How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All

How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All was the second comedy album recorded by The Firesign Theatre. It was originally released in 1969 by Columbia Records.

Its front cover features photographs of Groucho Marx and John Lennon next to the pseudo-Communistic slogan "All hail Marx, Lennon!" The back cover is an overhead shot of the four members looking up at the camera, with Proctor standing on Austin's foot.

It is perhaps their most accessible album, being easily understood on first listening yet yielding new and different pleasures each time.

The album consists of two 28-minute pieces, each taking up one side of the original vinyl release.

The title track opens with Philip Proctor playing car salesman Ralph Spoilsport, a spoof of southern California Ford dealer Ralph Williams, who was well known to late-night TV viewers. As Ralph is extolling the virtues of a featured new car, the main character, Babe (played by Peter Bergman), drives onto the lot and interrupts Ralph's spiel with an immediate desire to buy the car in question.

"Well, OK, fine. Let's just take a look inside your beautiful new home!" The impossibly luxurious car contains what would now be called a "home entertainment center," each component of which Ralph demonstrates one by one, in an increasingly complex stereophonic jumble that is the sonic equivalent of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

Persuaded, Babe buys the car and drives it onto the freeway, and as he talks to himself, the signs along the freeway also "talk" as he passes them.

The piece gradually morphs into an ironic celebration of America itself, as presumably exemplified by Babe's new car purchase. A panoply of characters talk and sing, in the manner of a propaganda newsreel, about America and its history, including sardonic references to slavery and gun ownership.

At the end, Spoilsport returns with an increasingly insane monologue that ends up being a direct quote of the final words of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The other piece, The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, is probably the group's most famous recording, its characters having been reused in many subsequent sketches. It imitates a 1940s radio drama, the "episode" title here being "Cut 'Em Off at the Past."

Nick Danger (played by Phil Austin) is a '40s-style detective character in the Raymond Chandler mold. In live performances and photographs, he wears the stereotypical fedora and trench coat. He has the obligatory nemesis on the police force, Lieutenant Bradshaw (Bergman), who questions his every move. His "mark" is Rocky Rococo (Proctor), a Peter Lorre imitation. As in all bad mysteries, there has to be a butler, who here is Catherwood (David Ossman).

In most ways this sketch is very straightforward and even old-fashioned, though it is loaded with then-contemporary references to The Beatles, the I Ching, and other "hippie" topics.

The next album to make use of the characters was Not Insane or Anything You Want To.