Peter Bergman is Home by Now: 1939 – 2012

Peter Bergman is Home by Now
1939 – 2012

By Jordan Davis

Peter Bergman, the madcap writer and performer who steered the Firesign Theatre through 45 years of surreal, satirical comedy, has passed away at age 72. For those who followed their multi-layered stories and preposterous characters over the years, it’s like losing a Beatle.

Each member of the Firesign Theatre brought his own stash of talents and predilections to the mix.  One was an old-time radio freak; one was a mile-a-minute improviser; one was a rock and roller with a back-to-the-land bent; one had a political passion that took no prisoners.  Together, Peter Bergman, Phillip Proctor, David Ossman and Phillip Austin forged a multi-faceted brand of humor that has no equal.  Of the four, Peter was the zaniest, the most political, the most cynical, maybe the most driven, possibly the funniest. The man was on his own wavelength, and people wanted to ride it with him.

Bergman’s parents, Rita and Oscar, were a radio personality team in Cleveland in the 1950s.  Peter inherited his father’s charisma and self-propelled confidence, as well as his resonant, stop-you-in-your-tracks voice.  He left Shaker Heights for a stint at Yale, where he briefly taught economics and studied acting.  But the lure of the West Coast was irresistible, and he soon had a shotgun seat in Sixties California, where he had his chance to reach over and yank on the steering wheel of the counterculture.

What started as an improvisational community radio show in 1966 led to more than 25 albums, and a steady stream of radio, television and stage appearances by the Firesign Theatre.  Drawing deeply from classic literature, The Goon Show, the fading culture of old-time radio and the still-emerging culture of rock and roll, they fused a body of work that still stretches and pokes at the imagination with amazing agility.

The calling card was always “comedy,” but that label belies the sophistication of their approach and techniques. The stories tend to be fast-paced romps through a blitz of shifting scenes, populated with an endless variety of manic characters.  But woven into this tapestry of ridiculous setups, relentlessly clever turns of phrase and audio sorcery is a subversive dose of social and political hardball. The acting seems so natural and spontaneous that it feels improvised but, in fact, most of the work is tightly scripted.  Although the scenery seem to race by in a slapdash blur, most of the stories contain a solid through-line – even if it takes multiple attentive listenings to find it.  And all those non-sequiturs?  Turns out, they actually connect to things: things elsewhere in the story, things on their other records, things in real life.   Their studio albums benefited from the innovative recording techniques which were rapidly evolving with the pop music business in the 1970s.  Decades later, fans couldn’t wait for digital re-releases so they could really hear what was happening deep in the background of a mix. These days, the internet and earbuds have removed the element of pursuit, but the reward is still there.

The album titles alone give a clue to the band’s cockeyed outlook:  Waiting for the Electrician, Or Someone Like Him, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, Everything You Know is Wrong (yes, they coined that phrase, in 1974).  Then came The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra (a boisterous homage to Sherlock Holmes), Anythinge You Want To, (their Shakespearean mashup, with a new world punch line c/o Sir Walter Raleigh), and Eat or Be Eaten which presaged the world of interactive video gaming, in 1985.

And how about those characters?  Ralph Spoilsport, Rocky Rococco, Porgie and Mudhead, Art Wholeflaffer, Principal Poop, Ben Bland, Betty Jo Bialoski.  The list is a long and wacky one.  Each has their own hilarious moment, and a backstory you can chew on.  And some, like Nick Danger and George Tirebiter, reappear over the course of multiple albums and many years.   The scripts were rife with sexual innuendos, drug references, and sideways jabs into hypocrisy and other human foibles.  Fans used to memorize the most bizarre passages, or entire scenes, entire sides, and repeat them to each other like oral history. There is no shortage of goofy phrases, strange quips and pseudo cosmic aphorisms to be found. Now and again you might actually hear them spill, out of context, into everyday conversation: “He’s no fun, he fell right over!”  “Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?”  “Duluth? Bucko, you can get Tierra del Fuego!”  Annoying as it may be to others, there is a reason people still quote the Firesign Theatre: the inventive wordplay was part of the ride.

And it wasn’t just the language. Their ideas were avant-garde.  Even as they were looking backward to Shakespeare and the golden age of radio, they foresaw all manner of corruption and other behaviors that we take for granted today: computer hacking, pay television, debit cards, the collapse of government in the face of the entertainment-industrial complex.  Sometimes their prescience could be scary – as with the invasion of Afghanistan in Fighting Clowns from 1980, or climate change on 1999’s Boom Dot Bust. Scary. But funny.

The Firesign Theatre were ahead of their time, of their time, and behind their time, all at the same time.  If that suggests they’re timeless, I suggest you dust off your old copy of whichever Firesign album you might still have around, and give it a spin.  If you do, I promise you’re going to hear something there you never noticed, and you’ll make a mental connection to something you never flashed on before.

Or, even better, find something newer, like Boom Dot Bust or Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death. Most of their later work holds up well to their classics.  These guys kept their edge.

They wanted their records to be worth listening to over and over and over – and at this they succeeded in spades. Their Columbia record contract was framed to give them all the studio time they needed, and they were the first comedy group to ever use multi-track technology. But in exchange, the record company kept the rights to the recordings, and that is the main reason that reissues of the Columbia albums, the masterpieces, are so scarce.

As individuals, most the members remained part of the Hollywood talent pool, but big-time success always eluded the group.  Despite their technological prowess, some of their later projects were made with just shoestring funding; their few films are surprisingly low budget and lo-fi.  I think this bothered Peter more than the rest.  But his love affair with fresh ideas never waned.  He was always full of out-of-the-box concepts and new projects to pitch, and he ran his podcast, Radio Free Oz, down to practically his last breath.

Even with their active solo careers and disparate lifestyles, The Firesign Theatre members continued to make funny music together, onstage and in the studio, until just a couple of months ago. They were like a band – a comedy band.  And although it could be easy to dismiss their work as a by-product of the crazy, hazy, 1960s, the surprise is this: the jokes get even better when you’re really paying attention.

—-

P.S. On a personal note, I’ve been lucky to have crossed paths with all four members of the Firesign Theatre over the years. Peter Bergman was a Cleveland export I felt especially close to and proud of. I interviewed him on my own community radio show in 1988, and it was WRUW’s Cuzin Dave Wilson who introduced me to Peter’s parents. We sat in the same living room where they once broadcast Breakfast with the Bergmans. Suddenly the Firesign’s hilarious “Golden Hind” spoof* of local travelogue television, (such as “Jim Doney’s Adventure Road”), snapped right into focus.

Peter graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1957. So the cold-war, rah-rah, Archie-comics mentality of “High School Madness”* was still fresh fodder for parody in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Bergman himself was kicked off of the closed-circuit high school radio station after he announced a communist takeover of the school. So the whole sub-plot involving Principal Poop, and the Communist Martyrs High School rivalry, and the arrest and trial of young Porgie Tirebiter by his own father for political gain… all of this wildly clever social and political satire is set against a backdrop that comes straight out of suburban Cleveland.

I’ll close with one more Cleveland memory of Peter Bergman, as shared recently by my friend Tom Miller:

“I guess I must be a firehead and didn’t know it. I met Peter and Phil at a party on Larchmere in the mid seventies. I had a pocket-full of cigars that I had gotten for Christmas and brought them along. I offered them to Peter and Phil and they both accepted. Nothing could go wrong now… having cigars with half of the Firesign Theatre!   My brother Geoff was still in high school and a huge fan of FT. I asked Phil if he would call him on the phone as a character from one of his albums. Phil used Rocky Rococo much to my brother’s delight.   An Indian businessman was at the party and started to give a talk about economics in the ballroom of the house. Peter sat in the back row with the cigar in his mouth and began to snore loudly after five minutes.   I also remember hearing “Electrician” for the first time (without any introduction) at a smallish restaurant/cabin in New Hampshire. What a trip.  Lessons in Kurdish.   Bought a sport coat from Peter’s father, Oscar, at his store at Shaker Square in the sixties. Great guy. He told me he would give me the sport coat if I could guess his age. It was a safe bet… he was 69.”

*Everything You Know is Wrong, 1974

**Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, 1970

 

From Cool Cleveland contributor Jordan Davis.

Post categories:

• News
• Commentary
• History
• Jordan Davis
• Comedy
• Culture