In November, Proctor was in Los Angeles looking for acting work and watching the Sunset Strip curfew riots. According to Austin, the show "featured everybody who was anybody in the artistic world who passed through LA." Guests included the band Buffalo Springfield and Andy Warhol. On returning to the US, Bergman started a late-night listener-participation talk show, Radio Free Oz, on July 24, 1966, on listener-sponsored KPFK FM in Los Angeles, working with producers Phil Austin and David Ossman. Also that year, he saw the Beatles in concert, which gave him the inspiration to form a four-man comedy group. Bergman went backstage and struck up a friendship with Milligan. In 1965, Bergman spent a year working in England on the BBC television program Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life and went to see surrealist comedian Spike Milligan in a play. Bergman studied playwriting and collaborated as lyricist with Austin Pendleton in 1958 on two Yale Dramat musicals in which Proctor starred: Tom Jones, and Booth Is Back In Town. Peter Bergman and Philip Proctor met while attending Yale University in the late 1950s, where Proctor studied acting and Bergman edited the Yale comedy magazine. In 2005, the US Library of Congress added Don't Crush That Dwarf to the National Recording Registry and called the group " the Beatles of comedy." Later, they received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for three of their albums: The Three Faces of Al (1984), Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death (1998), and Bride of Firesign (2001). Their 1970 album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers was nominated in 1971 for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation by the World Science Fiction Society, and their next album I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus received the same nomination in 1972. In 1997, Entertainment Weekly ranked the Firesign Theatre among the "Thirty Greatest Comedy Acts of All Time". They experienced a revival and second wave of popularity in the 1990s and continued to write, record and perform until Bergman's death in 2012. Their popularity peaked in the early 1970s and ebbed in the Reagan Era. The group's name stems from astrology, because all four were born under the three " fire signs": Aries (Austin), Leo (Proctor), and Sagittarius (Bergman and Ossman). The Firesign Theatre was the brainchild of Peter Bergman, and all of its material was conceived, written, and performed by its members Bergman, Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman. They also appeared in front of live audiences, and continued to write, perform, and record on other labels, occasionally taking sabbaticals during which they wrote or performed solo or in smaller groups. They produced fifteen record albums and a 45 rpm single under contract toĬolumbia Records from 1967 through 1976, and had three nationally syndicated radio programs: The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour in 1970 on KPPC-FM and Dear Friends (1970–1971) and Let's Eat! (1971–1972) on KPFK. They continued appearing on Radio Free Oz, which later moved to KRLA 1110 AM and then KMET FM, through February 1969. The Firesign Theatre (also known as the Firesigns) was an American surreal comedy troupe who first appeared on November 17, 1966, in a live performance on the Los Angeles radio program Radio Free Oz on station KPFK FM.
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