Customer Reviews

Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For those of you who know and loved this originally as an LP, you will be disappointed to learn that sony messed up the remix BIG TIME by deleting important dialog at the beginning of the second side of the album (of course, on the cd it would be the second segment). The beginning of the second side IS CRITICAL to the subject of the performance and as best as I can recall, should have begun something like this:

"Welcome to side 4. Please follow along as we learn 3 new words in Turkish.
Towel, Bath, Border...may I see your passport please..." ...
(someone could please tweak this for I know this is not EXACTLY the dialog).

Anyway, you get the idea. The beginning is suppose to be as if you were listening to one of those "Berlitz" language records. Just wish/ hope sony would rectify this REAL SOON!

"Electrician" is the debut album from the Firesign Theatre and, while (overall) a bit more conventional than their later releases, it is still very funny. It's sort of a notebook of things to come. The first half of the CD presents looks at the past, present (then, 1968), and future. The Past is a look at the American Indians exploitation by the Spaniards and Europeans, the Present is a stroll through a hippie commune, and the Future is presented as the counterculture becoming the Mainstream (where everyone is "groovy"). Okay, a bit quaint and dated, but still real funny... and idealistic (which can't be said for most of today's cynical comedy). The second half is Firesign's first extended piece which starts out as a Berlitz language tape and transforms into a Kafka-esque trip through a politically volatile and nameless Eastern-European country. Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor, Phil Austin, & David Ossman all essay several roles each and, indeed, this may be their most impressive (or, at least, most varied) vocal performance of any of their releases. This title has been out of print for nearly 10 years, so grab one now, you won't regret it. And, check out laugh.com, where the balance of Firesign's other classics (i.e., "Not Insane," "In the Next World, You're On Your Own") are finally being released on CD for the first time!

Messrs. Ossman, Austin, Bergman and Proctor, collectively known as the Firesign Theatre, were the kings of psychedelic comedy, using the LP as their primary medium along with free-form FM radio, still in its infancy when the Firesigns first began broadcasting on Radio Free Oz in 1967.
That said, this first album gives the listener an initial taste of what these four gentlemen (who have since said they were seeking to be the "Beatles of comedy") were capable of. It kicks off with "Temporarily Humboldt County," a pointed look at the exploitation of the Native American Indian tribes as the "manifest destiny" of white European explorers and settlers gradually forced them West into the deserts, and finally shows how badly represented the 500 Nations have been by Hollywood and TV. We then follow the group through a parody of an Eastern spirituality ashram--a brilliant and funny skewering featuring one of the group's many Beatles references--and "Le Treinte Huit Cunegonde," a parody of all things "groovy." ("He's groovy...all spades are groovy.")
The second half of the album is the title cut, a bizarre and dark bit of comedy that begins as a Berlitz language lesson and becomes one man's trip through a third-world nation pursued by admirers, secret police and plague-ridden natives. On the whole, "Waiting for the Electrician" is quite the head-trip. I admit that, on first listening, I wasn't at all certain just what I should make of this album, and it took some time to grow on me. But quite honestly, I am very happy to see that Columbia has finally reissued this, along with "How Can You Be...," "Don't Crush That Dwarf..." (previously unavailable on CD), and "I Think We're All Bozos on This bus" on CD. These were long overdue!

On the copy I received, the title track is missing the first seventeen seconds. This eliminates enough material to affect the overall structure of the piece, and as their fans know, the Firesign Theatre are all about structure, even if the jokes are what you notice first. Their work is tightly organized, and they're never sloppy. Wish I could say the same for their old record company.

I remember listening to "Waiting for the Electrician" when it came out. Earphones. Sunshine LSD. What's not to like. I lost my vinyl of all the Firesign guys and got replacements recently. Listening 38 years later, it has excatly the same effect. Must be flashbacks. Satire is beyond time. Each self standing one act play defines the language of the piece so that the 60's and 70's lingua via is accessible. The title auditory show is more powerful now than then because they got it all right.

The album opener, "Temporarily Humboldt County", should be required listening in any high school history class. Not only is it wickedly hilarious but it skewers the mindless faux history that students are spoonfed by the public school machinery. One of my all time favorite comedy routines.

The third track I tend to call "Returned For Regrooving" since I don't speak French. The beauty of this piece is that it shows how, unlike their peers in either comedy or popular music, the Firesigns were aware of how the counterculture was no different than its forebears with its own peer pressure to conform to a contrived set of generational rules. Better yet, the Firesigns weren't afraid to laugh about it.

The Firesign Theatre is comedy but it's not about jokes. It's not for those whose tastes in "humor" veer toward teevee stand ups spouting easily digested one-liners about the banal commonalities of life such as body functions, body parts, eating and drinking, domestic relations, raising offspring, annoying extended family members, housepets, or specific commodity celebrities of the day.

Firesign is not about slapstick, physical humor, or quips that wouldn't be funny without the punctuation of gratuitous obscenity. It's not for those who seek out the comedian who makes the most noise or the wildest gestures. It's not for those who think the measure of a humorist's wit and incisiveness is determined by which standup babbles the fastest or sounds like Bugs Bunny.

What this means is that Firesign Theatre is comedy and commentary like nothing else you've ever heard. You will only get as much out of it as you bring into it. If one suffers from a short attention span due to too many years of passively consuming the convenience of short attention span media it may be advisable to exercise that ability before coming to the Firesigns' table.

I was having a major life breakdown. This CD became my security blanket. When I felt scared it made me laugh. When I felt hopeless it made me laugh. When I felt alone,these guys were my friends. I can't think of better praise for comedy. Thanks, Firesign, for shining your light in my darkest night. Got trouble? Let these funny men help you feel better! Do you have to listen? Do you have to think about the humor? Oh, yeah. But if you want typical profanity and bathroom humor there's plenty of stuff out there for you. This is for the rest of us.

Sony has reportedly fixed the problem with the first several seconds of a track missing on the CD. However, there is a major defect in the mp3 rip sold here on Amazon. The first 3 tracks are good, but the 4th mp3 track starts by repeating the last 5 minutes of the 3rd track before going to the CD's track 4. This throws off the timing of the rest of the album, so that track 4 ends prematurely (after overflowing into track 5) and the actual track 5 is missing completely. Amazon confirmed the defect was in their master file & refunded my money, but DON'T BUY THE MP3 ALBUM UNTIL AMAZON FIXES THIS PROBLEM!

That said, if you can get your hands on a complete version of this album, it's a hoot. 40 years on and I still laugh out loud. So, five stars for the material and 1 star for the mp3 goof, averages out to 3.

I first heard this album in December of 1968 when my best friend from high school and I got together during Christmas break. I'd never heard anything like it, and no one has ever approached The Firesign Theater for material that can both make you laugh out loud while still making you think (and rethink) about what they are saying. The first side of this album had more "hip" puns and references than anything else they did. I found myself still getting some of the jokes and references for the first time after the 50th (100th?) listening, and I'm sure that there are still many I've missed. For instance, it was a year or two later that I was skimming through a book by Timothy Leary's old colleague Richard Alpert, who was then known as Baba Ram Dass, I think, when I learned that "the second bardo" was the hallucinatory phase of the psychedelic experience. And it wasn't until 1973, while watching "Key Largo" on the late show, that I learned who the electrician was. Humphrey Bogart was recounting how someone had "turned out the lights" (i.e., knocked him unconscious), when the character played by Elisha Cook, Jr. (whom Bogie called the "little gunsel" in "The Maltese Falcon") piped in with "I'm the electrician". And the name of the main villain in that film, played by Edward G. Robinson, was Johnny Rocco, which was almost certainly the source for at least the name of "Rocky Rococo" on their second album (along with Rocky Raccoon, of course), though they chose to do him as Peter Lorre instead. Then there was "Leftenant Baha'ind of the Seventh Seal Calvary" long before I'd heard of that religion or seen the Bergman film, "ten card Tarot, Pentacles wild" and "we frew I Ching out the window" before I knew of either fortune telling technique, "I saw the best minds of my generation . . ." before I'd read "Howl", etc., etc., etc., one after the other.

And they had some influence on our culture themselves. I was watching the Tonight show once when Julie Newmar came on promoting the new movie "McKenna's Gold" in which she played an Indian (type casting??), so she was dressed in a buckskin costume and carrying a "peace pipe". When Johnny Carson asked what she had in there, she replied "some Road Apple Red", which a small but significant number of the audience and maybe a couple of members of the band appreciated, though it went right over Johnny's head.

If you're much under 60, side one is going to be quite dated for you, but side two holds up a bit better.

Update: I was fortunate enough to get to see TFT doing a reunion show in Langley, WA, on January 9, 2010. They performed mostly their old stuff, including side two of "Electrician," and the humor was still there. However, when I asked two of them after the show if Elisha Cook, Jr., was the electrician, they had no idea what I was talking about. When I explained, they said that was an interesting idea, but they didn't tell me the source. So, I may have been wrong about Rocky Rococo, too, but it's still fun to speculate.

I get a kick out of The Firesign Theatre. They were the equivalent of The American GOON Show. And just like some people can't stand The Goon Show, some people can't stand these albums. But if you like them, this one's worth the time. The other good ones are Two Places, Bozos, Dwarf/Pliers, and Giant Rat of Sumatra.