Eat or Be Eaten, a hilarious and byzantine comedy adventure, is one of the few surviving artifacts of a time when the Firesign Theatre was somehow both blazing a technological trail ten years ahead of their time and nearly breaking up for lack of work.
The four founding members of Firesign--Philip Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor--had spent their first ten years as a group on Columbia Records under contract: a handy thing that insured there was a big company paying them to make records. That went away in 1976 when their deal went unrenewed. For five years they scrambled to find new ways to keep the band together. Geographically, they all still lived nearby--Ossman in Santa Barbara, the others in greater Los Angeles--but Firesign only existed as long as they could manage to will it back into being. They did local gigs, they did short national tours, and they recorded a series of EPs and LPs for local indie Rhino Records. Rhino was a reissue label with a big sense of humor but without