Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers

This is funny stuff but you have to listen a bunch to catch all the connections and inuendos. You cant do two things at once while you listen and get all the great stuff.

This most perfect of all Firesign Theatre albums has greatly gained in poignancy for me as I travel through later middle age. The centerpiece of our story is an elderly man, George Leroy Tirebiter, who sits awake late at night, an insomniac impatiently spinning through the TV dial. Every so often George comes upon a movie he appeared in as a youth: Peorgie and Mudhead in "High School Madness." At the very end of the album, after another long, exhausting night, a wrung-out Tirebiter gets a "wake-up" call from his answering service. The lady informs him that he has several messages from Stan Laurel, Babe Hardy, Mr. Roach and HONK! HONK! ("he wouldn't leave his name"). Tirebiter remembers them all and brightens considerably. Suddenly he hears the chimes of an ice cream truck off in the distance and George excitedly tells the answering service that he has to go, because "they NEVER come up in the hills!" Georgie chases after the ice cream man, nickel in hand, and at fadeout he magically transforms into a little boy.

As a teen, back in 1970, I listened to all that and enjoyed the circularity of the ending-- the album starts and finishes with the same chimes. Now that I'm considerably older, I appreciate the larger theme of a contemplative backward look at one's life, the hope of regeneration and dreams of a second chance at carefree childhood. It is perhaps this last thing more than any other that fuels our passion for nostalgia and the fond recollection of the good old days.


On the Theatre's followup to "Dwarf," I THINK WE'RE ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS, we go on another brilliantly bizarre trip, this time accompanied by a Clem Clone, a computer program that sounds like "Tricky Dick," and an ancient crystal ball reader ("I see... you are... a sailor...")

These guys make me laugh. I loved them when I first heard them. This album and a few others: Bozos, Two Places at Once, The Electrician and The Giant Rat of Sumatra are the ones I listen to again and again after all these decades. Not for everyone.

I have listened to this in excess of at least 10,000 times, and each time, the giggles continue. " Remember those good old days, when your Mommy and Daddy were fighting the War, that made you possible?????" " Well, you know, they didn't do it alone ". " No, they did it over the radio, to the sounds of THIS......!!!!!" Genius. And on a record!!!

If you have time for only one Firesign album before you die, make sure it's this one. A prescient, strangely psychedelic (no drugs involved) dissection of America & life in general that will leave you awake all night wondering about who or what's really in charge of this whole peculiar shebang anyway? But of course all their albums are like that. Must be those Canadian writers. The Firesign Theater is the closest thing America ever had to Monty Python, and we owe them a LOT for holding up an unflinching mirror to our loony culture.