One of my favorite tracks on the last Beatles record is I Want You (She’s So Heavy). It’s a perfect setup, the last session where the Beatles all played together with their friend Billy Preston — who’d joined the abortive Get Back live recording sessions filmed in January of the same year. Also the first song recorded for Abbey Road, the sessions actually began not in EMI’s studio but the independent Olympic. By its completion, the track contained a speculative journey into the future of the group — 8 track recording, the first Beatle album mixed only in stereo, Moog synthesizer overdubbed, and John Lennon’s brute force physical edit of the master. Designed as the last track of Side One, Lennon was acting out the final moments of the band’s existence as he made good on his promise to leave the group a year earlier.
As we recorded this edition of the Gang last Sunday, this was the beginning of a change in the structure, and likely the future of the show. We’d settled into a core membership, but the gnawing reality of the state of the country and its economy was making it more and more challenging to preserve the original feeling of the sessions. As Mike told me when he quit a few days earlier, he just wasn’t having fun anymore. The feeling was mutual; in the age of Trump, who did?
The Gang was a direct lift from the early days of my career, when I pitched and then directed a live concert filming and recording of the Firesign Theatre at Pacifica Radio’s KPFK studios in North Hollywood. The group’s label Columbia Records had a special arrangement negotiated after the success of their first record that provided them with whatever they needed in terms of studio time to be recouped after the record’s release. This deal produced the revolutionary Firesign style of using recording techniques and effects to create multilayered comedy records that survived, and prospered, repeated listenings and limited touring of the group. The film was an opportunity to enhance the marketing of the group by touring the film with a popular anti-marijuana Hollywood political tract called Reefer Madness. Firesign’s core audience was and remains fueled by reefer and the emerging FM radio stations in major college markets. The group’s record deal allowed us to park a CBS 16-track recording truck outside the gig and overdub effects, crowds, and the Firesign secret sauce a few days later. Rolling Stone called it “a loony mindtweaker of a film.”
I’m making things up when I say secret sauce. The Firesign Theatre would gather in the living room of Phil Austin’s house overlooking the Pasadena Hills and assemble, improvise, and generally make each other laugh around the table. Like the Beatles, they were a democracy with a paramount rule: only was it in if they all agreed. The conversation was magic. Phil Proctor would manufacture and assemble a city of buildings and tabloid monsters they called Fud, Peter Bergman would be on the phone assembling political and cultural events (he invented 1967’s canonical Love-Ins on his early AM radio show) while Austin played a stream of country and western on his acoustic guitar, and David Ossman held court by typing the results into his Selectric or whatever the hell it was.
I’m not saying what we do on the Gang comes close to what these prophetic giants did, but the process is what we emulate, rarely but perceptibly to those who know what they’re looking for. And when a writing session blew up months later and Phil threw everybody else out of the house, I blamed myself. But the truth was they just weren’t having fun anymore. Definitely not that day.
Each episode of the Gang has its moment of challenge, where we transition from what we don’t want to talk about to what we could. The Apple Vision Pro is hot and not. Keith, who is in the rationalize phase of having bought the damn thing, talks about how brave Apple is. Not buying it, says Brent. None of us agree with him, but the thought sits stubbornly in the air. Reviewers call the thing prophetic, the future pulled out of the blah blah blah and for only 39,000 dollars you can what what what. I am sure this will be something, because if we can’t play Stanley Kubrick and invent the future, then we have to get a real job, and oh, by the way, we’re being GPTed out of work and yet the stock market is OK with that. No wonder Trump is leading by 7. Or it’s going to be fine because the Republican Party is finding new ways to dismember its appeal to the suburban middle class women that are the Democrat’s only hope. And what about the young people? Personally, the young people are busy with other things, like moving back home when they know better.
I continue to like Nikki Haley’s run at the White House. Many people think she’s toast, but my bet is she’ll stay in at least to the Republican convention. I really don’t think she can help herself, given Trump’s inability to generate unforced errors over her temerity to elude his autocratic tendencies. The question is: how can you vote for the positions Haley takes? First, I am aware she is a Republican. Since she won 43 % of the New Hampshire vote by pursuing an Independent version of the Republican playbook, I like the fact that she stayed in the race long enough to outlast the positions of the rest of these clowns. If she were more like her rivals, I’d like her all the less, so enraging Donald and ignoring the rest seems to be a good choice. She promises to pardon Trump if he’s convicted of a felony; I wish Hillary would have done the same in 2016 and saved the electric bill on her private server.
How Time Flys