Firezine interview with Thane Tierney

The following is an interview with Thane Tierney,
Rhino product manager for Firesign Theatre's
"Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death" CD.
It was conducted by phone 6/29/99.

Thane updates us on "GMIOGMD" sales figures, the progress of the new album,"Welcome To Billville" (working title), and the projected release dates of the CD and DVD versions.

THANE TIERNEY: It's been an interesting little time. I'm no longer in the product management department, I'm in sales.

TT: Yeah, that's a good thing. Now I can actually go out and smack around retailers and say, "Now sell these freakin' things, you rat bastards!", instead of yelling at our salesman.

TT: I'm going to be involved with it but the 'day to day person' is a woman here named Emily Kagen. She's taking over the official product management duties. I'm going to be the eminence's grease.

TT: I think are probably in the 150 range a week. We're at about 18,568 with probably about 25,000 units out there. 163, 160, 135, 138 for the last 4 weeks, about 150 a week average.

FZ: THEY SEEM TO BE GOING UP ALONG WITH OUR WEBSITE HITS. WAS THERE ANY SALES SPIKE DURING THE TOUR?

TT: No, it didn't seem to make any big whoop. It might have in the individual cities.

TT: As of last Thursday (6/25) they had 17 min. I haven't heard any of it yet. So I guess it's getting pretty close.

TT: This is going to be the first audio DVD of anybody in the Warner music group. They are coming out with about, I think group wide, a dozen or so. They're shooting for November. It's a weird format. Audio DVD doesn't play on the current video DVD. You can play it but you don't get the super high fidelity thing. You get sort of a lesser version. It will be CD sound but it's optical and it won't be the 5.1 mix. I have a feeling that most people will probably wait until the combined video / audio DVD player is out. Why would you go out and just get an audio DVD player? So that's going to happen in a few months. But hey, we'll be out there. We may be the 'Beta'. This may be the very rare format like that CED disc.

TT: The album itself, the regular CD version of it's projected release date is 10/14 or 21st. The DVDs will probably be a little bit later. We're shooting for mid October. We don't have a name for it yet although the working title has been "Welcome To Billville". It will be interesting to see how the title shakes out considering how the last one was right down to the last minute. You know how we voted on it.

TT: Yeah, absolutely! That's why we're hot to have them do the DVD. Jac Holzman himself came out here to pitch them to do the DVD audio. He's the guy who founded Elektra Records and is the chief technologist for the Warner Music Group. He is the big tech head for the whole kit and kabuttle for WEA. He produced the Doors, he produced Judy Collins, he produced Tim Buckley, he da' man.

TT: He was close to Lord Buckley but I don't know if he actually produced them. I did a Lord Buckley reissue once for the old Retro label.

TT: No, it's long gone. We actually found Lady Buckley, she was still alive, at that time, 10 years ago, here in LA. He was pretty amazing. I remember having a little interchange with her about Lord Buckley. Somebody should do a Lord Buckley Box. You know somebody else they should do a box on is Bob & Ray.

TT: There isn't really much comedy coming out, unless you consider The Ramones comedy. Most of the comedy here has been unintentional and it's happened mostly at meetings. But not very much in the way of releases. Although the new Freberg project will go a long way to address that deficit. We did do a Woody Allen package, the live stand-up material. There's part of San Francisco '68, part of DC '65, and part of Chicago '64. So I think it's basically the Casblanca album that came out in the late 70's. It's probably that and maybe a bonus track. There is a Freberg box set, 4 CDs and a video coming out on August 3rd. There's commercials on audio and video, a lot of the old Capital singles, plus bits and pieces of "History of the USA". He's brought in some amazing things. He brought in lots of photographs too. He brought in a Modess ad, the sanitary napkins. There is a shot of a woman done up gauzily, standing out next to a tree saying, "Modess ... because." And he did a similar shot of himself and put it out in Ad Week that said "Freberg ... because" with the same type face. He's a trip, a really, really neat guy. Sort of a cranky old cuss because he is a cranky old cuss. But hey, a cranky old cuss with great stories. He's highly entertaining. What's great about this package is there's a picture of him on the cover and when you open it up, you pull the top of the box off, so you're actually pulling part of his head off and inside, the booklet sticks out and you see his brain. It's pretty cool. I'm really looking forward to it, it should be a laugh riot or at least a laugh disturbance, if not a full fledged laugh riot.

FZ: OUR SUBSCRIBERS WILL BE VERY HAPPY TO HEAR ABOUT IT. WE'RE GOING TO TRY AND DO "UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF . . . STAN FREBERG" FOR OUR NEXT ISSUE, SO THAT WOULD TIE IN PERFECTLY. I KNOW YOU'RE BUSY SO THANKS A LOT FOR CALLING. PLEASE KEEP IN TOUCH.