Americathon: The Skits Behind the Screenplay

By Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman

Phil Proctor, co-founder of the legendary, surrealist comedy group, the thrice Grammy-nominated Firesign Theatre, in cahoots with Peter Bergman, Phil Austin and David Ossman, helped to create the most revolutionary comedy recordings ever made. Over a 50-year career, starting in the ‘60s and ending with them all in their 70s, they predicted reality TV, hackers, computer viruses, virtual reality, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11 and much more still to come. But during a breather in the Firesign career, Phil joined up with Pete to launch Proctor & Bergman on a crazy ride that took them on the road through the hip back pockets of the U.S. including Hawaii and even Canada with their own brand of surreal silliness, resulting in radio series, three records: TV or Not TV, Give Us a Break and What This Country Needs, and films including the cult hit J-Men Forever, and the topic of this story: Americathon. It started as Gothamathon, a cabaret skit that soon evolved into The Americathon, hosted by Bergman as the manic Jerry Jerry, and me as everyone else, designed to raise money to pay off the national debt. When Director Neal Israel, on the road to promote his hit, Tunnelvision (in which I have a fun role), caught our act in Boston – well, you’ll have to buy the book to learn “the rest of the story.”

I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, and only wish that Peter was still here to relive these crazy daze. I dedicate this book to him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Apr 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386002369

Book preview

Half the Wits of the Firesign Theatre

My dear partner, Peter Bergman, succumbed to complications of leukemia in 2012 at the age of 72. I first met Peter in the Yale Dramat in 1960 and ’61, when he co-authored lyrics for two musicals by Austin Pendleton, Tom Jones and Booth is Back in Town, where I played Tom and Edmund Booth respectively.

Pete and I reunited in 1966 when I participated in an anti-curfew demonstration that became known as the Sunset Strip Riot, where I sat down on Peter’s face in a picture in the LA Free Press and discovered that he was on the LA Pacifica radio station KPFK-FM, as The Wiz, hosting an alternative late-night call-in talk show called Radio Free Oz. The next day I called him and was invited to appear on the show that night, November 17, 1966 (over 50 years ago!), where I met fellow firesigns David Ossman and Phil Austin, and playing off of one another in a spontaneous improv called the Oz Film Festival, The Firesign Theatre was born.

Our stream-of-consciousness comedy, both silly and surreal, spoke to a generation in turmoil and caught the attention of producer Gary Usher at Columbia Records, leading to a contract for four albums from 1968 to 1972: Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, How Can You be in Two Places at Once when You’re Not Anywhere at All, and I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus. The rest is history, or histrionics.

And Peter continues the story:

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Bergman Looks Back

How did Proctor and Bergman get underway? I don’t remember. I do remember this, in 1973 the Firesign Theatre was in disarray. We had produced Not Insane, a kind of crazy marginal album to fulfill our Columbia contract. It was ‘73 and we’d been together since ‘66, a long time, and while Austin and Ossman wanted to stay in town and produce more albums, we wanted to tour, so Phil and I made an individual record deal for our first Proctor & Bergman album called TV or Not TV, based on the concept that cable television was coming. Not only was it coming, but there was going to be a vast number of channels. In fact, we posited Channel 86 because that was the channel you couldn’t reach on your tuners at the time.

Fred Flamm was portrayed by Phil Proctor and Clark Cable by me. We ran a cable station out of our suitcase at home. It was true ‘pirate’ television, and the whole album consisted of various shows from this station. Not only did we make the record, but we created a vast touring vaudeville show. We put it up on stage and went out under the aegis of Northwest Releasing. Dan Bean sent us out and we played about 10 dates with this huge vaudeville show. We had a stuffed dog and Japanese soldiers dropping out of the flies. We broke bottles over our heads!

Around this time, Proctor and I were doing various promotions, and ended up in a trailer doing a remote radio broadcast with Wolfman Jack, a disc jockey famous for his gravelly voice. There we were, crowded into this RV with the Wolfman. He put us on the air with this intro in his signature growl: Proctor & Bergman, too much, too soon! This became our motto. Soon, as we were on the air, there were people pounding on the window and shouting, Hey baldy. Hey baldy. Hey Wolfman. Hey baldy. It was people’s theater. But Wolfman Jack really caught who Proctor & Bergman were. We were too much, too soon.

I was kind of like the business manager in a sense, while Phil took care of the props and costumes. We wrote, staged, and performed everything together, and we kind of shared all the other things. You know that we never, Phil and I, in the entire time that we were on the road, we never had anything that could be called a real fight.

So, we turned out this vast vaudeville show around our first album, TV or Not TV, and later filmed TV or Not TV at the fabled old Fairchild Mansion in Long Island. People loved that show. If we’d gone on at that level we could have been Penn & Teller today.

It was also over our heads in the sense that we were turning out a show too much, too soon. The show was bigger than who we were. We went back to the clubs after this. We did a lot of clubs. A lot, a lot of clubs. We got a manager who booked us, sometimes rather creatively. His name was Len Harriman, a former linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles.

We found ourselves being booked into the Playboy Club in Great Gorge, NJ. We were the lead act, and the woman who opened for us was going through the audience in diaphanous see-through clothing singing and having people join her in Doe, a deer, a female deer. We knew we were in big trouble. In the audience was the underarm division from Gillette and the Lawn Doctors Association of New Jersey. We were in serious trouble. We came out at the Playboy club to do our college boy act and they booed us and hissed. They hated us!

We went back to our room, where the carpet went halfway up the wall, and we said, We’ve got to rewrite the entire act, or we cannot appear in public tomorrow. Not until we redo it. We didn’t rewrite it, we re-segmented it and improvised; but we did it, and we got by. They didn’t like us, but they didn’t hate us, and we actually opened for the woman we previously followed. We told her, We have to go first, because after you there’s nothing.

Harriman got us a couple of other creative bookings. He sent us out to open for Sha Na Na. I have to