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WoG 0003 - The Many Faces of Mr. Morocco

WoG 0003 - The Many Faces Of Mr. Morocco
a 90 minute cassette officially attributed to multiple bands all of which were later considered the "band" Walls Of Genius.

Evan Cantor:
   The title hearkens rhythmically to "Johnny Rocco" and seems like a film noir reference, but I recall no connection.  I don’t recall any gangster types going by the name "Mr. Morocco".  For some reason this conjures up images of the actor Peter Lorre to me.  When I see "Mr. Morocco" in my imagination, it’s Peter Lorre playing Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
   As an album title, I'd say The Many Faces of Mr. Morocco reflects Evan's cleverness and his penchant for alliteration.

EC:
   Manic Joe Colorado is simply me.  “Strange Rituals” sounds like an Ed-name.  “Big Man On Campus” could have been anybody's, although those two selections are dominated by my vocals, leading me to believe that maybe it was one of mine. “K-9”, I do believe was one of Ed's names.  “Little Fyodor”, of course, had been identified as such by this time and was credited as such.

EC:
   "Strange Rituals" was the name we gave ourselves for our first live performance on June 4, 1983 at the Left Hand Bookstore's performance space, Back of the Hand, on Pearl Street in Boulder.  This was a leftist bookstore featuring Marxist literature and the like.  How did we get the gig?  I couldn't fer the life o'me tell ya.  Probably a KGNU radio connection and David may have some insight to that.

   This was not the first time that "Walls Of Genius Presents:" had been used. The Sunday, Monday, Or Always! cassette featured that heading on the liner/insert. We were not calling ourselves "Walls Of Genius" at this point.  We were still a different band every time we gathered to play.  We recorded almost all sessions, so there was never a lack of material.  We hardly ever practiced a thing.  Sometimes we would go over a song once or twice, and then, boom!, let it fly, turn on the machine.  We wanted the uninhibited spontaneity.  For myself, I was sick of bands that went over the same practiced parts over-and-over-and-over, trying to get a fancy ending arranged.  I didn't understand why it was so hard for so many musicians to just let it rip and jam.  After all, all my heroes did it!  If they could do it, why not me or us?  I still feel this way today.

   The poster for "Strange Rituals" has my drawing of a flying saucer with a plasma ray hitting the mesas just to the east of Eldorado Canyon, with Eldorado Mountain on the left and Boulder Mountain on the right.  This was drawn from a photo (in the WoG Scrapbook) and hearkens back to my idea of the "Eldorado Crazed Music Ensemble", that never happened.  But we must have had the idea that Walls Of Genius was now an organization, even if just a joke one.  David recalls us discussing a "business plan" and the need for titles, when I exclaim, "I'll be the Head Moron and you and Ed will be the Assistant Head Morons!"  I don't remember this myself, but I don't doubt it's true.  So we were just getting started on fooling the larger underground culture that there was a scene of weird bands in Boulder, Colorado.

   We opened the "Strange Rituals" show with "Abandon Ship", an existential meme on making the best of the “last ten minutes”.  But we did not use this track on the Mr. Morocco cassette, we used a studio version instead.  How we chose the songs for the show is lost in a fog of the past, but it would appear that we chose a few favorites that we already knew ("I'm Eighteen", "Sunday, Monday, or Always", "Abandon Ship"), mixed in some instrumental pieces that we already knew ("Boulder's Burning"), did some jamming on the spot ("Grounded"), responded to the audience's request ("Dead Puppies") and played a few "new" pieces, like "Ugly Girl" and "Honey Don't".  I included a blues-ified version of "Joe Hill", pointing to the Leftist politics of the venue.

   On the liner notes to The Many Faces Of Mr. Morocco, we thank Bob Summa “at the controls”.   Bob was one of David's roommates at this time. This means that we actually had an interested party watching over the tape recorder as we performed.  The recording isn't terrific, but it's not bad either, all things considered.  Probably a couple of Radio Shack microphones into a boombox, if we were lucky.  As a performance document, it's priceless.  I love the versions from this live show, the arrangements and uninhibited enthusiasm, the going-for-it whole-hog.
   We thanked Glenn Swanson, Roger Boraas, and Marsha Wooley on the notes also.  They were all Telethon Party friends of Ed's, who had participated in one way or the other on The Dirt Clods and Chariots Of Beer.  Marsha had done the cowboy duets with me on Sunday, Monday or Always!  They all came to the "Strange Rituals" show to cheer us on.
   Brian Kraft was a KGNU dee-jay and his "friends" were also thanked. Andrea DiNapoli likely made the connection to us via David's radio show and she was somebody we had made music with or would soon.  She appears on the K-9 sessions.  She would later on, through her employment, introduce us to Leo Goya, another major player in the later WoG canon.
   Natasha Brown, once again, was thanked because of the opportunities afforded by the house in Eldorado Springs.  In June of 1983, our relationship hadn't yet deteriorated.
   Scott Childress is also thanked.  He was a friend of mine at Trust Company of America.  Although he didn’t do anything on these performances, he later participated in some jam sessions, if only peripherally.  Not sure why we thanked him here. Perhaps he was hanging out around some of the sessions.  I do not recall who Steph Kaye was.
    We gave "extra special thanks" to "Joel", who was apparently the first person to ever "spend money" on a WoG product.  I seriously doubt this would have been Joel Haertling (future Architects' Office prime mover) as Walls Of Genius music would never have been up his alley.  So, in retrospect, I don't know who Joel was.
    We also thank Dena Zocher, finally spelling her name correctly, who performed with Walls Of Genius on many occasions, including "Strange Rituals".  She was also a member of Ed's Telethon Party "Club".

LF:
   It's ironic that Evan thanked no less than two people in the liner notes for this tape with whom there were eventually major fallings out!  Under three months later in the case of Natasha!  It took a little longer for Joel Haertling, but he was apparently clearly intrigued at this point in time with what we were doing, thus leading to the ill-fated (at least in some respects) collaboration that was later undertaken.  It's interesting that Bob Summa, one of my roommates at the time (a different one from the one who laughed at "Cheap!") was asked to watch the recording equipment as I think he had no musical background at all.  Evan always liked working with people he knew, and Bob was definitely a trustworthy sort!

Cassette j-card art from the collection of Little Fyodor - Date unknown; created after the initial release in mid-1983.

LF:
   I don't know how we came to do a live show, Evan was the Head Moron, he was our great leader, I'm sure it was all his idea.  I guess that's just what bands are supposed to do, play live!  I remember Evan referring to WoG somewhere in latter days (maybe on his MySpace page) as a "performance art" thing, and I think I know exactly what he meant because we took this sort of surreal, post-modern approach to being a band, but at the same time that was a kind of ironic description as we were mostly about recording and only occasionally performed for an audience, which was strictly a secondary aspect of what we were about. Anyway, Evan booked us at a lefty bookstore called Left Hand Bookstore (Left Hand is also the name of a canyon north of Boulder) because they were putting on live acts, albeit mostly folk musicians, but they had no restrictions on what they'd put on, so they ended up putting on us!

   Here's a little story about all this.  One band we saw at this Left Hand Bookstore was the Boulder Creative Music Ensemble, a kind of outside jazz outfit headed by this guy named Fred Hess, who I believe has made his living off music (probably mostly teaching, plus I've seen him lead more conservative type ensembles in the years since; he also played with Ginger Baker when the latter lived near Denver and he guested on a song on a Little Fyodor album, thanks to which I'm four degrees removed from The Beatles!! (the rest of WoG is thus five degrees, well Ed played on that same LF song so he's four degrees, too!)).  At one point in their performance, Fred asked the audience if they'd rather the next piece be more organized or more free, and Evan called out, "Go apeshit!"  And everyone laughed.  Anyway, one might see how we thought of what we were doing as a more low-brow or sillier or crazier version of what these guys were doing.  So when it occurred to us that we really needed some sort of umbrella name for these myriad bands we were calling ourselves each time we got together, Evan decided on that name being the "Eldorado Springs Crazed Music Ensemble", and thus he made a flyer for this show (he always made the flyers, even when I first met him in a fraternity (yes a fraternity, a kind of hippy weirdo fraternity, but yes a fraternity) in college, he'd make all the flyers for our parties.  Hey, he's an ARTIST!) that said "The Eldorado Springs Crazed Music Ensemble Presents: STRANGE RITUALS"  (Why Strange Rituals?  Just another funny band name, no more meaningful than Good Enough For a Hell Hole!!)
   I wasn't there, but Evan told me that when Ed saw this flyer, he complained that we shouldn't be naming ourselves after another band.  In response, Evan tore up the flyer and demanded to know what, then, Ed thought we should be.  Ed replied that he liked the name Walls Of Genius, the title of our first official release (which Evan came up with in tribute to Wall Of Voodoo, though it was originally Barrage Of Idiocy!), and thus, Walls Of Genius we were! Well, at least that was our umbrella organization.....  BTW, since "WoG Presents:" was used on our 2nd release, Sunday, Monday or Always!, I would deduce that this show was set up (and thus the above story happened) before that cassette was completed!

   It's a long time ago, but I'm thinking the audience was fairly small and about half friends (including Dirt Clod participants) and half bookstore regulars.  Our friends liked the show and laughed (in fact I think one reported cracking up every time they looked at me!), and one of the regulars said she was attracted by the name "Strange Rituals" and was hoping to see something more literally that but liked us anyway!  (Well, she meant the part about wanting to see actual strange rituals with tongue in cheek, I'm sure!)  I think the other regulars were mostly quiet or applauded politely.  They were too mellow to get mad at us!

   I don't know or remember how we chose the songs, but it seems fairly logical.  A combination of songs we had actually done and released already plus some pure free improvs since that was a big chunk of what we were about.  You're almost covering a free improv by doing a completely different free improv!  I don't know how much we thought about the fact that we actually had a semblance of a repertoire that we could reproduce live.  It just seemed the logical thing to do to do things we had done before!  And we needed something to do if we were to play for a live audience!  But it's not like we ever tried to craft these pieces for live presentation.  In fact, I don't believe we rehearsed or prepared musically one single bit.  You might say our recording sessions were our rehearsals, but I'm fairly certain we never did anything specifically as a rehearsal for the live gig itself.  

   One preparatory thing that happened was that Ed came prepared to outfit us.  He had all these crazy wacky clothes he'd purchased at thrift stores, and he gave complete outfits to me and Evan to wear for this show.  He did this when we got there, and we had no idea up to that point that he was going to do this!  (Dena was made up as a nerdy cheerleader.)  One of the things Little Fyodor is known for to this day is my wacky sense of thrift store fashion, and this was precisely when that started, as I had had no inkling of ever dressing that way before, but I took to it right away!  Little Fyodor might be more into clashing colors whereas Ed wanted the silly clothing to actually match, but my current raw materials are entirely a function of what Ed introduced me to that day!  I don't know if Ed purchased the articles of clothing that he gave to me and Evan specifically for that show or if he already had them lying around, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were the former!  I think this was something that really motivated him!  BAD CLOTHING!  He'd tell tales of bringing wacky jackets to the cashier and when told the price Ed would say, "Oh, c'mon, who else is ever going to buy THIS?"  And the cashier would say, Yeah you're right, and lower the price a buck or two (which was a large percentage of the already low original price!)!!

   Another significant thing that happened that day was that I found I enjoyed being on stage.  I'd never (well, let's say rarely) been on stage before, except maybe grade school stuff that I never liked.  I'd always been a fairly quiet and introverted kind of guy, though I'd occasionally had my moments of exhibitionism.  Kindergarten was a good microcosm of my life.  While everyone else was running around playing games and laughing and pushing toy cars around and playing in groups, I wandered around all by myself, lost in a dream and having no interest at all in joining in all the merry mayhem going on all around me.  I made no friends.  Then one day, the teacher handed out pear outlines with the instruction that we were supposed to color them in with crayons.  The big challenge was ostensibly to stay within the lines, within the pear outline.  Well, I wasn't satisfied with that.  I went all Jackson Pollack all over the place, I went crazy on that ol' pear outline.  And when I thought I'd finished my masterpiece, I held it up to all the kids racing around on their toy cars and such and yelled, "STOP AND LOOK!  STOP AND LOOK!"  I still never made any friends in Kindergarten, but years later people would say, "YOU were that crazy kid!?!"  I had no friends, but I was a star!  Well, y'know I'm not bragging. This is kind of a fucked up way to go through life.  (I've since adapted to social normalcy some, but still not completely!)  I'm just saying this says a lot about my life.  And this STOP AND LOOK sensibility suddenly returned when Ed and Evan told me to go on stage first!  I went on stage and started dancing around -- and having fun!!  And I felt right at home, which is very unusual for me....

Side A
MANIC JOE COLORADO - Bugs
"Strange Rituals" live at Left Hand 6-4-83
 - Grounded For A Week
 - I'm Eighteen
 - Can't Think
 - Boulder's Burning
 - Sunday Monday Or Always
 - Joe Hill
 - Dead Puppies
 - Ugly Girl
 - Honey Don't

Bugs
 by MANIC JOE COLORADO

EC:
   This is my solo recitation of an original rant/poem, accompanied by percussion done with a pencil.  What can ya say?  An existential exploration into the motivation of insects to be annoying?  Perhaps.  Probably recorded on a cassette machine, either a boombox or a small portable.
LF:
   "Bugs" was all Evan.  Hanging out and feeling inspired at the Eldorado Springs homestead.  Instead of overdubbing onto one of our jams while we weren't there, he wrote and arranged and recorded this entire song!  He told me he based it on "A Bicycle Built For Two", and you can hear some similarities once you know that.  I guess it was also getting toward summertime and the bugs had come to life and there he was living out in a mini wilderness.  A great example of making bountiful use of very little, and one of WoG's biggest hits!!  We expected to be stars when that one reviewer said it knocked his socks off!  Pretty sure that was the first time any reviewer said anything unabashedly nice about us!

"Strange Rituals"
live at Left Hand 6-4-83
- Grounded For A Week

EC:
   This is where we pick up Strange Rituals' live performance.  This jam was spontaneously generated after "Abandon Ship" was completed as the opener.  It fades in to a psychedelic jam with lots of walking bass taking leads against the background of psychedelic guitar noise.  The jam moves into aggressive exclamations and hooting by both David and myself.  David is emoting quite freely as the bass plays some chords.  Dena’s cello is finally audible layered over Ed’s echoplex guitar background.  There is some unintelligible chanting and gibbering, a real WoG trademark if ever there was one, and some lead bass comes in, then some bass volume knob effects.  As Ed plays lead guitar with the Echoplex droning on behind him, you hear my electric guitar chiming in.
LF:
   Evan's leading things as usual as Strange Rituals gets going for a live set, playing a bass line that me and Ed and Dena followed.  I was playing bongoes.  I guess I took Evan's scream as my own cue to do the same (maybe I didn't always let him solo, either!).  Then Evan seems to take my screaming as a cue to make his vocal utterances really weird.  Just doing what we knew, improvising and being weird!  And Ed's making psychedelic noises on the guitar and Dena's doing meditative things on the cello. Then I switch percussion instruments -- why stick to one?  I also alternate between being rhythmic and abstract.  I sound kind of desperate, I probably wasn't stoned enough.  This was a genuine improv from scratch, from out of the blue.  Until Evan switches from bass to guitar, a sly tactic to segue into...

- I'm Eighteen 

EC:
   We go right from the jam into this set piece.  A studio version of this appeared on Walls Of Genius.  Now we’re doing it live with an audience.  We ramp it up as usual and then launch into the now codified jam sequence, which abandons the song structure for a pulsing minor-key drone, featuring a rhythmic chant of “eighteen, eighteen, eighteen.”  It returns to the verse and Ed’s guitar is killer throughout.  Once again, back into the jam, a lot of grunting from David with me crooning “I’m eight..teeeeen” in the background. We return to one more verse and then finish up to applause while Ed is noodling on the electric guitar.
LF:
   The liner notes call this "an old Walls of Genius" favorite, just a joke as it was just one of the few songs we actually knew!  And I guess it was a revelation of sorts when we first did this song, it kind of made us what we were, ridiculous vocals aligned with knowledgeable playing by Evan and sublime playing by Ed.  So it kind of felt like we were reprising the good old days to do this live, even if it only three months time had transpired. My vocals are kind of overbearing on this one, aren't they?  But our aesthetic was to mix competence with incompetence, and I was kind of in charge of the latter!  Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it's in the hands of the spirits....
   Hey, there's laughter and merriment in the audience!  Probably mostly from our friends (nice that they came!!)....

- Can’t Think/Boulder’s Burning 

EC:
   You hear my voice asking “where’d you put that pick-up?”  I was preparing my 1890’s Haynes acoustic, the “little guitar” that was my mainstay for so many years.  I would insert a Dimarzio pickup into the sound-hole to amplify it.  Percussion starts this, sounds like bongos and then my guitar comes in, heavily flanged.  Cello threatens but doesn’t manifest and Ed’s spacey-noise guitar falls in.  Finally the cello plays a melodic theme as David bursts in reading my poem about being bored at the workplace.  There is a reference to little men selling ices on the beach in Mexico, something I experienced live-in-person when I walked across the border unbidden at Border Beach, south of San Diego, in December 1979.  After I saw some black helicopters, I thought maybe I ought to walk back into the United States.  This piece segues into the instrumental workout of “Boulder’s Burning”, which was also on the Walls of Genius cassette. There is a lot of nice growling here from David.
LF:
   I recognize my sloppy bongo playing and Evan's flanged acoustic guitar at the start of "Can't Think".  The bongos stop slopping cause it's time for me to take to the mic to read Evan's prose.  Typical of our MO, I probably hadn't read this until it was time to perform it.  I probably read it from a piece of paper it was typed on, that I handheld during performance. Another tirade against the evils of toil....
   Ooh!!  Another segue!!  Into another song we had recorded once!!  And I get to scream some more!  It's a veritable showcase for my screaming.  I must have thought that was my job!  I'm louder than Evan here probably because I had a mic and he didn't....

- Sunday Monday or Always

EC:
   The same song that appeared on the cassette release of the same title.  We reprise it here live, very faithful to our original studio version.
LF:
   Evan leads us into a different tempo for "Sunday, Monday, or Always!" than the more subdued one we'd recorded in Eldorado Springs.  My false start at one point reflects the unrehearsed nature of our performance. The songs that we did that we "knew" were probably only the second time we'd ever done them!  (The first being when we recorded them....)

- Joe Hill 

EC:
   You hear my voice announce "this song is for all you Left Hand regulars".  It’s an old union hymn, beloved by the Left and was also on our radar because Joan Baez sang it in the Woodstock movie.  The song is presented in an unlikely blues shuffle, my arrangement.  I could blues-ify anything for effect.  I loved the idea of totally not-blues tunes played as blues.  I get a good shuffle groove going for this one.  Ed might be playing the slide whistle as I don’t hear any Ed-guitar on this.  He would likely say he had never heard the song before and we weren't much up for "practicing", so he sat out.  But not for long…
LF:
   Oh, irony on irony!  Evan sings a rockabilly version of union anthem "Joe Hill" for the "Left Hand regulars," i.e., the lefty patrons of the bookstore.  I played that Latin instrument that sounds shaky and Ed plays a little slide whistle and bangs his gong.  Then I finish with "Hey Joe!" Get it?

- Dead Puppies 

EC:
   Although it wasn't captured on tape, the audience had been clamoring for this.  There were three of Ed's once-upon-a-Telethon-Party compatriots in the audience, a fourth was on stage with us this night.  You hear someone call out "Tell a joke!" and there’s some muttering.  I announce "we’re going to play all night!  We’re going to take over!"  There was another band scheduled to play after us.  Finally, to a round of cheers, you hear Ed start up the rhythm guitar for "Dead Puppies".  David and I didn't really know this song, other than we had heard Ed sing it.  How many times had we heard it?  Quite possibly only the one time I had actually recorded it previously for the Dirt Clods tape, later released as Johnny Rocco.   We certainly didn't practice it, so David and I just joined in with Ed wherever we could.  I'm playing harmonica and David is likely doing percussion, both of us responding vocally to Ed’s rendition.  Ed sings the lead on this one.  It's kind of a sing-along, especially with this particular audience.
LF:
   Another "old favorite from way back" is "Dead Puppies".  Anything we'd done more than a week prior was an old favorite for us!  Evan plays harp!  We all join in.  A little more maniacal than the studio version, but that's live performance for you!  Hey, I hear Roger laughing!  A song close to Ed's heart....

- Ugly Girl 

EC:
   The audience is calling for "more" and I introduce "a little change of pace, let the inimitable Little Fyodor serenade you."  David launches into a Little Fyodor solo piece and Ed and I offer some percussion.  This shows that the Little Fyodor persona was now up-and-running, complete in its conception and we were running with it.  You hear me announce "Let’s all hope he gets his wish" and then the intro to "Honey Don’t" comes in.
LF:
   This rendition of "Ugly Girl" (sometimes called "I Want An Ugly Girl") must be both the first live performance AND first release of a Little Fyodor song as such, i.e., one of my songs that I eventually recorded as a solo act and became part of my solo repertoire. History!  Too bad I fuck it up so badly! Nowadays I play with musicians louder than me so you can't hear my mistakes!  For this rendition, Ed and Evan seem to just be playing some of those little percussion thingies WoG loved so.  I guess this "solo spotlight" reflects that it was acknowledged that I had another side, my Little Fyodor song side.  I wrote this as a straight ahead rocker in a power pop/punk vein, but I changed the rhythm to a more folky, swingy beat for this eve's performance either cause I thought that made more sense for a solo rendition or cause it fit more into WoG's oeuvre, or both? "Let's all hope that he gets his wish..."  Nice! (This would be the first of three times this song showed up in the WoG catalog!  Go to littlefyodor.com to see a video of a basement full of kids moshing to my current band's rendition!!)

- Honey Don’t 

EC:
   We fade out the live introduction in favor of a studio version for the Mr. Morocco cassette. There is no explanation for this on the notes, but the studio version must have been a better one, perhaps a cleaner representation with better recording equipment and yet more mania introduced because of the opportunity to overdub.  This studio version was actually done by Big Man On Campus, but not credited as such. This was a song in my straight repertoire.  There is a nice gibbering solo by David on the first break and another inspired gibbering solo by me on the second break.  The song ends and we fade in the ending from the live performance where I’m doing the gibbering solo towards the end.
   My voice comes in after the applause, "Is Marsha in the house?"  Somebody answers "Right here!".  I invite Marsha Wooley to join me on stage for an impromptu cowboy duet, a la the tunes we sang on Sunday, Monday, Or Always!, "Red River Valley" and such.  I tell her it's her big chance, I reiterate that it’s her big chance and she responds by joking "Big chance to play with a good band?"  Okay, so I guess not.  I announce that "we’re going to mellow out for a while."  This is likely where we began an unplanned jam that would culminate with "Dogshit Drool".
LF:
   "Honey Don't" was kind of a "new" favorite: we hadn't even released it yet!  I actually don't know offhand which tape we released the "studio" version on, but I see from the reel to reel tapes that we actually recorded it about two weeks before the live show.  That demonstrates a little of how we were operating -- it was something we knew from recording, but it didn't matter whether it had been presented to the public yet.  Evan and I originally did this as a duo and Evan had this idea that both he and I would take turns screaming in place of guitar solos.  It sounds like we let Ed do the real thing first at the show.  I have a feeling we never discussed this arrangement with Ed (or each other!)....

Side B
"Strange Rituals" (continued)
 - Kitty Litter - Dogshit Drool / I Don't Want To Drool
K-9 - All Danced Out
K-9 - Johnny B. Goode
K-9 - Theme For A Science Fiction Movie
K-9 - Forced Child Labor
LITTLE FYODOR - Cheap!
BIG MAN ON CAMPUS - Abandon Ship

"Strange Rituals" (continued)
- Kitty Litter
- Dogshit Drool
      / I Don't Want To Drool

EC:
   This is an attempt that David and I made to get a cat mewing for the microphone.  The first mews are probably him and I.  Eventually we get a response.  In addition to dogs at the Eldorado Springs house, I was housesitting a cat or two, this is probably one of them.  We were probably trying to repeat the success of getting the dogs involved with the cat.  This was not part of the Strange Rituals performance and was probably recorded on a little cassette machine or a boombox.
   Then we fade in the live performance again. The bass is going at it and Ed's echoplex is wailing away.  Evan's voice comes through an amp with effects making strange noises, a la "Making A Deal With The Druids".  I’m playing some of the same odd scales from the Druids piece, but doing it on the bass, not the guitar. David comes roaring in with a reading of my poem "Dogshit Drool", which made it's first appearance on the Dirt Clods cassette that was later released as Johnny Rocco.  But this was the first time any of our audience would have heard it.  After the poem finishes, a freestyling bass solo comes in immediately, with percussion.  The bass solo goes on for a little bit and then winds up, with Ed announcing the players' names.  I come back in with the bullhorn:  "Attention Please!  Thank you!"
   As an aside, almost thirty years later, I was playing with Boulder guitarist and percussionist Joe Grossman in a folkie band, New Cosmic Americans, and we were talking about the "old days" in Boulder.  I mentioned doing a show where I opened with a bullhorn announcing "Abandon Ship!"  Joe’s eyes lit up, "I remember that!  I was there!  My band played next!"  I didn’t remember his band, but it was a cool coincidence and connection to make over so many years.
   Okay, that’s it for the Strange Rituals show.
LF:
   We made liberal use of Natasha's dogs for our recordings, but she also had two cats, and I think "Kitty Litter" is Evan giving them their 15 or so seconds of fame.  Maybe there's some human sounds in there?  Evan then got creative with the mixing process and stuck this at the beginning of side B before fading into our finale at the bookstore, that being an entirely new take on the Johnny Rocco chestnut, "Dogshit Drool"!  Some bands try to replicate their studio songs precisely for their lives shows; we weren't one of those!  My voice was beginning to go hoarse by this time.  I've had a lifelong struggle with that!  Ooh, Ed's famous echoplex sound starts to stir!  Evan knows when his poem ends and immediately strays from the riff he was playing into something completely different.  Sounds like I'm back on bongos, doing the beatnik thing!  "I Don't Want to Drool" sounds like a reference to the Rumours of Marriage title, "I Don't Want to Funk".  Wow, Ed gives the ending introductions!  How extroverted of him!  (Well the audience was mostly old friends of his....)  And then Evan pulls out the megaphone!  I think he had just gotten that somewhere somehow and it was a new "toy" for us to play with....  Wow, they liked it!  All few of them....  "I'm going to start throwing bricks!"  Wonder why I said that?  I guess you had to be there....

All Danced Out 
 by K-9

EC:
   Now we have a series of tunes performed by "K-9".  This is an ironic title, since no dogs are barking on these recordings.  I think Ed produced a keyboard device called a "King Casio".  It was a keyboard with some synth capacity and a primitive drum machine in it.  On this track, it provides a drum track while Evan plays a bass line on the keyboard.  Ed's lead guitar is very nice on this.  We kind of thought of this as "new wave-y" dance music at the time, hence the title given to it after-the-fact.  There were a number of bands that had utilized drum machines for dance drones, most notably the B-52s and the Talking Heads.  So this might have been on our minds as this scene was getting really big about this time.
   Andrea DiNapoli is credited on these K-9 tracks with flute, violin and percussion.  I don’t doubt that she did these things, but I don't hear it. Percussion, of course, could be any of us, so it's hard to identify.  But I really don't notice much of any flute or violin.  It may be that she stayed way in the background because she was uncomfortable musically in the situation, but I am only speculating there.  Many times, when you don't hear a musician, it's because that musician doesn't want to be heard.
LF:
   So!  Ed got a little Casio -- the scourge of 80's underground music!!  Or was it Andrea DiNapoli's?  K-9 marks both introduction of both the Casio and Andrea, but I think it was Ed's.  It was definitely a new toy for us to exploit, and exploit it we did!  It was  also definitely Andrea's violin that I'm brutalizing during "All Danced Out".  Hmm, I see no one gets credit for the violin in the liner notes.  I guess playing the violin the way I did, not having ever played one before, might count as percussion?  So!  Does my "bad" violin playing help make this piece by giving it something unusual and gritty and weird, or does it ruin an otherwise nice, peaceful and hypnotic piece?  I don't quite know myself!  Notice that while the Casio is always playing the same rhythm and pattern, it constantly changes from one chord (and thus pitch) to another, which was Evan's doing.  And tasty leads by Ed, of course!  I think the "Dance" in the title refers to the constant rhythm of the Casio.  You might look at it as a parody of dance music, but that was at most way way back in our minds while we were actually doing it.  I think the title reflects a little bit of embarrassment that we were using such a gadget, we had always been so non electronic and non mechanical before this point (I know guitar amps and effects boxes are "electronic" -- I shan't explain!).  OTOH, why not, we'd make it ours!  But that's probably also why Evan kept changing the pitch, to put some variation in the repetition!

Johnny B. Goode 
 by K-9

EC:
   I am singing this in a funny faux-reggae voice as we sort of approach reggae rhythmically.  We were never good at reggae, but this is an interesting and different take on yet another song in my straight repertoire.  As usual, we don't pay much attention to how it’s "supposed" to be played.  We set the King Casio going and just went with it.  Because the Casio wasn't, or couldn't be, programmed for chord changes, this becomes an almost John Lee Hooker-ish reggae piece, played in one chord.
LF:
   Not being sure if I help or hinder is almost as much of a running theme for me on K-9 as was the omni-present Casio.  Like my background vocals for "Johnny B. Goode"!  I guess maybe they're funny, but they didn't come out the way I intended, they sound so mournful!  Apparently there was a reggae version of this song out around this time, but I didn't know that till later.  I thought Evan was just inspired in that direction by the Casio rhythm (of course he still was)....

Theme For A Science Fiction Movie 
 by K-9

EC:
   This features my electric guitar through a digital delay, mostly playing a variety of descending figures in a kind of spacey threatening-danger kind of sound.  Nothing special going on here, other than a decent sounding jam in a moody spacey vein.  Probably why we named it, after the fact, as such.  Film noir and fifties sci-fi were staples for us, cultural touch-stones.  So here we imagined our own space flick.
LF:
   So on this next one it's my sloppy bongo playing that's embarrassing me!  Looked at charitably, maybe they were chaotic?  I do hear a nice spot here and there....  Evan was playing through Ed's echoplex and Ed took a solo on the Casio -- more examples of us switching around roles!  Ed playing keyboard was rare and he does a nice job.  And then he switches to gong!  Andrea played a few notes on he own violin here and there.  I don't remember how we met Andrea, maybe Evan does.  Someone invited her over and she came over with her violin and she was as much a part of it as any of us.  Well, or at least she had the opportunity to be, but she was kinda shy.  Still, another example of us being open to trying whatever and including new people, maybe the first new participant since we became WoG?  I do kinda wish I had been a little more shy on those bongos....

Forced Child Labor 
 by K-9

EC:
   Ed is back on lead guitar and I am reciting my own rant about making children work, work, work….  We were doing quite a bit of this kind of poetry at the time, inspired more by Jim Morrison style recitations than anything to do with the Beat poets who inhabited Boulder.  I was never aware of "cut-up poetry" until later on.  There are some really nice lead lines by Ed on this piece.
LF:
   "Forced Child Labor", the hit of the K-9 session!  Evan just started reading this poem of his and Ed pulled out a killer riff and some killer leads, all unplanned, all one take!  My part?  Meh....  BTW, there was this drum/percussion type thing that was popular in the 80's that was basically a box with resonant loops carved out on the top where you could play various different percussive notes.  That's what I was playing here.  Evan overdubbed some of that same device on "Making A Deal with the Druids", on Sunday, Monday or Always.  Toward the end of this one, Evan starts scraping and banging on this little cylindrical drum my parents had brought back for me from Jamaica when I was a kid.  They'd bought there it for a dollar.  I had originally not brought it along with me on my original sojourns from home, but WoG gave me the idea to take it back to Colorado with me after one of my return sojourns home.  It had a small drumhead at the end of the cylinder and it had ridges on the side that produced that ridgey sound (wish I knew more technical terms about percussion!)  (BTW, Evan plays this drum on "Johnny B. Goode" -- hey, authenticity!)  I remember telling Evan that between this song and "Can't Think" and "Dogshit Drool," people were gonna really get the idea that we hated work! Evan seemed surprised and said he only wrote this in response to seeing Rianne's kids running around playing without any cares or responsibility at the Rumours of Marriage house, and I guess he fantasized about putting them to work....

Cheap!
 by LITTLE FYODOR

EC:
   This is Little Fyodor doing his Little Fyodor thing, accompanied by an unamplified electric guitar that he is banging away on mercilessly. He has overdubbed some growling gibbering on this.
LF:
   Ah, "Cheap!"  Now here's something I'm proud to have done for WoG that's also certainly unlike anything WoG would have done without me around!  I was so coarse and unpolished and aggressively unbridled.  But it's also something I wouldn't have done without having WoG as an outlet!  Because it's all an improvisation!  Well not completely, I had some idea of what I was going to do, but some idea is as far as it went up till the time the tape started rolling....
   Well hey, there's a story behind this one, so I'll tell it to you.  I needed a guitar stand because I had a guitar but no stand.  I noticed that Evan had these nifty little thingers that were real simple and opened up real nice and worked great.  He said he'd bought them for five bucks back in Virginia.  I was a little pessimistic about finding something as cheap in Boulder, it being such a monied, chichi type town, but I thought I'd give it a try.  I figured if I couldn't find what I wanted, I'd go take a trip to Denver.  The thought occurred that maybe I should just go to Denver first, but hey, I lived in Boulder, it seemed absurd to not at least try to look there first.
   So I ventured into a music store in Boulder.  Now, you'd think I'd feel right at home in a music store being a musician. But I don't.  I don't hardly feel right at home anywhere, to tell you the truth, and music stores are kinda especially bad for me for the very reason that I feel like I should feel right at home there but I don't.  Cause I'm a musician but I'm also not.  I hate trying out a guitar and only being able to play chords, for instance.
   But anyway, I walk into this Boulder music store and I tell them I'm looking for a guitar stand. Well guess what, surprise, surprise, the only ones they have are twenty bucks and they look like they're way more complicated than the simple cheap ones that Evan has. So I take one look at these and I tell the lady, Well, I was hoping to find something cheaper, so I guess I'll just go to Denver and see if I can find a cheap guitar stand there.  And guess what.  SHE GOT ALL PISSED AND PISSY AND BUTT HURT AND OFFENDED.  Really.  I ain't making this shit up!  A distraught, hurt look swept over her face and she started going, Oh right, you just go to Denver to get a CHEAP guitar stand, sure go ahead!  And then this guy from the other side of the store started backing her up, saying, How do you think it feels when you tell her you want a CHEAP guitar stand, how do you think that FEELS?!?  You just go to Denver, why don't you!  You'll spend more money on gas than you'll save anyway!  (This had kind of occurred to me too.)
   Well.  Y'know, I'd like to think that if this happened to me today I'd give 'em all a WTF look and leave shaking my head and forget about it. But this didn't happen today, it happened to me back in 1983 when I was young and insecure and suffered from low self-esteem (have I mentioned that yet?). This shit WEIRDED ME THE FUCK OUT. It frazzled me.  And it really was pretty fucking weird.  That's how you treat a customer?  Well, I know I told them I was going to go elsewhere -- ah, I don't have to explain this shit to you! It's basically just a great big WTF.  And I knew that on a rational level, but it still left me utterly frazzled. They did have a LITTLE bit of a point.  Maybe I really should have just gone to Denver first?  Or maybe I should have bought the expensive "nice" guitar stand (it WAS all nice and shiny and cushiony) they had there rather than spend time and gas money going to Denver?  The little seeds of doubt combined with the shoddy way I'd been treated in a situation where I'd expected to be treated well (as a customer!) helped wreck my nerves, and I couldn't get it out of me!  I couldn't shake it!  I couldn't shake this damn nervey feeling!  I couldn't relax!
   Well, meanwhile, Evan had lent me the use of his Sony 2 track recorder since he didn't need that since he had the Dokorder 4 track at his place.  So to deal with this crap I went home and recorded "Cheap!" on Evan's Sony 2-track.  It had this "sound on sound" feature that allowed you to record two tracks on each track.  I'm still not sure if I understand how that works, but it worked just fine and I recorded my unamplified electric guitar, lead vocals, and backup quasi bass vocals, all overdubbed on a 2-track!  This was sort of a veritable Little Fyodor song in that it was an expression of my alienated angst.  But it was also a WoG song in that I turned on the recorder and winged it.  I've done little bits of improv in my Little Fyodor solo act, but very little, and this was entirely improvved beyond the initial idea.  Which was to express how these twits at the record store made me feel!  To express the uncertainty over who's to blame, them or me? To rid myself of this horrible feeling that I was some sort of social pariah!  Well, that's as much as I need to say.  The song probably sounds anti-climactic after all THAT!   I played it for my roommate and his girlfriend and they thought it was real funny, especially the high frilly notes I sang with my backup vocals at the end, except that the girlfriend winced when I said, "Fucking bitch!"....

Abandon Ship
 by BIG MAN ON CAMPUS

EC:
   Finally we end the Morocco cassette with the song that opened the "Strange Rituals" performance, albeit a studio version from another day.  David’s guitar is run through a flanger and my voice comes through on the bullhorn.  There was no text for this, it’s entirely off-the-cuff.  There is good use of the panning feature on my 6-track TEAC mixer as the phrases “Abandon Ship” jump from speaker to speaker.  I think this may be my favorite track on the whole thing.  It has a kind of existential timelessness.  Is it the ship going down?  Or is the ship simply a metaphor for all humanity?  I suspect the latter!  References to “Nearer My God To Thee” point to the Titanic disaster, wherein the ship’s band famously played that song as the Titanic slipped into it’s watery grave.  I think the narrator’s message is still relevant:  “make the best of it!”
LF:
   I sure don't remember if I had any idea what Evan was going to spew through the megaphone. It was a new toy (this was two weeks before the live show), and I'm sure we knew he was going to use it.  Maybe he and maybe I as well knew the general theme of what he was about to rant about, but maybe not!  And we certainly didn't know the specifics!  I think I came up with two chords I liked that I wanted to play through my flanger.  Maybe these were jazz chords Evan showed me?  Do they sound like jazz chords?  I knew I was supposed to be improvising, so I added a third chord toward the end.  And then I frenzied out, a good improvising tool for the technically challenged.  Big Man On Campus was just me and Evan.  I think Evan first heard the phrase from me and thought it was pretty funny.  I had just first heard it from a co-worker at the hotel where I worked who told me he was no such thing.  Listen for the vocal panning! "Abandon Ship"!

WoG Cassettes                                                                                                              Next: WoG 0004 - The Essential Rumours Of Marriage