Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him
| Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him | ||||
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| Studio album by The Firesign Theater | ||||
| Released | January 1968 | |||
| Genre | Comedy | |||
| Length | 42:00 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Producer | Gary Usher, The Firesign Theatre | |||
| The Firesign Theater chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Rolling Stone | (favorable) |
| The New Rolling Stone Record Guide |   |
| The Goldmine Comedy Record Price Guide |  |
Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him is the first comedy album recorded by The Firesign Theatre. It was originally released in January 1968 by Columbia Records.
The first side of the original LP presented a trilogy of three related plays, presented as continuously connected tracks progressing in time. The second side presented a longer, separate play.
The first section runs 9 min 14 sec, and satirizes the displacement of the American Indians, first by Spanish conquistadors, then by American frontiersmen, and finally by the US government forcing them onto a reservation, which it uses as a "cobalt testing range". The title comes from friends of the Firesign Theatre telling them that the local Indians in Humboldt County, California added "temporarily" to the name as a way of saying no one could really own the land. The section ends with a bomb explosion, followed by the sound of wind blowing.
This 7 min 39 sec track is continuous with the first; the Indians wander silently through the desert and come upon the "Lazy Ol' Magic Circle Dudes Ranch and Collective Love Farm", a hippie commune. The commune's spiritual leader, the perpetually drunk/stoned "Tiny Doctor Tim", is a parody of Timothy Leary. (W. C. Fields actually appeared on the first track, dedicating the cobalt testing range.) The title parodies the Beatles song "Strawberry Fields Forever".
This 7 min 19 sec track continuously segues into a future world in which the 1960s hippie counterculture has now replaced the mainstream cultural establishment. Police patrol searching for "non-groovy" people whom they arrest to be "returned for re-grooving". Mothers breast-feed their sons into adolescence, and a teenager named Malcolm X John Lennon gets in trouble with his school principal for studying instead of hanging out and "relating" with his peers by smoking marijuana. A US senator who sounds like Robert Kennedy chairs a committee which also returns people for re-grooving, and the "Secretary of Peace" directs bomber aircraft to drop copies of Naked Lunch on Nigeria.
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Wikipedia