Walls Of Genius - Childhood & Teen Inspirations
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg)
born Summit, New Jersey, 1957
The earliest music related memory I can drum out of my brain is my mother commenting on the fade-out to "Crimson & Clover". I remember her saying to a friend, "Oh I think they're just saying 'over and over'". Years later I realized that was only half of what they were saying....
There was very little music in my house growing up. I remember my father playing My Fair Lady and Fiddler on the Roof soundtracks on a little record player. My father listened to a 1001 strings type radio station that always drove me nuts on long drives in the car, though I did notice two songs on that station that I like to this day: "Theme From a Summer Place" and the "Phoenix Love Theme"! It took knowing Boyd Rice to track down that latter one!
My father had zero musical inclination. My mother had some, enough to buy a piano, but it was rarely on display.
My mother got me guitar lessons when I was 12 or so. They mostly frustrated me cause I never fully mastered one lesson by the time it was time for the next one. I never felt I got good at it or really fully grokked what was being taught. So I mainly felt real bad at guitar. But I did learn the basics! I did learn the chords!
At some point we got a piano and I kinda self-taught myself to play that in a real rudimentary way. Actually, it was mostly on that piano that I wrote my first songs. I wrote a bunch of fairly shitty songs as a kid, mostly while I was in junior high. Very bleeding heart and "meaningful". I also started playing in a band with my best friend since I was little from across the street. I played guitar and he played keyboards. I think we managed one gig that included a drummer. Some girl told me that I played good and I thought she was being sarcastic! Oh, we played all covers, I don't know of what. Someone in the audience that night asked if we knew any Elvis and when I said no he said, "Well what good are you?" I didn't realize how standard a thing that was to say! Oh, I remember one cover we played! It was CCR's "Bad Moon Rising"! The keyboardist's father liked it when we played that. He'd bounce up and down with a big grin on his face and he called it "the farmer song"! Boy, Evan could write a book if he went into this much detail about all the bands HE was in....
By mid high school I had jumped on the progressive rock bandwagon and that hammered the nails in the coffin of my musical aspirations. I just knew I could never play like THAT.
Y'know, it's recently occurred to me that my mother had musical frustrations somewhat similar to mine. She learned to play piano as a kid to sheet music. But take away the sheet music and she was lost! She saw other people just sit down at the piano and play, without any sheet music, and that frustrated and discouraged her! And that's why she gave up playing as a kid. Well, that and she preferred to play softball! In retrospect that seems a little like the years I gave up guitar cause prog and ELP seemed so out of my league....
Then punk came along, and despite my original mixed feelings, I finally got into it after listening to The Ramones Leave Home Side A real stoned. Then it spoke to me!! And I got the idea that I Could Do This! I have a shitload of influences I could name, but that was the moment that got the ball rolling to where I thought of music as something I might want to take up again. That was reinforced by starting to write songs, which I found was much easier than writing the novel I had in my head (from whence it has never ventured).
Pre WoG days influences? Boy, how pre? CCR was my first favorite band. Then as I mentioned before, prog rock, especially ELP, kinda influenced me to STOP playing! Then punk, especially the Ramones, influenced me to start again!
My song writing grew out of attempts to write short stories and a novel (that I never finished) in a style that was heavily influenced by Nathaniel West, who wrote short, snappy novels of satire, humor and social cynicism in the 1930's. His writing and the Ramones both strongly influenced my first songs. When I started writing songs, it excited me cause it was so much easier and more fun than trying to be literary! And then of course Dostoevsky turned my head upside down. "I am a sick man. I am an angry man. I am an ugly man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. But will I see a doctor? NO!" Hahahahaha!! I turned Evan onto Dostoevsky and he was the one to first dub me Little Fyodor after I showed him my song lyrics. At first Evan didn't entirely like my songs because while he liked their sense of malevolence, he thought they lacked what he thought should be a corresponding sense of fun and exuberance, but then when I pointed out that they weren't about that, that's when he had the revelation that my songs were like Dostoevskian characters because the people in them couldn't even get any joy out of their own evil! And he jokingly called me Little Fyodor (Dosty's first name, as it was written on the books we read)! He was surprised to later learn I had taken that as my name!!
Evan Cantor
born Arlington VA 1956
Evan's Band History:
Long Lost Friend (high school garage into 1st year college)
TKE Blues All-Stars (frat house)
Wishing Well (Jeff Bragg's cover band, rock)
Dreamer Easy (Jeff Bragg's original progressive rock, King Crimson clones, I dropped out of college for this)
More TKE Blues All-Stars (went back to college)
Folk Grass Blues Band (post-college, Charlottesville VA)
Blitz Bunnies (punk rock, Fairfax VA)
Mystic Knights Of The Sea (jazz standards duo, Fairfax VA)
Rumours Of Marriage (new wave, Boulder CO)--next came the first incarnations of WoG
Were/are you a trained musician?
---No. Mostly self-taught, I play by ear. Had piano lessons as a kid, so I know how to read music, but it's a struggle to figure stuff out from musical notation. Like translating Russian. I took a couple of guitar lessons to work out tablature and finger-picking.
I loved listening to the transistor radio before falling asleep as a boy. I could get stations from far away at night and the first song i remember hearing on the radio was the Supremes' "Someday We'll Be Together". My parents took me to Radio City Music Hall in NYC to see the Beatles' movie "Help" when I was just a lad. I wondered why everybody was screaming.
2 years of piano lessons. Picked up Tom Ranken's brother's Kay bass for $30 in high school and started playing in the garage with Tom. I sang "Sweet Jane", "Johnny B Goode" and "Riot In Cell Block number 9"
My mother played show tunes on the piano. Grandpa played an accordion, but never within our hearing. Mom says I got my music from her father (my grandpa) who came to the US from Russia around the time of the Bolshevik revolution. He was a Jewish-Lithuanian lumber-man, so maybe I got my love of the outdoors from him as well.
Give it to The Beatles for childhood infatuation with rock and roll and The Grateful Dead for college years' revelations. These two are at the top of an immense musical heap--I always listened to jazz. My father had some Dixieland records which I liked a lot. Later I got into the canon of classic jazz, Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, Ellington, Monk, etc. As a kid, I loved top-40. I would sit in Sunday School class with Mr. Sadoff (Mr. Sadist anyone?) with a transistor radio in my pocket and a wire running to a little ear-bud listening to Casey Kasem's American top-40. One time I tried using aluminum foil hooked up to outdoor plumbing pipes to enhance the antenna capacity of my radio. "Cracklin' Rosie" by Neil Diamond was Number 1 on the top-40 that morning. My first rock concert was Blood Sweat And Tears ("Spinning Wheel"). I think Thelonious Monk must have been opening for them because I remember a jazz band opening with a sax player marching back and forth across the stage. The sax player had a huge beard, could have been Rahsaan Roland Kirk for all I know. Wish I did know! The first LP I ever bought with my own money was CCR's "Green River". My parents faithfully bought us Beatles records (since we demanded them) and me and my brothers would stand in front of the record player with tennis rackets playing air guitar. We discovered that if we put the record player in the garage, we got a great reverb effect. I had a subscription to Billboard Magazine in high school and read the reviews religiously, bought records on the basis of such. I even wrote record reviews for my high school newspaper. The cool kids in art class turned me on to the Allman Brothers before they were popular. The first rock concert I ever went to by myself was Yes ("Close to the Edge") with the Eagles opening, at Merriwether Post Pavilion. I loved Yes and Genesis, but thought Emerson Lake & Palmer pretensious. I also loved Cream and Fleetwood Mac and Mayall and Savoy Brown, the whole litany of English blues bands. When I discovered the Grateful Dead in college, it was fabulous. Saw them five or six times, with LSD and peyote, then got disillusioned by bad album releases and the maniacal culture arising around them. Can't blame them for wanting lots of fans, though. They got me more and more interested in avant-garde, as they were very experimental in their earliest incarnations. Around 1980 they codified the old-same-thing and kept doing that and that's when I lost interest. I still love the "canon", though, all the way through "Blues For Allah". They started losing me at "Terrapin". Then there was punk-rock... ooh-whee! Then there was new-wave, Yowza! Then there was Walls Of Genius! And at that point, I stopped keeping up with all the changes in popular music...
HM
Did the Church of the Sub-Genius enter into the WOG thing?
Little Fyodor
Not really, the use of "Genius" I'm pretty sure was just parallel, um, genius! Evan came up with the name, originally for a cassette title, and for him it was a parody of Wall of Voodoo. At first he came up with Barrage of Idiocy, then Walls of Genius. For a bit he was calling us The Eldorado Springs Crazed Music Society, in parody of a nearby band called Boulder Creative Music Works, but Ed didn't like naming ourselves so similarly to another band, and when Evan said well what do YOU want us to be then, Ed said, well I like that name Walls Of Genius, so that's what we became. "Genius" was a word Evan liked bandying about. Ralph Sampson would score a dunk for our alma mater UVa, and Evan would exclaim, "That Ralph Sampson is a Genius!!" So it had nothing to do with the Church, though I wouldn't discount the possibility that we'd heard of the Sub-Genii by then. Probably not, but I couldn't say for sure.
born Summit, New Jersey, 1957
The earliest music related memory I can drum out of my brain is my mother commenting on the fade-out to "Crimson & Clover". I remember her saying to a friend, "Oh I think they're just saying 'over and over'". Years later I realized that was only half of what they were saying....
There was very little music in my house growing up. I remember my father playing My Fair Lady and Fiddler on the Roof soundtracks on a little record player. My father listened to a 1001 strings type radio station that always drove me nuts on long drives in the car, though I did notice two songs on that station that I like to this day: "Theme From a Summer Place" and the "Phoenix Love Theme"! It took knowing Boyd Rice to track down that latter one!
My father had zero musical inclination. My mother had some, enough to buy a piano, but it was rarely on display.
My mother got me guitar lessons when I was 12 or so. They mostly frustrated me cause I never fully mastered one lesson by the time it was time for the next one. I never felt I got good at it or really fully grokked what was being taught. So I mainly felt real bad at guitar. But I did learn the basics! I did learn the chords!
At some point we got a piano and I kinda self-taught myself to play that in a real rudimentary way. Actually, it was mostly on that piano that I wrote my first songs. I wrote a bunch of fairly shitty songs as a kid, mostly while I was in junior high. Very bleeding heart and "meaningful". I also started playing in a band with my best friend since I was little from across the street. I played guitar and he played keyboards. I think we managed one gig that included a drummer. Some girl told me that I played good and I thought she was being sarcastic! Oh, we played all covers, I don't know of what. Someone in the audience that night asked if we knew any Elvis and when I said no he said, "Well what good are you?" I didn't realize how standard a thing that was to say! Oh, I remember one cover we played! It was CCR's "Bad Moon Rising"! The keyboardist's father liked it when we played that. He'd bounce up and down with a big grin on his face and he called it "the farmer song"! Boy, Evan could write a book if he went into this much detail about all the bands HE was in....
By mid high school I had jumped on the progressive rock bandwagon and that hammered the nails in the coffin of my musical aspirations. I just knew I could never play like THAT.
Y'know, it's recently occurred to me that my mother had musical frustrations somewhat similar to mine. She learned to play piano as a kid to sheet music. But take away the sheet music and she was lost! She saw other people just sit down at the piano and play, without any sheet music, and that frustrated and discouraged her! And that's why she gave up playing as a kid. Well, that and she preferred to play softball! In retrospect that seems a little like the years I gave up guitar cause prog and ELP seemed so out of my league....
Then punk came along, and despite my original mixed feelings, I finally got into it after listening to The Ramones Leave Home Side A real stoned. Then it spoke to me!! And I got the idea that I Could Do This! I have a shitload of influences I could name, but that was the moment that got the ball rolling to where I thought of music as something I might want to take up again. That was reinforced by starting to write songs, which I found was much easier than writing the novel I had in my head (from whence it has never ventured).
Pre WoG days influences? Boy, how pre? CCR was my first favorite band. Then as I mentioned before, prog rock, especially ELP, kinda influenced me to STOP playing! Then punk, especially the Ramones, influenced me to start again!
My song writing grew out of attempts to write short stories and a novel (that I never finished) in a style that was heavily influenced by Nathaniel West, who wrote short, snappy novels of satire, humor and social cynicism in the 1930's. His writing and the Ramones both strongly influenced my first songs. When I started writing songs, it excited me cause it was so much easier and more fun than trying to be literary! And then of course Dostoevsky turned my head upside down. "I am a sick man. I am an angry man. I am an ugly man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. But will I see a doctor? NO!" Hahahahaha!! I turned Evan onto Dostoevsky and he was the one to first dub me Little Fyodor after I showed him my song lyrics. At first Evan didn't entirely like my songs because while he liked their sense of malevolence, he thought they lacked what he thought should be a corresponding sense of fun and exuberance, but then when I pointed out that they weren't about that, that's when he had the revelation that my songs were like Dostoevskian characters because the people in them couldn't even get any joy out of their own evil! And he jokingly called me Little Fyodor (Dosty's first name, as it was written on the books we read)! He was surprised to later learn I had taken that as my name!!
Evan Cantor
born Arlington VA 1956
Evan's Band History:
Long Lost Friend (high school garage into 1st year college)
TKE Blues All-Stars (frat house)
Wishing Well (Jeff Bragg's cover band, rock)
Dreamer Easy (Jeff Bragg's original progressive rock, King Crimson clones, I dropped out of college for this)
More TKE Blues All-Stars (went back to college)
Folk Grass Blues Band (post-college, Charlottesville VA)
Blitz Bunnies (punk rock, Fairfax VA)
Mystic Knights Of The Sea (jazz standards duo, Fairfax VA)
Rumours Of Marriage (new wave, Boulder CO)--next came the first incarnations of WoG
Were/are you a trained musician?
---No. Mostly self-taught, I play by ear. Had piano lessons as a kid, so I know how to read music, but it's a struggle to figure stuff out from musical notation. Like translating Russian. I took a couple of guitar lessons to work out tablature and finger-picking.
I loved listening to the transistor radio before falling asleep as a boy. I could get stations from far away at night and the first song i remember hearing on the radio was the Supremes' "Someday We'll Be Together". My parents took me to Radio City Music Hall in NYC to see the Beatles' movie "Help" when I was just a lad. I wondered why everybody was screaming.
2 years of piano lessons. Picked up Tom Ranken's brother's Kay bass for $30 in high school and started playing in the garage with Tom. I sang "Sweet Jane", "Johnny B Goode" and "Riot In Cell Block number 9"
My mother played show tunes on the piano. Grandpa played an accordion, but never within our hearing. Mom says I got my music from her father (my grandpa) who came to the US from Russia around the time of the Bolshevik revolution. He was a Jewish-Lithuanian lumber-man, so maybe I got my love of the outdoors from him as well.
Give it to The Beatles for childhood infatuation with rock and roll and The Grateful Dead for college years' revelations. These two are at the top of an immense musical heap--I always listened to jazz. My father had some Dixieland records which I liked a lot. Later I got into the canon of classic jazz, Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, Ellington, Monk, etc. As a kid, I loved top-40. I would sit in Sunday School class with Mr. Sadoff (Mr. Sadist anyone?) with a transistor radio in my pocket and a wire running to a little ear-bud listening to Casey Kasem's American top-40. One time I tried using aluminum foil hooked up to outdoor plumbing pipes to enhance the antenna capacity of my radio. "Cracklin' Rosie" by Neil Diamond was Number 1 on the top-40 that morning. My first rock concert was Blood Sweat And Tears ("Spinning Wheel"). I think Thelonious Monk must have been opening for them because I remember a jazz band opening with a sax player marching back and forth across the stage. The sax player had a huge beard, could have been Rahsaan Roland Kirk for all I know. Wish I did know! The first LP I ever bought with my own money was CCR's "Green River". My parents faithfully bought us Beatles records (since we demanded them) and me and my brothers would stand in front of the record player with tennis rackets playing air guitar. We discovered that if we put the record player in the garage, we got a great reverb effect. I had a subscription to Billboard Magazine in high school and read the reviews religiously, bought records on the basis of such. I even wrote record reviews for my high school newspaper. The cool kids in art class turned me on to the Allman Brothers before they were popular. The first rock concert I ever went to by myself was Yes ("Close to the Edge") with the Eagles opening, at Merriwether Post Pavilion. I loved Yes and Genesis, but thought Emerson Lake & Palmer pretensious. I also loved Cream and Fleetwood Mac and Mayall and Savoy Brown, the whole litany of English blues bands. When I discovered the Grateful Dead in college, it was fabulous. Saw them five or six times, with LSD and peyote, then got disillusioned by bad album releases and the maniacal culture arising around them. Can't blame them for wanting lots of fans, though. They got me more and more interested in avant-garde, as they were very experimental in their earliest incarnations. Around 1980 they codified the old-same-thing and kept doing that and that's when I lost interest. I still love the "canon", though, all the way through "Blues For Allah". They started losing me at "Terrapin". Then there was punk-rock... ooh-whee! Then there was new-wave, Yowza! Then there was Walls Of Genius! And at that point, I stopped keeping up with all the changes in popular music...
HM
Did the Church of the Sub-Genius enter into the WOG thing?
Little Fyodor
Not really, the use of "Genius" I'm pretty sure was just parallel, um, genius! Evan came up with the name, originally for a cassette title, and for him it was a parody of Wall of Voodoo. At first he came up with Barrage of Idiocy, then Walls of Genius. For a bit he was calling us The Eldorado Springs Crazed Music Society, in parody of a nearby band called Boulder Creative Music Works, but Ed didn't like naming ourselves so similarly to another band, and when Evan said well what do YOU want us to be then, Ed said, well I like that name Walls Of Genius, so that's what we became. "Genius" was a word Evan liked bandying about. Ralph Sampson would score a dunk for our alma mater UVa, and Evan would exclaim, "That Ralph Sampson is a Genius!!" So it had nothing to do with the Church, though I wouldn't discount the possibility that we'd heard of the Sub-Genii by then. Probably not, but I couldn't say for sure.