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From All Music: Shoes for Industry! The Best of the Firesign Theatre is a terrific double-disc, 31-track collection of the comedy troupe's best-loved routines, including "Temporarily Humbolt County," "I Was a Cock-Teaser for Roosterama, " "Further Adventures of Nick Danger, " "Napalmolive, " "Not Quite the Solution He Expected, " "Communist Love Song" and "Police Street."

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An All Music Album pick. If you want to have their best bits on CD this is the one to own.

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From All Music: When the 25th anniversary of the first Firesign Theatre album rolled around, the group had been on hiatus for about eight years, ever since the Eat or Be Eaten album. Getting together again to do a series of anniversary shows, no one was sure how it would work out; after all, the group stopped performing together for a reason, and there were definitely several points in their past where disharmony was the overriding theme. Well, the reunion shows not only succeeded personality-wise, but the group discovered that their audience was an intensely loyal bunch, making the shows extra special (just listen to the way everyone chants along with the Nick Danger episode, if you need proof). Apart from "Toad Away," the material on the Back From the Shadows album was entirely taken from the first four classic albums, and all four members sound like they're having a ball performing it again, especially with the reaction they're getting from the audience. Although the album was originally released as a two-CD set on Mobile Fidelity, it went out of print for quite some time; Whirlwind Media finally reissued the album on a single DVD, which not only includes the album in its entirety in 5.1 Surround Sound, but also adds a 56-minute video component containing interviews with the band, as well as an interactive component. If you didn't pick it up the first time around, all of the bonus material makes it almost irresistible this time around.

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From All Music:
This set is a distillation of the Firesign Theater's 21 hour-long weekly radio programs conceived and produced live on the air at KPFK in Los Angeles between September 9, 1971, and February 17, 1972. These tapes were then whittled down to 12 one-hour shows and syndicated under the title Dear Friends, and were subsequently broadcast throughout North America on burgeoning underground FM stations. Some of their funniest bits ever are on this album. Ralph Spoilsport, Freezing Mr. Foster, Deputy Dan, Diving For Dopers and of course Bob's Brazerko Lounge. A must have!
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From All Music: Featuring better production than the debut album, Two Places at Once is a much tighter affair, with much happening throughout. Side one features a number of smaller sketches, with social commentary interwoven with smart television and radio parodies. It's side two, however, that makes this album worth having. The side-long "Further Adventures of Nick Danger" is a nearly perfect parody of a detective radio play, with sharp wordplay and interesting characters. The more fully developed nature of the piece makes the album worth repeated listening, which isn't the case with many other comedy albums released at about the same time.

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From All Music- Firesign Theatre's previous work had already proved that the troupe wasn't particularly interested in releasing conventional comedy albums. While earlier albums had longer pieces, Don't Crush That Dwarf is the first time they dedicated an entire album to a single theme. Although initially it sounds like a loose collection of semi-related items, it later becomes clear that the whole album is a look through the past of a single character, George Leroy Tirebiter, with a few flips of a television tuner knob taking you through his early days as a child star all the way up to a This Is Your Life-style reflection and beyond.

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From All Music: Picking up exactly where Don't Crush That Dwarf left off (with the sound of an ice cream truck), I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus isn't so much a revelation as its predecessor. This is another concept album, this time about technology, the future, and humanity's place in the equation. There are less obvious laughs this time out, and the album really needs repeated listens to begin to make any sense of it (indeed, in the Mobile Fidelity reissue, two of the members of the group contribute essays in an attempt to make it less incomprehensible). Still, there are some really fine moments that immediately click, like "Breaking of the President" and the visits from the Holygrams. Repeated listening will bring out all the album has to offer.

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By fusing the high-concept comic vision of Stan Freberg with the expansive studio experimentation of the Beatles, the Firesign Theatre singlehandedly dragged the comedy album into the psychedelic era. Creating densely layered montages of improvisational routines, overheard dialogue, media manipulation, commercial parodies and sound effects, the four-man troupe devised a hallucinatory brand of surrealist comic performance and Joycean satire laced with puns, metaphors and obscure literary allusions which redefined the very concept of recorded comedy.<br>
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