We had reached a creative peak in the spring of 1971 with the creation of our fourth album, I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus. Soon after it was released that fall, we put together a double-album of short cuts from the "Dear Friends" radio broadcasts, a series which had frequently revv'd up our creative energies in the months before Bozos was produced.

We had been improvising together for years over the air, and it was now time for TFT to release a "comedy record" - one that maybe more FM stations would play. Dear Friends also turned out to be a multi-dimensional demonstration of TFT at work, and of our individual voices and styles.

In November 1971 we began a new series of live broadcasts on Thursday nights. again on KPFK, the L. A. Pacifica station where we four had met five years before on "Radio Free Oz."

Rolling Stone had profiled us in their September 30th issue. We were getting good airplay, the reviews of Bozos coming out everywhere were fantastic. CBS was advertising all four albums at once, available on LP, cassette and 8-track tape "For Berserkers, Zips & Bozos only!" TFT was finally making it.

After a short holiday hiatus we picked up the KPFK show again in January 1972 and also continued our regular L.A. meetings, usually at Phil Austin's great hillside house overlooking historic Mixville. I came down the coast from Santa Barbara for three or four days a week and usually stayed at the succulent-draped El Patio Motel in North Hollywood.

I kept a regular diary at that time which, along with other sources, makes up the following calendar of events: the story of THE MARTIAN SPACE PARTY, the last completed work, and the only film record of the Firesign's "Golden Age."

TET rehearses "all afternoon and late into the night." The KPFK hall decorated as a Convention Hall by the volunteer Grassroots, led by Edgar Bullington. Rolling Stone's review of Dear Friends comes out: "This album is us!" The Christian Science Monitor says of Bozos. "This is the Firesign Theatre's Finnegan's Wake!"

Set up miniatures on PA's porch for insert shots of Glutamoto attacking the Miniature Cardboard Village of Fudd until 3 PM, then shot until after dark.

"Work progresses. By the end of the day we will have the base-tracks for the first 5 mins and music for the whole thing." "Finished the back-tracks for Not Insane. Very positive feelings all around. Good music and improvisation." Sinatra comes out of retirement to croon at a fundraiser for VP Spiro Agnew, then vows it's his last public performance.

TFT's album titled Not Insane was released in the late fall to confused reviews. Finished during the summer, it was finally a collage of the new studio recordings, parts of the MSP performance, and our old favorite, "The Count of Monty Cristo," recorded on tour In 1970. The contemplated story-line and newly written but un-recorded scenes were never used.

A year came and went. Proctor & Bergman teamed up for TV Or Not TV (in which two guys try to produce everything for a home-made cable station by themselves while media pirates surf on their sync waves). I produced How Time Flys with Steve Gillmor, in which Mark Time does return, in the year 2000, alone and forgotten, from Planet X, and has his hologram records of the trip stolen by an unscrupulous entertainment entrepreneur. Austin began work on Roller Maidens From Outer Space, a Surrealist Detective Story With Music which takes place out on the thin boundaries between electrons, where the Apocalypse is always in progress. Fit the two hours-plus of these three albums together with Not Insane and the "Let's Eat!" shows into a single time-and-space condominium and you'll have 1972's long-awaited "next Firesign album."

Easier yet, join us in person on that Historic Night, March 30th, 1972 at THE MARTIAN SPACE PARTY!

Oh yes, TFT didn’t formally meet again until late August 1973, to begin work on The Giant Rat of Sumatra. The Golden Age had become the Sober Seventies.