BOZO: A man; fellow; guy; esp. a large, rough man or one with more brawn than brains. 1934: "Drive the heap, bozo!" Chandler, Finger Man. From Sp. dial. "boso" (from "vosotros") - you (pl.) which resembles a direct address.

DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG by Wentworth and Flexner, 1960

BUS: A circuit in a mixing board which carries signals from one or more inputs to any output or set of outputs.

AUDIO CRAFT by Randy Thom, 1982

BARNY or BARNEY: In the English circus, a fight. The closest American equivalent is clem.

CLEM: Its most common meaning is that of a general fight or riot between town hoodlums who attack shows and the circus or carnival employees. As an interjection, clem has replaced Hey rube as a battle cry for a forthcoming fight.

THE LANGUAGE OF AMERICAN POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT by Don B. Wilmeth, 1981

THEME OF FAIR IS SCIENCE

An epic theme! ... Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is molded by, new things ... Individuals, groups, entire races of men fall into step with the slow or swift movement of the march of science and industry ... "The Fair," wrote an observer, "considered as an electrical exposition only, would be well worth the attention of the world ... It is barely within the compass of any man's mind to conceive of what the future has in store for us."

Official Guide To A Century of Progress Exposition, 1933

"THE WORLD OF TOMORROW MUST BE BUILT WITH THE TOOLS OF TODAY."

This is the gospel we feel you will be compelled to preach as you return thoughtfully from the Fair to your various destinations, filled, yes, and perhaps even overcome by the simple grandeur of what you have seen, every bit of which tells you that a glorious future is at hand, that a new day, one in which mankind at last realizes the tremendous necessity for close cooperation, is dawning, and that science and industry will both serve you and in return demand your service, both simple and complex.

Views of The New York World'S Fair, 1939

"Garrison Keillor ... world's tallest radio humorist ... was drawn to the Eastern part of the U.S., he said. In the meantime Denmark, where he was 'just another bozo on the bus,' would be his home."

TIME, June 29, 1987

We were on tour, three-dimensionally staging Clem's assault on Dr. Memory and "the breaking of the 'Resident'," while the Nixon-Agnew Presidency was collapsing in showers of TV confetti in hotel rooms coast-to-coast. It was the spring of 1974. We had written BOZOS three years before and now borrowed its general form and "second act" for the touring show, called ANYTOWN USA - A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH FIRESIGN WORLD.

The first act of ANYTOWN, like side one of BOZOS, was shaped as a series of dioramic, holographic, disneylandish carnival rides. On stage we performed favorite chunks from our first three albums, leading into the intermission with our famous parody (by Phil Proctor's Ralph Spoilsport) of Molly Bloom's "yes I will yes" erotic fantasy from James Joyce's ULYSSES. On the album, the main ride had been drawn from images suggested by Norman Bel Geddes' 1939 "Futurama" - an audio trip through the idyllic, plexiglassed, Art Deco City of the (1960) Future, fantasized in model form as a smog-free and regularly-intersected paradise for the internal combustion engine - and the 1933 H(W)all of Science building, which visitors entered "to marvel at the interpretations of science it offers."

Incidentally, the 1933 Chicago Fair also gave us both the "Bozo" (a fire-breathing dragon of a roller-coaster which "takes us for a ride in the manner of Jonah") and the "Bus" (a miniature Greyhound for carting visitors between the exhibit buildings) of the title, as well as such key suggestions as the "rocket cars" of the Sky Ride, the mechanical mammoths and cavemen of The World A Million Years Ago, a "heart-gripping" reproduction of Abe Lincoln's Birthplace, giant toys and Oz figures, and the entire pleasure-centered Mid(Fun)way.

In 1974 we had the opportunity, in the person of Phil Proctor, to amplify and develop Clem's personality and his reasons for trying to invade the memory banks of the Hal-like computer masterminding the Future Fair. Phil's stage monologues developed this story: Clem, a shoeless computer programmer for the Fair, was fired after he re-programmed the Ralph Spoilsport Speedway ride to "smoke dope," i.e., slow down, free-associate, play. He has now re-entered the Fair and broken into the maintenance circuits of "Dr. Memory" in order to re-program it to "forget the past." As on the album, he succeeds in confusing the good Dr. into contradictory on/off instructions which sabotage the machine and destroy the fantastic illusions we had taken for Reality.

Forgetting the Past edits and erases (like the gap in the Nixon Tapes) the Memory of the Future. Pay no attention to the gang behind the curtain at your peril, dear listeners.

The recorded ending of BOZOS leaves us behind as gypsy fortune-tellers, segueing into our next adventure. On stage, three years after, we vanished Dr. Memory's compelling fantasies with a flash-pot. The show was really "just them boys, foolin' around" with a long-abandoned mainframe. A caretaker chases the hackers out and pulls the chain on the last work-light.

BOZOS came at the end of the Firesign Theatre's first, "Sixties" creative manifestation. No use waiting for the Electrician any more - he come an' he gone. The Seventies produced new illusions - Self, Sex and Psychic Phenomena - and everything we knew was proved wrong. When the Firesign "boys" enlisted in the Eighties as Fighting Clowns, they sang "Everyone's a Bozo on this Bus/Zips and Beaners sit-tin' next to us/Are you a hostage? Are you a spy?/Or just some Berzerker who's prepared to die?" Now, just in time for the Nineties, with Berliner Walls and blindfolds falling, here's another chance to go back Before The Beginning, plug into the bus, honk a few nozos and remember the Future with a few old friends. Welcome aboard!

David Ossman
Whidbey Island
December 1989

"Bozos" is the last of the four classic albums of the early Firesign Theatre and was written and recorded in 1971. It might be thought of as the first of our consciously Science Fiction pieces and although it attempts to span some time/space barriers, it exists primarily in a world just out of sight, in a future that seems to be just around the corner. At the height - so it would turn out - of our fame, interviewed and taken seriously for the first time, we felt ourselves under unusual scrutiny and pressure for the first time since Columbia had nearly dropped us just before we recorded our second album, "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All." (Available from Mobile Fidelity on Compact Disc:MFCD 834.)

We had tentatively settled upon a form that was to be reminiscent of the old "Bozo the Clown" children's records of the Forties and early Fifties. We did not fulfill that dream, with its musical page-turnings and breezy narration, but the idea of a Bozo certainly survived. The strain of the process of writing can be felt in the long, digressive opening which takes up almost all of Side One on the original, vinyl album. In it, a scientific and religious system that rules the Future is sketched in a number of impressions that are satires of the kind of script-writing for animated dummies that you hear and see at Disneyland. Clem, the main character of the piece, is only rarely heard and his motivations are maddeningly secret. This was a far cry from "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" - our third album - (also available from Mobile Fidelity on Compact Disc: MFCD 880) which immediately preceded this one, replete with complex characters and interwoven stories and media satires. Luckily, Bozos was an immediate success and has always been a favorite with a substantial portion of our listeners, especially those interested in science and Science Fiction.

The story is very concerned with computers although it was written in a time some years before the general availability of the Personal Computer. We drew a good deal of inspiration from the now-famous Eliza Program, an early attempt to elicit the questions and responses of a psychiatrist from a computer.

Bozos is also very much about the phenomenon of someone who can "Live in the future, now!" as the first voices of the fair tell Clem. Prescience and prediction of the future and the peculiar traps of fortune-telling are what this story is about. Clem is not who he seems, neither is Barney. (Much of our thinking about the future was conditioned by a mutual fascination for the history of the New York and Chicago World's Fairs and their exhibits about the future, in the General Motors pavilion in New York, or the Surreal, as in the Salvador Dali building at Chicago. But it is Wait Disney and Disneyland's peculiar slant on education that inspires most of what we will hear in the first half of the story.)

The first voice of the future is that of someone in the distance, over a loudspeaker, saying "... biting through, in this area." This reflects the throw of the I Ching coins, tossed by us upon beginning and ending any album in a process that by now was increasingly superstitious and not wholly inspirational. We had already been through a bitter but private breakup and had reformed. And the tumultuous social and political events of the early Seventies were mirrored on our own lives by the tragic deaths of two of our intimate associates, Jerry (Wacko) Brian and David Grimm. Circling whatever this idea was to be, like wolves under pressure, we had begun to think about the Future.

A man named Clem goes into the Future Fair by associating himself with a happy group of spectators called B.O.Z.O.s (Brotherhood of Zips and Others) whose mission in life seems to be to get together and do things together in a state we characterized as "mindless fellowship." He hooks up with a Bozo named Barney, who doesn't like to "clone alone." In the background, we can hear the receding sound of the ice cream wagon that is being chased by George Tirebiter at the end of "Dwarf." We hear a bus equipped with loudspeakers through which speak the voice that is "biting through." As it pulls to a stop at the station on Dutch Elm Street, we hear the voice of Clem. Practically the first thing he says is "Holy Fudd!" Science is God in the world of the future and Sir Sidney Fudd is His prophet and we will soon learn why.

Several lovable, life-size holograms leap from the bus and entertain and usher the passengers on board. They are large cowboy vegetables, evidently so familiar to everyone as to need no introduction and they sing of Another World, the Shadows:

"We're back from the Shadows again
Out where an In-jun's your friend
Where the vegetables are green
And you can pee right into the stream."

They seem to hearken back to some idyllic American time when no environmental conscience was needed and in which no Indian would have a discouraging word about his treatment, some slap-happy, Disney-like approximation of a shared longing for an imaginary past seen from the vantage of an imperfect present. Even when they quarrel - which is frequently - they tell each other something that will come to be a byword of our journey, that fighting is "out of style." Although there are evidences, here and there, that the real world is not free of fighting, (particularly in Hideo Knutt's Boltadrome, a mobile carnival of violence that must attract a more rowdy, sideshow crowd) it is clear that Whoever has programmed this future does not want its inhabitants to fight one another.

Once inside the bus, the ride to the future itself is accomplished by surrounding simulation screens and disembodied voices that trick the innocent Bozos into thinking that they are actually flying. Since they got on a bus, what must happen is that the bus simply drives to the site of the Fair, but they believe ("Do you suppose that was simulated?" askes Barney) what they see and hear much as we had been believing what we saw on TV in those end-of-Vietnam and beginning-of-Watergate times.

We are introduced to the rubber lines, moving colored walkways that transport visitors in the Future Fair. We learn incidentally that the Bozos - and presumably nearly everyone else in this world - wear wigs that must be locked down in flight and inflatable shoes that can walk on water. Clem, it seems, gave up all shoes years ago. By now, any serious Firesign Theatre listener knows that "taking off your shoes" serves us as an analogy for childhood itself and its attendant dreams of freedom. Clem's ambivalence and rootlessness project the image of a slightly bored and pleasantly childlike person with nothing much to do. In fact, he is something quite different but we will not learn the truth until the very end. The Bozos are a self-satisfied, cheerful lot, especially in the person of their "Chairman" Barney, (is this some implication that the Bozos are, in fact, communists or at the very least Maoists, somehow integrated into a capitalist world of the future? Hmmmm. If so, it's a cheerful, middle-class kind of Maosim and an interesting prediction in itself when set against the tumultuous events in the Eastern Europe of the early Nineties.)

The simulation that begins to surround Clem and Barney already shows the wearing and cracking of age and repetition. The scientific "knowledge" that is displayed is addled and mixed in strange ways, as if truth were less important than entertainment and entertainment meant to manipulate its audience by drawing on such basics as fear of the night, fear of science and fear of knowledge itself. As Clem rather aimlessly gets on the Yellow Rubber Line which will lead him to an exhibit called the Wall of Science, he seems to be just killing time, just letting the random events of the Fair move him in any old direction.

The Path of Science that leads to the Wall of Science is a recreation of popular myth of the social and intellectual development of Man. First we hear a kind of portentous telling of primitive Myth, the story of the Turtle and his Mother, a kind of arboreal, incestuous mixing of species and genera which produces a mythic figure, the walking Catfish, so human and so male that he carries two enormous testicles which are also the Sun and the Moon of our terrestrial world. This myth is roundly ridiculed as primitive naturism and is quickly replaced by animatronic scenes which detail the comfortable, self-satisfied view of Mankind that places scientific knowledge at the top of a pyramidal view of history and Man at the top of the Ladder of Progress. Full of his new-found power, Man drops a great fecal load of knowledge over the earth to fertilize it and make it grow.

The idiotic antics Of Sir Sidney Fudd, who by knocking a woman over invents the basic principle on which this civilization seems built - that "if you push something hard enough, it will fall over" - and the equally adolescent version of the invention of Technology by Tom Teslacle and Dick Beddoes that follows, would convince any Bozo that Science has solved the problems of the Present and has led us to a happy Future, wherein we may interact with a simulated President who seems to exist in a Model Government of the Future, both of them wholly dependent on electricity and cocaine (or do you think that the little boxcars are filled with industrial sugar water? Don't be naive.) Cocaine and electricity are the life's blood of the Bureau of Western Mythology, controlled by Chester Cadaver and presided over by President Springhead himself. It is one great system, fed by nonsense knowledge and skewed mimicry of nature which has resulted in this Future Fair.

(There is a temptation by some writers about the Firesign Theatre to look for some systematic political metaphor in this Path of Science and while it is true that we most often use electricity and power interchangeably and that a good deal of our work qualifies as social satire, it is equally interesting to examine the biological aspects that seem most superficial; the simple sexual ones. The primitive confusions of the Turtle and his Mother and the Catfish are all concerned with procreation and, by extension, evolution. Fudd's Law and Teslacle's deviant, although both are childish male adolescent ways of viewing sex, still are a good enough imitation of unruly Nature to lead to a kind of Frankensteinian Pushover Machine (called, presumably, "Nancy") that produces electricity through some mechanical sex act or another.)

Man, still without shoes, still living a dream of adolescent freedom, only divines the world around him from his own limited experience, entirely male. He sees the sun and the moon as is own testicles and he sees the power that issues therefrom to be capable of taming and controlling an unruly and presumably dangerously feminine world. It may not be Science as we know it, but it's good enough for the Future Fair.

We are now entering a world less technical than mysterious as Clem asserts himself and begins to do battle with the very computerized entity that operates the Future Fair, known as Dr. Memory. Clem does not seem to have access codes that would lead him reliably right through to the memory of the Future Computer but he comes up with a series of good ideas as he is swept along and eventually he penetrates through the many defenses and comes face to face with the Doctor himself. What Clem does have is a mysterious Key, an almost-occult talisman, a phrase, a question: "Why does the Porridge Bird lay its egg in the air?" It is with this phrase that Clem begins to lead us through several onion-skin layers of reality back to himself as himself, a man who lives in a place of No Electricity, where horses are ridden around in the wagon rather than having to pull, where it's "all downhill from here," where the Porridge Bird and the Little Sailor and other figures of myth and freedom populate the real world of what will turn out to be a fantasy after all. I suppose the best name for that place would be "The Shadows."

The first person to go before the interactive exhibit of the President is known only as Jim. He is a nervous and outgoing man, Bozo-like in his sincere desire to believe in the system. But he lives in the ghetto, he is poor, and he is beleaguered by vermin and snakes and insects as if afflicted by Old Testament curses. The President can only respond in set answers and government-speak trivialities as it creaks through its programmed responses. Jim is swept away by the Rubber Line to be replaced with Barney whom we haven't seen in a clown's age. Barney does something odd. Failing all over himself to praise and congratulate the absurd mechanical President, he inadvertently utters the word "stop" and sure enough, the President stops talking. Unknown to him, workers service and maintain these animatronic figures by communicating verbally to the Central Computer. The first command is always "Stop." We presume that if Clem did not know this before, he learns it as he stands waiting, next in line. Finally, when it is his turn, he assumes the guise of Worker and steps the computer through its maintenance routine and into an area of the program where he can attempt to read Memory directly. He seems to be getting closer as the President begins to spew out statistics of its operations and we are witness to some of the internal chatter of the Central Computer as it runs the Fair outside. He finds a gate into the pure "machine language" on which the computer's intelligence is built, that is, the English language itself. Catching a random pattern, he tricks the President into actual contact with Dr. Memory himself and he carefully, almost cavalierly, offers his verbal talisman to the machine. The system immediately shuts off his access to Memory by physically breaking the President. The President creaks to a halt and the rubber line swiftly moves Clem outside and onto the Funway.

He is quickly spotted by Barney the Bozo, flushed with success from his talk with the President and raring to explore the wonders of the midway. As messages begin to multiply over the loudspeakers calling for Clem's presence in the "Hospitality Shelter," he realizes that he must hide and so he goes with Barney who chatters mindlessly, reciting current jokes and sayings as they gaze up at the fronts of sideshow amusements meant to assuage the heroic and violent urges that presumably still haunt even the future. Mark Time's outlaw Ghost Ship and Hideo Knutt's Boltadrome (as seen on "Who Asked For It!") are animatronic nightmares of animal mutilation and servo-violence and Clem tries to get Barney to get aboard either of them but Barney is so paralyzed by the need to make an actual independent decision that he delays long enough for one of the vegetable holograms, Artie Choke, to find Clem and try to herd him to the Security area. Artie does not want to alert other patrons that something is wrong, so it tries to childishly trick Clem. At first Clem thinks about escaping and then he suddenly seems to become angry with all the pretense that he must use to assuage Barney's sincere belief in the reality of the simulations. In a moment, he uses Worker commands to reveal Artie's vulnerability and general formlessness once the holographic aspects of his program are swept aside. Angry at Barney's childlike, superstitious beliefs, he goes even further, demonstrating his ability to get the holographic program to clone a mirror image of Clem himself and make it appear as real as Artie Choke. To do this, he uses a password with Dr. Memory's name in it. All seems well until his clone turns on him, suddenly controlled by the security system. He again tries to communicate with Dr. Memory and at the same time tries to get rid of the Clem-Clone by sending it "back to the Shadows." The world around the Clone disappears as if in a dream and it is faced finally with Dr. Memory.

The Clem-Clone is a program; in fact the Computer identifies it as a "gypsy" program, What Clem did was use the Computer's ability to mimic the world around it to create an unauthorized program that, by being commanded to return to the Shadows, inexorably hunts down and destroys the memory itself by using logic and the words of Clem's magic talisman.

The Gypsy Program works its way laboriously through the literalities of the machine language, the chatter of the Fair's operations, and the security programs in order to finally confront the Memory directly. Memory is seen as consisting only of the words "yes" and "no" and a humming state of readiness. Confused finally by the gypsy program, Dr. Memory blows up the Future Fair in an explosion of fireworks, Memory turning memory back on itself in a recursive assault on logic. By getting the machine to admit that it remembers the future he proves that in fact, the future is past and therefore we are returned to the present in a flash.

The present is the world of the Gypsy and it is the true time in which this tale has been told. The figure that we have seen as Clem is in fact the Gypsy, a fortune-teller and benevolent shyster who practices his trade in a gypsy wagon in the company of other Gypsies. He has been telling the future of Barney. The story is now seen to be a vision in the twin crystal balls, a vision of Bamey's future. We are back home in some mythological Alternate Present and we have been dealing with the nature of Time itself. The magic talisman - whose exact meaning we do not need to know - is a little piece of that real world, a place where Porridge Birds do lay their eggs in the air for some good reason or another.

Incidentally, the Little Sailor is a duck. The horses ride in the wagon. This present is a place where man talks to the animals, where eggs are suspended in air and where a Catfish walks like a man. This present is the Shadows, again.