WoG Cassettes Next: Slither/Sloth
Walls Of Genius - Do Not Write Below THis Line
Listing from the November 1985 Cause And Effect Cassette Catalog. Layout by Debbie Jaffe, text by Hal McGee.
Note the mistake: I called the first track on Side B "Oh Chord Nine" instead of "On Chord Nine"! — Hal McGee
Note the mistake: I called the first track on Side B "Oh Chord Nine" instead of "On Chord Nine"! — Hal McGee
Evan Cantor:
I don’t remember which of us came up with the idea to call the album Do Not Write Below This Line, but regardless, it was a brilliant call. All we had to do was pull the line off some form and photocopy it. This was an exclusive release via Cause And Effect (Debbie Jaffe and Hal McGee’s operation).
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
I think it kind of made us feel like real music moguls to – make a deal! We made a deal, well mainly an arrangement I guess, to make a tape that would be released by a whole ‘nother cassette label rather than our own. This label was Cause And Effect, run by Hal McGee and Debbie Jaffe. They had previously distributed our tapes on their all-cassette distribution service of the same name. I actually don’t know or remember how commonly they issued exclusive releases like this as opposed to merely distributing tapes “released” by someone else, or whether they made a distinction between these two different (if overlapping in nature) services, like if they had a separate numbering system for the two. But anyway, this was a Cause And Effect exclusive release and thus didn’t receive a Walls Of Genius catalog number. Once again, this was really all Evan’s doing (regarding WoG’s role in it). I suppose if I had any particular objection I could have voiced it, but I didn’t, as I was completely good with this. It was a great compliment to be valued enough for Hal and Debbie to want to do this…
The title of the tape was either my idea or Evan’s as a result of something I said, after I had observed this being a common thing I saw on forms, maybe at work. Evan found the picture of the fisherman and liked joking that it was Ed’s father, I guess because the guy is so obviously brimming with a very sincere, old fashioned, down to earth joy.
EC:
The cover featured a photograph of an insanely happy fisherman holding a big one. Because of Ed Fowler’s paintings of fish and fish-image obsession, we claimed, in the Twit catalog, that this was Ed’s father holding the ‘infant Ed’. We gave thanks again to Frank Zygmunt (for the warped autoharp) and Stacy Benedict (whose name I saw in menus). We also thanked Andy Brennan, the fellow who lived in the basement apartment below the Halls Of Genius. He was a pianist and composer and it was his image that graced the Son Of Madness compilation tape.
LF:
I don’t remember how we met Riff Randall (real name Randall Cunningham, but he liked using this name after a character in the Ramones movie, Rock ‘N’ Roll High School), but he became pretty involved with WoG towards the end. He mostly played percussion and drums with us, though he may have done other stuff as well. He actually became a permanent member of our five piece live ensemble which existed for our last three performances which took place between October 11 and November 30 of 1985. I believe he played drums on our rendition of Suzie Q. and he was evidently present for the “On Chord Nine” jam, as were the other two people credited as “musicians featured on this tape”, Charles Verrette, who has been namedropped copiously in this archive, and Dave Sperry, whom I recall knowing from my workplace, the Hotel Boulderado. I don’t think Dave Sperry was a musician in a general sense, but he was there for our jam and participated, so he was a musician then!
Andy Brennan was our downstairs neighbor. He may have lent us the vacuum cleaner featured on “Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet”. We had jammed with him a couple of times though I don’t believe we ever released anything with him on it [added later: I’ve since discovered online that we released the “Typewriter Sonata”, which featured Andy on congas, on an Insane Music compilation]. Frank Zygmunt was and is a friend who often found stuff for us to use as instruments, including the autoharp Evan used on the track, “Dilemma”. And Stacy Benedict inspired Evan’s song, “I See Your Name in Menus”.
EC:
Additional musicians listed were Riff Randall, Charlie Verrette and David Sperry. Riff was a friend of ours who hung out and jammed with us sometimes. He likely played a lot of the relentlessly pounding percussion for the jam number “On Chord Nine”, as did David Sperry. I don’t remember anything about David Sperry. Charlie (from Architects Office and Doll Parts) probably played a percussive synthesizer on that same track.
The cassette label featured the title and the words “Walls Of Genius” and “Cause And Effect” repeated across the label, simple but effective.
I don’t remember which of us came up with the idea to call the album Do Not Write Below This Line, but regardless, it was a brilliant call. All we had to do was pull the line off some form and photocopy it. This was an exclusive release via Cause And Effect (Debbie Jaffe and Hal McGee’s operation).
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
I think it kind of made us feel like real music moguls to – make a deal! We made a deal, well mainly an arrangement I guess, to make a tape that would be released by a whole ‘nother cassette label rather than our own. This label was Cause And Effect, run by Hal McGee and Debbie Jaffe. They had previously distributed our tapes on their all-cassette distribution service of the same name. I actually don’t know or remember how commonly they issued exclusive releases like this as opposed to merely distributing tapes “released” by someone else, or whether they made a distinction between these two different (if overlapping in nature) services, like if they had a separate numbering system for the two. But anyway, this was a Cause And Effect exclusive release and thus didn’t receive a Walls Of Genius catalog number. Once again, this was really all Evan’s doing (regarding WoG’s role in it). I suppose if I had any particular objection I could have voiced it, but I didn’t, as I was completely good with this. It was a great compliment to be valued enough for Hal and Debbie to want to do this…
The title of the tape was either my idea or Evan’s as a result of something I said, after I had observed this being a common thing I saw on forms, maybe at work. Evan found the picture of the fisherman and liked joking that it was Ed’s father, I guess because the guy is so obviously brimming with a very sincere, old fashioned, down to earth joy.
EC:
The cover featured a photograph of an insanely happy fisherman holding a big one. Because of Ed Fowler’s paintings of fish and fish-image obsession, we claimed, in the Twit catalog, that this was Ed’s father holding the ‘infant Ed’. We gave thanks again to Frank Zygmunt (for the warped autoharp) and Stacy Benedict (whose name I saw in menus). We also thanked Andy Brennan, the fellow who lived in the basement apartment below the Halls Of Genius. He was a pianist and composer and it was his image that graced the Son Of Madness compilation tape.
LF:
I don’t remember how we met Riff Randall (real name Randall Cunningham, but he liked using this name after a character in the Ramones movie, Rock ‘N’ Roll High School), but he became pretty involved with WoG towards the end. He mostly played percussion and drums with us, though he may have done other stuff as well. He actually became a permanent member of our five piece live ensemble which existed for our last three performances which took place between October 11 and November 30 of 1985. I believe he played drums on our rendition of Suzie Q. and he was evidently present for the “On Chord Nine” jam, as were the other two people credited as “musicians featured on this tape”, Charles Verrette, who has been namedropped copiously in this archive, and Dave Sperry, whom I recall knowing from my workplace, the Hotel Boulderado. I don’t think Dave Sperry was a musician in a general sense, but he was there for our jam and participated, so he was a musician then!
Andy Brennan was our downstairs neighbor. He may have lent us the vacuum cleaner featured on “Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet”. We had jammed with him a couple of times though I don’t believe we ever released anything with him on it [added later: I’ve since discovered online that we released the “Typewriter Sonata”, which featured Andy on congas, on an Insane Music compilation]. Frank Zygmunt was and is a friend who often found stuff for us to use as instruments, including the autoharp Evan used on the track, “Dilemma”. And Stacy Benedict inspired Evan’s song, “I See Your Name in Menus”.
EC:
Additional musicians listed were Riff Randall, Charlie Verrette and David Sperry. Riff was a friend of ours who hung out and jammed with us sometimes. He likely played a lot of the relentlessly pounding percussion for the jam number “On Chord Nine”, as did David Sperry. I don’t remember anything about David Sperry. Charlie (from Architects Office and Doll Parts) probably played a percussive synthesizer on that same track.
The cassette label featured the title and the words “Walls Of Genius” and “Cause And Effect” repeated across the label, simple but effective.
EC:
By this time, tensions were running higher between David and myself. I have addressed this in earlier notes, but it was a situation that just kept growing. Suffice it to say that three years of sharing a house, a band and camping trips, was beginning to drive us both crazy. Although I still had plenty of ideas, on this album I eschewed the intense over-dubbed complex mixing projects which had previously figured so prominently in our most recent work. David put in more effort over-dubbing and mixing than I did, which was a reversal of roles, likely the result of me spending more time getting away from both him and the band-scene at the house.
By the time the Walls Of Genius AND MIRACLE sessions were coming to a close, I had started dating the woman who would later become my wife, Robin, a co-worker at the CU Recreation Center. After several bonafide bad dates, I had finally, at long last, thought I had located a girlfriend I could keep. I wasn’t shopping for a wife, all I wanted was a girlfriend.
The Hall of Genius was no house to which any girl should have been exposed. Not only was it fraternity-house-filthy and falling apart, the kinds of people in the scene surrounding Walls Of Genius weren’t always the easiest to digest. We had one fan who danced around in a straitjacket at our gigs. Several of our musical collaborators turned out to be medically-diagnosed with “ass-hole syndrome” (well, probably not an actual medical diagnosis…). One of these characters, who was actually the bassist I replaced years before in the band that became Rumours Of Marriage, would later break into my post-Walls Of Genius house and steal a quarter-pound of Thai stick as well as a box containing all the WoG masters (which, fortunately, I recovered, since I basically had evidence that caught the dickweed red-handed). Go figure, right?
I had realized that if I kept up with this band, my social and romantic possibilities would be of the lowest order on any number of counts, choices to be made amongst only the most bizarre, eccentric and odd, and I wasn’t ready to make that kind of commitment to my lifestyle. I can’t say how many times I would meet people who would later ask me what the hell I was doing hanging out with Little Fyodor and attendant members of the underground scene. Not surprisingly, every single one of those people turned out to be bigger dickweeds than anybody of whom they were critical. One of them embezzled half-a-million dollars from the University of Colorado, sitting at a desk no farther than six feet away from me for six years. Another, who would later be my best man at my wedding, dropped out of society altogether, stopped paying taxes, did nothing but deal drugs and blew me off entirely because I had quit my casual end of that ‘business’ upon getting married. In retrospect, I may have exaggerated my existential dilemma, but it seemed quite real to me at the time. So, getting out of the house and spending less time with the mixer resulted in some very different sound experiments, all of which sound good many years later.
Another contributing factor to the separate sound experiments was “musical room-mate phenomenon”. Any of us who have lived with musical room-mates have likely experienced the phenomenon of room-mates writing or learning a song in their particular bedroom and then hearing it down the hall, through the walls or vents, over and over and over, until you are so sick of the song in question that you are ready to destroy both singer and song. At the Hall of Genius, this musical room-mate was David. We had both been helping each other out with percussion, guitar, bass and keyboards on our own “solo” tracks for some time. When it came to actual “Little Fyodor” material, David was very demanding about the overdubbed tracks. They had to be a certain way and that was not always easy to achieve since playing the guitar or bass with many of those pieces was totally anti-intuitive to me. Not only was I getting to a point where I thought his rhythmic sense was obnoxious, he had expressed the opinion that doing percussion on my solo pieces was “like doing the laundry”. So there was friction associated with this and it contributed to my getting out of the house more often and doing solo pieces.
By this time, tensions were running higher between David and myself. I have addressed this in earlier notes, but it was a situation that just kept growing. Suffice it to say that three years of sharing a house, a band and camping trips, was beginning to drive us both crazy. Although I still had plenty of ideas, on this album I eschewed the intense over-dubbed complex mixing projects which had previously figured so prominently in our most recent work. David put in more effort over-dubbing and mixing than I did, which was a reversal of roles, likely the result of me spending more time getting away from both him and the band-scene at the house.
By the time the Walls Of Genius AND MIRACLE sessions were coming to a close, I had started dating the woman who would later become my wife, Robin, a co-worker at the CU Recreation Center. After several bonafide bad dates, I had finally, at long last, thought I had located a girlfriend I could keep. I wasn’t shopping for a wife, all I wanted was a girlfriend.
The Hall of Genius was no house to which any girl should have been exposed. Not only was it fraternity-house-filthy and falling apart, the kinds of people in the scene surrounding Walls Of Genius weren’t always the easiest to digest. We had one fan who danced around in a straitjacket at our gigs. Several of our musical collaborators turned out to be medically-diagnosed with “ass-hole syndrome” (well, probably not an actual medical diagnosis…). One of these characters, who was actually the bassist I replaced years before in the band that became Rumours Of Marriage, would later break into my post-Walls Of Genius house and steal a quarter-pound of Thai stick as well as a box containing all the WoG masters (which, fortunately, I recovered, since I basically had evidence that caught the dickweed red-handed). Go figure, right?
I had realized that if I kept up with this band, my social and romantic possibilities would be of the lowest order on any number of counts, choices to be made amongst only the most bizarre, eccentric and odd, and I wasn’t ready to make that kind of commitment to my lifestyle. I can’t say how many times I would meet people who would later ask me what the hell I was doing hanging out with Little Fyodor and attendant members of the underground scene. Not surprisingly, every single one of those people turned out to be bigger dickweeds than anybody of whom they were critical. One of them embezzled half-a-million dollars from the University of Colorado, sitting at a desk no farther than six feet away from me for six years. Another, who would later be my best man at my wedding, dropped out of society altogether, stopped paying taxes, did nothing but deal drugs and blew me off entirely because I had quit my casual end of that ‘business’ upon getting married. In retrospect, I may have exaggerated my existential dilemma, but it seemed quite real to me at the time. So, getting out of the house and spending less time with the mixer resulted in some very different sound experiments, all of which sound good many years later.
Another contributing factor to the separate sound experiments was “musical room-mate phenomenon”. Any of us who have lived with musical room-mates have likely experienced the phenomenon of room-mates writing or learning a song in their particular bedroom and then hearing it down the hall, through the walls or vents, over and over and over, until you are so sick of the song in question that you are ready to destroy both singer and song. At the Hall of Genius, this musical room-mate was David. We had both been helping each other out with percussion, guitar, bass and keyboards on our own “solo” tracks for some time. When it came to actual “Little Fyodor” material, David was very demanding about the overdubbed tracks. They had to be a certain way and that was not always easy to achieve since playing the guitar or bass with many of those pieces was totally anti-intuitive to me. Not only was I getting to a point where I thought his rhythmic sense was obnoxious, he had expressed the opinion that doing percussion on my solo pieces was “like doing the laundry”. So there was friction associated with this and it contributed to my getting out of the house more often and doing solo pieces.
Side A
Shleppin' Mein Strudel (Lichtenverg)
House Of Horrors (Lichtenverg)
Budget Ramming (Cantor)
Suzie Q. (Hawkins)
Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet (Cantor, Lichtenverg)
The Real Bad Blues (Fowler)
Dilemma (Cantor)
Humbuzz (Lichtenverg)
Happy Pretty Girl (Lichtenverg)
Shleppin' Mein Strudel (Lichtenverg)
House Of Horrors (Lichtenverg)
Budget Ramming (Cantor)
Suzie Q. (Hawkins)
Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet (Cantor, Lichtenverg)
The Real Bad Blues (Fowler)
Dilemma (Cantor)
Humbuzz (Lichtenverg)
Happy Pretty Girl (Lichtenverg)
“Shleppin’ Mein Strudel”
LF:
So quirkiness, quirkiness, it’s time for more quirkiness, cause that’s what I give the world on “Shleppin’ Mein Strudel”. This song is a testament to the notion that if you fool around with your instrument(s) long enough, you’ll have a song!
One moderately notable thing about this piece is that after much anticipation throughout this archive, my used Roland Drumatix finally makes its initial appearance. On what turned out to be the final Walls Of Genius per se release. Of the first go ‘round, that is, now that we’ve had a reunion. The vintage phase. Had I mentioned that this was the last one yet? The last one by Walls Of Genius the band itself per se, at least by itself. And as for the Drumatix, I’d previously thought I’d remembered it playing a more longstanding role in WoG, but now having reviewed all the material it seems that it was always my el cheapo Mattel Synsonics or my synthesizer on which I made my electronic rhythms before this. But finally, the Drumatix arrives. I don’t remember exactly, but I’m guessing this piece started out with that Drumatix, I was probably having fun figuring it out and coming up with patterns on it. I think I was trying to make a “funky” rhythm. I had no illusions (or at least few) about my aptitude for funkiness, but for some reason I was frequently drawn that fraudulent (for me) way. I did generally like the idea that I could create something new via incompetence. I remember my Uncle Henry comparing that idea to taking a shit on the floor and calling it art, but hey, you gotta go with what you have! So this was my idea of a funky Drumatix beat.
The Farfisa bass probably came next, maybe through the distortion built into my Jazz Chorus amp. I’d noticed that distortion made the overly deep bass on my Farfisa less so, which may be a common effect of distortion on bass, to make it less bassy, like McCartney’s on “Think For Yourself”. Then probably came my guitar, also with distortion, using the el cheapo Fuzz-Wah pedal I’d gotten as a kid. I remember Evan saying his Big Muff (and both he and Ed had one of those) (and I think Jimi Hendrix too?!) had especially good tone for a distortion pedal. Well, my Fuzz-Wah didn’t. When you played a chord through it, it was all noise. And that’s what I’m doing in the first part of this piece.
Like most of my quirky songs, this one has two parts. A first part, and a second part. And in the first part, I just blasted a guitar chord through the Fuzz-Wah and all you hear is a blast of noise. I don’t remember what chord it was, maybe just a C, but it probably didn’t matter, anyway! Then I actually play some actual notes in the second part. On the guitar, that is. Real primitive, caveman, like. I like that keyboard bass line I’m playing though! In the second part? Give it a listen!
Then after I had done all this, I was listening back to it all in the living room and I went into the bathroom for some reason, who knows what, and I started doing these screams along with the music while I was in there (a co-worker of Evan’s called them barks – “Is that you barking?” she said to me), and I liked the way they sounded in there, there was a bit of natural bathroom reverb, so I pulled the microphone in there and recorded my (ahem) screams right in there. My voice actually gave out a little before the recording was done which led to some variation.
I also added bongos at some point along the way, cause I liked mixing the manual and mechanical rhythms. I don’t know if it’s me or Evan playing the cabasa. I’m guessing me, which would mean I played everything on this one, but I’m not sure. Oh, and then I also growl some when I’m not scream/barking. I must have done a couple of these things simultaneously, as there’s six performances on only four tracks, like maybe I played the bongos while the drum machine was being recorded. The title was just my idea of something corny and cheesy and borscht belty sounding. I don’t think I was consciously thinking of the actual meanings of any of those words at the time, which is probably why it doesn’t make any sense. I just liked the sound of it….
EC:
This is David’s solo vehicle. He’s on the drum machine and synthesizer, doing a lot of grunting and yelping.
“House Of Horrors”
LF:
Okay, time for you to read this word one more time: QUIRKY! Not only that, but Drumatix, two part instrumental (albeit with non-verbal vocals), Farfisa, fuzz guitar. It’s all there again, though other than all that (oh, and a three word, alliterative title), “House Of Horrors” is pretty different (from “Shleppin’ Mein Strudel”), just a very different melody and harmony and feel. A lot more frantic. Not all quirkiness is the same!
Again, I probably started with the Drumatix drum machine beat (with some effect on it, either the flange or a slight delay), then I found some catchy stuff on the organ, though this time it started with a melody and the bass surely came after that.
My fuzz guitar acted mostly just as a noisy rhythm for the first part. I remember Jeanne Strzelewicz (Leo Goya’s significant other and later wife) telling me how much she liked that guitar part. She punched the air with her fist as she told me that as if it were the power of it she liked, the umph. And then I played a couple of mini-chords and bent the strings with my whammy bar on the second part.
And then on top of all Smokey, I mean, this, I had a bunch of people alternately scream and laugh along with it. I did this by playing the song in the living room for everyone with a mike or two in front of them and I told them to scream for the first part and then laugh for the second. I remember Ed and Evan being present for this but I don’t know who else, though I’m pretty sure there were a few others. Maybe we did it on the day we recorded “On Chord Nine” and the other screamer/laughers were the others on that piece (Riff, Charlie and Dave Sperry)? That would make sense, but I don’t frankly actually rightly know, I can only speculate. Then when we mixed this piece, we ran the track with the screams and laughs through a delay and I used a button on the mixer to turn the track off and on. The delay effect allows the screaming and laughter to linger in echo while the track was muted. I did this more or less randomly, or just by whatever felt right at the moment.
There were two versions of this song, two completely different mixes from the same source material. The other mix went to a 4-LP compilation made in France that I remember being called SNX: the Popular Music of Tomorrow, I think one of the only two times we made it onto vinyl. I was proud to be on a record with one of my heroes, Renaldo and The Loaf! The comp version (which I think we did first) differed in that we just let the screams and laughs play continuously, with no on and offs. I also remember the comp version rocking a bit more, maybe cause the guitar part that Jeanne liked was more prominent, while I thought the Do Not Write one sounded “spacier” (I’ve since lost that compilation somehow so I can’t check that one out now!). Obviously, the name of the piece refers to the funhouse feel of it.
I once played this piece live for an adult game of musical chairs at some artsy variety show type event, on the stage of a theater in Boulder. I remember a couple of people (maybe including Leo?) expressing great relief when the game was over so they wouldn’t have to hear me keep playing that lead melody whenever the music was “on” as it was driving ‘em nuts! (I think Charlie Verrette played the bass line with me for that.) Oh, and then the famed WoG gong ends it all….
EC:
Another David solo vehicle. There’s a synth playing a melodic part, a lot of digital-delay sounds, and a drum machine. This one has a verse-chorus structure even though it is an instrumental.
“Budget Ramming”
EC:
This is me manipulating the dial on a Technics ST-Z1 radio tuner. I was fascinated by all the squeaky sounds you could make just moving the dial around. It’s a very abstract piece constructed of both abstract radio noises and snippets of what was actually playing on the radio at the moment. The squeaky stuff is fantastic and I don’t recall how I got it to do that simultaneously with commercial radio material. This was recorded entirely “live”, no dubbing or mixing required. I was working the dial with a rhythmic sensibility. I don’t recall how I got multiple things going on with it, but it strikes me that it was not unusual to tune in multiple radio stations simultaneously, especially if they were weak signals. The title perhaps alludes to the fact that I was getting wise to how budgets were constructed up on campus at the University of Colorado. We would have staff meetings at the CU Recreation Center where the Director would ask us all what we thought about this or that and then, after he had heard all our opinions, announce that he had already decided what it would be, regardless of our thoughts, essentially “ramming” the budget down our throats whether we liked it or not. This was their modus operandi when it came to banning beer at the club hockey games. I argued that beer was a part of the hockey culture and you shouldn’t ban it, but it had already been decided. Of course. You could hardly be made to feel any stupider.
LF:
“Budget Ramming” is Evan playing with the tuner knob of a radio dial. Okay, next song…. Ha-ha! Actually there’s a lot to say about this. It’s an entirely abstract piece using the completely commercial fodder of what just happened to be on the radio at the time. It’s also completely off the cuff and spur of the moment yet it perfectly managed to capture our aesthetic of experimental cheese, outside but fun(ny). It’s also a nice blend of intentionality and the completely accidental and unexpected. The walking bass line near the end that was somehow maintained while Evan jiggled the static to his own rhythm was especially fortuitous and Evan got a big kick out of that.
Most of all, to my mind anyway, it shows there were other ways of being improvisational than what I’ve described elsewhere in this archive as traditional free music. The stuff that’s essentially an offshoot of jazz, though I’m sure there’s dissenters to that view. Where a bunch of people get together and improvise on their instruments, often a sax, usually drums, maybe guitar, occasionally found objects. There’s an infinite number of things they can do with that gestalt, but you always know it’s free music. It’s a genre. I used to say that WoG was so free-form we weren’t limited to just free-form! Being free could be learning a song and recording it right then and there and then never playing it again. It could be layering an overdub project with ideas that come to you with each new layer. It could be noticing how cool the sounds of a spinning radio dial are and then turning it into a piece by recording it on the spot, in one take. There’s an infinite number of places free music can go, but just because there’s an infinite number of points between any two points doesn’t mean there ain’t nothing outside of those two points! Um, obviously…? The title came from something completely unrelated that Evan heard someone say at his job, at the University…
“Suzie Q.”
EC:
This was a holdover from my straight repertoire. This one sounds like we played it live and perhaps overdubbed some organ on it later. It sounds like David on the organ, not me. My voice is heavily reverbed, probably run through a digital delay. Ed plays a nice lead on the first break, a simple vamp on E7, but is not mixed up, probably the result of having recorded the stuff live with too much bleed-across the tracks. He plays some wild middle-eastern sounding stuff on the second break before we fade it out.
LF:
Our cover of “Suzie Q” was Evan’s idea and featured Evan on lead vocals, through my digital delay, and on acoustic rhythm guitar. The beat leads in with Riff Randall playing the drum set that Evan had purchased and set up in the Hall. I don’t know if Riff had ever played drums seriously in any context previously, but he was into it and did a fine job, and that was good enough for us! I played my Farfisa. This was all recorded concurrently, on three tracks, and then Ed overdubbed his lead guitar, which often doubles the rhythm guitar part, at a later date. Ed does an excellent job as usual, but I remember thinking I liked the piece better before Ed’s overdub. It seemed to have a neater feeling, more “airy” and spacious, for lack of a better. I remember Evan saying something about he and Ed agreeing that Ed’s guitar was the only part that couldn’t be recorded clearly (I wasn’t there at the time), or something like that, and I wondered if he or they had noticed the same thing that I did, that however good Ed’s part was in and of itself, the song for some reason sounded better without it…. This track cemented my realization that Evan had lost all interest in the old ways, of giving me cover songs to sing and to use cover songs as vehicles for going ape shit and having anarchic, freewheeling fun. I realized that if I was going to sing a WoG cover song again, I would have to make it happen myself, and I thus embarked on a cover of “This Diamond Ring” for inclusion on a future WoG tape, but the band broke up before it was completed. It ended up on a solo LP of mine, with credit given to ¾ of it being recorded at the Halls Of Genius….
“Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet”
EC:
This is credited to both David and I, but as I recall, it was my idea and I had David “play” the vacuum cleaner, which consisted of turning it on and off to get the machine sound and the whine of the engine as it wound down. I’m playing the cello like a stand-up bass. I don’t recall whose cello it was or why we had a cello available. I don’t think we were playing with Dena Zocher at this time, but it could have been hers. I really like this piece. It’s so simple, yet it mixes elements of the abstract and the musical perfectly. Machine Music meets Jazz Bass.
LF:
I don’t remember for sure where either the vacuum cleaner or the cello came from for “Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet”. The former may have been lent to us by Andy Brennan our downstairs neighbor (something I’ve recently learned is illegal in Colorado!). And maybe the cello too? But we had them lying around and we noticed that the vacuum cleaner made a real neat sound when it wound down after being turned off. So I played the vacuum cleaner and Evan played the cello (as a bass), and we recorded this in one take. Surprised by that division of labor? Probably not, ha-ha! I tried to be real careful not to step on Evan’s playing while still being unabashed about utilizing the absurdity of “playing” a vacuum cleaner. There was only one spot where we overlapped, and maybe it sounds intentional? Then I went hog wild and turned on the vacuum player three times in a row at the end!
“The Real Bad Blues”
EC:
The badness described is not the intensity of having the blues, but more along the lines of “it’s so bad it’s good”. This continued a longstanding theme of ours, playing the blues in some sick twisted way that was “so bad it’s good”. We credited this to Ed, but the most prominent part of it is my halting, off-beat bass line, that holds it all together but implies a kind of off-balanced perspective. David is playing a contrapuntal synth part and Ed is playing a very subdued fuzz guitar. Another fade-out.
LF:
The bad blues were a running theme for WoG and a compositional theme for Ed. I think we recorded all of “The Real Bad Blues” at double the speed of playback. Ed’s playing guitar, maybe acoustic? I’m playing arpeggios on the Farfisa and Evan’s playing harmonica. Real bad, eh?
“Dilemma”
EC:
This is me attacking the warped autoharp. It sounds like a John Cage prepared-piano. The reel tapes indicate that I recorded it on 2-tracks, each at a different speed. The sound of the warped autoharp was so dissonant that I thought “Dilemma” was a perfect title for it. Thanks again to Frank Zygmunt for the autoharp.
LF:
“Dilemma” is just Evan playing the autoharp Frank Zygmunt had found in the trash for us on two different tracks, with one recorded at half the speed of playback. Obviously this was sequenced to provide contrast with the opposite effect used on the previous piece. You can see from the reel tape photos that Evan originally just called this “Dueling Autoharps”. It was given its ultimate name after the recording, with a title that sounded arty and neat, as was customary….
“Humbuzz”
LF:
“Humbuzz” started out with me utilizing what might be called -- undertones? I actually don’t recall real exactly, but I found that my Drumatix drum machine made some sort of sound when it wasn’t supposed to, maybe the volume was all the way down but you could still hear something underneath, something like that. Then I moved the volume up (on something somewhere along the line in the recording arrangement) and “played” the ensuing hiss. I may have turned the drum machine on and off, but maybe not, I can’t recall. I know I got a couple of different sounds that weren’t meant to be heard. Then I overdubbed a bass line on my Farfisa, in time with the undertone of the drum machine that could be heard although its volume was all the way down, and then I asked Ed and Evan to overdub parts, and they both played very abstract parts, on guitar and roto-toms (and some other percussion, sounds like a glass jar), respectively. Evan recorded his percussion through the delay and Ed made heavy use of his Echoplex’s feedback feature (maybe on a separate track from his playing?). A nice group effort! I believe Ed and Evan did their parts concurrently but after I had laid down the original noise foundation and bass line at earlier dates. I assume you get the joke of the title, since when I told Evan that I hoped people would get it, he replied that it was almost too obvious, and then he exclaimed, “Humbuzz!” in classic Scrooge fashion….
EC:
David’s solo vehicle. The title is an obvious riff on “Humbug” (a la Ebenezer Scrooge) referring also to buzzing noises in the electronics. The synthesizer rumbles along underwater, while there is some percussion solo going on (that might be me assisting). Something is making a persistent buzzing noise, perhaps a synth or an electric guitar with a bad cord. I recall David’s fascination with the sounds made by bad guitar cords.
“Happy Pretty Girl”
LF:
“Happy Pretty Girl” is another of my “horny” songs! And another of my solo a cappella pieces that finished off a Side A, with me vocalizing both parts, one overdubbed on top of the other. “Happy pretty girl” was just some phrase that popped into my head while ogling some chick that fit that description. I think it reflected my feeling of distance from women I was attracted to, i.e., she was just a happy pretty girl, going about her business, as I admired her and lusted for her pretty much from a completely different world. I remember this really cracked up Ed! In case it’s not obvious, I recorded the “happy pretty girl” part first and then the lecherous moaning/growling part afterwards….
EC:
David’s solo vehicle. David repeats the title over and over in a high, chirpy voice, while ramping up in the background with moans and grunts editorializing on the idea of the ‘happy pretty girl’. Was he thinking of my new girlfriend, Robin, at the time? Maybe, I don’t know.
LF:
So quirkiness, quirkiness, it’s time for more quirkiness, cause that’s what I give the world on “Shleppin’ Mein Strudel”. This song is a testament to the notion that if you fool around with your instrument(s) long enough, you’ll have a song!
One moderately notable thing about this piece is that after much anticipation throughout this archive, my used Roland Drumatix finally makes its initial appearance. On what turned out to be the final Walls Of Genius per se release. Of the first go ‘round, that is, now that we’ve had a reunion. The vintage phase. Had I mentioned that this was the last one yet? The last one by Walls Of Genius the band itself per se, at least by itself. And as for the Drumatix, I’d previously thought I’d remembered it playing a more longstanding role in WoG, but now having reviewed all the material it seems that it was always my el cheapo Mattel Synsonics or my synthesizer on which I made my electronic rhythms before this. But finally, the Drumatix arrives. I don’t remember exactly, but I’m guessing this piece started out with that Drumatix, I was probably having fun figuring it out and coming up with patterns on it. I think I was trying to make a “funky” rhythm. I had no illusions (or at least few) about my aptitude for funkiness, but for some reason I was frequently drawn that fraudulent (for me) way. I did generally like the idea that I could create something new via incompetence. I remember my Uncle Henry comparing that idea to taking a shit on the floor and calling it art, but hey, you gotta go with what you have! So this was my idea of a funky Drumatix beat.
The Farfisa bass probably came next, maybe through the distortion built into my Jazz Chorus amp. I’d noticed that distortion made the overly deep bass on my Farfisa less so, which may be a common effect of distortion on bass, to make it less bassy, like McCartney’s on “Think For Yourself”. Then probably came my guitar, also with distortion, using the el cheapo Fuzz-Wah pedal I’d gotten as a kid. I remember Evan saying his Big Muff (and both he and Ed had one of those) (and I think Jimi Hendrix too?!) had especially good tone for a distortion pedal. Well, my Fuzz-Wah didn’t. When you played a chord through it, it was all noise. And that’s what I’m doing in the first part of this piece.
Like most of my quirky songs, this one has two parts. A first part, and a second part. And in the first part, I just blasted a guitar chord through the Fuzz-Wah and all you hear is a blast of noise. I don’t remember what chord it was, maybe just a C, but it probably didn’t matter, anyway! Then I actually play some actual notes in the second part. On the guitar, that is. Real primitive, caveman, like. I like that keyboard bass line I’m playing though! In the second part? Give it a listen!
Then after I had done all this, I was listening back to it all in the living room and I went into the bathroom for some reason, who knows what, and I started doing these screams along with the music while I was in there (a co-worker of Evan’s called them barks – “Is that you barking?” she said to me), and I liked the way they sounded in there, there was a bit of natural bathroom reverb, so I pulled the microphone in there and recorded my (ahem) screams right in there. My voice actually gave out a little before the recording was done which led to some variation.
I also added bongos at some point along the way, cause I liked mixing the manual and mechanical rhythms. I don’t know if it’s me or Evan playing the cabasa. I’m guessing me, which would mean I played everything on this one, but I’m not sure. Oh, and then I also growl some when I’m not scream/barking. I must have done a couple of these things simultaneously, as there’s six performances on only four tracks, like maybe I played the bongos while the drum machine was being recorded. The title was just my idea of something corny and cheesy and borscht belty sounding. I don’t think I was consciously thinking of the actual meanings of any of those words at the time, which is probably why it doesn’t make any sense. I just liked the sound of it….
EC:
This is David’s solo vehicle. He’s on the drum machine and synthesizer, doing a lot of grunting and yelping.
“House Of Horrors”
LF:
Okay, time for you to read this word one more time: QUIRKY! Not only that, but Drumatix, two part instrumental (albeit with non-verbal vocals), Farfisa, fuzz guitar. It’s all there again, though other than all that (oh, and a three word, alliterative title), “House Of Horrors” is pretty different (from “Shleppin’ Mein Strudel”), just a very different melody and harmony and feel. A lot more frantic. Not all quirkiness is the same!
Again, I probably started with the Drumatix drum machine beat (with some effect on it, either the flange or a slight delay), then I found some catchy stuff on the organ, though this time it started with a melody and the bass surely came after that.
My fuzz guitar acted mostly just as a noisy rhythm for the first part. I remember Jeanne Strzelewicz (Leo Goya’s significant other and later wife) telling me how much she liked that guitar part. She punched the air with her fist as she told me that as if it were the power of it she liked, the umph. And then I played a couple of mini-chords and bent the strings with my whammy bar on the second part.
And then on top of all Smokey, I mean, this, I had a bunch of people alternately scream and laugh along with it. I did this by playing the song in the living room for everyone with a mike or two in front of them and I told them to scream for the first part and then laugh for the second. I remember Ed and Evan being present for this but I don’t know who else, though I’m pretty sure there were a few others. Maybe we did it on the day we recorded “On Chord Nine” and the other screamer/laughers were the others on that piece (Riff, Charlie and Dave Sperry)? That would make sense, but I don’t frankly actually rightly know, I can only speculate. Then when we mixed this piece, we ran the track with the screams and laughs through a delay and I used a button on the mixer to turn the track off and on. The delay effect allows the screaming and laughter to linger in echo while the track was muted. I did this more or less randomly, or just by whatever felt right at the moment.
There were two versions of this song, two completely different mixes from the same source material. The other mix went to a 4-LP compilation made in France that I remember being called SNX: the Popular Music of Tomorrow, I think one of the only two times we made it onto vinyl. I was proud to be on a record with one of my heroes, Renaldo and The Loaf! The comp version (which I think we did first) differed in that we just let the screams and laughs play continuously, with no on and offs. I also remember the comp version rocking a bit more, maybe cause the guitar part that Jeanne liked was more prominent, while I thought the Do Not Write one sounded “spacier” (I’ve since lost that compilation somehow so I can’t check that one out now!). Obviously, the name of the piece refers to the funhouse feel of it.
I once played this piece live for an adult game of musical chairs at some artsy variety show type event, on the stage of a theater in Boulder. I remember a couple of people (maybe including Leo?) expressing great relief when the game was over so they wouldn’t have to hear me keep playing that lead melody whenever the music was “on” as it was driving ‘em nuts! (I think Charlie Verrette played the bass line with me for that.) Oh, and then the famed WoG gong ends it all….
EC:
Another David solo vehicle. There’s a synth playing a melodic part, a lot of digital-delay sounds, and a drum machine. This one has a verse-chorus structure even though it is an instrumental.
“Budget Ramming”
EC:
This is me manipulating the dial on a Technics ST-Z1 radio tuner. I was fascinated by all the squeaky sounds you could make just moving the dial around. It’s a very abstract piece constructed of both abstract radio noises and snippets of what was actually playing on the radio at the moment. The squeaky stuff is fantastic and I don’t recall how I got it to do that simultaneously with commercial radio material. This was recorded entirely “live”, no dubbing or mixing required. I was working the dial with a rhythmic sensibility. I don’t recall how I got multiple things going on with it, but it strikes me that it was not unusual to tune in multiple radio stations simultaneously, especially if they were weak signals. The title perhaps alludes to the fact that I was getting wise to how budgets were constructed up on campus at the University of Colorado. We would have staff meetings at the CU Recreation Center where the Director would ask us all what we thought about this or that and then, after he had heard all our opinions, announce that he had already decided what it would be, regardless of our thoughts, essentially “ramming” the budget down our throats whether we liked it or not. This was their modus operandi when it came to banning beer at the club hockey games. I argued that beer was a part of the hockey culture and you shouldn’t ban it, but it had already been decided. Of course. You could hardly be made to feel any stupider.
LF:
“Budget Ramming” is Evan playing with the tuner knob of a radio dial. Okay, next song…. Ha-ha! Actually there’s a lot to say about this. It’s an entirely abstract piece using the completely commercial fodder of what just happened to be on the radio at the time. It’s also completely off the cuff and spur of the moment yet it perfectly managed to capture our aesthetic of experimental cheese, outside but fun(ny). It’s also a nice blend of intentionality and the completely accidental and unexpected. The walking bass line near the end that was somehow maintained while Evan jiggled the static to his own rhythm was especially fortuitous and Evan got a big kick out of that.
Most of all, to my mind anyway, it shows there were other ways of being improvisational than what I’ve described elsewhere in this archive as traditional free music. The stuff that’s essentially an offshoot of jazz, though I’m sure there’s dissenters to that view. Where a bunch of people get together and improvise on their instruments, often a sax, usually drums, maybe guitar, occasionally found objects. There’s an infinite number of things they can do with that gestalt, but you always know it’s free music. It’s a genre. I used to say that WoG was so free-form we weren’t limited to just free-form! Being free could be learning a song and recording it right then and there and then never playing it again. It could be layering an overdub project with ideas that come to you with each new layer. It could be noticing how cool the sounds of a spinning radio dial are and then turning it into a piece by recording it on the spot, in one take. There’s an infinite number of places free music can go, but just because there’s an infinite number of points between any two points doesn’t mean there ain’t nothing outside of those two points! Um, obviously…? The title came from something completely unrelated that Evan heard someone say at his job, at the University…
“Suzie Q.”
EC:
This was a holdover from my straight repertoire. This one sounds like we played it live and perhaps overdubbed some organ on it later. It sounds like David on the organ, not me. My voice is heavily reverbed, probably run through a digital delay. Ed plays a nice lead on the first break, a simple vamp on E7, but is not mixed up, probably the result of having recorded the stuff live with too much bleed-across the tracks. He plays some wild middle-eastern sounding stuff on the second break before we fade it out.
LF:
Our cover of “Suzie Q” was Evan’s idea and featured Evan on lead vocals, through my digital delay, and on acoustic rhythm guitar. The beat leads in with Riff Randall playing the drum set that Evan had purchased and set up in the Hall. I don’t know if Riff had ever played drums seriously in any context previously, but he was into it and did a fine job, and that was good enough for us! I played my Farfisa. This was all recorded concurrently, on three tracks, and then Ed overdubbed his lead guitar, which often doubles the rhythm guitar part, at a later date. Ed does an excellent job as usual, but I remember thinking I liked the piece better before Ed’s overdub. It seemed to have a neater feeling, more “airy” and spacious, for lack of a better. I remember Evan saying something about he and Ed agreeing that Ed’s guitar was the only part that couldn’t be recorded clearly (I wasn’t there at the time), or something like that, and I wondered if he or they had noticed the same thing that I did, that however good Ed’s part was in and of itself, the song for some reason sounded better without it…. This track cemented my realization that Evan had lost all interest in the old ways, of giving me cover songs to sing and to use cover songs as vehicles for going ape shit and having anarchic, freewheeling fun. I realized that if I was going to sing a WoG cover song again, I would have to make it happen myself, and I thus embarked on a cover of “This Diamond Ring” for inclusion on a future WoG tape, but the band broke up before it was completed. It ended up on a solo LP of mine, with credit given to ¾ of it being recorded at the Halls Of Genius….
“Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet”
EC:
This is credited to both David and I, but as I recall, it was my idea and I had David “play” the vacuum cleaner, which consisted of turning it on and off to get the machine sound and the whine of the engine as it wound down. I’m playing the cello like a stand-up bass. I don’t recall whose cello it was or why we had a cello available. I don’t think we were playing with Dena Zocher at this time, but it could have been hers. I really like this piece. It’s so simple, yet it mixes elements of the abstract and the musical perfectly. Machine Music meets Jazz Bass.
LF:
I don’t remember for sure where either the vacuum cleaner or the cello came from for “Vacuum Cleaner & Cello Duet”. The former may have been lent to us by Andy Brennan our downstairs neighbor (something I’ve recently learned is illegal in Colorado!). And maybe the cello too? But we had them lying around and we noticed that the vacuum cleaner made a real neat sound when it wound down after being turned off. So I played the vacuum cleaner and Evan played the cello (as a bass), and we recorded this in one take. Surprised by that division of labor? Probably not, ha-ha! I tried to be real careful not to step on Evan’s playing while still being unabashed about utilizing the absurdity of “playing” a vacuum cleaner. There was only one spot where we overlapped, and maybe it sounds intentional? Then I went hog wild and turned on the vacuum player three times in a row at the end!
“The Real Bad Blues”
EC:
The badness described is not the intensity of having the blues, but more along the lines of “it’s so bad it’s good”. This continued a longstanding theme of ours, playing the blues in some sick twisted way that was “so bad it’s good”. We credited this to Ed, but the most prominent part of it is my halting, off-beat bass line, that holds it all together but implies a kind of off-balanced perspective. David is playing a contrapuntal synth part and Ed is playing a very subdued fuzz guitar. Another fade-out.
LF:
The bad blues were a running theme for WoG and a compositional theme for Ed. I think we recorded all of “The Real Bad Blues” at double the speed of playback. Ed’s playing guitar, maybe acoustic? I’m playing arpeggios on the Farfisa and Evan’s playing harmonica. Real bad, eh?
“Dilemma”
EC:
This is me attacking the warped autoharp. It sounds like a John Cage prepared-piano. The reel tapes indicate that I recorded it on 2-tracks, each at a different speed. The sound of the warped autoharp was so dissonant that I thought “Dilemma” was a perfect title for it. Thanks again to Frank Zygmunt for the autoharp.
LF:
“Dilemma” is just Evan playing the autoharp Frank Zygmunt had found in the trash for us on two different tracks, with one recorded at half the speed of playback. Obviously this was sequenced to provide contrast with the opposite effect used on the previous piece. You can see from the reel tape photos that Evan originally just called this “Dueling Autoharps”. It was given its ultimate name after the recording, with a title that sounded arty and neat, as was customary….
“Humbuzz”
LF:
“Humbuzz” started out with me utilizing what might be called -- undertones? I actually don’t recall real exactly, but I found that my Drumatix drum machine made some sort of sound when it wasn’t supposed to, maybe the volume was all the way down but you could still hear something underneath, something like that. Then I moved the volume up (on something somewhere along the line in the recording arrangement) and “played” the ensuing hiss. I may have turned the drum machine on and off, but maybe not, I can’t recall. I know I got a couple of different sounds that weren’t meant to be heard. Then I overdubbed a bass line on my Farfisa, in time with the undertone of the drum machine that could be heard although its volume was all the way down, and then I asked Ed and Evan to overdub parts, and they both played very abstract parts, on guitar and roto-toms (and some other percussion, sounds like a glass jar), respectively. Evan recorded his percussion through the delay and Ed made heavy use of his Echoplex’s feedback feature (maybe on a separate track from his playing?). A nice group effort! I believe Ed and Evan did their parts concurrently but after I had laid down the original noise foundation and bass line at earlier dates. I assume you get the joke of the title, since when I told Evan that I hoped people would get it, he replied that it was almost too obvious, and then he exclaimed, “Humbuzz!” in classic Scrooge fashion….
EC:
David’s solo vehicle. The title is an obvious riff on “Humbug” (a la Ebenezer Scrooge) referring also to buzzing noises in the electronics. The synthesizer rumbles along underwater, while there is some percussion solo going on (that might be me assisting). Something is making a persistent buzzing noise, perhaps a synth or an electric guitar with a bad cord. I recall David’s fascination with the sounds made by bad guitar cords.
“Happy Pretty Girl”
LF:
“Happy Pretty Girl” is another of my “horny” songs! And another of my solo a cappella pieces that finished off a Side A, with me vocalizing both parts, one overdubbed on top of the other. “Happy pretty girl” was just some phrase that popped into my head while ogling some chick that fit that description. I think it reflected my feeling of distance from women I was attracted to, i.e., she was just a happy pretty girl, going about her business, as I admired her and lusted for her pretty much from a completely different world. I remember this really cracked up Ed! In case it’s not obvious, I recorded the “happy pretty girl” part first and then the lecherous moaning/growling part afterwards….
EC:
David’s solo vehicle. David repeats the title over and over in a high, chirpy voice, while ramping up in the background with moans and grunts editorializing on the idea of the ‘happy pretty girl’. Was he thinking of my new girlfriend, Robin, at the time? Maybe, I don’t know.
Side B
On Chord Nine (Walls Of Genius)
I See Your Name In Menus (Cantor)
On Chord Nine (Walls Of Genius)
I See Your Name In Menus (Cantor)
“On Chord Nine”
EC:
After all the very short pieces on side 1, side 2 opens with this lengthy jam. The title is an obvious reference to the idea of ‘cloud nine’, an expression for a place of ecstatic happiness, paralleling the endorphin-like state of transcendence achieved by musicians in the midst of a jam session. We fade in, so who knows how long it had gone on prior to this selection. This is the piece that Riff, Charlie and David Sperry assisted as additional musicians. It fades in on Ed’s guitar riff with lots of pounding percussion. My saxophone playing comes in, little-bit by little-bit, squawking away in a tremendously dissonant manner over Ed’s Zeppelin-esque guitar riff until I am taking a lead with it. I had been playing the saxophone a lot with Walls Of Genius & Miracle, so was all ‘practiced’ up.
Ed steps up to the plate to take the lead and uses the Echoplex to play rhythm and lead simultaneously. The sax drops out and what sounds like electronic percussion steps in. It could have been a percussive approach to the synthesizer and it’s likely that this was Charlie Verrette at the keyboard. It’s almost taking a lead, paralleling the relentless pounding percussion that never stops throughout this piece. I start to fade in with the bass in the background. Ed’s guitar goes abstract as the bass starts to pick up a groove. The gong (or a cymbal) crashes as the percussive synth sounds continue. Some chanting comes in, voices going “hey ho”. I can pick out David’s high-pitched squeal amidst the frenzy. The rhythm is being led by a sitar-sounding buzzy noise as a real bass line emerges. Another synth comes in, it sounds like David’s Pro-One, taking a lead. Ed takes another nice lead, prompted by the pounding percussion and the bass groove and then the whole thing stops on a dime, with a cymbal (or gong) crash.
LF:
I’ve mentioned Brian Kraft before in this archive, a friend who alternated with me on my KGNU radio time slot and whom I considered an experimental music connoisseur and whose opinion I thus greatly looked up to (even if I didn’t always agree with it). He had an interesting reaction to “On Chord Nine”. He said, “You got bad again!” I reacted inquisitively, and he continued, saying, “Everyone always gets better, from Throbbing Gristle to The Captain and Tennille. And you were doing it too, but now you got bad again! How’d that happen?” He clearly meant it as a compliment. And indeed we were back to our old just going for it improvisational tricks, with participation from otherwise onlookers like David Sperry, who was just someone I knew from work (the Hotel Boulderado) and who may never have played music before or since. This is the WoG release premiere of Evan on saxophone, which he also played on our compilation contribution, “Letters to Dan Fogelberg”. The repetitive rhythm was kept on my Drumatix, which was fed through one or more effects, including my flanger, which I manipulated at times. Though we were ostensibly back to our old crazy and “bad” tricks, I do remember being a lot more self-conscious than in the old days and thus was careful not to change up the drum machine too much. But then again, I didn’t want to be too timid, either! Ed’s on guitar just like the old days. The bass playing you hear from Evan is mostly overdubbed. He originally played the same bass line in the original live jam, but it didn’t come out in the recording, and everyone was bummed, with someone (probably Riff) saying that he was following along with that bass line. So Evan redid the same bass line on an overdubbed track. There’s various percussion, which may have variously been me or Dave Sperry or Riff or Charlie Verrette. And now I'm thinking Charlie may have had some influence over the drum machine too, which would have been his type of thing too, but hell if I remember any details! The most drum-like of the (manual) percussion was probably Riff. I don’t remember who started the bit of chanting several minutes in, but I recognize my voice in there. I liked doing that! Although Ed’s playing all the while, his guitar seems to become prominent and kind of “takes over” towards the end of the jam. Then I apparently ended it all by turning off the drum machine, but of course the crash of the ubiquitous WoG gong has the final say!
EC:
After all the very short pieces on side 1, side 2 opens with this lengthy jam. The title is an obvious reference to the idea of ‘cloud nine’, an expression for a place of ecstatic happiness, paralleling the endorphin-like state of transcendence achieved by musicians in the midst of a jam session. We fade in, so who knows how long it had gone on prior to this selection. This is the piece that Riff, Charlie and David Sperry assisted as additional musicians. It fades in on Ed’s guitar riff with lots of pounding percussion. My saxophone playing comes in, little-bit by little-bit, squawking away in a tremendously dissonant manner over Ed’s Zeppelin-esque guitar riff until I am taking a lead with it. I had been playing the saxophone a lot with Walls Of Genius & Miracle, so was all ‘practiced’ up.
Ed steps up to the plate to take the lead and uses the Echoplex to play rhythm and lead simultaneously. The sax drops out and what sounds like electronic percussion steps in. It could have been a percussive approach to the synthesizer and it’s likely that this was Charlie Verrette at the keyboard. It’s almost taking a lead, paralleling the relentless pounding percussion that never stops throughout this piece. I start to fade in with the bass in the background. Ed’s guitar goes abstract as the bass starts to pick up a groove. The gong (or a cymbal) crashes as the percussive synth sounds continue. Some chanting comes in, voices going “hey ho”. I can pick out David’s high-pitched squeal amidst the frenzy. The rhythm is being led by a sitar-sounding buzzy noise as a real bass line emerges. Another synth comes in, it sounds like David’s Pro-One, taking a lead. Ed takes another nice lead, prompted by the pounding percussion and the bass groove and then the whole thing stops on a dime, with a cymbal (or gong) crash.
LF:
I’ve mentioned Brian Kraft before in this archive, a friend who alternated with me on my KGNU radio time slot and whom I considered an experimental music connoisseur and whose opinion I thus greatly looked up to (even if I didn’t always agree with it). He had an interesting reaction to “On Chord Nine”. He said, “You got bad again!” I reacted inquisitively, and he continued, saying, “Everyone always gets better, from Throbbing Gristle to The Captain and Tennille. And you were doing it too, but now you got bad again! How’d that happen?” He clearly meant it as a compliment. And indeed we were back to our old just going for it improvisational tricks, with participation from otherwise onlookers like David Sperry, who was just someone I knew from work (the Hotel Boulderado) and who may never have played music before or since. This is the WoG release premiere of Evan on saxophone, which he also played on our compilation contribution, “Letters to Dan Fogelberg”. The repetitive rhythm was kept on my Drumatix, which was fed through one or more effects, including my flanger, which I manipulated at times. Though we were ostensibly back to our old crazy and “bad” tricks, I do remember being a lot more self-conscious than in the old days and thus was careful not to change up the drum machine too much. But then again, I didn’t want to be too timid, either! Ed’s on guitar just like the old days. The bass playing you hear from Evan is mostly overdubbed. He originally played the same bass line in the original live jam, but it didn’t come out in the recording, and everyone was bummed, with someone (probably Riff) saying that he was following along with that bass line. So Evan redid the same bass line on an overdubbed track. There’s various percussion, which may have variously been me or Dave Sperry or Riff or Charlie Verrette. And now I'm thinking Charlie may have had some influence over the drum machine too, which would have been his type of thing too, but hell if I remember any details! The most drum-like of the (manual) percussion was probably Riff. I don’t remember who started the bit of chanting several minutes in, but I recognize my voice in there. I liked doing that! Although Ed’s playing all the while, his guitar seems to become prominent and kind of “takes over” towards the end of the jam. Then I apparently ended it all by turning off the drum machine, but of course the crash of the ubiquitous WoG gong has the final say!
“I See Your Name In Menus”
EC:
Evan’s solo vehicle, featuring acoustic rhythm guitar and fuzzed-out lead guitar, with two tracks of vocals, a third probably on there with the acoustic guitar. This was inspired by Stacy Benedict, one of the girls we hung out with. Any musician would have wanted her as a groupie, but that was not to be with WoG. My personal obsession at the time was her counterpart, Martha Roskowski. They were both KGNU dee-jays. Stacy was herself such a gorgeous babe that I would have never even given myself a snowball’s chance in hell of possessing such a creature as my own personal girlfriend. There are pictures of her in the WoG Scrapbook. As a dee-jay, Stacy played cool stuff, likely including Walls of Genius and certainly The Shaggs. We all thought The Shaggs were brilliantly hilarious, so bad they were genius, an inspiration to all of us in the WoG scene. So, back to the song: Every time you go out to breakfast, there they are on the menu, Eggs Benedict. Stacy Benedict. Boom, I See Your Name In Menus. And…You make me come. A boy could wish, couldn't he? Oops... I mean, you make me come to breakfast! That was the joke and the song in a nutshell. Stacy was involved with a player in a Denver new wave/punk band called The Fluid. After Walls of Genius imploded, I never saw her again.
LF:
“I See Your Name in Menus” was all Evan, sort of his own, albeit more subtle and tasteful (and focused), version of a “horny” song! A very cleverly-worded ode to our friend the lovely and curvaceous Stacy Benedict, who I believe was dating Jello Biafra around that time….
EC:
Evan’s solo vehicle, featuring acoustic rhythm guitar and fuzzed-out lead guitar, with two tracks of vocals, a third probably on there with the acoustic guitar. This was inspired by Stacy Benedict, one of the girls we hung out with. Any musician would have wanted her as a groupie, but that was not to be with WoG. My personal obsession at the time was her counterpart, Martha Roskowski. They were both KGNU dee-jays. Stacy was herself such a gorgeous babe that I would have never even given myself a snowball’s chance in hell of possessing such a creature as my own personal girlfriend. There are pictures of her in the WoG Scrapbook. As a dee-jay, Stacy played cool stuff, likely including Walls of Genius and certainly The Shaggs. We all thought The Shaggs were brilliantly hilarious, so bad they were genius, an inspiration to all of us in the WoG scene. So, back to the song: Every time you go out to breakfast, there they are on the menu, Eggs Benedict. Stacy Benedict. Boom, I See Your Name In Menus. And…You make me come. A boy could wish, couldn't he? Oops... I mean, you make me come to breakfast! That was the joke and the song in a nutshell. Stacy was involved with a player in a Denver new wave/punk band called The Fluid. After Walls of Genius imploded, I never saw her again.
LF:
“I See Your Name in Menus” was all Evan, sort of his own, albeit more subtle and tasteful (and focused), version of a “horny” song! A very cleverly-worded ode to our friend the lovely and curvaceous Stacy Benedict, who I believe was dating Jello Biafra around that time….
