firesign in Hip Hop Forward into the Past Acknowledgments  Appendix A: Firesign Theatre Discography  Appendix B: Firesign Theatre Samples in Hip Hop and Electronic Music, 1989–2023  Notes  Bibliography  Index