comedy, Covers, Homages, Sex, Drugs, Beer, Art, Boulder
HM:
Where does the WoG comedy come from? I'm talking about the insistence on zaniness, clownishness, moronic behavior. Were there any comedians that inspired you? Firesign Theater? Monty Python? The Three Stooges? The Marx Brothers? Or was it all someone or something else?
LF:
Hey, we're Jews, comedy comes naturally!! (ha-ha, though only half joking!) I think the zaniness and mania originally came mostly from Evan, though I picked up on it and I guess I kinda felt anything worth doing was worth overdoing (something I saw written on an album jacket somewhere, maybe by Todd Rundgren?), so I was all into going as far with it as I could. And being of questionable talent as a singer, anything I vocalized pretty much came out funny anyway! I know Evan was taken by the Residents album (Third Reich 'N' Roll?) that was all mini covers of sixties songs done in the most ridiculous and absurd fashion, though our zany, crazy approach was almost the opposite of their quasi robotic style. Ed was a big factor here too, cause he was into anything funny and especially "bad" culture and movies, and we'd rent bad or weird movies together and watch them and laugh at them. Of course, that all became a real big cultural "thing"; I don't know enough to be able claim that Ed was ahead of everyone else on that, but I know he was the one I personally first caught that bug from. I once featured him on my supposedly experimental radio show playing selections from his collection of "artists" like Telly Savalas and Festus (from Gunsmoke!). It was from his collection that I first heard the now famous William Shatner travesties. Leonard Nimoy, too! Oh, and let us NOT forget Mrs. Miller!! He also had a record by Rocky Graziano pretending to be a spiritual guru! One "real" comedian he liked a lot was Rodney Dangerfield. If I had to name a comedian I liked or was inspired by I'd probably name the embarrassingly all too obvious choice of Woody Allen. The comedy of the satirical writer Nathaniel West helped inspire my song writing. But again, the idea of applying comedy and zaniness to WoG as an "experimental music" thing mostly came from Evan. Though I should make a distinction here between zaniness and comedy, cause we rarely if ever tried to make "jokes" per se. We were just having fun going ape shit and doing whatever we felt like!
EC:
We never actually made "jokes" per se. There were never set-ups and punch-lines. I had always liked Monty Python & Firesign Theatre, but I also thought the people who constantly quoted from them were ridiculous. I appreciate it now, but back then, not so much. I also enjoy the Jewish humor that came from the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Woody Allen, etc. But I never saw myself as a comedian or in comedy. The comedic approach with Walls of Genius, I think, originated in three places: John Lennon, Janis Joplin and my own personal frustration with musicians and the music business.
John Lennon once said in an interview that the key to the Beatles' success was their willingness to completely humiliate themselves on stage. You might say, "The Beatles? Complete humiliation? That's ridiculous! They revolutionized rock'n'roll music, they are the eternal iconic best rock band that ever was, blah blah blah etc." All that is true. But think about John Lennon's own experience. He and the rest of the band were fifties greasers with floppy pompadours and black leather jackets. They played all night at the Reeperbahn, a red-light district. They were bad boys until Brian Epstein cleaned them up. They got haircuts and matching suits. They became a manufactured British faux-Marx Brothers comedy ensemble in addition to playing rock music. Then they were compared against the Rolling Stones, who maintained their bad-boy image and attitude. The Beatles, on the other hand, became "nice young lads" and "good boys". In <their> minds, they had been emasculated and humiliated, but they kept on rockin'.
Janis Joplin once said in an interview that nobody paid any attention to her when she was just another girl-hippie folk-singer. When she decided to let it all hang out, all of a sudden people took notice and she became a star.
After Rumours of Marriage broke up, I was pretty much totally sick of musicians. They all seemed like undependable, irresponsible idiots. Bands never seemed to last more than three months before imploding. And never because of me, right? Well, maybe I contributed to the scenes, but it always seemed like some lead singer wannabe Jim Morrison or lead guitarist wannabe or off-key female singer or asshole drummer was tearing the projects apart. And the business end was even worse. Gigs? Cripes, man, who did you have to blow to get a date? Was it only about giving away cocaine? The music business is still this way. There are three-hundred bands who want to play for every one gig available and it's like fishing in a black hole to get any attention. You either have to be so incredibly good that you just blow away the competition completely (be an actual virtuoso genius) or do something so unique for so long that it doesn't matter if you're good or bad, you can't help but be noticed (like Little Fyodor, who happens to be a quite competent musician and also totally unique).
So I just said, "Fuck it" and started to let my demons loose. Red Ed was my muse for a long time and he was just as willing to loose his demons. Ed had the William Shatner and Telly Savalas records. He was obsessed with Mexican Wrestling Films dubbed into English. We would drink beer by the bucketload, get stoned and laugh our asses off at these things. We developed a highly-nuanced sense of humor based on cultural artifacts that were "so bad they were good". Like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Samson at the Wax Museum". By the time we became Walls Of Genius, we had mastered our own kind of primal-scream self-psychoanalytic approach to indulging our demons through music. It was Ed and I who first unleashed Little Fyodor, so it was obvious that David had some demons he was ready to loose upon the world as well. Some people said we were just a bunch of screaming meemies, but there was a helluva lot more going on than just screaming. There was singing in funny voices, for instance. Or taking what might diplomatically be called a "wannabe autistic" approach. This represented our willingness to be humiliated, to let it all hang out, to become totally uninhibited. The resulting mania sometimes led to a comedic approach ("This Is The Voice Of God"..."Abandon Ship", etc).
I should mention that being in Walls Of Genius was a rather sex-less experience. While we enjoyed a great deal of virtual sex (via the music, call-in radio and trading letters with female underground participants), none of the three of us had a girlfriend during Walls Of Genius. There were no groupies lined up to service the genial maniacs of music. In some ways, we were contemptuous of the musicians who got the groupies. They were the very music business we were rejecting. We were critical of the social rituals of romance. So this contributed to the variety of 'frustrated adolescence' expressed so often by Walls Of Genius. I think of "Falling In Love With Ellen" or "Everybody's Fuckin'" or "Palisades Park" or the Monkees' "Valleri". Towards the end, David nabbed a girlfriend and they are still together to this day. He was the only one of the three who got a girl out of being in this band and that was at a time when all things WoG were beginning to fray. I started dating the woman who became my wife around that time, but it was not because of the band. I met her at work and it took her a long time to work up a sincere appreciation for Walls Of Genius. In retrospect, WoG doesn't seem like such difficult music to me, but at the time, I think we were ahead of our time, ripping and tearing and growling at the cutting edge.
So I think this gets to the heart of the comedic part of our performance-art comedy rock band.
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LF:
Boy, Evan makes it sound like his zaniness was at least partly some kind of calculated show business move, but it never seemed that way to me. He never discussed it like that at the time, not with me.
I think Evan's just being himself when he's being funny, and when he's expressing that in his music, He's being honest about himself.
I remember once in college we met somewhere in our respective cars with plans to go somewhere else, maybe to go on a hike or something. Evan reached his arm out his window and in rapid fire succession he flashed me a peace sign, then he flashed me the thumbs up sign, then he flashed me the AOK sign, then he flashed me the finger, and then he smiled real big and mischievous like and drove off to the appointed rendezvous. That made me feel real good. I think WoG was very much a musical expression of the same!
Oh, and I'd like to add one very seminal influence, comedy wise, at least for me but I bet Evan would concur: MAD MAGAZINE!!!
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EC:
I wouldn't overstate the MAD magazine influence. Just one of many satiric approaches that we likely absorbed growing up, like the Smothers Brothers show or Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Who can forget that icon of uncool-ness, President Nixon, saying "Sock it to me" on national television?
LF:
I wouldn't understate MAD's role in warping my own mind, though I loved Laugh-In, too and watched it religiously the first three years, often talking about last night's episode the next morning with my best friend on our walk to junior high.
I remember an issue of Mad which had "Loused Up In Space". Because they were on these alien planets, the artist had a lot of fun drawing in little space monsters of one ridiculous sort or another, in the corners and such, where they didn't really have anything to do with the action, they were just drawn in while other stuff was going on (this was not Sergio Aragones, it was drawn by the artist who drew the strip, though I think it was the artist's idea, not the writer's). One such monster was a head with a Beatles haircut and right under the head were two little feet, and it was going Yeah yeah yeah! I was so young at this time that I didn't consciously think "Beatles" but I knew it had something to do with musical bands that were popular. I also found this quite hilarious!!!!! Anyway, this would seem to place the issue in the mid sixties. Unfortunately I sold all my old Mads while I was still a kid, thinking I was being a slick entrepreneur, sigh................
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an afterthought by LF:
I'd kinda like to offer my own perspective on these comments by Evan:
"In some ways, we were contemptuous of the musicians who got the groupies. They were the very music business we were rejecting. We were critical of the social rituals of romance. So this contributed to the variety of 'frustrated adolescence' expressed so often by Walls Of Genius. I think of "Falling In Love With Ellen" or "Everybody's Fuckin'" or "Palisades Park" or the Monkees' "Valleri"."
Speaking entirely for myself, I don't think I was *critical* of the rituals of romance so much as I was *alienated* by them because of how extremely self-conscious and inept I felt any time I made the slightest motions toward engaging in them. At this point, I must admit that I may be speaking more for my current self than my self at the time, but I believe I always recognized at least to some degree that these rituals were likely necessary and inherent to human nature and thus criticizing them would be much akin to criticizing gravity for keeping one from being able to fly around at will. I certainly felt a degree of anger at my lot in life for my sense of being, you might say, deficient in this area and some of that may very well have boiled over into an anger at society and people and maybe even women, but mostly I just knew it was the way of things and there was nothing "bad" about it necessarily other than that I personally had the short end of the stick regarding the matter. If you're a square peg and the world is a round hole, who's to blame for your not fitting in? Now, in a sense one might frame this as an injustice if one sees that people who embody attributes that are generally considered desirable or admirable are not valuable toward attaining the things generally desired by all. (I believe there is more recent debate on the internet about "nice guy" syndrome or some such.) (I should mention this also has applicability to economic issues.) But at the same time, the way things are works great for some people, and who's to really say it shouldn't be that way, especially if that's pretty much the way we're wired to be. Well, the exact details of these rituals may vary wildly between one time and place and another, but it's pretty difficult to imagine there not being any ritual at all, and some people are always going to succeed at them better than others whatever they are. I suppose one might call for these rituals to better reward socially desirable characteristics, but I don't know if that's realistic. There's likely a degree of injustice built into reality (thus the old saying, "Life isn't fair!") and we may hate that on one hand yet there's an absurdity to criticizing what cannot be any other way on the other. It's a paradox in that sense. Someone later called Little Fyodor a "metaphysical protest singer" and I think it was this sentiment in my songs that he was referring to.
Now, I don't know for sure if Evan was trying to say anything that would be contradicted by what I just said, but I wanted to articulate that for myself anyway. Also, Evan may rightly protest that I may have not expressed any disagreement when he expressed sentiments of derision regarding the social rituals surrounding romance back in the day. My reply would be twofold. One is, as I already alluded to, my thoughts on this are maybe more well formed now than they were back in the day, though I would claim that I was at the very least beginning to form these ideas back then, even if I don't know that I would have been able to articulate them as clearly (assuming I'm making sense at all even now!). Plus, I probably just didn't open up about my ideas a lot of the time, and I probably felt especially reticent about saying something that might have come across as, "Oh, there's nothing wrong with all that stuff, it's just that I/we suck at it!"
Well, I don't know where any of that would fit in. And I should add that I certainly did feel contempt for mainstream music of the day (though OTOH I very much liked a lot of mainstream music of earlier days, and maybe do so even more today, and if that seems like so much get off of my lawn, well hey, it's my lawn, so... though I should also add that I include mainstream music from *before* my day as well as those from my own formative years -- and I bet Evan would concur on this, even though I may have somewhat struck out on my previous bet, that he would concur on Mad Magazine!), though I don't know to what degree I projected that contempt onto the musicians themselves.....
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an after-thought by Evan, regarding MAD Magazine -
Regarding Mad Magazine, I must confess that I did love Mad Magazine as a boy. My cousin Jeff had a collection of the old MADs in my Aunt Hannah's attic and whenever we went to visit my Aunt (in Maplewood, NJ) I would spent as much time as possible reading those magazines. Jeff had gone off to college, he was about fifteen years older than I. He had a hookah once, too, and let me take a hit off it. I coughed a lot and that was that. I just never thought of Mad Magazine in terms of Walls of Genius, although I'm sure it was a seminal influence on how both David and I view the world. I sometimes referred to Little Fyodor as "Little Fonebones", which is a direct Mad Magazine reference.
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HM:
A lot of the WoG recordings seem to be cover versions of rock, country, lounge and folk songs. You'd sort of start out with what sounded like a fairly competent version of the original and then tweak it, improvise off of it and take it to dimensions crazy, demented, far-out and unknown. This seems to be very much like what the Dead and the Allmans did, and the free jazz improv guys. State a theme, and then improvise on that theme. You've talked about how the comedy in your songs was a kind of cutting-loose, releasing demons, going nuts, cathartic, primal scream kind of deal. So, it seems like doing "covers" was a vehicle or "excuse" to create something new? I get the idea from what you've said that these crazy versions of recognizable songs were not "spoofs" or "lampoons" on those original songs.
LF:
The doing of cover songs without much intentionality as to how they would sound or what we were adding to them beyond just going ape shit and have a wild and crazy improvisational good time with them the same way we might have a pots and pans party and record the resulting jam with copious amounts of echo (copping some review copy there!) was, again, something that originated with Evan.
If he feels he was emulating John Lennon humiliating himself or Janis Joplin finding the key to her success, or that he was expressing frustration with former band leaders, who am I to dispute that, except that I didn't feel any of that myself at the time. Again, although they were much more controlled in their approach, The Residents did take sixties covers songs in weird places, and I do think that was a big influence. I remember playing the "Virgin Fugs" record for Evan which he called "refreshing" probably because of the way they "let it all hang out" on that record (much more so than on the song with that title!) and really go ape shit, though I think WoG had already begun to do that by the time either of us heard that song. But I think there was something in the sixties ether that fed that ideal, even if few took it as far as we did. But if you combine Virgin Fugs with The Residents Third Reich 'n Roll with the Beatles singing "Twist And Shout"...? With the Art Ensemble of Chicago (with whom WoG was once compared in a review that also compared us to Negativland) too? And then just Evan's personality, where ever that came from, though I know there's not as much to write about in a cultural sense with regard to that....
But I agree we weren't attacking the songs we covered. Whether they were "spoofs" may depend on how you define that, but the point was not to denigrate those songs, as a lot of people believed. We did cover some songs we didn't especially like, probably at the behest of other people who were there at the time (remember a lot of WoG was recorded in party atmospheres!). But mostly we covered songs we liked, so you might look at the process as one of simply seeking to have fun, as banal as that might sound. Playing a song you like is fun, but going ape shit with it is even MORE fun! Also, I didn't like how culture was getting slicker and slicker. I was horrified by Garland Jeffries's cover of "96 Tears". I felt that part of the fun of sixties Top 40 was its lack of slickness, its amateur enthusiasm, and even its silliness and absurdity. So it made sense to me to ACCENTUATE these traits rather than to minimize them, as Jeffries had done!
Well, that was my justification in my own mind, but I don't know if I ever discussed that with anyone, and it would have been after the fact anyway. Again, it was Evan's impetus, and the rest of us just found it so much fun that we were all about it!
FWIW, I also remember Evan commending Frankie Valli's singing for how unabashed it was.....
But I think I would agree with your main premise that we were approaching the cover songs pretty much the same way we were approaching all that we did, with a sense of experimental fun and not so much with the intention of commenting on the song itself. Other than the Residents, I really don't know who did it first.
I will add two people who've come to mind in influencing me to like things for being "bad". One was Frank Zappa, though he's a bit of a sore point for us as our worst review ever point blank accused us of trying to sound like him which was utterly untrue. But FWIW, I do remember Zappa talking about the beauty of dumb pop music and celebrating cheap movies. And I was very impressed when I once read Lou Reed saying that he likes trash. But again, most of my "so good its bad" aesthetic came from Ed and Evan more than anyone out in cultural milieu land!
EC:
Little Fyo' has this mostly right--but I don't want you to think that I was emulating John Lennon or Janis Joplin in an some misguided effort to find success. Those were just memorable examples (to me) of performers finding their voice and a measure of success when they stopped trying to "fit in" or do "normal" musical things. When we let it all hang out (a la Janis) or allowed ourselves to wallow in what most would consider a totally humiliating context (the Fabulous Pus-Tones), we somehow found a musical voice that gathered an audience. Not a huge audience, I grant you, but an audience nonetheless. All the zaniness was a response to cultural artifice. And, yes, I was always a little agitated that listeners or reviewers assumed that we couldn't play our instruments very well and that's why we made the kind of music we did. We could not have made that music if we had not all been competent musicians.
Structurally, you're right--a lot of what we did echoed the Grateful Dead's approach to a song, but that approach came from John Coltrane, Miles Davis and other jazz luminaries. You play the "head" a few times and then take off. Some people took off farther than others (Eric Dolphy, for instance). Cream was one of the first pop groups to try this jazz approach with rock music, but I think the Dead did it more effectively. So when we did a song like Alice Cooper's "Eighteen", we'd play the tune somewhat properly, generally taking a "fuck you" attitude with the vocals and then we'd take off like a jet plane into some kind of unexpected stratosphere. Part of the enjoyment was that you never knew exactly where you were gonna go--oh sure, I had an arrangement for "Eighteen", I knew each time we performed it how the jam section was gonna start. But where it ended? That was for the moment to decide.
David is right that many people thought we were ridiculing the cover songs. The truth is that they were all loving homages, mostly, to music that we loved growing up. Our approach was to use those pieces as a basis for whatever other message we wanted to deliver, such as "bite me, world!" or whatever. And then a lot of it was not about any message at all, just us having a blast letting it all hang out and seeing how far we could let it hang.
We never sat down and listened to something in particular, deciding to emulate that something. It was more of a case that as we got farther into what we were doing, we discovered other people who had done similar things in the past. The Fugs, the Holy Modal Rounders, Wild Man Fischer, the Shaggs--these were all very inspiring along the way. But I never listened to that stuff growing up, never knew it existed. People did compare us to Zappa, which I think only reflected a lack of a listener's imagination. Just because the music had humorous aspects didn't mean we were Zappa fans or Zappa wannabes. I never was a Zappa fan--I respected his music and chops, but to this day, I can't listen to Zappa for pleasure. It sort of annoys me and I never really got into it. What I did listen to that has some bearing on what we did is Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan's big bands, both of which took a humorous approach, both bands utilizing some funny voices ("What's the point of getting sober..."). Louis Prima did this also but I never heard him until after Walls of Genius was kaput, so he couldn't have influenced me.
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HM:
Tell me about drugs, drinking and WoG.
LF:
Pot and beer, no big deal. There was a bit of a rivalry between Ed's preference for Coors (Colorado native, he) and Evan's championing of Pabst (pre Blue Velvet). When I lost my job, I made periodic pilgrimages by foot to the Hall Of Genius's neighborhood liquor store, returning with a 12 pack of Carling Black Label in my backpack! We had no problem imbibing these fine products while recording. One posthumous review described some of our output as "late night drunken antics," to which Ed observed, "How did they know it was night?"
EC:
Yes, there was a lot of pot and beer in those days. I happened to be a pot dealer on and off throughout that time and there might be some who would say having a band was a cover for dealing. But I never had a large "business". It was more like I knew where to get some weed and I knew a bunch of people who wanted it, so it was a moral and ethical responsibility to serve as the middleman (the 'dealer'). We were lucky if we had a choice of something beyond dirt-weed. Colombian Gold, Panama Red, Maui Wowie, Jamaican bricks, Afghan hashish and Thai stick were the choices on the best of days, never all at the same time. In Boulder, I never found Panama or Maui.
We had all had experiences on LSD, but it wasn't really involved with Walls Of Genius other than a shared historical reality between the players. One time, though, when we were jamming with Miracle in the old schoolhouse, Ed popped a tab of acid and then, about 20 minutes later, asked if I was getting off. I asked him "what are you talking about?" "Didn't you drop some acid?" he asked. "No, I didn't drop any acid." Ha! That was the night that Ed put ketchup in his socks at the Denny's on Baseline Road.
David and I had taken acid together on a number of occasions in college, but I think we had both given it up by the time we moved to Colorado (1981). My last 'trip' was in 1979, when a friend of mine (David you might remember Larry Russe) hit me in the head with a freakin' frisbee. That kind of ticked me off and I thought Larry was an idiot. He would have been a fraternity brother, but then he disappeared into another world, the navy I think. I remember seeing the Jerry Garcia Band while I was on peyote at the Warner Theatre in Washington DC and seeing some hippie's eyeballs ringing up double-zeroes like an old-fashioned cash register. I didn't want to end up that way and I figured I had learned what I was gonna learn from the psychedelic experience and it was time to be 'enlightened' on my own without the extra added chemical help.
Beer-wise, this was before microbrews had descended on the world. I drank a lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon back in the day, I will admit. I still love beer, but can only handle a few at a time.....
None of us were into coke, speed or narcotics. We were nice young lads....
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HM:
Let's talk now a little bit about Boulder, Colorado. Why did you move there? What was going on culturally there at the time? And did living in Boulder have any effect on the way that WoG developed? Was there anything special about the town that may have contributed to the way WoG was? David commented to me in a private message that Boulder at the time was kind of saturated with glorification of the Beat writers. Must have been that Naropa Institute thing. I can see how that could have been annoying.
LF:
Well, I said I liked the Beats but I liked making fun of them too since they seemed overly hallowed in that time and place. But it was no real big deal to me. I remember Naropa had an anniversary party in the lobby of the hotel where I was a desk clerk. Abby Hoffman came up to the desk with Alan Ginsberg and pointed out this gal who also worked at the desk to Ginsburg and told him, "I came up to the desk and said, 'Stick 'em up, I'm a former con!' and she said, 'The last guy who told me that was G. Gordon Liddy! HA HA HA HA HAHAH HA!!" I remember telling Evan how this old senile guy who lived at the hotel came down during the Naropa party and looked very confused. Then when he came down in the middle of the night (have I told you I was a night auditor, working the graveyard shift? also, this old senile guy Ralph would come down once or twice in the middle of the night thinking he could get breakfast...), he told me, Boy, there were sure a lot of FRUITS down here before! And Evan commented, Well, he got THAT part right!!
Sometime in the year after I graduated from college, Evan told me that he wanted to move to Colorado but didn't want to go alone and didn't know who to go with. I basically, metaphorically speaking, raised my hand.
We thought we'd move to either Denver or Boulder. Everyone, but everyone, whom I told this to said, "Boulder!"
Boulder was in a pretty neat space around that time. It had already started to get kinda expensive, but not all that much so yet, and it was just a big destination for people into living life for the sake of it, for fun and experiences, rather than for getting ahead or whatever it is most people do. I think it was way over represented by people with alternative lifestyle ambitions, like artists, yoga teachers, massage therapists, mountain bikers, rock climbers. A lot of outdoor interest, which is what we went there for. It also had a big high tech presence, though I didn't really realize that till later. We met a lot of like minded people there. Before long, they all seemed to be leaving for San Francisco. But Colorado had big cred among hippies and former hippies and the like, and mostly they were centered on Boulder and the mountain communities nearby. I started doing a radio show on KGNU pretty quickly, and I played the weirdest shit I could get my hands on with total freedom to do that. There was a big punk rock presence there despite (or because of?) the hippies. I really don't know if most of the rest of the country had that or not. It was the first place I really saw it, though it definitely seemed like a thing that was just happening then. I believe the couple who fronted Rumours of Marriage thought Boulder was too mellow for them to succeed there and that's why they moved to NY. But it says something that they were there in the first place! I don't know what brought them there (maybe Evan does), but it just seemed like a lot of artsy people had made Boulder a place they wanted to move to.
Y'know, one of my earliest LF songs was sort of a lampoon on Boulder, called Why Am I Down?, which had lines like I believe in peace and love and everyone I know does too, so why am I down? I jog five miles every day and then relax in a hot tub, so why am I down? But it was a nice place, smack up against the foothills and small enough to get around fairly easy but big enough to have interesting people and a university, with a greenbelt around it to prevent too much sprawl, though that probably contributed to pushing housing prices up, along with that university and general popularity. I was bummed to have to leave it to find a house I could buy, though I don't miss it all that much now. Evan still lives there, having bought a house sooner, right before housing prices started rising dramatically......
EC:
I was playing in a band in Charlottesville, VA after graduating college (1978-79), the Folk-Grass-Blues Band. I played bass. We had some gigs, were starting to even get paid for some. All of us in the band worked construction during the day, mowing lawns, painting dorms and houses, moving furniture, digging ditches, etc. for the Santana Construction Company. I had intended to move to San Francisco, still enamored of the whole Frisco thing, but the band was doing so well that I stuck around in Cville. Then the two prime movers of the band quarrelled and the band busted up. The money I had saved to move was now gone, so I went to San Francisco anyway (Nov 79) and couch-surfed in a college pal's apartment for two months, essentially doing nothing except wandering around the city. I was lucky to have not become involved in my pal's bisexual adventures because the AIDs epidemic exploded shortly thereafter. I think my pal was lucky, too, because last I heard he was a school teacher out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After that, I came back to my parents' house in northern Virginia to figure out where I wanted to be and save enough money to go there. I briefly flirted with the idea of New England (Boston), but eventually decided that I had had it with the east coast and the siren call of the Rocky Mountains had hooked me. So I put out the word to friends that I wanted to move to Colorado, but wouldn't it be great to have a friend to do it with. My thought process was that of elimination--California would fall into the ocean, the northwest was too rainy, Montana too cold, New Mexico and Arizona too hot, Utah and Wyoming had no towns sufficiently cool to even consider, Colorado was the winner by elimination and I knew there were a lot of mountains. David and I had both been avid backpacking campers in Charlottesville and I was intent on pursuing the outdoors. David took the bait and so we set the date to go. David had a cousin with an apartment in Boulder, so we focused on that as a destination.
I had no idea what Boulder was, other than a "suburb" of Denver. At the time, I didn't even realize that we were headed for "Mork & Mindy's" hometown. I figured Denver was big enough that we could find jobs and it was close enough to a lot of mountains for my satisfaction. The highway coming into Denver goes through the industrial sector and we were essentially horrified by what looked just like northern Jersey. But Boulder was different and I think we both fell under it's spell immediately.
Boulder is geographically defined, steep mountains on the west side of town and long low mesas around the east. Most of that land is preserved as open space park, so regardless of the sprawl beyond, Boulder remains this little island of urbanity within the preserved perimeter. From a distance, it looks no different now than then. In Aug 1981 when David and I moved to Boulder, there was 25 miles of countryside between Boulder and Denver. No more. It's all developed, but within the "Peoples Republic", we remain "x-number of square miles surrounded by reality." David's description of the cultural climate in Boulder at that time is accurate. We were not enamored of the remnants of Beat Culture, because they were mostly all older gay guys and, in those days, gay and straight culture were two different places. Whenever I made friends with gay guys in those days, they always eventually wanted to be my boyfriend, but I wasn't gay. Why wasn't I gay, they wanted to know. Well, who knows. We all are what we are. There were occasions when people thought that David and I "must" be lovers. We lived in the same house, went on backpacking trips together, had an avant-garde band together, we must be gay. So many assumptions!
We discovered that Boulder had been written up in Life magazine as the place where the "hip meet to trip". Boulder is still trying to live that down and the city council does it's damndest to make life as difficult as possible for anybody who wants to party on. Currently they have enacted draconian rules regarding recreational marijuana even though it's legal now in Colorado and Boulder is the college town. Don't college students like to drink beer and smoke pot? Yes! All the more reason we should enact draconian rules.... cripes. Boulder has morphed from the counter-cultural haven we came to in 1981 into a kind of contemporary Santa-Fe-Junior fancytown. Lately, Boulder is building it's rep as a "foodie" destination with a shite-load of fancy restaurants. Compared to downtown Denver joints, though, Boulder is still a bargain for fancy food. But it's expensive any way you look at it.
David mentions Mikal & Riann from Rumours of Marriage leaving Boulder because it was too mellow. May very well be the case. Ed always said that Mikal came to Boulder because he got into trouble with statutory rape in Norman, Oklahoma. I thought he had had a record store in Norman that burnt down and he needed to escape the financial implications. In any case, he was unpredictable and volatile, which made him an exciting front-man for a band. Ed maintained that they left Boulder because Norman was catching up to them. I do know that they wanted to pursue music and thought NYC was the place to be. They disappeared into the city and none of us know what has happened to them since. Mikal Bellan caught a "thank you" on R. Stevie Moore's website and David picked up a rumor that he opened a restaurant in the Caribbean, but all that is so far in the past, who knows at this time. Mikal wrote the original incarnation of "Amerika Futura" which Walls of Genius played a lot.
As far as Boulder having something to do with how WoG developed, that's hard to say. I think we were in total rebellion at the culture of the eighties, as the Reagan years began and wore on. So Boulder was a liberal bastion even then and anti-conservative stuff has always gone over well here. But Boulder was, and still is, an ideologically diverse place even if it looks like a completely white-bread-town. Soldier of Fortune magazine was published here and conservatives pride themselves on being iconoclasts in the liberal soup.
Just so you know, David and Lauren live in one of the coolest Denver neighborhoods in the entire city, the Highlands. "Up" in the northwest corner of Denver, separated from downtown (LoDo) by the railyards and interstate highway, it has developed it's own cool reputation with hip boutiques and restaurants and brewie places.
LF:
Heh, just remembered that one of the more prominent "sometimes" members of WoG, a Leo Goya (an assumed name that he uses consistently), actually attended Naropa briefly. He said he quit after his obligatory consultation with Allen Ginsberg in which Leo says Ginsberg criticized his poetry for not being commercial!
Other than that, I can't offhand recall ever befriending someone from Naropa, though its presence was certainly felt, particularly in the number of "trustafarians" one would find in the hipster coffee shop.....
I also remember Joel Haertling telling me to honk my horn as I drove by a particular house to show that we knew Allen Ginsberg was in there having sex with this young guy we all knew who was a big fan of the local experimental scene....
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HM:
Was there something/anything you were trying to "say" with WoG? Was there, were there any points you were trying to make? Were there motivating ideas or philosophies, such as anarchism behind WoG? Was there a worldview or ideology behind it? Or was it more of a "fuck it, let's jam and get weird" kind of thing? There might or might not be some crossover with the Dada/Surrealism question that I also sent this morning.
LF:
Evan may feel differently, but I thought of our craziness as the antithesis of messaging, as a pure indulgence in silliness for its own sake, for the pure fun of it. You can construe a message in anything, and if you wanted to construe something out of what I just described, you might look at it as being anti pretension and contrivance. But it's not like we ever sat down and discussed how to best be anti pretension and contrivance. We never sat down and discussed what we did at all. Well, at a certain point, me and Evan did discuss things cause we lived under the same roof and did a lot of stuff together, went on vacation trips together (hiking and backpacking). There was at least one time that a friend expressed (to Evan) genuine surprise that we were not gay lovers (and at least one other time someone accused us of the same for offensive effect, on the radio!), we did so much together. So certainly we talked about WoG a lot. But I don't know that we ever really talked about what direction to take or what goals to achieve or (obviously, from the previous point) how to achieve whatever goals. I seem to remember the topic of what covers to do coming up at times, but I don't think we ever settled anything in such a setting or manner. We pretty much did what we felt like. I didn't really choose what covers I would sing as that seemed to be more Evan's thing. Either he'd put me up to singing something or it would just be a function of the situation (spontaneity!). Towards the end, our output consisted more of overdub projects than group jams (another subject unto itself!), and Evan seemed to be keeping the covers mostly to himself at that point and I started missing them, and thus I decided to record "This Diamond Ring", but ironically WoG broke up before it could see a WoG release, and it ended up on the Little Fyodor LP, "Idiots Are Closer To God," (which I considered my most WoG-like release), though three of the four tracks were recorded on Evan's equipment at the Hall of Genius (and I give credit on the liner notes). Like I said previously, I abhorred the way Garland Jeffries covered "96 Tears" and one could look at our approach as a rebellion against that kind of thing ("overproduced" was a big rallying cry of the alternative minded of the time, in fact Jello Biafra sarcastically/ironically introduces a DK's song as being such, I think on the one DK's record I ever owned), but I don't know if I would extend our "message" beyond that. That said, a memory of Evan and I discussing how WoG would get the world settling its problems with humor and effrontery rather than war and violence has just seeped into my mind.... I think there's a certain freedom one gains when one loses (in the intentional sense of that word, like "hey, lose the bumb!") one's pretense, one's sense of or concern for dignity. There's less need to compete when you've forsaken the prize. But again, we didn't talk about this. Much of comedy is based on the flouting of dignity, so I think that all just seemed like a natural thing. I can see the influence of the likes of the Three Stooges, but again, I think that would be more of an ether thing than a direct or discussed thing. (Though y'know when considering the Jewishness of what I do, I like to say that I'm following in the footsteps of Kafka, Lenny Bruce and the Three Stooges! Though that's more meant to be about LF than WoG, though I think the latter two would still apply! Ed, by the way, is goy, in case I've accidentally implied otherwise....) As for Dada, the more I think of it the less I'm sure I really know what it is. I guess I've assumed it to incorporate humor and non sequitur, like when something doesn't make sense but there seems to be some sense to it not making sense. Evan and I certainly have intellectual backgrounds and interest, but I really think WoG was a primarily non-intellectual exercise, except with regard to how our backgrounds played into whatever we considered "cool" to do.
EC:
I'm sure Dada and surrealism had an influence on us, but probably not directly.
For myself, I have always enjoyed the heck out of art museums and once spent 6 hours on acid in the National Gallery in D.C. That was an interesting experience--there was a girl in my anthropology class (with me and Will MacLeod, a frat bro) named Sandy that I was somewhat interested in romantically. Sandy was fascinated by Will and I discussing the psychedelic experience with the professor in terms of archetypal aboriginal rituals (or somesuch thing) and one thing led to another. How would you like to go with me and Will and David to the National Gallery in DC and drop acid? Okay, she said, that would be good. So I obtained the acid and gave her a hit at the next class that she could take on the weekend. Come Friday, she didn't want to go with us. And she had already taken the hit of acid all by herself! This was not the way to do it... but okay, fine, you don't have to go. Come Saturday, she decided she did want to come after all, so we trundled on up from Charlottesville to DC. We went to the gallery, dropped acid and looked at art. Sandy and I were in this wonderful room full of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings when she said to me, "I don't understand why everybody loves these so much, they don't do anything for me." Well, hell, Vincent's paintings are just about the liveliest thing you can look at on acid. I told her that there were plenty of pictures in the museum and she should go find whichever ones she liked best and just make sure to meet up with all of us at the main fountain at 6 o'clock, okay? Okay. Come 6 o'clock, where the hell is she? I'm thinking, maybe she went to the car. So I go out of the building and go to the car. She's not there. I start walking back to the museum. But she's not there, either. I turn to go back to the car. But she's not at the car, I know that. I'm sweating out in the D.C. heat and repeated this process a couple of times and then stopped, realizing that i must have looked like a lunatic going back and forth on the sidewalk. I went back to the museum and there was David and Will exactly where I expected them to be, right by the main fountain, but no sign of Sandy. We talked to a museum guard, but no, there hadn't been any lost girl happening. We went to dinner somewhere nearby and came back to the museum at closing time, but still, she wasn't there. So we got in the car, scratched our heads, hoped for the best and went home to Charlottesville. I called Sandy's phone number the next morning and discovered what she had done. She had walked right out of the museum after leaving me and took a bus to her parent's home in Alexandria, Virginia. Somehow they got her back to Charlottesville. I was glad she was okay and then that was it. I don't remember having anything to do with her after that. Cripes, how could you trust a girl like that? I was lucky I didn't get into any trouble, having fed her LSD, twice even, and then letting her wander right out of the National Gallery into the big wide world outside. We thought we were so grown-up and could treat each other like adults, but I should have known better.
Well, back to the subject at hand--how could you not love Salvador Dali's work (surrealism)? Or Marcel Duchamp and his famous urinal (Dada)? But it wasn't a concern. The only reason we got into sound collage and musique concrète was because everybody else in the underground was doing it and we wanted to be taken seriously, even if we didn't take ourselves all that seriously in the first place.
Regarding the choice of cover songs, it was usually a case of what I could figure out or had laying around in piano sheet-music books. In those days, with no internet, the only reference material was piano sheet music, which was often very difficult for guitarists to use anyway. Take the Beatles piano sheets, for instance. The guitar chords would be in the key that the Beatles used, but that might be some very bizarre key for guitar, like B♭. But if you capo'd up 1, you could chord the song in A, much more straightforward. It took me many years to learn this essentially very easy trick. But nobody showed me, I had to figure it out for myself. So in those days, I would sit with a record and try to parse out the lyrics and figure out the song. Which I have always been fairly proficient at doing. Nowadays, almost everything is available on the web and most of the songs even have chords to go with them. Most internet material is hardly ever completely correct, though, but it saves a lot of time and effort in the process of learning a song. In the WoG days, I had a number of song-books and I would try to learn all the songs, whether they were songs I liked or not. The ones with the easiest chords I learned the fastest. Sometimes, with Walls of Genius, people would thumb through the song-books and ask us to play "that" song... so we would, however we could. The best results of that process are highlighted on the release "Wanna Beer?".
We weren't particularly political, although we all hated Reagan, the whole screw-the-poor make-war-on-the-world mentality of Reagan and the warmongering trickle-down voodoo economics people. It was the first George Bush who coined the term 'voodoo economics' when he was running against Reagan. How quickly they change their tune when they get ensconced in office. I wrote a country song once that had the refrain at the end of every verse, "so fuck you, Ronald Reagan". Ed objected to the obscenity. Why, I couldn't tell you, there was plenty of obscenity elsewhere in W.o.G., but he objected, so I sent it to some compilation project and have never been able to locate the piece since. Oh well! The piece I assembled for 'Before and After' called '4 More Years' was essentially an anti-Reagan-war-mongering piece. So there was some of that, but not that much in the long run.
LF:
Yeah that was sure weird going back to Charlottesville without her in the car and not knowing what the hell happened to her, and all three of us found reasons to individually take the blame for it (I think I didn't take her seriously when she seemed to drop some vague hint of freaking which was the last I saw of her), but once we heard what happened it seemed like it was just her being goofy. Hey wait a second, why didn't any of us think of calling her cell?? Ha ha...
I loved the surreal movies of Buñuel, especially the two French ones with the long names. Also loved Fellini, especially Amarcord and Satyricon. The latter was one of my more successful "appreciating art while tripping" experiences. There was this great movie theater in Charlottesville and I'd go check out weird old foreign films by directors I'd heard of from a cinema class in college. I also really liked Bergman's The Magician.
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HM:
Let's talk about what happened during the first months after your move to Boulder. Fyodor told me that you guys moved to Boulder in August 1981. Did you stay with his cousin first? What did you do for a living, and how did you establish yourselves there? Meaning, finding a residence of your own, taking steps to maintain permanent residency there, getting invloved with the locals, etc. There is a reel to reel box (see two attached pics) that contains recordings from late November of 1981. The first Rumours Of Marriage session occurred on March 10, 1982. Please describe what went on between August and March, and what led to the association with Rumours Of Marriage. I understand that David was not really involved in RoM. Did the KGNU show get started at this time? Load me up with details - addresses, dates, the works, whatever you can remember.
LF:
Evan, I think Hal asked me for addresses on Facebook, and I think the number 2473 comes to mind for the Halls Of Genius, so that would be 2473 19th Street? I might be able to find old documents to confirm (or contradict) that, but if you have a clear memory, of course that'd be easier. I sure don't remember our address # at Bob and Brenda's, though I know it was on Sandpiper Circle. Same with my cousin's place, it was on Table Mesa Drive.
Yeah, we went immediately to crash at my cousin's place. That first night we got there (after I think three days of driving from the east and then getting a primo view of Boulder at dusk which reminded me of a Hawkwind back cover of a futuristic city sitting at the base of great monoliths rising up right behind it), my cousin Ellen's boyfriend supposedly wasn't feeling well, and he was in the bedroom with Billy Joel blasting. I remember Evan telling Ellen, "No wonder he's feeling bad, he's listening to bad music real loud!" BF managed to get up and took us up Flagstaff Road, one of the primo tourist attractions, a road that goes straight up a 1500 foot foothill right next to town. First he told Ellen to put on something warm or her "titties would freeze".
I think next day we got to work looking for a place we could both rent by Sep 1, which we found in Gunbarrel, an area right outside of Boulder proper. We were looking for a place that had two separate rooms to rent for not too much. I think the rent was $150 (each room), which was twice as much as I had been paying in Charlottesville, though I had a particularly sweet deal in Charlottesville since I had five roommates.
And then we went on vacation! (I'm actually not sure if we found the rooms before or after we went on this vacation, but I'm leaning towards before.) We'd come to Colorado for the hiking opportunities, and that's what we took advantage of ASAP! You really only have the summer for getting up to the high peaks of the Rockies anyway, unless you're an extreme skier or something (well that's the short synopsis anyway, there's all sorts of outdoorsmen who do all sorts of things, but I'll stand by that as an applicable summation). So we took a trip up to Wyoming to take a backpacking trip in the Grand Tetons (I think it was three nights/four days?) and then a couple of days sightseeing Yellowstone. On the way up, Evan got mad at me for forgetting the pot stash, which I was apparently entrusted with for some reason. But we had a cool time seeing the magnificence of these places. I think it was a place called Death Canyon Saddle where we found a picturesque camping spot over looking Death Canyon. Evan had been backpacking in the Tetons once before, but it was my first time west of Philadelphia! Evan and I had gone on backpacks in Virginia before we moved. The first time we did that was my first experience ever backpacking. We were to leave the day after my last final and I told Evan, who was probably just back from his trip to SF and was living with his folks in Norther Virginia, to everything I had to bring, but he didn't tell me to bring a bowl to eat out of cause that seemed too obvious, and I didn't know from squat and had no real time to think about it, so I went backpacking without a bowl! That led to a bit of friction between us. But I was a little more adept by the Tetons trip, so I *think* that went more smoothly. Anyway, that's what we did and it was a cool time. I remember seeing summertime snow for the first time as soon as we got to the top of the aerial tramway we took to start our backpack, it was a maybe 5 by 6 foot chunk which isn't really much, but it was still cool to see right next to the trail!
LF:
So we crashed at my cousin Ellen's place off Table Mesa Road in south Boulder. She lived in an apartment complex. She had gone to CU, that's why she was in Boulder. She grew up right outside of Philadelphia (the furthest west I had been!) and our families got together a lot when we were growing up (she's about a year younger than me). She once got me a six pack of Coors for Christmas (being secular Jews, we did the Christmas get together and present thing) while in college cause she knew I liked beer and it was an exotic gift from Out West as Coors was not sold in the east back then! I think she had graduated by our arrival though I'm not sure. I know she remained there at least through some of our time at the Halls as she once showed up there with some cocaine for me for my birthday. (Coors to cocaine?) Evan and I both recognized that she was, um, kind of out of the sociological or world view realm that we were interested in. It was a little weird for me as she was family, but I certainly saw why she was not going to be a central figure in my life in Boulder!
EC:
David's recollection here is accurate. Bob & Brenda Gandossy lived on Sandpiper Circle, out by Twin Lakes in the Gunbarrel area. That was our first place in Colorado. In January 1982 I moved over to a house in the middle of a prairie off the far east end of Arapaho Ave near Lafayette. Then in the summer 1982, I moved to the Rumours Of Marriage house in old-town Louisville. In the fall of 1982 I moved to Rich Schaffer's house on 36th Street near Williams Village dormitories in Boulder. Rumours of Marriage had broken up. Rich's house was a bastion of normality, music-wise. That's when I started heading down to Denver to jam with Ed at his place on Dahlia Street. It had to have been the Spring of 1983 that I moved to Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs. When I left there six months later, we established The "Hall o'Genius", likely 2473 19th Street, at the corner of 19th and Alpine Ave.
At Bob & Brenda's place, I got a job as a bill collector, of all things. That lasted about 3 months before I was fired over complex misunderstandings about my relationship with the boss' daughter, Maureen. Maureen was a real looker, was coming on to me, and I was in no state to say no, but then she pulled back before we ever had any bonafide sex and I was pissed off. everybody thought we were doing it because she had gotten me so drunk one night that I slept in her basement and then had to show up at breakfast knowing that her mother (my boss) thought I had gotten some action from Maureen but I knew i hadn't. Very awkward. I don't think I was really aware of David's musical ambitions at this time, but we must have discussed it because that Fall we made recordings of him under a nom-de-plume "John Leningrad". I don't think I had the 4-trac Dokorder yet. I think I was still using a 2-trac reel machine that I had brought with me from Virginia.
Sometime that fall, I had been introduced to a Leslie by a masseuse who had an office across from mine. The masseuse thought I would be a good match for Leslie because we were both Jewish and there were hardly any Jews in Colorado whatsoever. I wasn't interested in her romantically, but I wanted to move out of Bob and Brenda's place. Leslie's house (in the middle of a prairie near Lafayette) needed a new roommate, so I moved in over there. Leslie had a friend that was in a band, a guy named Bill Snow, and she introduced us. At the time I was just trying to dig myself out of debt after having been fired from my 3-months as a bill collector. That was a hateful job, but I needed work and they hired me. I thought I could do it and still be a nice guy, but that's apparently not possible. So then I was looking for work again. But I had no local references, only the people who had fired me. I was telling people that I had just been messing around enjoying a long vacation in Colorado before looking for work. Finally I got a job at the Trust Company of America, which turned out to be just down the street from a future residence, the Hall of Genius house.
Anyway, in the winter of 82-83, I was visiting this band. They were called Stand In The Yard. Bill Snow seemed like a nice guy, but he wasn't much of a second guitarist and considering that they had Ed Fowler playing lead and Michael Bellan playing effects on a guitar also, he was sort of extraneous. He had a song that they kept trying to work out along the lines of a "rinse, lather, repeat" chant. I didn't really want to play in a band at that time because I was beginning to think in terms of what a band needed, rather than finding a band to play in. What I wanted to do was be the recording engineer, because every band I had been in previously had suffered from not having any decent recordings. I had the 4-trac Dokorder by this time and started fooling around trying to record Stand in The Yard. One day not long after, the bassist and Bill Snow didn't show up, but I was there and I said "well, I can play bass." That was all she wrote. The other two guys got kicked out of the band and I was in as the bassist. Bill and the bassist tried to solicit my interest in forming a new band with them as a guitarist, but I was more interested in Michael and Ed's group. The song "Amerika Futura" seemed very appealing to me and I thought they had something there. Many years later that bassist, Donny Littlechief, broke into my house on The Hill in Boulder and stole a pound of weed plus a bunch of cassettes, including a tape of me singing songs in my high school Senior Class play. I never did get that tape back... Ed Fowler was the primary guitarist in this group. We became the group that eventually named itself Rumours Of Marriage. That band name appears on a reel in March 1982, so Riann and Michael must have been talking about getting married around that time. Hence the "Rumours". That summer of 1982 I moved into Michael Bellan's house in old-town Louisville, which became the de-facto "band house" for Rumours, and I lived there for 3 months. I enlisted David to operate and monitor the 4-trac, but he would drink too much and sometimes pay no attention to the VU meters, so I got pissed off at him. When Michael and Riann bolted for NYC at the end of summer, I moved into Rich Schaffer's place in south Boulder. They didn't like punk-rock at Rich's house. I tried to turn them on to the Clash, but they were too far into Billy Joel. By January of 1983, I was escaping on weekends and heading down to Denver to visit Ed Fowler to party and jam. These jams were the first Dirt Clods (et al) sessions.
Sometime that Spring 1983, a wealthy woman named Natasha Brown heard Walls Of Genius (or some iteration of it) on David's radio show. By this time, I was no longer mad at David over the Rumours recordings and he was interested in the crazy stuff that Ed and I were doing and had become a participant in it. Natasha was planning to move to NYC and wanted somebody 'arty' to rent her place in Eldorado Springs, a tiny village tucked into the foothills a few miles southwest of Boulder. I couldn't afford it on my own, so David helped out a little bit with the rent, and that became the Walls of Genius "studio". We recorded a lot of music there and had jam sessions all the time. That was when we coalesced as Walls of Genius. Eldorado Springs was a piece of work. I thought I was a responsible tenant, but it seemed like every time I had a jam session (read: party), somebody in the village would call Natasha and tell her that weird people were coming and going from her house. I told her they were musicians. Wasn't that why she rented the place to me in the first place? One time, David and I took another backpack trip to the Tetons and I had a fraternity brother house-sit for me. Again, somebody called Natasha. Some new guy is living at your house. I thought I was being responsible by having somebody house-sit and take care of the dogs and cats, which was also part of the deal. The new guy was Chris Norden, who participated in the Pots-and-Pans Party and some of the call-in radio show stuff that we did. He also did some drawings of Little Fyodor, which you'll see when I send you the scans of the Walls o'Genius scrapbook. Anyway, by the time I was ready to move out, Natasha came back early from NYC and bawled me out something awful. She called my parents and bawled them out, too. At the very end, she smashed my alarm clock on the front stoop of the place and screamed at me and David, "Why don't you two Jews go back to New York where you came from!"
Well, we weren't interested in going "back" to New York. We had just rented the house on 19th Street in Boulder, the Hall of Genius.
LF:
So like I said, we moved to the Gunbarrel area right outside of Boulder proper. A couple that was renting there had a ranch style house with three bedrooms. So while they had the main bedroom, me and Evan rented the other two. On something something Sandpiper Circle. It was in a suburban subdivision, but there was a big field on the other side of a fence at the end of the property line that had horses in it.
Before long I got a job as the Night Auditor at the Hotel Boulderado, a Victorian hotel built in 1908 that was in transition from being a flop house to returning to prestigious glory. It gets mentioned in an early John Prine song. There were two remaining permanent residents there, one of whom I mentioned previously. I had been a night auditor for six months in Charlottesville (after I'd been fired as an Assistant Manager at fast food fish house Long John Silver's, my first job after graduation), so I was able to go up to the front desk and ask if they were looking for an experienced night auditor. Now, this is a job that doesn't exactly pay a lot, maybe 50 cents an hour more than a regular desk clerk, which also doesn't pay a lot, and you get to work the graveyard shift, so someone who's been a night auditor and actually WANTS to do it again is a rare bird, and the front desk manager looked at me like he'd just seen a ghost. I left wondering what I did wrong, but I eventually found out that's how this guy was, not exactly a smooth operator, plus their night auditor had just left (quit or been fired I sure don't remember). So I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call to work there! (I had been working as a night auditor for I think two or three nights, or maybe just one, at another hotel much further away, otherwise this was my first job in Colorado) I lasted there three and a half years, three of them on the graveyard shift, before getting canned. I believe Evan got a job as a bill collector. I'll leave it to him as to whether he wants to tell stories about THAT job! (I've just started reading Evan's BOOK about his travails at the most long-lived employer he had, which he started three years later, in 1984)
Between our mutual time at Bob and Brenda's and our reunification at the Halls, Evan lived at I think three other places and I one. He first moved out of Bob and Brenda's to take advantage of a sweet offer to live in a nice place in the town of Louisville (often described as a "bedroom community", about 10 miles east of Boulder) with a bunch of New Agers. I think he thought he would have more space and freedom to pursue music there, plus we had begun to get on each other's nerves.
EC:
Bob and Brenda's house, moved in August 1981
Prairie House in Lafayette, moved in January 1982
Rumours of Marriage house, moved in summer 1982
Rich Schaffer's house, moved in Fall of 1982 and stayed there over a year until moving to
Natasha's Eldorado house, January 1983 (music recorded at that time is on "Johnny Rocco")
Hall Of Genius, moved in probably June or July 1983
DF:
Lafayette, Louisville, heh. Some people around here just call them "the L towns" cause they're these two little towns just several miles east of Boulder that are sometimes hard for non L-town residents to tell apart, except that Louisville has a little downtown....
But I stand corrected by Evan's cross-posted post that it was indeed Lafayette he moved to. I also forgot that he lived at Belan's place for a while! That makes four places he lived at between Bob & Brenda's and the Hall! And actually that must have been January, 1982 when you first left B & B's (and winter 81/82 that you first visited Stand In The Yard). Not to be a stickler, but I know Hal wants the exact details! It was sometime in early 1983 that you moved into Natasha's, and then September 1983 (a lot of leases in Boulder start in Sep thanks to the influx of CU students) that we opened up the Hall for business.
Evan, are you sure you got the Dokorder while in Boulder? (re-reading your post, I see you actually do express uncertainty about it) Because I could have sworn you brought the Dokorder out here from Virginia and that you originally got it to record Mystic Nights of the Sea. But I could be wrong, maybe that was that two tracker. I know we did overdubbing of the Little Fyodor songs you recorded at Bob & Brenda's, though I guess that was possible to do on the two track machine using sound on sound, whatever that actually is. I know I recorded "Cheap" for WoG a little later on that machine by overdubbing two vocal tracks using the sound on sound feature.
Speaking of recording Little Fyodor, I have to disagree with Evan that he didn't know anything of my musical ambitions when we moved to Boulder (though again, re-reading his post, I see he expresses uncertainty about that). I had shown him my song lyrics at his folks' place in NoVa and he first dubbed me Little Fyodor there when he made the connection between my lyrics and the Dostoevsky he had been reading originally at my suggestion. We spoke then of how we would both pursue our musical dreams in Colorado! At B&B's house, Evan recorded my nascent Little Fyodor songs and played some bass and lead guitar on them. You can see which ones from those notes! He also recorded some songs of his own (at B&B's and/or the hippy house in Lafayette) in a somewhat Neil Youngish vein. I remember one song of his with the refrain, "I don't know what I mean when I say I love you" ("It's a funny situation, don't you agree" was another line), and another where he sang, "Sleep with me" in a plaintive manner. I also remember him doing a doo-wop parody in which he sang about a fellow who had everything going for him but couldn't get a girl in his bed because he was dum dum dum dum dum, i.e., that part turned into a doo-wop shtick around the ostensible nonsense syllable "dum" but which also served as a double entendre regarding the protagonist's only shortcoming. I remember he enlisted Bob Gandossy to harmonize on it for authenticity cause Bob was Italian.
That's my best summation of what we did musically between our arrival in Boulder and Rumours Of Marriage. Actually, while typing that last line, I recalled a song Evan wrote about that CT, Maureen!! I remember it had really standard folky chords in the verse, C Am Em G, then broke rules a little to create some tension which sounded a little punkier in the chorus, the angry part!
I think Evan was/is making assumptions to think I didn't pay attention to the recordings I was enlisted to oversee, but it's true enough that I had zero experience in doing such a thing at that point and probably did a shitty job. One thing I did do, and I don't know if I ever told Evan this, was I turned the treble all the way up on the drums and the bass all the way up on the bass. I cringe just thinking of that now, and in retrospect it was pretty stupid. But I think that was the best explanation for the fact that the band found that the recordings were better when no one was watching the equipment than when I was. I kinda suspected that might not be the right way to record drums and bass when I got that feedback, but I was too timid to ask for another chance. But whatever, it's history, in more ways than one, that that's what Evan thought at the time.
Heh, I don't really think Natasha really said "Jews" when she told us to go back to NY, but we knew that's what she meant. She had brought up our Jewishness a few times previously, though mostly in an "isn't that darling?" tone. The reason she was mad was because I had taken Evan's turntable out of her closet and packed it in his car while Evan was diverting her attention in her kitchen. She had put it in her closet as a form of collateral to make Evan come back and clean the house better. It looked fine to me! And handling it that way was just not, um, kosher! I wasn't going to let her get away with that, so I told Evan to divert her attention and I'd take the turntable out of the closet and pack it in his car, which he did and I did. Natasha had just noticed that the turntable wasn't there when Evan was beginning to back up his car to make our getaway. She came out screaming at us and she smashed an alarm clock on the ground. Maybe that was Evan's alarm clock that he had forgotten and she was bringing it out to him, but what the hell, better to lose a little alarm clock than a turntable!! And most importantly, we got Natasha out of our lives! Natasha was a weird bird. A rich jetsetting hippy, you might say. Don't know if it's worth going into more detail about her, so I'll leave it there....
EC:
It's amazing to sort of "re-live" all this stuff in retrospect, giving it more thought than I have in many years. We're bound to have some different takes on it--I asked myself the question, if I had the Dokorder in Virginia, why would I have bothered to bring the 2-trac machine with me in addition to it? Both machines weigh a friggin' ton. But it made sense if I bought it in Colorado that I would then keep both. I know I used the two-trac at the Festival of Pain (where Joel ruined most of the recordings by whispering the words 'Architects Office' into the microphones). But really, I can't remember the origin of the Dokorder.... which strikes me as odd, but heck, it was a long time back. The Mystic Knights Of The Sea (in Virginia) were on the 2-trac, that much I do recall. For some reason, I thought the John Leningrad tape was on the 2-trac, also, but could be wrong.
And I think you're right about moving into the Hall of Genius in September--otherwise, why would I have bothered to have Chris Norden house-sit for me in Eldo when we went to the Tetons? We would have gone in July or August, not May or June.
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HM:
I really do not know how much further we can go without talking about the other Assistant Head Moron, Ed Fowler. You met Ed when he was the guitarist in Stand In The Yard? You guys have mentioned that Ed is a native Coloradan and not goy. Can you tell me a little about his musical background, family history, any anecdotes from the first time(s) you met him, etc.? Is he the same age as you two? From the one photo I've seen so far, he looks a lot taller than either of you.
LF:
Ed's family moved to Pakistan, yes, Pakistan, when he was a kid. I think they were there two years? At one point his family was evacuated because something bad was happening (imagine that). They were trekking through the mountains and Ed strayed and got away from the group and ended up in some little village where he was put in a room and different people kept coming in and saying all sorts of stuff in their native tongue. Ed was pretty weirded out. Finally a guy speaking perfect English, with a very English accent, appeared to say, "Don't worry old chap, these folks have just never seen a white person before!"
When they came back, Ed heard "All Along The Watchtower" by Hendrix on the radio. And. It. Blew. His. Mind. He quickly decided he had to learn to play guitar like that, and he did.
Another big influence on Ed's guitar playing was Steve Hillage of Gong. Another was Tommy Bolin, who as you might know, was a Coloradan. Ed recounts seeing Bolin play in little clubs with a dozen people in the audience. After Bolin became big, Ed saw him dressed flamboyantly with boas and stuff while Ed was at work (at the airport, I think Bolin was catching a plane) and when Bolin said, "Hey Ed! How ya doin!", Ed was nervous what his co-workers would think (because of the way Bolin was dressed).
Ed went to either one semester or one year of college before dropping out. College just wasn't for him. He was working at his airport job when we met him. I forget what he did there. Baggage maybe?
He got laid off and now works at a supermarket. Thanks to union wages, he does all right, though he hates his job.
EC:
I think Ed will turn 60 this year (August). One of the important pieces of Ed's history is that he and a bunch of his friends got into mocking the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethons. You'll see pictures of these people in the WoG scrapbook disk I will be sending soon. They would have drunken stoned parties watching Jerry on the tube and go wild and crazy making fun. These same people (Russ Stevens, Glenn Swanson, Dena Zocher, Marsha Wooley, Roger Boraas) were participants in the Dirt Clods and Jerry's Kids. They even went to Los Angeles one time to attend the telethon in person. They made so much noise and were so distracting that Jerry Lewis kicked them out of the auditorium. He was apparently really pissed off at all their antics, snickering and raising cain. It was at one of these parties that Ed was photographed in drag.
Read an interview with Ed Fowler
Where does the WoG comedy come from? I'm talking about the insistence on zaniness, clownishness, moronic behavior. Were there any comedians that inspired you? Firesign Theater? Monty Python? The Three Stooges? The Marx Brothers? Or was it all someone or something else?
LF:
Hey, we're Jews, comedy comes naturally!! (ha-ha, though only half joking!) I think the zaniness and mania originally came mostly from Evan, though I picked up on it and I guess I kinda felt anything worth doing was worth overdoing (something I saw written on an album jacket somewhere, maybe by Todd Rundgren?), so I was all into going as far with it as I could. And being of questionable talent as a singer, anything I vocalized pretty much came out funny anyway! I know Evan was taken by the Residents album (Third Reich 'N' Roll?) that was all mini covers of sixties songs done in the most ridiculous and absurd fashion, though our zany, crazy approach was almost the opposite of their quasi robotic style. Ed was a big factor here too, cause he was into anything funny and especially "bad" culture and movies, and we'd rent bad or weird movies together and watch them and laugh at them. Of course, that all became a real big cultural "thing"; I don't know enough to be able claim that Ed was ahead of everyone else on that, but I know he was the one I personally first caught that bug from. I once featured him on my supposedly experimental radio show playing selections from his collection of "artists" like Telly Savalas and Festus (from Gunsmoke!). It was from his collection that I first heard the now famous William Shatner travesties. Leonard Nimoy, too! Oh, and let us NOT forget Mrs. Miller!! He also had a record by Rocky Graziano pretending to be a spiritual guru! One "real" comedian he liked a lot was Rodney Dangerfield. If I had to name a comedian I liked or was inspired by I'd probably name the embarrassingly all too obvious choice of Woody Allen. The comedy of the satirical writer Nathaniel West helped inspire my song writing. But again, the idea of applying comedy and zaniness to WoG as an "experimental music" thing mostly came from Evan. Though I should make a distinction here between zaniness and comedy, cause we rarely if ever tried to make "jokes" per se. We were just having fun going ape shit and doing whatever we felt like!
EC:
We never actually made "jokes" per se. There were never set-ups and punch-lines. I had always liked Monty Python & Firesign Theatre, but I also thought the people who constantly quoted from them were ridiculous. I appreciate it now, but back then, not so much. I also enjoy the Jewish humor that came from the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Woody Allen, etc. But I never saw myself as a comedian or in comedy. The comedic approach with Walls of Genius, I think, originated in three places: John Lennon, Janis Joplin and my own personal frustration with musicians and the music business.
John Lennon once said in an interview that the key to the Beatles' success was their willingness to completely humiliate themselves on stage. You might say, "The Beatles? Complete humiliation? That's ridiculous! They revolutionized rock'n'roll music, they are the eternal iconic best rock band that ever was, blah blah blah etc." All that is true. But think about John Lennon's own experience. He and the rest of the band were fifties greasers with floppy pompadours and black leather jackets. They played all night at the Reeperbahn, a red-light district. They were bad boys until Brian Epstein cleaned them up. They got haircuts and matching suits. They became a manufactured British faux-Marx Brothers comedy ensemble in addition to playing rock music. Then they were compared against the Rolling Stones, who maintained their bad-boy image and attitude. The Beatles, on the other hand, became "nice young lads" and "good boys". In <their> minds, they had been emasculated and humiliated, but they kept on rockin'.
Janis Joplin once said in an interview that nobody paid any attention to her when she was just another girl-hippie folk-singer. When she decided to let it all hang out, all of a sudden people took notice and she became a star.
After Rumours of Marriage broke up, I was pretty much totally sick of musicians. They all seemed like undependable, irresponsible idiots. Bands never seemed to last more than three months before imploding. And never because of me, right? Well, maybe I contributed to the scenes, but it always seemed like some lead singer wannabe Jim Morrison or lead guitarist wannabe or off-key female singer or asshole drummer was tearing the projects apart. And the business end was even worse. Gigs? Cripes, man, who did you have to blow to get a date? Was it only about giving away cocaine? The music business is still this way. There are three-hundred bands who want to play for every one gig available and it's like fishing in a black hole to get any attention. You either have to be so incredibly good that you just blow away the competition completely (be an actual virtuoso genius) or do something so unique for so long that it doesn't matter if you're good or bad, you can't help but be noticed (like Little Fyodor, who happens to be a quite competent musician and also totally unique).
So I just said, "Fuck it" and started to let my demons loose. Red Ed was my muse for a long time and he was just as willing to loose his demons. Ed had the William Shatner and Telly Savalas records. He was obsessed with Mexican Wrestling Films dubbed into English. We would drink beer by the bucketload, get stoned and laugh our asses off at these things. We developed a highly-nuanced sense of humor based on cultural artifacts that were "so bad they were good". Like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Samson at the Wax Museum". By the time we became Walls Of Genius, we had mastered our own kind of primal-scream self-psychoanalytic approach to indulging our demons through music. It was Ed and I who first unleashed Little Fyodor, so it was obvious that David had some demons he was ready to loose upon the world as well. Some people said we were just a bunch of screaming meemies, but there was a helluva lot more going on than just screaming. There was singing in funny voices, for instance. Or taking what might diplomatically be called a "wannabe autistic" approach. This represented our willingness to be humiliated, to let it all hang out, to become totally uninhibited. The resulting mania sometimes led to a comedic approach ("This Is The Voice Of God"..."Abandon Ship", etc).
I should mention that being in Walls Of Genius was a rather sex-less experience. While we enjoyed a great deal of virtual sex (via the music, call-in radio and trading letters with female underground participants), none of the three of us had a girlfriend during Walls Of Genius. There were no groupies lined up to service the genial maniacs of music. In some ways, we were contemptuous of the musicians who got the groupies. They were the very music business we were rejecting. We were critical of the social rituals of romance. So this contributed to the variety of 'frustrated adolescence' expressed so often by Walls Of Genius. I think of "Falling In Love With Ellen" or "Everybody's Fuckin'" or "Palisades Park" or the Monkees' "Valleri". Towards the end, David nabbed a girlfriend and they are still together to this day. He was the only one of the three who got a girl out of being in this band and that was at a time when all things WoG were beginning to fray. I started dating the woman who became my wife around that time, but it was not because of the band. I met her at work and it took her a long time to work up a sincere appreciation for Walls Of Genius. In retrospect, WoG doesn't seem like such difficult music to me, but at the time, I think we were ahead of our time, ripping and tearing and growling at the cutting edge.
So I think this gets to the heart of the comedic part of our performance-art comedy rock band.
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LF:
Boy, Evan makes it sound like his zaniness was at least partly some kind of calculated show business move, but it never seemed that way to me. He never discussed it like that at the time, not with me.
I think Evan's just being himself when he's being funny, and when he's expressing that in his music, He's being honest about himself.
I remember once in college we met somewhere in our respective cars with plans to go somewhere else, maybe to go on a hike or something. Evan reached his arm out his window and in rapid fire succession he flashed me a peace sign, then he flashed me the thumbs up sign, then he flashed me the AOK sign, then he flashed me the finger, and then he smiled real big and mischievous like and drove off to the appointed rendezvous. That made me feel real good. I think WoG was very much a musical expression of the same!
Oh, and I'd like to add one very seminal influence, comedy wise, at least for me but I bet Evan would concur: MAD MAGAZINE!!!
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EC:
I wouldn't overstate the MAD magazine influence. Just one of many satiric approaches that we likely absorbed growing up, like the Smothers Brothers show or Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Who can forget that icon of uncool-ness, President Nixon, saying "Sock it to me" on national television?
LF:
I wouldn't understate MAD's role in warping my own mind, though I loved Laugh-In, too and watched it religiously the first three years, often talking about last night's episode the next morning with my best friend on our walk to junior high.
I remember an issue of Mad which had "Loused Up In Space". Because they were on these alien planets, the artist had a lot of fun drawing in little space monsters of one ridiculous sort or another, in the corners and such, where they didn't really have anything to do with the action, they were just drawn in while other stuff was going on (this was not Sergio Aragones, it was drawn by the artist who drew the strip, though I think it was the artist's idea, not the writer's). One such monster was a head with a Beatles haircut and right under the head were two little feet, and it was going Yeah yeah yeah! I was so young at this time that I didn't consciously think "Beatles" but I knew it had something to do with musical bands that were popular. I also found this quite hilarious!!!!! Anyway, this would seem to place the issue in the mid sixties. Unfortunately I sold all my old Mads while I was still a kid, thinking I was being a slick entrepreneur, sigh................
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an afterthought by LF:
I'd kinda like to offer my own perspective on these comments by Evan:
"In some ways, we were contemptuous of the musicians who got the groupies. They were the very music business we were rejecting. We were critical of the social rituals of romance. So this contributed to the variety of 'frustrated adolescence' expressed so often by Walls Of Genius. I think of "Falling In Love With Ellen" or "Everybody's Fuckin'" or "Palisades Park" or the Monkees' "Valleri"."
Speaking entirely for myself, I don't think I was *critical* of the rituals of romance so much as I was *alienated* by them because of how extremely self-conscious and inept I felt any time I made the slightest motions toward engaging in them. At this point, I must admit that I may be speaking more for my current self than my self at the time, but I believe I always recognized at least to some degree that these rituals were likely necessary and inherent to human nature and thus criticizing them would be much akin to criticizing gravity for keeping one from being able to fly around at will. I certainly felt a degree of anger at my lot in life for my sense of being, you might say, deficient in this area and some of that may very well have boiled over into an anger at society and people and maybe even women, but mostly I just knew it was the way of things and there was nothing "bad" about it necessarily other than that I personally had the short end of the stick regarding the matter. If you're a square peg and the world is a round hole, who's to blame for your not fitting in? Now, in a sense one might frame this as an injustice if one sees that people who embody attributes that are generally considered desirable or admirable are not valuable toward attaining the things generally desired by all. (I believe there is more recent debate on the internet about "nice guy" syndrome or some such.) (I should mention this also has applicability to economic issues.) But at the same time, the way things are works great for some people, and who's to really say it shouldn't be that way, especially if that's pretty much the way we're wired to be. Well, the exact details of these rituals may vary wildly between one time and place and another, but it's pretty difficult to imagine there not being any ritual at all, and some people are always going to succeed at them better than others whatever they are. I suppose one might call for these rituals to better reward socially desirable characteristics, but I don't know if that's realistic. There's likely a degree of injustice built into reality (thus the old saying, "Life isn't fair!") and we may hate that on one hand yet there's an absurdity to criticizing what cannot be any other way on the other. It's a paradox in that sense. Someone later called Little Fyodor a "metaphysical protest singer" and I think it was this sentiment in my songs that he was referring to.
Now, I don't know for sure if Evan was trying to say anything that would be contradicted by what I just said, but I wanted to articulate that for myself anyway. Also, Evan may rightly protest that I may have not expressed any disagreement when he expressed sentiments of derision regarding the social rituals surrounding romance back in the day. My reply would be twofold. One is, as I already alluded to, my thoughts on this are maybe more well formed now than they were back in the day, though I would claim that I was at the very least beginning to form these ideas back then, even if I don't know that I would have been able to articulate them as clearly (assuming I'm making sense at all even now!). Plus, I probably just didn't open up about my ideas a lot of the time, and I probably felt especially reticent about saying something that might have come across as, "Oh, there's nothing wrong with all that stuff, it's just that I/we suck at it!"
Well, I don't know where any of that would fit in. And I should add that I certainly did feel contempt for mainstream music of the day (though OTOH I very much liked a lot of mainstream music of earlier days, and maybe do so even more today, and if that seems like so much get off of my lawn, well hey, it's my lawn, so... though I should also add that I include mainstream music from *before* my day as well as those from my own formative years -- and I bet Evan would concur on this, even though I may have somewhat struck out on my previous bet, that he would concur on Mad Magazine!), though I don't know to what degree I projected that contempt onto the musicians themselves.....
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an after-thought by Evan, regarding MAD Magazine -
Regarding Mad Magazine, I must confess that I did love Mad Magazine as a boy. My cousin Jeff had a collection of the old MADs in my Aunt Hannah's attic and whenever we went to visit my Aunt (in Maplewood, NJ) I would spent as much time as possible reading those magazines. Jeff had gone off to college, he was about fifteen years older than I. He had a hookah once, too, and let me take a hit off it. I coughed a lot and that was that. I just never thought of Mad Magazine in terms of Walls of Genius, although I'm sure it was a seminal influence on how both David and I view the world. I sometimes referred to Little Fyodor as "Little Fonebones", which is a direct Mad Magazine reference.
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HM:
A lot of the WoG recordings seem to be cover versions of rock, country, lounge and folk songs. You'd sort of start out with what sounded like a fairly competent version of the original and then tweak it, improvise off of it and take it to dimensions crazy, demented, far-out and unknown. This seems to be very much like what the Dead and the Allmans did, and the free jazz improv guys. State a theme, and then improvise on that theme. You've talked about how the comedy in your songs was a kind of cutting-loose, releasing demons, going nuts, cathartic, primal scream kind of deal. So, it seems like doing "covers" was a vehicle or "excuse" to create something new? I get the idea from what you've said that these crazy versions of recognizable songs were not "spoofs" or "lampoons" on those original songs.
LF:
The doing of cover songs without much intentionality as to how they would sound or what we were adding to them beyond just going ape shit and have a wild and crazy improvisational good time with them the same way we might have a pots and pans party and record the resulting jam with copious amounts of echo (copping some review copy there!) was, again, something that originated with Evan.
If he feels he was emulating John Lennon humiliating himself or Janis Joplin finding the key to her success, or that he was expressing frustration with former band leaders, who am I to dispute that, except that I didn't feel any of that myself at the time. Again, although they were much more controlled in their approach, The Residents did take sixties covers songs in weird places, and I do think that was a big influence. I remember playing the "Virgin Fugs" record for Evan which he called "refreshing" probably because of the way they "let it all hang out" on that record (much more so than on the song with that title!) and really go ape shit, though I think WoG had already begun to do that by the time either of us heard that song. But I think there was something in the sixties ether that fed that ideal, even if few took it as far as we did. But if you combine Virgin Fugs with The Residents Third Reich 'n Roll with the Beatles singing "Twist And Shout"...? With the Art Ensemble of Chicago (with whom WoG was once compared in a review that also compared us to Negativland) too? And then just Evan's personality, where ever that came from, though I know there's not as much to write about in a cultural sense with regard to that....
But I agree we weren't attacking the songs we covered. Whether they were "spoofs" may depend on how you define that, but the point was not to denigrate those songs, as a lot of people believed. We did cover some songs we didn't especially like, probably at the behest of other people who were there at the time (remember a lot of WoG was recorded in party atmospheres!). But mostly we covered songs we liked, so you might look at the process as one of simply seeking to have fun, as banal as that might sound. Playing a song you like is fun, but going ape shit with it is even MORE fun! Also, I didn't like how culture was getting slicker and slicker. I was horrified by Garland Jeffries's cover of "96 Tears". I felt that part of the fun of sixties Top 40 was its lack of slickness, its amateur enthusiasm, and even its silliness and absurdity. So it made sense to me to ACCENTUATE these traits rather than to minimize them, as Jeffries had done!
Well, that was my justification in my own mind, but I don't know if I ever discussed that with anyone, and it would have been after the fact anyway. Again, it was Evan's impetus, and the rest of us just found it so much fun that we were all about it!
FWIW, I also remember Evan commending Frankie Valli's singing for how unabashed it was.....
But I think I would agree with your main premise that we were approaching the cover songs pretty much the same way we were approaching all that we did, with a sense of experimental fun and not so much with the intention of commenting on the song itself. Other than the Residents, I really don't know who did it first.
I will add two people who've come to mind in influencing me to like things for being "bad". One was Frank Zappa, though he's a bit of a sore point for us as our worst review ever point blank accused us of trying to sound like him which was utterly untrue. But FWIW, I do remember Zappa talking about the beauty of dumb pop music and celebrating cheap movies. And I was very impressed when I once read Lou Reed saying that he likes trash. But again, most of my "so good its bad" aesthetic came from Ed and Evan more than anyone out in cultural milieu land!
EC:
Little Fyo' has this mostly right--but I don't want you to think that I was emulating John Lennon or Janis Joplin in an some misguided effort to find success. Those were just memorable examples (to me) of performers finding their voice and a measure of success when they stopped trying to "fit in" or do "normal" musical things. When we let it all hang out (a la Janis) or allowed ourselves to wallow in what most would consider a totally humiliating context (the Fabulous Pus-Tones), we somehow found a musical voice that gathered an audience. Not a huge audience, I grant you, but an audience nonetheless. All the zaniness was a response to cultural artifice. And, yes, I was always a little agitated that listeners or reviewers assumed that we couldn't play our instruments very well and that's why we made the kind of music we did. We could not have made that music if we had not all been competent musicians.
Structurally, you're right--a lot of what we did echoed the Grateful Dead's approach to a song, but that approach came from John Coltrane, Miles Davis and other jazz luminaries. You play the "head" a few times and then take off. Some people took off farther than others (Eric Dolphy, for instance). Cream was one of the first pop groups to try this jazz approach with rock music, but I think the Dead did it more effectively. So when we did a song like Alice Cooper's "Eighteen", we'd play the tune somewhat properly, generally taking a "fuck you" attitude with the vocals and then we'd take off like a jet plane into some kind of unexpected stratosphere. Part of the enjoyment was that you never knew exactly where you were gonna go--oh sure, I had an arrangement for "Eighteen", I knew each time we performed it how the jam section was gonna start. But where it ended? That was for the moment to decide.
David is right that many people thought we were ridiculing the cover songs. The truth is that they were all loving homages, mostly, to music that we loved growing up. Our approach was to use those pieces as a basis for whatever other message we wanted to deliver, such as "bite me, world!" or whatever. And then a lot of it was not about any message at all, just us having a blast letting it all hang out and seeing how far we could let it hang.
We never sat down and listened to something in particular, deciding to emulate that something. It was more of a case that as we got farther into what we were doing, we discovered other people who had done similar things in the past. The Fugs, the Holy Modal Rounders, Wild Man Fischer, the Shaggs--these were all very inspiring along the way. But I never listened to that stuff growing up, never knew it existed. People did compare us to Zappa, which I think only reflected a lack of a listener's imagination. Just because the music had humorous aspects didn't mean we were Zappa fans or Zappa wannabes. I never was a Zappa fan--I respected his music and chops, but to this day, I can't listen to Zappa for pleasure. It sort of annoys me and I never really got into it. What I did listen to that has some bearing on what we did is Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan's big bands, both of which took a humorous approach, both bands utilizing some funny voices ("What's the point of getting sober..."). Louis Prima did this also but I never heard him until after Walls of Genius was kaput, so he couldn't have influenced me.
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HM:
Tell me about drugs, drinking and WoG.
LF:
Pot and beer, no big deal. There was a bit of a rivalry between Ed's preference for Coors (Colorado native, he) and Evan's championing of Pabst (pre Blue Velvet). When I lost my job, I made periodic pilgrimages by foot to the Hall Of Genius's neighborhood liquor store, returning with a 12 pack of Carling Black Label in my backpack! We had no problem imbibing these fine products while recording. One posthumous review described some of our output as "late night drunken antics," to which Ed observed, "How did they know it was night?"
EC:
Yes, there was a lot of pot and beer in those days. I happened to be a pot dealer on and off throughout that time and there might be some who would say having a band was a cover for dealing. But I never had a large "business". It was more like I knew where to get some weed and I knew a bunch of people who wanted it, so it was a moral and ethical responsibility to serve as the middleman (the 'dealer'). We were lucky if we had a choice of something beyond dirt-weed. Colombian Gold, Panama Red, Maui Wowie, Jamaican bricks, Afghan hashish and Thai stick were the choices on the best of days, never all at the same time. In Boulder, I never found Panama or Maui.
We had all had experiences on LSD, but it wasn't really involved with Walls Of Genius other than a shared historical reality between the players. One time, though, when we were jamming with Miracle in the old schoolhouse, Ed popped a tab of acid and then, about 20 minutes later, asked if I was getting off. I asked him "what are you talking about?" "Didn't you drop some acid?" he asked. "No, I didn't drop any acid." Ha! That was the night that Ed put ketchup in his socks at the Denny's on Baseline Road.
David and I had taken acid together on a number of occasions in college, but I think we had both given it up by the time we moved to Colorado (1981). My last 'trip' was in 1979, when a friend of mine (David you might remember Larry Russe) hit me in the head with a freakin' frisbee. That kind of ticked me off and I thought Larry was an idiot. He would have been a fraternity brother, but then he disappeared into another world, the navy I think. I remember seeing the Jerry Garcia Band while I was on peyote at the Warner Theatre in Washington DC and seeing some hippie's eyeballs ringing up double-zeroes like an old-fashioned cash register. I didn't want to end up that way and I figured I had learned what I was gonna learn from the psychedelic experience and it was time to be 'enlightened' on my own without the extra added chemical help.
Beer-wise, this was before microbrews had descended on the world. I drank a lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon back in the day, I will admit. I still love beer, but can only handle a few at a time.....
None of us were into coke, speed or narcotics. We were nice young lads....
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HM:
Let's talk now a little bit about Boulder, Colorado. Why did you move there? What was going on culturally there at the time? And did living in Boulder have any effect on the way that WoG developed? Was there anything special about the town that may have contributed to the way WoG was? David commented to me in a private message that Boulder at the time was kind of saturated with glorification of the Beat writers. Must have been that Naropa Institute thing. I can see how that could have been annoying.
LF:
Well, I said I liked the Beats but I liked making fun of them too since they seemed overly hallowed in that time and place. But it was no real big deal to me. I remember Naropa had an anniversary party in the lobby of the hotel where I was a desk clerk. Abby Hoffman came up to the desk with Alan Ginsberg and pointed out this gal who also worked at the desk to Ginsburg and told him, "I came up to the desk and said, 'Stick 'em up, I'm a former con!' and she said, 'The last guy who told me that was G. Gordon Liddy! HA HA HA HA HAHAH HA!!" I remember telling Evan how this old senile guy who lived at the hotel came down during the Naropa party and looked very confused. Then when he came down in the middle of the night (have I told you I was a night auditor, working the graveyard shift? also, this old senile guy Ralph would come down once or twice in the middle of the night thinking he could get breakfast...), he told me, Boy, there were sure a lot of FRUITS down here before! And Evan commented, Well, he got THAT part right!!
Sometime in the year after I graduated from college, Evan told me that he wanted to move to Colorado but didn't want to go alone and didn't know who to go with. I basically, metaphorically speaking, raised my hand.
We thought we'd move to either Denver or Boulder. Everyone, but everyone, whom I told this to said, "Boulder!"
Boulder was in a pretty neat space around that time. It had already started to get kinda expensive, but not all that much so yet, and it was just a big destination for people into living life for the sake of it, for fun and experiences, rather than for getting ahead or whatever it is most people do. I think it was way over represented by people with alternative lifestyle ambitions, like artists, yoga teachers, massage therapists, mountain bikers, rock climbers. A lot of outdoor interest, which is what we went there for. It also had a big high tech presence, though I didn't really realize that till later. We met a lot of like minded people there. Before long, they all seemed to be leaving for San Francisco. But Colorado had big cred among hippies and former hippies and the like, and mostly they were centered on Boulder and the mountain communities nearby. I started doing a radio show on KGNU pretty quickly, and I played the weirdest shit I could get my hands on with total freedom to do that. There was a big punk rock presence there despite (or because of?) the hippies. I really don't know if most of the rest of the country had that or not. It was the first place I really saw it, though it definitely seemed like a thing that was just happening then. I believe the couple who fronted Rumours of Marriage thought Boulder was too mellow for them to succeed there and that's why they moved to NY. But it says something that they were there in the first place! I don't know what brought them there (maybe Evan does), but it just seemed like a lot of artsy people had made Boulder a place they wanted to move to.
Y'know, one of my earliest LF songs was sort of a lampoon on Boulder, called Why Am I Down?, which had lines like I believe in peace and love and everyone I know does too, so why am I down? I jog five miles every day and then relax in a hot tub, so why am I down? But it was a nice place, smack up against the foothills and small enough to get around fairly easy but big enough to have interesting people and a university, with a greenbelt around it to prevent too much sprawl, though that probably contributed to pushing housing prices up, along with that university and general popularity. I was bummed to have to leave it to find a house I could buy, though I don't miss it all that much now. Evan still lives there, having bought a house sooner, right before housing prices started rising dramatically......
EC:
I was playing in a band in Charlottesville, VA after graduating college (1978-79), the Folk-Grass-Blues Band. I played bass. We had some gigs, were starting to even get paid for some. All of us in the band worked construction during the day, mowing lawns, painting dorms and houses, moving furniture, digging ditches, etc. for the Santana Construction Company. I had intended to move to San Francisco, still enamored of the whole Frisco thing, but the band was doing so well that I stuck around in Cville. Then the two prime movers of the band quarrelled and the band busted up. The money I had saved to move was now gone, so I went to San Francisco anyway (Nov 79) and couch-surfed in a college pal's apartment for two months, essentially doing nothing except wandering around the city. I was lucky to have not become involved in my pal's bisexual adventures because the AIDs epidemic exploded shortly thereafter. I think my pal was lucky, too, because last I heard he was a school teacher out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After that, I came back to my parents' house in northern Virginia to figure out where I wanted to be and save enough money to go there. I briefly flirted with the idea of New England (Boston), but eventually decided that I had had it with the east coast and the siren call of the Rocky Mountains had hooked me. So I put out the word to friends that I wanted to move to Colorado, but wouldn't it be great to have a friend to do it with. My thought process was that of elimination--California would fall into the ocean, the northwest was too rainy, Montana too cold, New Mexico and Arizona too hot, Utah and Wyoming had no towns sufficiently cool to even consider, Colorado was the winner by elimination and I knew there were a lot of mountains. David and I had both been avid backpacking campers in Charlottesville and I was intent on pursuing the outdoors. David took the bait and so we set the date to go. David had a cousin with an apartment in Boulder, so we focused on that as a destination.
I had no idea what Boulder was, other than a "suburb" of Denver. At the time, I didn't even realize that we were headed for "Mork & Mindy's" hometown. I figured Denver was big enough that we could find jobs and it was close enough to a lot of mountains for my satisfaction. The highway coming into Denver goes through the industrial sector and we were essentially horrified by what looked just like northern Jersey. But Boulder was different and I think we both fell under it's spell immediately.
Boulder is geographically defined, steep mountains on the west side of town and long low mesas around the east. Most of that land is preserved as open space park, so regardless of the sprawl beyond, Boulder remains this little island of urbanity within the preserved perimeter. From a distance, it looks no different now than then. In Aug 1981 when David and I moved to Boulder, there was 25 miles of countryside between Boulder and Denver. No more. It's all developed, but within the "Peoples Republic", we remain "x-number of square miles surrounded by reality." David's description of the cultural climate in Boulder at that time is accurate. We were not enamored of the remnants of Beat Culture, because they were mostly all older gay guys and, in those days, gay and straight culture were two different places. Whenever I made friends with gay guys in those days, they always eventually wanted to be my boyfriend, but I wasn't gay. Why wasn't I gay, they wanted to know. Well, who knows. We all are what we are. There were occasions when people thought that David and I "must" be lovers. We lived in the same house, went on backpacking trips together, had an avant-garde band together, we must be gay. So many assumptions!
We discovered that Boulder had been written up in Life magazine as the place where the "hip meet to trip". Boulder is still trying to live that down and the city council does it's damndest to make life as difficult as possible for anybody who wants to party on. Currently they have enacted draconian rules regarding recreational marijuana even though it's legal now in Colorado and Boulder is the college town. Don't college students like to drink beer and smoke pot? Yes! All the more reason we should enact draconian rules.... cripes. Boulder has morphed from the counter-cultural haven we came to in 1981 into a kind of contemporary Santa-Fe-Junior fancytown. Lately, Boulder is building it's rep as a "foodie" destination with a shite-load of fancy restaurants. Compared to downtown Denver joints, though, Boulder is still a bargain for fancy food. But it's expensive any way you look at it.
David mentions Mikal & Riann from Rumours of Marriage leaving Boulder because it was too mellow. May very well be the case. Ed always said that Mikal came to Boulder because he got into trouble with statutory rape in Norman, Oklahoma. I thought he had had a record store in Norman that burnt down and he needed to escape the financial implications. In any case, he was unpredictable and volatile, which made him an exciting front-man for a band. Ed maintained that they left Boulder because Norman was catching up to them. I do know that they wanted to pursue music and thought NYC was the place to be. They disappeared into the city and none of us know what has happened to them since. Mikal Bellan caught a "thank you" on R. Stevie Moore's website and David picked up a rumor that he opened a restaurant in the Caribbean, but all that is so far in the past, who knows at this time. Mikal wrote the original incarnation of "Amerika Futura" which Walls of Genius played a lot.
As far as Boulder having something to do with how WoG developed, that's hard to say. I think we were in total rebellion at the culture of the eighties, as the Reagan years began and wore on. So Boulder was a liberal bastion even then and anti-conservative stuff has always gone over well here. But Boulder was, and still is, an ideologically diverse place even if it looks like a completely white-bread-town. Soldier of Fortune magazine was published here and conservatives pride themselves on being iconoclasts in the liberal soup.
Just so you know, David and Lauren live in one of the coolest Denver neighborhoods in the entire city, the Highlands. "Up" in the northwest corner of Denver, separated from downtown (LoDo) by the railyards and interstate highway, it has developed it's own cool reputation with hip boutiques and restaurants and brewie places.
LF:
Heh, just remembered that one of the more prominent "sometimes" members of WoG, a Leo Goya (an assumed name that he uses consistently), actually attended Naropa briefly. He said he quit after his obligatory consultation with Allen Ginsberg in which Leo says Ginsberg criticized his poetry for not being commercial!
Other than that, I can't offhand recall ever befriending someone from Naropa, though its presence was certainly felt, particularly in the number of "trustafarians" one would find in the hipster coffee shop.....
I also remember Joel Haertling telling me to honk my horn as I drove by a particular house to show that we knew Allen Ginsberg was in there having sex with this young guy we all knew who was a big fan of the local experimental scene....
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HM:
Was there something/anything you were trying to "say" with WoG? Was there, were there any points you were trying to make? Were there motivating ideas or philosophies, such as anarchism behind WoG? Was there a worldview or ideology behind it? Or was it more of a "fuck it, let's jam and get weird" kind of thing? There might or might not be some crossover with the Dada/Surrealism question that I also sent this morning.
LF:
Evan may feel differently, but I thought of our craziness as the antithesis of messaging, as a pure indulgence in silliness for its own sake, for the pure fun of it. You can construe a message in anything, and if you wanted to construe something out of what I just described, you might look at it as being anti pretension and contrivance. But it's not like we ever sat down and discussed how to best be anti pretension and contrivance. We never sat down and discussed what we did at all. Well, at a certain point, me and Evan did discuss things cause we lived under the same roof and did a lot of stuff together, went on vacation trips together (hiking and backpacking). There was at least one time that a friend expressed (to Evan) genuine surprise that we were not gay lovers (and at least one other time someone accused us of the same for offensive effect, on the radio!), we did so much together. So certainly we talked about WoG a lot. But I don't know that we ever really talked about what direction to take or what goals to achieve or (obviously, from the previous point) how to achieve whatever goals. I seem to remember the topic of what covers to do coming up at times, but I don't think we ever settled anything in such a setting or manner. We pretty much did what we felt like. I didn't really choose what covers I would sing as that seemed to be more Evan's thing. Either he'd put me up to singing something or it would just be a function of the situation (spontaneity!). Towards the end, our output consisted more of overdub projects than group jams (another subject unto itself!), and Evan seemed to be keeping the covers mostly to himself at that point and I started missing them, and thus I decided to record "This Diamond Ring", but ironically WoG broke up before it could see a WoG release, and it ended up on the Little Fyodor LP, "Idiots Are Closer To God," (which I considered my most WoG-like release), though three of the four tracks were recorded on Evan's equipment at the Hall of Genius (and I give credit on the liner notes). Like I said previously, I abhorred the way Garland Jeffries covered "96 Tears" and one could look at our approach as a rebellion against that kind of thing ("overproduced" was a big rallying cry of the alternative minded of the time, in fact Jello Biafra sarcastically/ironically introduces a DK's song as being such, I think on the one DK's record I ever owned), but I don't know if I would extend our "message" beyond that. That said, a memory of Evan and I discussing how WoG would get the world settling its problems with humor and effrontery rather than war and violence has just seeped into my mind.... I think there's a certain freedom one gains when one loses (in the intentional sense of that word, like "hey, lose the bumb!") one's pretense, one's sense of or concern for dignity. There's less need to compete when you've forsaken the prize. But again, we didn't talk about this. Much of comedy is based on the flouting of dignity, so I think that all just seemed like a natural thing. I can see the influence of the likes of the Three Stooges, but again, I think that would be more of an ether thing than a direct or discussed thing. (Though y'know when considering the Jewishness of what I do, I like to say that I'm following in the footsteps of Kafka, Lenny Bruce and the Three Stooges! Though that's more meant to be about LF than WoG, though I think the latter two would still apply! Ed, by the way, is goy, in case I've accidentally implied otherwise....) As for Dada, the more I think of it the less I'm sure I really know what it is. I guess I've assumed it to incorporate humor and non sequitur, like when something doesn't make sense but there seems to be some sense to it not making sense. Evan and I certainly have intellectual backgrounds and interest, but I really think WoG was a primarily non-intellectual exercise, except with regard to how our backgrounds played into whatever we considered "cool" to do.
EC:
I'm sure Dada and surrealism had an influence on us, but probably not directly.
For myself, I have always enjoyed the heck out of art museums and once spent 6 hours on acid in the National Gallery in D.C. That was an interesting experience--there was a girl in my anthropology class (with me and Will MacLeod, a frat bro) named Sandy that I was somewhat interested in romantically. Sandy was fascinated by Will and I discussing the psychedelic experience with the professor in terms of archetypal aboriginal rituals (or somesuch thing) and one thing led to another. How would you like to go with me and Will and David to the National Gallery in DC and drop acid? Okay, she said, that would be good. So I obtained the acid and gave her a hit at the next class that she could take on the weekend. Come Friday, she didn't want to go with us. And she had already taken the hit of acid all by herself! This was not the way to do it... but okay, fine, you don't have to go. Come Saturday, she decided she did want to come after all, so we trundled on up from Charlottesville to DC. We went to the gallery, dropped acid and looked at art. Sandy and I were in this wonderful room full of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings when she said to me, "I don't understand why everybody loves these so much, they don't do anything for me." Well, hell, Vincent's paintings are just about the liveliest thing you can look at on acid. I told her that there were plenty of pictures in the museum and she should go find whichever ones she liked best and just make sure to meet up with all of us at the main fountain at 6 o'clock, okay? Okay. Come 6 o'clock, where the hell is she? I'm thinking, maybe she went to the car. So I go out of the building and go to the car. She's not there. I start walking back to the museum. But she's not there, either. I turn to go back to the car. But she's not at the car, I know that. I'm sweating out in the D.C. heat and repeated this process a couple of times and then stopped, realizing that i must have looked like a lunatic going back and forth on the sidewalk. I went back to the museum and there was David and Will exactly where I expected them to be, right by the main fountain, but no sign of Sandy. We talked to a museum guard, but no, there hadn't been any lost girl happening. We went to dinner somewhere nearby and came back to the museum at closing time, but still, she wasn't there. So we got in the car, scratched our heads, hoped for the best and went home to Charlottesville. I called Sandy's phone number the next morning and discovered what she had done. She had walked right out of the museum after leaving me and took a bus to her parent's home in Alexandria, Virginia. Somehow they got her back to Charlottesville. I was glad she was okay and then that was it. I don't remember having anything to do with her after that. Cripes, how could you trust a girl like that? I was lucky I didn't get into any trouble, having fed her LSD, twice even, and then letting her wander right out of the National Gallery into the big wide world outside. We thought we were so grown-up and could treat each other like adults, but I should have known better.
Well, back to the subject at hand--how could you not love Salvador Dali's work (surrealism)? Or Marcel Duchamp and his famous urinal (Dada)? But it wasn't a concern. The only reason we got into sound collage and musique concrète was because everybody else in the underground was doing it and we wanted to be taken seriously, even if we didn't take ourselves all that seriously in the first place.
Regarding the choice of cover songs, it was usually a case of what I could figure out or had laying around in piano sheet-music books. In those days, with no internet, the only reference material was piano sheet music, which was often very difficult for guitarists to use anyway. Take the Beatles piano sheets, for instance. The guitar chords would be in the key that the Beatles used, but that might be some very bizarre key for guitar, like B♭. But if you capo'd up 1, you could chord the song in A, much more straightforward. It took me many years to learn this essentially very easy trick. But nobody showed me, I had to figure it out for myself. So in those days, I would sit with a record and try to parse out the lyrics and figure out the song. Which I have always been fairly proficient at doing. Nowadays, almost everything is available on the web and most of the songs even have chords to go with them. Most internet material is hardly ever completely correct, though, but it saves a lot of time and effort in the process of learning a song. In the WoG days, I had a number of song-books and I would try to learn all the songs, whether they were songs I liked or not. The ones with the easiest chords I learned the fastest. Sometimes, with Walls of Genius, people would thumb through the song-books and ask us to play "that" song... so we would, however we could. The best results of that process are highlighted on the release "Wanna Beer?".
We weren't particularly political, although we all hated Reagan, the whole screw-the-poor make-war-on-the-world mentality of Reagan and the warmongering trickle-down voodoo economics people. It was the first George Bush who coined the term 'voodoo economics' when he was running against Reagan. How quickly they change their tune when they get ensconced in office. I wrote a country song once that had the refrain at the end of every verse, "so fuck you, Ronald Reagan". Ed objected to the obscenity. Why, I couldn't tell you, there was plenty of obscenity elsewhere in W.o.G., but he objected, so I sent it to some compilation project and have never been able to locate the piece since. Oh well! The piece I assembled for 'Before and After' called '4 More Years' was essentially an anti-Reagan-war-mongering piece. So there was some of that, but not that much in the long run.
LF:
Yeah that was sure weird going back to Charlottesville without her in the car and not knowing what the hell happened to her, and all three of us found reasons to individually take the blame for it (I think I didn't take her seriously when she seemed to drop some vague hint of freaking which was the last I saw of her), but once we heard what happened it seemed like it was just her being goofy. Hey wait a second, why didn't any of us think of calling her cell?? Ha ha...
I loved the surreal movies of Buñuel, especially the two French ones with the long names. Also loved Fellini, especially Amarcord and Satyricon. The latter was one of my more successful "appreciating art while tripping" experiences. There was this great movie theater in Charlottesville and I'd go check out weird old foreign films by directors I'd heard of from a cinema class in college. I also really liked Bergman's The Magician.
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HM:
Let's talk about what happened during the first months after your move to Boulder. Fyodor told me that you guys moved to Boulder in August 1981. Did you stay with his cousin first? What did you do for a living, and how did you establish yourselves there? Meaning, finding a residence of your own, taking steps to maintain permanent residency there, getting invloved with the locals, etc. There is a reel to reel box (see two attached pics) that contains recordings from late November of 1981. The first Rumours Of Marriage session occurred on March 10, 1982. Please describe what went on between August and March, and what led to the association with Rumours Of Marriage. I understand that David was not really involved in RoM. Did the KGNU show get started at this time? Load me up with details - addresses, dates, the works, whatever you can remember.
LF:
Evan, I think Hal asked me for addresses on Facebook, and I think the number 2473 comes to mind for the Halls Of Genius, so that would be 2473 19th Street? I might be able to find old documents to confirm (or contradict) that, but if you have a clear memory, of course that'd be easier. I sure don't remember our address # at Bob and Brenda's, though I know it was on Sandpiper Circle. Same with my cousin's place, it was on Table Mesa Drive.
Yeah, we went immediately to crash at my cousin's place. That first night we got there (after I think three days of driving from the east and then getting a primo view of Boulder at dusk which reminded me of a Hawkwind back cover of a futuristic city sitting at the base of great monoliths rising up right behind it), my cousin Ellen's boyfriend supposedly wasn't feeling well, and he was in the bedroom with Billy Joel blasting. I remember Evan telling Ellen, "No wonder he's feeling bad, he's listening to bad music real loud!" BF managed to get up and took us up Flagstaff Road, one of the primo tourist attractions, a road that goes straight up a 1500 foot foothill right next to town. First he told Ellen to put on something warm or her "titties would freeze".
I think next day we got to work looking for a place we could both rent by Sep 1, which we found in Gunbarrel, an area right outside of Boulder proper. We were looking for a place that had two separate rooms to rent for not too much. I think the rent was $150 (each room), which was twice as much as I had been paying in Charlottesville, though I had a particularly sweet deal in Charlottesville since I had five roommates.
And then we went on vacation! (I'm actually not sure if we found the rooms before or after we went on this vacation, but I'm leaning towards before.) We'd come to Colorado for the hiking opportunities, and that's what we took advantage of ASAP! You really only have the summer for getting up to the high peaks of the Rockies anyway, unless you're an extreme skier or something (well that's the short synopsis anyway, there's all sorts of outdoorsmen who do all sorts of things, but I'll stand by that as an applicable summation). So we took a trip up to Wyoming to take a backpacking trip in the Grand Tetons (I think it was three nights/four days?) and then a couple of days sightseeing Yellowstone. On the way up, Evan got mad at me for forgetting the pot stash, which I was apparently entrusted with for some reason. But we had a cool time seeing the magnificence of these places. I think it was a place called Death Canyon Saddle where we found a picturesque camping spot over looking Death Canyon. Evan had been backpacking in the Tetons once before, but it was my first time west of Philadelphia! Evan and I had gone on backpacks in Virginia before we moved. The first time we did that was my first experience ever backpacking. We were to leave the day after my last final and I told Evan, who was probably just back from his trip to SF and was living with his folks in Norther Virginia, to everything I had to bring, but he didn't tell me to bring a bowl to eat out of cause that seemed too obvious, and I didn't know from squat and had no real time to think about it, so I went backpacking without a bowl! That led to a bit of friction between us. But I was a little more adept by the Tetons trip, so I *think* that went more smoothly. Anyway, that's what we did and it was a cool time. I remember seeing summertime snow for the first time as soon as we got to the top of the aerial tramway we took to start our backpack, it was a maybe 5 by 6 foot chunk which isn't really much, but it was still cool to see right next to the trail!
LF:
So we crashed at my cousin Ellen's place off Table Mesa Road in south Boulder. She lived in an apartment complex. She had gone to CU, that's why she was in Boulder. She grew up right outside of Philadelphia (the furthest west I had been!) and our families got together a lot when we were growing up (she's about a year younger than me). She once got me a six pack of Coors for Christmas (being secular Jews, we did the Christmas get together and present thing) while in college cause she knew I liked beer and it was an exotic gift from Out West as Coors was not sold in the east back then! I think she had graduated by our arrival though I'm not sure. I know she remained there at least through some of our time at the Halls as she once showed up there with some cocaine for me for my birthday. (Coors to cocaine?) Evan and I both recognized that she was, um, kind of out of the sociological or world view realm that we were interested in. It was a little weird for me as she was family, but I certainly saw why she was not going to be a central figure in my life in Boulder!
EC:
David's recollection here is accurate. Bob & Brenda Gandossy lived on Sandpiper Circle, out by Twin Lakes in the Gunbarrel area. That was our first place in Colorado. In January 1982 I moved over to a house in the middle of a prairie off the far east end of Arapaho Ave near Lafayette. Then in the summer 1982, I moved to the Rumours Of Marriage house in old-town Louisville. In the fall of 1982 I moved to Rich Schaffer's house on 36th Street near Williams Village dormitories in Boulder. Rumours of Marriage had broken up. Rich's house was a bastion of normality, music-wise. That's when I started heading down to Denver to jam with Ed at his place on Dahlia Street. It had to have been the Spring of 1983 that I moved to Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs. When I left there six months later, we established The "Hall o'Genius", likely 2473 19th Street, at the corner of 19th and Alpine Ave.
At Bob & Brenda's place, I got a job as a bill collector, of all things. That lasted about 3 months before I was fired over complex misunderstandings about my relationship with the boss' daughter, Maureen. Maureen was a real looker, was coming on to me, and I was in no state to say no, but then she pulled back before we ever had any bonafide sex and I was pissed off. everybody thought we were doing it because she had gotten me so drunk one night that I slept in her basement and then had to show up at breakfast knowing that her mother (my boss) thought I had gotten some action from Maureen but I knew i hadn't. Very awkward. I don't think I was really aware of David's musical ambitions at this time, but we must have discussed it because that Fall we made recordings of him under a nom-de-plume "John Leningrad". I don't think I had the 4-trac Dokorder yet. I think I was still using a 2-trac reel machine that I had brought with me from Virginia.
Sometime that fall, I had been introduced to a Leslie by a masseuse who had an office across from mine. The masseuse thought I would be a good match for Leslie because we were both Jewish and there were hardly any Jews in Colorado whatsoever. I wasn't interested in her romantically, but I wanted to move out of Bob and Brenda's place. Leslie's house (in the middle of a prairie near Lafayette) needed a new roommate, so I moved in over there. Leslie had a friend that was in a band, a guy named Bill Snow, and she introduced us. At the time I was just trying to dig myself out of debt after having been fired from my 3-months as a bill collector. That was a hateful job, but I needed work and they hired me. I thought I could do it and still be a nice guy, but that's apparently not possible. So then I was looking for work again. But I had no local references, only the people who had fired me. I was telling people that I had just been messing around enjoying a long vacation in Colorado before looking for work. Finally I got a job at the Trust Company of America, which turned out to be just down the street from a future residence, the Hall of Genius house.
Anyway, in the winter of 82-83, I was visiting this band. They were called Stand In The Yard. Bill Snow seemed like a nice guy, but he wasn't much of a second guitarist and considering that they had Ed Fowler playing lead and Michael Bellan playing effects on a guitar also, he was sort of extraneous. He had a song that they kept trying to work out along the lines of a "rinse, lather, repeat" chant. I didn't really want to play in a band at that time because I was beginning to think in terms of what a band needed, rather than finding a band to play in. What I wanted to do was be the recording engineer, because every band I had been in previously had suffered from not having any decent recordings. I had the 4-trac Dokorder by this time and started fooling around trying to record Stand in The Yard. One day not long after, the bassist and Bill Snow didn't show up, but I was there and I said "well, I can play bass." That was all she wrote. The other two guys got kicked out of the band and I was in as the bassist. Bill and the bassist tried to solicit my interest in forming a new band with them as a guitarist, but I was more interested in Michael and Ed's group. The song "Amerika Futura" seemed very appealing to me and I thought they had something there. Many years later that bassist, Donny Littlechief, broke into my house on The Hill in Boulder and stole a pound of weed plus a bunch of cassettes, including a tape of me singing songs in my high school Senior Class play. I never did get that tape back... Ed Fowler was the primary guitarist in this group. We became the group that eventually named itself Rumours Of Marriage. That band name appears on a reel in March 1982, so Riann and Michael must have been talking about getting married around that time. Hence the "Rumours". That summer of 1982 I moved into Michael Bellan's house in old-town Louisville, which became the de-facto "band house" for Rumours, and I lived there for 3 months. I enlisted David to operate and monitor the 4-trac, but he would drink too much and sometimes pay no attention to the VU meters, so I got pissed off at him. When Michael and Riann bolted for NYC at the end of summer, I moved into Rich Schaffer's place in south Boulder. They didn't like punk-rock at Rich's house. I tried to turn them on to the Clash, but they were too far into Billy Joel. By January of 1983, I was escaping on weekends and heading down to Denver to visit Ed Fowler to party and jam. These jams were the first Dirt Clods (et al) sessions.
Sometime that Spring 1983, a wealthy woman named Natasha Brown heard Walls Of Genius (or some iteration of it) on David's radio show. By this time, I was no longer mad at David over the Rumours recordings and he was interested in the crazy stuff that Ed and I were doing and had become a participant in it. Natasha was planning to move to NYC and wanted somebody 'arty' to rent her place in Eldorado Springs, a tiny village tucked into the foothills a few miles southwest of Boulder. I couldn't afford it on my own, so David helped out a little bit with the rent, and that became the Walls of Genius "studio". We recorded a lot of music there and had jam sessions all the time. That was when we coalesced as Walls of Genius. Eldorado Springs was a piece of work. I thought I was a responsible tenant, but it seemed like every time I had a jam session (read: party), somebody in the village would call Natasha and tell her that weird people were coming and going from her house. I told her they were musicians. Wasn't that why she rented the place to me in the first place? One time, David and I took another backpack trip to the Tetons and I had a fraternity brother house-sit for me. Again, somebody called Natasha. Some new guy is living at your house. I thought I was being responsible by having somebody house-sit and take care of the dogs and cats, which was also part of the deal. The new guy was Chris Norden, who participated in the Pots-and-Pans Party and some of the call-in radio show stuff that we did. He also did some drawings of Little Fyodor, which you'll see when I send you the scans of the Walls o'Genius scrapbook. Anyway, by the time I was ready to move out, Natasha came back early from NYC and bawled me out something awful. She called my parents and bawled them out, too. At the very end, she smashed my alarm clock on the front stoop of the place and screamed at me and David, "Why don't you two Jews go back to New York where you came from!"
Well, we weren't interested in going "back" to New York. We had just rented the house on 19th Street in Boulder, the Hall of Genius.
LF:
So like I said, we moved to the Gunbarrel area right outside of Boulder proper. A couple that was renting there had a ranch style house with three bedrooms. So while they had the main bedroom, me and Evan rented the other two. On something something Sandpiper Circle. It was in a suburban subdivision, but there was a big field on the other side of a fence at the end of the property line that had horses in it.
Before long I got a job as the Night Auditor at the Hotel Boulderado, a Victorian hotel built in 1908 that was in transition from being a flop house to returning to prestigious glory. It gets mentioned in an early John Prine song. There were two remaining permanent residents there, one of whom I mentioned previously. I had been a night auditor for six months in Charlottesville (after I'd been fired as an Assistant Manager at fast food fish house Long John Silver's, my first job after graduation), so I was able to go up to the front desk and ask if they were looking for an experienced night auditor. Now, this is a job that doesn't exactly pay a lot, maybe 50 cents an hour more than a regular desk clerk, which also doesn't pay a lot, and you get to work the graveyard shift, so someone who's been a night auditor and actually WANTS to do it again is a rare bird, and the front desk manager looked at me like he'd just seen a ghost. I left wondering what I did wrong, but I eventually found out that's how this guy was, not exactly a smooth operator, plus their night auditor had just left (quit or been fired I sure don't remember). So I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call to work there! (I had been working as a night auditor for I think two or three nights, or maybe just one, at another hotel much further away, otherwise this was my first job in Colorado) I lasted there three and a half years, three of them on the graveyard shift, before getting canned. I believe Evan got a job as a bill collector. I'll leave it to him as to whether he wants to tell stories about THAT job! (I've just started reading Evan's BOOK about his travails at the most long-lived employer he had, which he started three years later, in 1984)
Between our mutual time at Bob and Brenda's and our reunification at the Halls, Evan lived at I think three other places and I one. He first moved out of Bob and Brenda's to take advantage of a sweet offer to live in a nice place in the town of Louisville (often described as a "bedroom community", about 10 miles east of Boulder) with a bunch of New Agers. I think he thought he would have more space and freedom to pursue music there, plus we had begun to get on each other's nerves.
EC:
Bob and Brenda's house, moved in August 1981
Prairie House in Lafayette, moved in January 1982
Rumours of Marriage house, moved in summer 1982
Rich Schaffer's house, moved in Fall of 1982 and stayed there over a year until moving to
Natasha's Eldorado house, January 1983 (music recorded at that time is on "Johnny Rocco")
Hall Of Genius, moved in probably June or July 1983
DF:
Lafayette, Louisville, heh. Some people around here just call them "the L towns" cause they're these two little towns just several miles east of Boulder that are sometimes hard for non L-town residents to tell apart, except that Louisville has a little downtown....
But I stand corrected by Evan's cross-posted post that it was indeed Lafayette he moved to. I also forgot that he lived at Belan's place for a while! That makes four places he lived at between Bob & Brenda's and the Hall! And actually that must have been January, 1982 when you first left B & B's (and winter 81/82 that you first visited Stand In The Yard). Not to be a stickler, but I know Hal wants the exact details! It was sometime in early 1983 that you moved into Natasha's, and then September 1983 (a lot of leases in Boulder start in Sep thanks to the influx of CU students) that we opened up the Hall for business.
Evan, are you sure you got the Dokorder while in Boulder? (re-reading your post, I see you actually do express uncertainty about it) Because I could have sworn you brought the Dokorder out here from Virginia and that you originally got it to record Mystic Nights of the Sea. But I could be wrong, maybe that was that two tracker. I know we did overdubbing of the Little Fyodor songs you recorded at Bob & Brenda's, though I guess that was possible to do on the two track machine using sound on sound, whatever that actually is. I know I recorded "Cheap" for WoG a little later on that machine by overdubbing two vocal tracks using the sound on sound feature.
Speaking of recording Little Fyodor, I have to disagree with Evan that he didn't know anything of my musical ambitions when we moved to Boulder (though again, re-reading his post, I see he expresses uncertainty about that). I had shown him my song lyrics at his folks' place in NoVa and he first dubbed me Little Fyodor there when he made the connection between my lyrics and the Dostoevsky he had been reading originally at my suggestion. We spoke then of how we would both pursue our musical dreams in Colorado! At B&B's house, Evan recorded my nascent Little Fyodor songs and played some bass and lead guitar on them. You can see which ones from those notes! He also recorded some songs of his own (at B&B's and/or the hippy house in Lafayette) in a somewhat Neil Youngish vein. I remember one song of his with the refrain, "I don't know what I mean when I say I love you" ("It's a funny situation, don't you agree" was another line), and another where he sang, "Sleep with me" in a plaintive manner. I also remember him doing a doo-wop parody in which he sang about a fellow who had everything going for him but couldn't get a girl in his bed because he was dum dum dum dum dum, i.e., that part turned into a doo-wop shtick around the ostensible nonsense syllable "dum" but which also served as a double entendre regarding the protagonist's only shortcoming. I remember he enlisted Bob Gandossy to harmonize on it for authenticity cause Bob was Italian.
That's my best summation of what we did musically between our arrival in Boulder and Rumours Of Marriage. Actually, while typing that last line, I recalled a song Evan wrote about that CT, Maureen!! I remember it had really standard folky chords in the verse, C Am Em G, then broke rules a little to create some tension which sounded a little punkier in the chorus, the angry part!
I think Evan was/is making assumptions to think I didn't pay attention to the recordings I was enlisted to oversee, but it's true enough that I had zero experience in doing such a thing at that point and probably did a shitty job. One thing I did do, and I don't know if I ever told Evan this, was I turned the treble all the way up on the drums and the bass all the way up on the bass. I cringe just thinking of that now, and in retrospect it was pretty stupid. But I think that was the best explanation for the fact that the band found that the recordings were better when no one was watching the equipment than when I was. I kinda suspected that might not be the right way to record drums and bass when I got that feedback, but I was too timid to ask for another chance. But whatever, it's history, in more ways than one, that that's what Evan thought at the time.
Heh, I don't really think Natasha really said "Jews" when she told us to go back to NY, but we knew that's what she meant. She had brought up our Jewishness a few times previously, though mostly in an "isn't that darling?" tone. The reason she was mad was because I had taken Evan's turntable out of her closet and packed it in his car while Evan was diverting her attention in her kitchen. She had put it in her closet as a form of collateral to make Evan come back and clean the house better. It looked fine to me! And handling it that way was just not, um, kosher! I wasn't going to let her get away with that, so I told Evan to divert her attention and I'd take the turntable out of the closet and pack it in his car, which he did and I did. Natasha had just noticed that the turntable wasn't there when Evan was beginning to back up his car to make our getaway. She came out screaming at us and she smashed an alarm clock on the ground. Maybe that was Evan's alarm clock that he had forgotten and she was bringing it out to him, but what the hell, better to lose a little alarm clock than a turntable!! And most importantly, we got Natasha out of our lives! Natasha was a weird bird. A rich jetsetting hippy, you might say. Don't know if it's worth going into more detail about her, so I'll leave it there....
EC:
It's amazing to sort of "re-live" all this stuff in retrospect, giving it more thought than I have in many years. We're bound to have some different takes on it--I asked myself the question, if I had the Dokorder in Virginia, why would I have bothered to bring the 2-trac machine with me in addition to it? Both machines weigh a friggin' ton. But it made sense if I bought it in Colorado that I would then keep both. I know I used the two-trac at the Festival of Pain (where Joel ruined most of the recordings by whispering the words 'Architects Office' into the microphones). But really, I can't remember the origin of the Dokorder.... which strikes me as odd, but heck, it was a long time back. The Mystic Knights Of The Sea (in Virginia) were on the 2-trac, that much I do recall. For some reason, I thought the John Leningrad tape was on the 2-trac, also, but could be wrong.
And I think you're right about moving into the Hall of Genius in September--otherwise, why would I have bothered to have Chris Norden house-sit for me in Eldo when we went to the Tetons? We would have gone in July or August, not May or June.
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HM:
I really do not know how much further we can go without talking about the other Assistant Head Moron, Ed Fowler. You met Ed when he was the guitarist in Stand In The Yard? You guys have mentioned that Ed is a native Coloradan and not goy. Can you tell me a little about his musical background, family history, any anecdotes from the first time(s) you met him, etc.? Is he the same age as you two? From the one photo I've seen so far, he looks a lot taller than either of you.
LF:
Ed's family moved to Pakistan, yes, Pakistan, when he was a kid. I think they were there two years? At one point his family was evacuated because something bad was happening (imagine that). They were trekking through the mountains and Ed strayed and got away from the group and ended up in some little village where he was put in a room and different people kept coming in and saying all sorts of stuff in their native tongue. Ed was pretty weirded out. Finally a guy speaking perfect English, with a very English accent, appeared to say, "Don't worry old chap, these folks have just never seen a white person before!"
When they came back, Ed heard "All Along The Watchtower" by Hendrix on the radio. And. It. Blew. His. Mind. He quickly decided he had to learn to play guitar like that, and he did.
Another big influence on Ed's guitar playing was Steve Hillage of Gong. Another was Tommy Bolin, who as you might know, was a Coloradan. Ed recounts seeing Bolin play in little clubs with a dozen people in the audience. After Bolin became big, Ed saw him dressed flamboyantly with boas and stuff while Ed was at work (at the airport, I think Bolin was catching a plane) and when Bolin said, "Hey Ed! How ya doin!", Ed was nervous what his co-workers would think (because of the way Bolin was dressed).
Ed went to either one semester or one year of college before dropping out. College just wasn't for him. He was working at his airport job when we met him. I forget what he did there. Baggage maybe?
He got laid off and now works at a supermarket. Thanks to union wages, he does all right, though he hates his job.
EC:
I think Ed will turn 60 this year (August). One of the important pieces of Ed's history is that he and a bunch of his friends got into mocking the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethons. You'll see pictures of these people in the WoG scrapbook disk I will be sending soon. They would have drunken stoned parties watching Jerry on the tube and go wild and crazy making fun. These same people (Russ Stevens, Glenn Swanson, Dena Zocher, Marsha Wooley, Roger Boraas) were participants in the Dirt Clods and Jerry's Kids. They even went to Los Angeles one time to attend the telethon in person. They made so much noise and were so distracting that Jerry Lewis kicked them out of the auditorium. He was apparently really pissed off at all their antics, snickering and raising cain. It was at one of these parties that Ed was photographed in drag.
Read an interview with Ed Fowler