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| PHIL AUSTIN: | That year, the year we writers in Hollywood struck, John Dryden from Washington DC contacted me and
convinced me and sent me recording equipment and encouraged me to write and perform as Nick Danger over a year and a half, as a feature on his radio satire show, The Daily Feed. I wrote and performed over fifty of these pieces and a few of them turned out to be the starting points for several short stories which later came to be part of "Tales of the Old Detective and
Other Big Fat Lies". Other parts became incorporated into "Beaver Teeth", the novel I continue to work on, and which formally started in 1990, the year that the Nick Danger pieces in the Daily Feed stopped and my odd experience writing a screenplay for the Grateful Dead began. What I now think of as the real Nick began to take shape in these episodes, as I recorded them in my home studio during that year, with John encouraging and threatening and cajoling me to keep going. This Nick was much more antic and loose than he had been on the "Three Faces of Al" or in "The Case of the Missing Yolk", his other appearances in the eighties. As the Decade of Indulgence came to an end, Nick was back, or so it began to seem as I wrote away, week after week. As well, the idea of doing something that wasn't connected to TV or films was very attractive. I began to think about pure writing in a way I hadn't in some years. Fred Wiebel and John Dryden went through many hours of reconstruction to pull all these episodes together. They did it without any help from me, that's for sure, and I'm forever in their debt. John, by the way, introduced the Firesign Theatre at our concert at the Warner in D.C. in 1993, a memorable and standing-only performance of the Reunion Show. The Daily Feed continues to dazzle Radio America, and long may it reign. |
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