A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and '70s told through the story of the period's most important forgotten comedy group. This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. At the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock explores how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture. He deploys a vast range of material sources, drawing on numerous interviews and writing in tune with the group's obsessive and ludic reflections—on multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and more—to focus on Firesign's work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975. This ebullient act of media archaeology reveals Firesign Theatre as authors of a comic utopian pessimism that will inspire twenty-first-century recording arts and urge us to engage the massive technological changes of our own era.

“How quickly we forget! Not so many decades ago, we were all listening to Vaughn Meader’s First Family album, Steve Martin on LP, or Columbia’s I Can Hear It Now. Alas, spoken word records, like so many aspects of phonography, have been relegated to garage sales and footnotes. Finally, thanks to Jacob Smith’s Spoken Word, this important form of entertainment and culture is receiving the attention it so richly deserves.” —Rick Altman, author of Silent Film Sound “Jacob Smith’s engaging study of spoken word LPs is as revelatory as it is welcome. No other book has so thoroughly explored a phenomenon that was unique to the 1950s and 1960s, when LPs were the only widely available medium that allowed consumers to enjoy repeated exposure to recorded material. —Krin Gabbard, author of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture "Smith's work contains historical material that few scholars have studied and many people have never even heard of. ... The grouping of these unique case studies results in new connections to and between various performance styles, materials, and industries." —Susan Murray, author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars

This book addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the explosive appropriation of Indigenous identities in the 1960s. It reveals a largely unknown network of Native, non-Indian, and neo-Indian actors who spread misrepresentations of the Hopi that they created through interactions with the Hopi Traditionalist faction of the 1940s through 1980s. Significantly, many non-Hopis involved adopted Indian identities during this time, becoming “neo-Indians.” Exploring the new social field that developed to spread these ideas, Hopis and the Counterculture meticulously traces the trajectories of figures such as Ammon Hennacy, Craig Carpenter, Frank Waters, and the Firesign Theatre, among others. Drawing on insights into the interplay between primitivism, radicalism, stereotyping, and identity, Haley expands on concepts from scholars such as Roy Harvey Pearce’s notion of “isolated radicals” and Jonathan Friedman’s observations regarding the ascendancy of primitivism amid global crises. Haley scrutinizes the roles played by non-Hopi actors and the timing behind the widespread popularization of Hopi religious practices.

What do Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Cassandra Wilson, and Ani DiFranco have in common? In Highway 61 Revisited, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro says the answer is jazz--not just the musical style, but jazz's distinctive ambiance and attitudes. As legendary bebop rebel Charlie Parker once put it, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." Unwinding that Zen-like statement, Santoro traces how jazz's existential art has infused outstanding musicians in nearly every wing of American popular music--blues, folk, gospel, psychedelic rock, country, bluegrass, soul, funk, hiphop--with its parallel process of self-discovery and artistic creation through musical improvisation. Taking less-traveled paths through the last century of American pop, Highway 61 Revisited maps unexpected musical and cultural links between such apparently disparate figures as Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Herbie Hancock; Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. Focusing on jazz's power to connect, Santoro shows how the jazz milieu created a fertile space "where whites and blacks could meet in America on something like equal grounds," and indeed where art and entertainment, politics and poetry, mainstream culture and its subversive offshoots were drawn together in a heady mix whose influence has proved both far-reaching and seemingly inexhaustible. Combining interviews and original research, and marked throughout by Santoro's wide ranging grasp of cultural history, Highway 61 Revisited offers readers a new look at--and a new way of listening to--the many ways jazz has colored the entire range of American popular music in all its dazzling profusion.

Politics, Humor, and the Counterculture discusses the post-war period (1945-1972) through the lenses of three artists: Ken Nordine, Lenny Bruce, and Firesign Theatre. Their humor cut through the hypocrisy of the Cold War and the prevailing culture and expanded our horizons. From the Beats to the peace and civil rights movements, these humorists illuminate America from their unique perspectives. Vwadek P. Marciniak highlights the poetic nature of humor as well as its insights on our political and social habits: addiction, conformity, marketing, and fear. The modern is giving way to the post-modern, the fixed to an existential attitude: humanism and humor.

Semiotics concepts from a design perspective, offering the foundation for a coherent theory of graphic design as well as conceptual tools for practicing designers. Graphic design has been an academic discipline since the post-World War II era, but it has yet to develop a coherent theoretical foundation. Instead, it proceeds through styles, genres, and imitation, drawing on sources that range from the Bauhaus to deconstructionism. In FireSigns, Steven Skaggs offers the foundation for a semiotic theory of graphic design, exploring semiotic concepts from design and studio art perspectives and offering useful conceptual tools for practicing designers. Semiotics is the study of signs and significations; graphic design creates visual signs meant to create a certain effect in the mind (a “FireSign”). Skaggs provides a network of explicit concepts and terminology for a practice that has made implicit use of semiotics without knowing it. He offers an overview of the metaphysics of visual perception and the notion of visual entities, and, drawing on the pragmatic semiotics of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, looks at visual experience as a product of the action of signs. He introduces three conceptual tools for analyzing works of graphic design—semantic profiles, the functional matrix, and the visual gamut—that allow visual “personality types” to emerge and enable a greater understanding of the range of possibilities for visual elements. Finally, he applies these tools to specific analyses of typography.

Finally available after thirty years, MARCHING TO SHIBBOLETH collects all the words (and sound effects) to Firesign's favorite audio comedies of the Seventies, including Waiting For the Electrician; How Can You Be In Two Places At Once; Nick Danger; Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers; I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and The Giant Rat of Sumatra. MARCHING TO SHIBBOLETH, now under the imprint of Bear Manor Books, reproduces both of Firesign's "Big Books," originally published in 1972 and 1974 by Straight Arrow. Designed by Jon Goodchild and Richard Silverstein, the texts are full of photographs, collages and weirdly cool typography typical of High Seventies Style. Phil Proctor edited the visuals and David Ossman the album transcripts for Firesign. Alan Rinzler was editor for Straight Arrow. Both books have been collector's items for a couple of decades. Collecting both under one cover puts the best known Firesign works together for the first time and provides readers with the unique word-for-word wordplay which was often confusing - er, confused with that of James Joyce during Firesign's heyday. The four major titles - Electrician, How Can You Be, Dwarf and Bozos collectively present Firesign's prescient look at technology, the media, American history and paranoia (especially in the classic "Beat The Reaper " gameshow.) The Giant Rat is their tribute to British "Goon Show" humor and Nick Danger, Third Eye has become the classic send-up of both the "noir" detective story and Golden Age radio.

This book speaks to the professional administrator who must set up, configure, maintain, and troubleshoot a multi-tasked network environment. Rob Kirkland attacks the technology at the professional level, with practical-hands-on assistance to get Domino 5 running.