21 March 2011

Dear Friends

Peter Bergman and Firesign Theatre producer and archivist, Taylor Jessen, discuss the box set of Firesign Theatre radio shows (1970-72), Duke of Madness Motors (released February 2011), featuring over 80 hours of MP3 audio on a DVD-ROM and a 108 page full-color book.


When I first leafed through the book, I knew I had a Rossini comment to add . . . the interview is 67% well worth watching, and let Peter Bergman speak for himself:

Firesign Theatre: Duke of Madness Motors from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.



. . . which is great fun for about 21:49, and then gets topical, and the host is ‘candid’ in a way which kills the brilliant soul of the prior discussion. Bergman does take part at a plane which reflects well upon himself.



Big kudoi to Taylor Jessen for putting the audio feast which is Duke of Madness Motors together.

. . . in his own comments in the book, he makes a fun musical error . . . which first (it being a humor book, after all) I almost took for a joke, attributing the famous Flight of the Bumblebee to Rossini. (Don’t make me tell you who the actual composer was.) But all the other composer-&-title match-ups were accurate (including Grofe, Prokofiev & Liszt) — and, of course, no one is going to fault Taylor Jessen for a minor slip like that. Apart perhaps from the heirs of Rimsky-Korsakov (oh, what a giveaway).

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