Some of the people who are on "The Astrology Album" are Chad and Jeremy, John Merrill from The Peanutbutter Conspiracy, David Crosby, and yourself. Did you ever hear any of this stuff there in the studio?

No. I had nothing to do with that. For me it was just a job of walking in and spending one night recording my parts. That's all it was.

On the record jacket it says "material written by Phil AUSTIN:, Ron Budnick and Gary Usher".

I'd forgotten that Ronnie had anything to do with that. Maybe Ron, who knows, I mean I just don't remember. It was like a two day job, thirty years ago.

He's also listed as one of the voices and credited with effects.

Must have been a theremin on it or something, some kind of electronic instrument. That's what that sounds like.

There are some weird musical sounds going on in the background.

Ronnie must have been responsible for those.

Bob Caulderwood! I went to high school with Bob Caulderwood! Bob Caulderwood was a guy a Fresno High School when I was there that was our champion pole vaulter. He was also a diver. My girlfriend in high school was a diver. I always tremendously looked up to Bob. He was this kind of high school hero at Fresno High and so years later I met up with him and he was essentially kind of an arranger for Gary. I remember Bob leading the sessions that resulted in the music on our first album. Memory is dim on all this stuff, but I remember at one point Bob conducting. It might have been rehearsals, but I'm not sure. We worked so fast on those projects, that I barely had a chance to even say "Hi", and I haven't seen him since.

The Chad and Jeremy LP "Of Cabbages and Kings" and The Astrology Album" were both released in 1967.The catalog numbers are just a couple of digits away from one another, so they are probably from the same season. The first Firesign Theatre LP was issued in January 1968.

We would have gone to work with the Firesign Theatre that winter of 1967, and yeah, we had already been in the studio with Gary quite a bit. So Gary and I were used to working with each other.

And "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" LP released in March 1968. So it seems as if all four of these records, in a sense, are of a group.

This fits with what I remember. I was working at KPFK. I was the director of Drama and Literature for the station. My specific job was really to ride herd for the station over Radio Free Oz. So I was up all night doing Radio Free Oz and also trying to hold down the office work on the Drama and Literature Department at the same time.

And one day in the middle of all this scheduling and administering kind of stuff Gary Usher called me up and I realized that I had been talking to Gary quite a lot over the last year or so out of what had started as a lark out of my Army reserve unit, in "Duckman". All of the sudden there was this guy calling me up saying he had been listening to us on the radio and he wanted to make an album out of it.

At that point I remember thinking to myself "Ah, Gary's inventing some kind of art form here. Some kind of concept record art form that's like "his deal". He was the only one doing it. That's the first time I became aware that there was a kind of "school" of Gary Usher and somehow what he was hearing on Radio Free Oz fit with his idea of how he could try to take these marginal areas of interest, like astrology, and turn them into something that was vaguely connected with the rock and roll business. I guess he was kind of unique that way.

With me in particular, my life was very much wrapped up in KPFK. At that time KPFK was going through one of these odd little renaissances that go through companies that are involved in the arts. I just happened to work there for the period of time that the station experienced a kind of artistic revival and a move away from pure politics and things that Pacifica is often very concerned with. I just happened to be there as the station changed a lot of its programming into a more entertainment oriented type of programming of which Radio Free Oz became the flagship. It just happened to fall into my department. I was just the person that happened to be in charge for the station.

I didn't have that much to do with Radio Free Oz. It was a talk show essentially and it had its own producer that arranged the guests and so forth. I never had anything to do with that at all. I was there essentially just to make sure that the show got on the air. And so my only studio experience was with Gary. I was doing those kind of jobs on the side from just being real wrapped up in, not just Radio Free Oz, but the whole stations ability to raise money for itself and to survive and to kind of combine these cultures that were clashing at the time. It was like a big deal. It was fun. Big fun. KPFK was big fun in those years.

Out of the middle of it Gary Usher calls up and says to me that something that we were doing on the radio would make an album rather than him calling up and kind of offering me a nice job. Like "The Astrology Album" must have made me some money I suppose. I don't remember. I have no records of it or anything.

Those were definite starving artist days. Any work you could get was a huge help. Gary was my guy. I loved Gary. He'd actually made a record out of "Duckman". I just thought that was the most amazing thing that he could do this, 'cause I had no knowledge of the business or anything.

So you think then that all of this business about astrology was floating in the air and it just so happens that the comedy group that became The Firesign Theatre is named after astrological signs.

No, it's because of, to some extent, what happened between Peter and Paul. The first night we were on the air with Peter, me and Paul J. Robbins. And Paul and Peter became the hosts of what became Radio Free Oz. I was interviewing them. We were on the middle of a fund raising drive, so they were there theoretically to help us raise funds, late into the night.

Initially, what the manager of the station heard that night and then later called me in the next day much too early and said, "Listen, we're gonna put these guys on the air every night, and somehow you're gonna handle it". What Peter and Paul were doing on the air was extremely new age. Peter had just come from Holland and Amsterdam and was full of Sufi meditations and connections with the East that came to you in Europe in those days. Paul was very much a California crystal reading, tarot reading, typical kind of California new ager. The two of them were just so sweet with each other, that it worked up to a point, but as when Paul left the show, and it had to be entertainment oriented, Peter was by far the more entertaining of the two of them, the entertainment value suddenly rose. It became more and more my job to be entertaining, to be funny, to call Peter with funny phone calls, to be the funny guy in the booth kind of guy, to take more of a part in the show.

Then when suddenly we began to find allies in David and Phil, who would occasionally come on, what we arrived at was something that only we knew about. What Gary was hearing was the talk show part, which was the LSD addict until three in the morning, everybody trying to be as knowledgeable as they could be about whatever subject of new age culture came up, whether it was "Baja Rumdas" or "Raba Bamdas" or "Naba Ramagama". It didn't matter, and I had a peculiar knowledge in that area 'cause I'd been raised in those religions, although I'm a tremendous non-believer. I was raised, more than anyone else that I know in a way, from a very early age, in California new age religions, and I knew a lot about it.

So the connection that eventually happened in the entertainment phase of Radio Free Oz, what happens between me and Peter where we start making each other laugh on the air, which to me is the earliest memory of what The Firesign Theatre's sense of humor eventually becomes. This kind of oddball sense of humor. I remember it starting originally between me and Peter as Radio Free Oz had gotten old and in which we were just looser and more willing to be funny and we didn't care about religion particularly or any of the rest of the new age concerns. We began to just kind of concentrate on being funny and how amazing this was that we could just be funny. And somewhere in that melding right there the name The Firesign Theatre comes out.

Peter's making an elaborate joke when he first says the words The Firesign Theatre. He's relating it back to the 30's and to Roosevelt and to old time radio. It's another of those odd things that Peter will often do where he'll connect two or three things in one thought, and you really want to try and write those down when they happen, and luckily we did. In many ways the name "The Firesign Theatre" has been "berry berry goot to us".

Other than that, "The Astrology Album" is just a horrifying thing. It's like Gary was combining trash and something else. I don't know what it was 'cause I don't know Gary so I'm just guessing. He's just a guy I did three jobs for. The fact that the last one turned out to be real important, who knows? We didn't see Gary past that first album. He didn't know what we were doing. In other words, he would have been just as happy putting out an album that had to do with Radio Free Oz. Peter and I said "No, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna go in and we're gonna say we're doing The Firesign Theatre". And we went to The Copper Penny in Hollywood and we sat down with Gary, and we said "Here's what we're gonna do" and Gary said "OK, fine". That was what Gary was like, 'cause I remember he was just like he was trusting in the moment somehow. He believed all this new age stuff. He was like actually acting it out. He was doing it in a kind of corporate setting, which made it very odd. At least I thought it was odd, still do think it's odd.