Home > Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him

On this album only, the group's name was spelled "The Firesign Theater."

As originally programmed on vinyl, side one consisted of three short pieces:

• Temporarily Humbolt [sic] County is a compressed timeline of the European expansion into North America and the displacement of the Native Americans, a theme the group would revisit often. (The group had been told by friends in Humboldt County, California, that the local Indians added "Temporarily" to the county's name as a way of saying no one could really own the land.)

• W. C. Fields Forever is a plotless series of vignettes satirizing hippie culture and philosophy, through a parade of characters who variously take drugs, eat "natural" foods, and embrace Eastern religions.

• Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde imagines what the world would be like if the counterculture were the mainstream. People are arrested for not possessing drugs, politicians use the word "groovy" in their speeches, and bomber aircraft drop copies of Naked Lunch.

Side two consisted of the 18-minute title track, a Kafkaesque fantasy of paranoia in which an unnamed innocent (played by Phil Austin) is manipulated by mysterious strangers and authority figures into situations beyond his control. (In the written script, the character is called simply "P." for Phil, a reference to Kafka's use of "K." in The Castle.)

A highlight is the "Beat the Reaper" routine, a mock game show in which the contestant is injected with a disease and must guess what it is before being given the antidote. This segment, included on the Shoes for Industry! compilation, probably comes closest to being a self-contained bit that can be successfully separated from the rest of the story.

On this and the three subsequent albums, a different member of the quartet would assume the lead role on the title track.