On this week's Firesign Theatre Radio Hour, we have a particularly bizarre episode entitled Only The Blackness Behind Me Is Real, which originally aired on July 15th, 1970, on KPPC as part of the Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour series.
Multiple storylines, plot points and shifting narratives. It's as if M.C. Escher wrote the run-sheet for the show. But the four or five crazy guys pull it off somehow. There's also lots of wanton tape-echo abuse, probably done live by a particularly inspired (or chemically enhanced) Live Earl Jive. The show gets especially strange towards the end, sounding somewhat like an Avant-Garde electronic music performance.
This is an abridged version of this program. Paradoxically, the entire Radio Hour Hour series runs well over an hour and a half (those crazy guys!), so bits of it were excised to fit within an ACTUAL hour time slot. To get the whole tamale, you'd have to buy the wonderful Duke Of Madness Motors set, which we highly recommend.