THE MAKING OF NICK DANGER: THE DAILY FEED TAPES AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN DRYDEN FIREZINE:  Talk about how you first got started with your political commentary radio show, The Daily Feed. JOHN  DRYDEN:  Do I remember that? The Daily Feed was not on the air but it was in the works when I met The Firesign Theatre. It was in March of 1981, the day Reagan was shot, and by working with the warm-up group, The Video Buddies that appeared first at the University of MD performance, I got to introduce Firesign. Phil Austin said to me, "If you can do a radio show everyday, and make money off of it, everyday, and keep it going, that's one of the things we always wanted to do ourselves. That would be a great achievement if you could pull that off." I was producing radio advertising at the time and was a creative director at an agency led by a woman who had gone to MD, as well. I quit and moved downtown to the Press Building and said, "Here I am, ready to do my radio show." I didn't know what it was called yet. So the show didn't get on the air until December of 81. FZ:   Did The Firesign Theatre inspire you to do your own show? JD:   Sure! Yeah! How did I get on the air? I did a bulk mailing that just said, "Not available in Baltimore or Washington", to make 'em think maybe I was on the air. So Dave Einstein of WHFS, was looking for something to counter Howard Stern. Howard was on DC 101 in the morning. Dave wanted to put on something short that would be considered more... cerebral or whatever. I played a few things for him and he said, "Yeah, we'll do that." So all of a sudden I'm on WHFS, twice a day. I later got a syndicator, in '88 and 80 stations at that time.    How did you get Phil to do the Nick Danger pieces for The Daily Feed, starting in 'FZ:88? JD:   Phil had said "Well, if you get something going on the air, give me a call and let know me how it's going." So, I did. He responded and we came to an agreement on an arrangement and I sent him a bunch of equipment, some Sonex, a cassette recorder, a microphone stand, a microphone, a windscreen and some tape. He started sending me back cassettes with 4 or 5 pieces on them. I didn't really ask him to do anything except record something and send it to me. That's all I really wanted. Any monolog he would do, would fit anyway because the show tries to be different every day. I kind of gave him some guidelines as to what I would like, which would have been once a week. FZ:   Did you have Nick Danger in mind? JD:   I asked him to do Nick Danger. That's what I wanted from the beginning and I'm sure that at that point in his life it was the easiest thing to write. I consider the Nick Danger stuff on our show to be pretty unique amongst all of the Nick Danger stuff. It's the only single voice Nick Danger stuff, right? He does monologs to himself on the albums, but he always knows that there are 3 other characters there to bounce off. I knew that he was making fun of me at the same time he's doing the show, but he's allowed to do that because, like this was a step down in his career. He's supposed to be able to goof with it. There is nothing better to do than be working for someone and being able to make fun of them at the same time.    But then he's making fun of himself too. JD:   Nick Danger always makes fun of himself. It's one of his greatest charms. FZ:   Putting Nick Danger on a case that is currently political is what's unique about these pieces. He also started doing those generic sort-of philosophical raps as Nick Danger, which are great. JD:   Which is also the hardest thing to write. You can tell when you hit a theme like that and you know that you have a lot to say about it and you can write it 5, 6, 7 times, it gets real good. I'm sure he did a lot of work putting those together. FZ:   So from the beginning you said, "Just tape your commentary and I'll do all the production work." It reminded me of the way the old time radio show, "Johnny Dollar, Insurance Investigator" used to start out his shows typing up his expense accounts. Did you have in mind the way you wanted the music and sound effects, such as the typewriter? JD:   Oh, that's right! "Johnny Dollar" was on in the 80s locally on an old-time radio show. I just listened to it because he was a character. He wasn't even supposed to be as funny as he was. Right? But he was funny. I can't remember if the typewriter was my idea or Phil's but it all fit in. FZ:   How did you decide to use the sped-up voice introduction. JD:   That's based on my character Max. I told Phil how Max worked. When I first started I didn't have Max. So for the first 3 years I had to do all my commentaries based on one voice. And so it was like a sort-of revelation when I realized I should just create another one. Because I'm not talented enough to come up with a completely separate voice I figured I'd speed mine up. I couldn't think of another voice that I could do that convincingly. FZ:   You thought that worked so well with Max so Phil thought that it would work well for Nick Danger? JD:   It did work and it was sort-of making fun of Max at the same time, which I love. I needed a teaser but I was content to let him do just a Nick Danger voice, read 3 or 4 words for the teaser. I believe it was he who seized on the little voice. He said, "You're doing that with Max, why don't I do that." I would transfer them to reel to reel and then I would take the little guy's transfer and speed it up. And then I would have to produce the teaser with my wrap music and Phil's teaser sound and then I would have to take Phil's voice track. If he really thought he'd blown a take he might re-record it or I would just take 2 of it. Every once in a while I guess he would roll it back and do one good one. But you could tell he was trying to do it all in one take. I don't remember having to do pick-ups. I would just put it all on reel to reel and run all the music and pack this thing together. I would mix it from his voice and the music I had for Nick Danger onto a master reel. I would mix it 2-track. FZ:   Who picked the music? Do you remember? JD:   No. Did he say to me 'Harlem Nocturne'? That's what I don't know. He may have. I know I went out and got it. I also recorded Dan Ruskin playing it on piano, a couple versions. So I used that several times. Its a lot slower, more thoughtful, so it worked real well with insightful, 'Let me tell you a story of a dame' type of pieces. FZ:   How did you feel getting Phil Austin to work for you? JD:   It was a real high point career-wise and opportunity-wise. FZ:   Do you think having Nick Danger on The Daily Feed increased circulation? JD:   Yes it did. I think it made people interested that would have been otherwise interested, at least to sit up and listen to the show. They realized they were only getting Phil 1 day out of 5 but I did get some stations out of that. College stations would play it a lot. I've had some that played it 6 times. It's always great when they played them several times a day, in the morning, around drive time and then early evening about 8:30. FZ:   We had some trouble playing back your original reel masters when we produced the Firezine collection. JD:   The tapes were mastered on black back coated tape and the adhesive binder that Ampex was making, for the whole industry, during the 80s, turns into goo and turns the tape into glue. So not only do you have recording tape, you also have Scotch tape. You can use it to wrap Christmas presents, which I do, anyway. Now when it plays, it screeches to a halt because it builds up gooey stuff, mostly on the hardest angles to and from the play heads assembly. If you took a piece of Saran Wrap and pulled it around a corner of something that was gooey it would screech. Right? It's like rubbing your hand across a balloon. So the fact that the tape would screech, that vibration would transmit all the way through electronically. Remember it's an analog signal, a picture signal and we're fucking up the picture with this thing. You could hear the screech on the machine, plus you can hear it amplified coming out of the speaker. After a while, we realized we had to clean the capstan and pinch roller every time. We would take the pieces of the reel off, put the machine in no-motor drive and just let the rubber pinch roller against the metal capstan be the only thing that pulls the tape through so that it wasn't being pulled real hard up against all those sliders that it would collect stuff on. The thing that saved us is that that particular playhead has a spring the comes up and clamps over it. It's a good thing that we used a Revox machine because we played it on every machine I had and got each one of them gummy, one at a time, trying to find the place to play it back. I had to have both hands on the machine with 2 pieces of cotton holding the thing away from the screecher. Some of them still screeched so bad that we had to go back, re-record pieces of them and cut them in with a razor blade. You take a word that starts with a K sound or a T or a B, something real sharp, go in and you cut it on one word and cut out on another and go into the good one and edit in the piece so that you can't tell it's been cut. The only real solution is to bake the original tapes in a convection oven at 106 degrees for who knows how many hours, at least 2, probably 12 and then you can take it out and play it and get at least another pass at it. At that point you put it on something digital, which you will find in the next century also not only get's sticky but it just turns into smoke or something. You'll open the door and all these little silver colored 0s and 1s will fall out on the floor. Ha, ha, ha. FZ:   Now, you picked certain ones of the Nick Danger pieces to include on your yearly newsreels that you put out in '88 and '89 to sell to your listeners. So how could you make a decision of which ones to release? JD:   I don't remember and I'm glad I don't, too. I don't know how I figured it out. I'm sure they are one's that tickled me most. Different things work, as with all Firesign Theatre material, it's what I call, 'the car pool effect'. One day you are gonna hit this guy. The next morning this other guy will laugh. You know? The day you get the driver to blow Coke up through his nose you've gotten the whole car. That's kind of the way all the Firesign Theatre stuff works. It just makes you laugh to the point where you can't think about what you're trying to get done, you know, because its so funny. FZ:   How can we get your Daily Feed show now? JD:   You can hear it every day on our website, dailyfeed.com and on the Timecast site dailybriefing.com and that's a site owned by RealAudio.