We’ve been shooting reds and yellows all day…

The night before my first college vacation I went with my friend Larry to the Batts, to visit his girlfriend Karen, whom he’d met the second day of school.

It didn’t last.

But it went on a good long time. They turned out to be opposites. She an artist, he a social scientist. But at this point they didn’t know that. They had their attractiveness in common. Add in a dollop of niceness and you have a newly-minted relationship.

Which gave me entry into the aforementioned Batts, the colloquial name for "Battelle Hall", a sprawling two story edifice where each and every freshman girl resided. You might say "woman", but at age eighteen, you’re on the cusp of transition. Boys are horny, but they don’t know what to do with themselves other than show up in the right place and hope and pray.

And the Batts was the right place.

It’s hard being a hanger-on. You’ve got entry to the club, but no real status. You’ve got no room to move, to exhibit your personality, because if you commit a faux pas, you might be ejected. And that would hurt.

So we journey up to Karen’s room and there’s a cluster of girls, maybe four or five. And not a single guy in sight. And putting my best foot forward, which was not always easy for me to do, I spoke to Judy. Who spoke back. And I got that tingling inside. That this could be romance.

And I had forty minutes to contemplate it, because that’s how long it took us to listen to "Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers".

This was Firesign Theatre’s third album. The first two I only knew by title, "Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him" and "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All". The latter, in addition to having an eminently quotable title, featured a memorable cover, which you only had to see once. There was a row of revolutionaries, akin to the dictators in "Bananas", and they had their arms in the air hailing Lenin and Marx. Only, in this case, it was John Lennon and Groucho Marx.

Creativity. We marvel in its presence. How do people come up with this stuff?

And music was the bleeding edge. Whether it be the Beatles, Frank Zappa or this comedy group, if you were interested in seeing limits tested, you put on a vinyl record.

It’s so different from today. Where so-called "artists" are looking where to sell out. In the sixties and seventies, the Fortune 500 was afraid of the musicians. And the musicians had contempt for the businessmen, who were abusing the planet and marginalizing the proletariat.

You only had to listen to "Don’t Crush That Dwarf" once to remember the catch phrases. The adventures of the Tirebiters were just that fascinating.

And I’d like to tell you that when we returned from vacation, Judy was interested. But that would be a lie. All these years later I’m thinking her distance could have been about anxiety more than disinterest, guess I’ll never know.

But during that vacation I purchased "Don’t Crush That Dwarf". And I subsequently acquired the even further out there, "I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus".

Follow the yellow rubber line…

This vinyl theatre penetrated the counterculture. The Grateful Dead embraced Bozoism. Today people think Bozo’s a clown, but if you were hip forty years ago, you knew bozos were more than that, you learned about them from the Firesign Theatre.

It was a club. Not so small, and its members could quote lines back and forth ad infinitum. We hung our culture upon them.

And if you’re under forty, you’ve got no idea what I’m speaking of.

Maybe if you’re under fifty.

Because very little lasts.

But that does not mean that which fades has no value.

But to understand the Firesign Theatre you’d have to have lived through Vietnam, experienced the absurdity of our politicians, you’d have to want to stay out more than buy in.

Maybe, with the inability to penetrate the upper class, we’ll see a burst of creativity in the arts. College graduates will be consumed with more than creating new investment vehicles.

Peter Bergman went to Yale. And he didn’t go to work for Goldman Sachs. He went into radio, not the Ryan Seacrest Clear Channel make me puke terrestrial of today, but the public airwaves of yesteryear. And while doing a show at KPFK, the Firesign Theatre was born.

I don’t need you to listen to the records.

But I do need you to understand the culture of days gone by. When Peter Bergman and his compatriots were counterculture heroes and affected society more than Ivy League dropouts desiring to clean up in Silicon Valley.

Peter Bergman didn’t O.D. He didn’t go out with a bang. He lived to the ripe old age of 72 before the cancer got him.

It’s gonna get all of us. Best to try and leave your mark before it does.