How to Be in Two Places at Once (The Organist ep. 91)

In late 2017, when I was first figuring out how to write about the Firesign Theatre, Andrew Leland offered me a space (and a producer, Myke Dodge Weiskopf) on his excellent podcast, sponsored by KCRW and McSweeney’s, The Organist. Early on — before I decided that media archaeology would be the book’s through line — I was thinking a lot about the way people listened to Firesign Theatre albums: almost always in a group, intensively, in the dark, often stoned. I had also heard that Firesign had a cult following among soldiers in Vietnam, and (more specifically) that the legendary KCRW reggae DJ Roger Steffens had made hundreds of Firesign tapes for soldiers in the field during his two-year deployment in Saigon. This episode includes clips from my interview with Roger Steffens, who definitely had some stories to tell, and from my first weekend of interviews with Firesign’s David Ossman. And it also features the poet John Koethe, describing his experiences with the obsessive Firesign fan John Ashbery. Although my book ended up going in several different directions after this, I can see how some of its ideas developed out of this early piece. Thanks, Andrew, for letting me put this together. Every episode of the Organist is worth hearing, but Firesign fans might be especially an episode that slightly precedes mine, Clive Desmond’s “A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream.” (Also, for any listening Angelinos —> I regret that there is one error in the piece: Firesign’s 1970 radio program broadcast on KPPC, not the newer KPCC. If I’d been one year further into research, that mistake wouldn’t have happened.) Thanks for reading Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremybraddock.substack.com