Dear Friends was the Firesign Theatre's shorthand for the mesmerizing jargon of preachers on the radio. We understood that preaching on the radio was a natural abuse of power, yet preachers on the radio were an unimaginably fertile source of humor. The phrase got to be dropped in at the end of sentences and became a kind of theme reflecting our own ambivalences. In the basements or attics of radio stations public and private, we broadcast to the supposed mentally infirm and the imagined eternally sleepless, the constantly inconsistent, the lonely and the shut-in and the Friends of Radio who had found out that we - like them - were out there. Radio gets to you, like minor-league baseball, or small-town stock car racing or books hidden under the covers and read by flashlight. Voices would come out of the darkness and they were ours. It was irresistable.

My favorite parts of those crazy radio shows were the fairly rare times when we would just go on with no prepared scripts or readings, just improvising with each other, knowing each other's minds and rhythms; four minds working - not as one - but as four together. There were times when the results would fling me to the floor, choking with throttled laughter. You had to throttle it so as not to destroy the broadcast, the liveness of it all. If you let too much laughter go, it would become part of the improvisation and everyone would rise to the bait, treating it as improvisation as well. Big fun.

There's something pretty interesting in four humans with their heads up and their eyes closed, four talking humans in the wee small hours of the smokey studio in the imagined night, feeling each others pauses and soliloquies, knowing each has the right to fill up the space and take the stage now and again. Not all of this was funny, to be sure, but you always had the right to be serious and that in itself was funny.

Phil Austin
Los Angeles
April, 1992

We were between records. Our first big tour and the album that followed - Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers - had filled the first half of 1970. In September we were back on the air from whence we had come - the studios of KPFK, Los Angeles' community radio station. We did twenty-one weekly shows between September 9, 1970 and February 17, 1971. Unlike Radio Free Oz, which had really been Peter's program, this was unmistakably One Hour With Us, with The Firesign Theatre, whatever that was. What you heard was who we were at the moment.

We had virtually no scripts, mostly no plan of action. We brought into the studio what interested us from the daily news, short bits we might have written, notebooks and sketchpads, a harmonica, a violin, and a squeeky pickle. We brought ourselves, wives, girlfriends, fans, a producer named Bill McIntyre who tried hard to make sure we Dear Friends stayed on speaking terms with each other, and an engineer known as The Live Earl Jive, whose choices of music, sound effects and reverb were strictly his own. When the red light went on, so did we all.

After Dear Friends stumbled off the air, we wrote I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and, in our spare time, put together a 12-record set of hour-long broadcasts, which we offered to the underground FM Rockers. Only one hundred sets were pressed, and these are now among the rarest of Firesign artifacts. From those twelve hours, 74 minutes of short cuts were untimely ripped, in hopes that we would finally get some air time on stations unwilling to play an entire comedy album.

Now 21 years have passed. The Nix is still around, the Hoove is not. Big Boom-Boom Air Farce Base has been shut down. Deputy Dan still has no friends. Giant Toads and Dukes of Madness have continued to arise on the right. The Balliol Brothers hang around the stoplight on the Left. None of them will find this record funny. But then, being Power Hungry, they can't afford to find anything funny. I expect you can. And, fortunately,for you, the CD format allows you to hear something like an original Dear Friends broadcast without flipping sides. A jagged rhythm of jokes, commercials, sketches, improvs, sermons, poems, laffs. Sudden riffs on language, lists of words, neighborhood dialects. Some whatchu-might-call "audio art." And so, Deeee-ar Frieeeends... press Play.

David Ossman
Whidbey Island, Washington
April First, 1992

What I remember most about all the Firesign radio experiences, from the very beginning to the last syndicated manifestation, is the sense of FUN - the chance to let the "imp" out of the bottle of improvisation!

I remember keenly the sense of childish anticipation I felt driving to a studio where we were to gather and broadcast LIVE for little more than the sheer LOVE of it.

Mainly I remember the sense that we were all part of a very unique theatre company, composed of 4 mad, unrestricted, totally unpredictable actor/writer/poet/artists - sharing the thrill of raw discovery with an eager, supportive and open-minded audience, some of whom would occupy the floor in our cramped studio or laugh like mimes under glass in the out-of-control room.

There was always the potential of discovering an idea or format that would later become an album; and often someone would pass around a script, hot off the typewriter, for a cold reading or try out a piece of personal material.

There was a real sense of DANGER - never knowing what our partners had prepared - or not prepared; and never certain, as the program progressed, what stupid, totally inappropriate sound effect would be introduced by our warped engineer, demanding an immediate adjustment as we toyed with some obscure, hastily arrived-at theme.

I remember the JOY of breaking up my fellow Firesigns with some particularly loony piece of writing, scrap of "found art," or inspired idea.

Part of the adventure, with so much performance history behind us, was the sense of TRUST, which allowed us to throw out an idea and watch in awe as it was snatched up, passed around, devoured and digested - onky to be hurled out again in some hideous, hilarious, undreamt of form.

The image that keeps emerging as I pen these remembrances is a sense of FLYING like a circus trapeze artist, swinging from one comic peg to the next, and, suspended from the strong arms of my dear fiends, Pete, Phil, and Dave - experiencing giddy surrealistic flights of fancy, in and - ON THE AIR!

It's ironic that our last major 4-man radio collaboration was back at KPFK where it had all begun. We produced some political stuff later for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, but it was nothing like the longform experience.

I miss that wild freeform comic jam. The Firesign Theatre was born in improvisation. I believe all true art starts there - in that magic moment at the point of creation - the "now" we're supposed to live in to be truly happy.

It was a live radio show. Parts of it became a record.

Now it's a CD.

How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?

You hold the answer in your hand. Now put it in your head.

Phil Proctor
Los Angeles
March 24, 1992