Twenty-five years ago, everybody knew who Nick Danger was: "Los Angeles! He walks again by night! Out of the fog, into the smog -- relentlessly, ruthlessly!" "I wonder where Ruth is?" Nick, a clueless detective cut from cloth left over from Jake Gittes and Sam Spade, was star of a fifteen-minute routine titled "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye," on the Firesign Theatre's second album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All? The Nick Danger routine was a loving homage to the hard-boiled dicks of film noir and 40s radio drama. But he was funny -- very funny. So funny, in fact, that to this day you can get aficianados to do five minutes by simply saying, "It had been snowing in Santa Barbara ever since the top of the page..." or "Why, that's just a two-bit ring from a Cracker Back Jox!"

It seems a little strange now, I suppose, but comedy records used to be very popular. Jonathan Winters and Bill Cosby regularly released concert recordings, as did many less well known talents. The Firesign Theatre was the counterculture's answer to the "establishment" acts -- although comedy has always been, by its very nature, somewhat subversive. Firesign certainly took that ball and ran with it, producing at least two of the funniest, most interesting, and enduring classics of recorded comedy, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, full-length character-rich excursions into a future that was half Buckminster Fuller, half Hollywood wilderness and half Orwellian nightmare. Yes, that's three halves, but in Firesign's world, where James Joyce lives cheek-by-jowl with Chucko the Rocket Robot, a coke-crazed Sherlock Holmes and psychic Nino the Mind-Boggler, double-think is a necessity.

Since the days of their greatest fame, the individual members of the Firesign Theatre -- Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Phil Proctor -- have gone on to a fair bit of commercial success. (Net-aware readers of this review may well be familiar with Bergman's hilarious CD-based game parody, PYST.) The group did a critically well-received twenty-fifth anniversary tour a few years ago, and on the strength of that they caught a spark and began working on this, their first new album in fifteen years.

Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death doesn't quite have the satirical edge of prime Firesign, but it sure has some good laughs -- a Princess Diana robot worshipped by the masses ("...just as virtually beautiful in full digital as she was in the fab flesh"), New Age self-sex advocate Dr. Onan WinqueDinque, the century's biggest disaster movie, Glacier ("It's coming -- slowly -- very slowly -- to a theatre near you") -- and if the narrative isn't as compelling as Peorgie Tirebiter's odyssey through the movie business of the future (or is it the past?) in Dwarf, or Clem Clone's quest to disable the Future Fair's omniscient computer overseer in Bozos, that's okay. Once again Firesign has seen the enemy, and, as always, it is us. Only now, The Firesign Theatre is a part of the establishment they so ruthlessly ("I wonder where Ruth is?") excoriated in their youth. It's almost as if they can't quite figure out what to do about that. But I'm willing to give them a chance -- it's nice to think that the group may have another masterpiece of science fiction in them. Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death isn't it, but I'll take whatever I can get. The album, which was debuted on the web via RealAudio, is beautifully recorded and produced, reflecting Firesign's own long-time experience with radio. It's a wonderful alternative to Books on Tape, that's for goddam sure!

"If it isn't Now, who cares?"