WoG 0004 -
The Essential Rumours of Marriage
WOG 0008 -
MORE RUMOURS OF MARRIAGE/COUCH DOTS
Rumours of Marriage was released by WoG as a "sister" band but was actually a band that preceded WoG. It was, in fact, the band in which eventual Head Moron Evan met eventual Assistant Head Moron Ed, both members. Couch Dots was the name used by the same general personnel for improvised sessions engaged in after the band's decision to disband. These sessions marked eventual Assistant Head Moron Little Fyodor's first participation. Both tapes were 90 minutes.
Evan Cantor:
Sometime during the fall of 1981, I had been introduced to a woman named Leslie by a masseuse who had an office across from mine. The masseuse thought I would be a good match for Leslie because we were both Jewish and there were hardly any Jews in Colorado whatsoever. I hadn’t practiced Judaism in over fifteen years. Not that I ever really believed in the first place, but I had to admit that I was ethnically Jewish. People sometimes seemed to think that was important although it wasn’t particularly meaningful to me. I wasn't interested in this woman Leslie romantically, but I did want to move out of Bob and Brenda Gandossy’s place. David (a/k/a Little Fyodor) and I both had rooms at Bob and Brenda’s place in Gunbarrel, just outside the actual city of Boulder. For both of us, it was our first residence in Boulder. Leslie's house (in the middle of a prairie near Lafayette) needed a new roommate, so I moved in over there. Leslie had a friend that was in a band, a guy named Bill Snow, and she introduced us. At the time I was trying to dig myself out of debt after having been fired from three months as a bill collector. That was a hateful job, but I needed work and they hired me. I thought I could do it and still be a nice guy, but that's apparently not possible. So then I was looking for work again. But I had no local references, only the people who had fired me. I was telling people that I had been enjoying an extended vacation in Colorado before looking for work. Finally I got a job at the Trust Company of America, which turned out to be just down the street from a future residence, the Hall of Genius house. During the winter of 81-82, I was visiting this band. They had been called Stand In The Yard, but were in a process of re-assembling after a bassist had left the group (“Dirty Kurt”). Stand In The Yard had practiced upstairs from the Bagel Bakery on Pearl Street in Boulder (now “Centro Latin Kitchen”). Bill Snow seemed like a nice guy, but he wasn't much of a second guitarist and considering that they had Ed Fowler playing lead and Michael Bellan (a/k/a “Mikal” Bellan) playing effects on a guitar also, Snow was rather extraneous. He had a song that they kept trying to work out along the lines of a "rinse, lather, repeat" chant. Michael’s girlfriend Riann Thonesson sang and wrote lyrics. Brad Carton (later of The Lepers and a WoG collaborator) was the drummer. The bassist was Donny Littlechief. Ed Fowler worked at Stapleton Airport in Denver, for Air Midwest, and his schedule was something like four days on, four days off. On his long days-off “weekends”, he would come up to Michael Bellan’s place in Louisville, Colorado, and play with the band, sleeping on the couch. One time they all went up to Longmont for a party and Ed woke up in somebody’s living room wearing women’s clothes. He remembers the waking up, but not how he got there. I had no desire to play in a band at the time because I was beginning to think in terms of what a band needed, rather than finding a band to play in. I wanted to be the recording engineer. Every band I had been in previously had suffered from not having decent recordings. For that very purpose, I had a 4-trac Dokorder reel-to-reel tape machine and I started fooling around trying to record the tattered remnants of Stand in The Yard. It wasn’t long before Donny and Bill Snow didn't show up for practice. I was there and said "well, I can play bass." That was all she wrote. The other two guys got kicked out of the band and I was in as the bassist. Bill and Donny tried to solicit my interest in forming a new band with them as a guitarist. They were very impressed that I knew how to play some diminished chords on the guitar. But I was far more interested in Michael and Ed's group. The song "Amerika Futura" was very appealing to me and I thought they were on to something there. Many years later, after I moved out of the Hall of Genius into a little carriage house on the Hill in Boulder, Riff Randall (a WoG collaborator) brought Donny by the house and we became re-acquainted. They were mainly interested in buying pot and I was still interested in selling it. The guy I bought my pounds from had shown me a little leather-and-spike bracelet one day. He said it fell off somebody’s arm and did I know anybody who might like it? Donny was culturally “punk”, so I gave it to him. Later, when my house was broken into, a pound of Thai stick stolen, and all the Walls of Genius master cassettes along with a lot of other tapes, I found the bracelet on the floor of my living room! It had fallen off Donny’s wrist just like it had somebody else’s previously. So I knew who had broken in. I busted Donny’s chops pretty good, got the WoG tapes back and some others, and even got some of the pot back. Donny’s father wondered why I was so agitated over some bunch of tapes. It wasn’t just tapes. It was a pound of pot. AND the WoG masters! Not to mention breaking-and-entering. On top of that, he also stole a cassette of me singing a lead role in my high-school play, which I did not recover (wearing a fat-suit as Mr. Bumble in “Oliver”) as well as the best (and rare) tape ever made of the band I dropped out of college in which to play (Dreamer Easy). Any way, I had to eventually press charges against Donny for breaking-and-entering in order to get back all of what I did. It turned out that he had been in trouble with the law before and that’s why his father was as agitated as he was. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I never saw him or Riff ever again. Although Michael Bellan was the leader of this group and played guitar, Ed Fowler was the lead guitarist in this group. Michael was mostly playing effects-laden rhythm. Along with Michael, Riann and Brad, we became the group that eventually named itself Rumours Of Marriage. That band name appears on a reel box in March 1982, so Riann Thonneson and Michael Bellan must have been talking about getting married around that time. The two of them were like a Fleetwood Mac rock ’n’ roll romance, a la John & Christine McVie, or Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Hence the "Rumours", a double entendre in the wake of Fleetwood Mac’s very popular hit album. That summer of 1982 I moved out of the Lafayette prairie house and into Michael Bellan's place at Garfield and Pine in old-town Louisville, which became the de-facto "band house" for Rumours of Marriage. I lived there for three months. Michael Bellan was the charismatic leader of Rumours of Marriage. Ed always insisted in later years that Michael came to Boulder because he got into trouble with a statutory rape in Norman, Oklahoma. The story I heard was that he had had a record store in Norman that burnt down and he needed to escape the financial implications. In any case, Michael was not only charismatic, he was unpredictable and volatile, which made him an exciting front-man for the band. After the band imploded, Ed maintained that Michael left Boulder because Norman was catching up to him. I know nothing about that speculation, but I do know that both Michael and Riann wanted to pursue music and thought NYC was the place to do it. They disappeared into the city and none of us know what has happened to them since. “Mikal” Bellan caught a "thank you" on R. Stevie Moore's website and Little Fyodor picked up a rumor that he opened a restaurant in the Caribbean, but all that is so far in the past, nobody has any idea at this time. Michael wrote the original incarnation of "Amerika Futura" which Walls of Genius played a lot [on Almost Groovy!, Crazed To The Core, and Now Not Then]. Rumours of Marriage’s version of “AF” was a straight-ahead punk-rocking tune with no bridge. Ed mastered his incredible solo at this time and was able to re-create it every time I re-invented the song over the years. With Walls of Genius, I morphed the power chord punk into a loping open chord cow-punk rhythm. Walls of Genius did a number of versions of it. I added lyrics, altered the arrangement and the latest, circa 2014, appears on Now Not Then, with a new break and a jazzy major-seventh bridge. The lyrical content of the song, primarily about censorship, is highly politicized and is, in my not-so-humble opinion, as relevant in 2014 as it was in 1983. Readers may note that Little Fyodor has many disagreements with my proclamations. With Walls of Genius, I think he got tired of playing “Amerika Futura” over time. I have, however, continued to play it and he did not object to a “New” version for the "Not Not Then” session. Returning to the narrative arc, I enlisted David Lichtenberg (a/k/a Little Fyodor) to operate and monitor the 4-track Dokorder, since I was playing the bass and couldn’t concentrate on recording. But the recording was problematic. I felt that he was drinking too much at these sessions. He would play the spoons loudly (where did he get those spoons?) and often pay no attention to the VU meters, letting them go way into the red, which caused distortion, and I got pissed off at him for this.
We worked really hard practicing our songs and felt that we had promise in a kind of post-punk power-pop style. We only played out three times. One time was at a record store in Louisville, Colorado, for which a flyer was produced. Another time was at a party (“Gaby”s) which, according to my notes, “rejected Rumours of Marriage”. At another party, off Baseline Road in East Boulder, we froze our fingers playing outside on a patio while a bunch of Buddhists sat inside the house listening to Pink Floyd. As far as my contributions were concerned, I was just trying to learn bass lines to a lot of material that the guys had played when they were Stand In The Yard. I managed to write a bridge for one of the tunes (“I Don’t Want To Funk, I’ve Got A Headache.”) But even the newer tunes were basically Michael and Riann’s creations. One of the songs had music written by Ed Fowler and the bass line reappeared years later in a Walls of Genius jam (“Never Come On Sunday” [on the Dirt Clods cassette]). Michael started talking to me one day about moving to New York. I was horrified, as I had only recently moved into his house as a roommate, with the idea that we were pursuing this band, Rumours of Marriage. The band sounded good, why would he want to leave? He thought New York was where the action was. I drove over to Riann’s place and asked her if he had said anything to her about moving to New York. I should have known better than to get involved in that discussion. Riann was equally horrified, as she hadn’t heard anything like that either. Next thing I knew, the two of them were mad as hornets at me for agitating about the issue. Michael accused me of being a suspicious son-of-a-bitch and was incensed.
Because Michael and Riann were now threatening to move to New York, we basically gave up being a straight-ahead rock band. We started jamming extensively while both Michael and Riann recited lyrics and poetry in a spoken word approach. These sessions were recorded as “Couch Dots”. Michael took a Jim Morrison approach and ranted about spaceships and “Ronnie Ray-Gun” (Ronald Reagan). David Lichtenberg continued to record the sessions and even did a vocal rendering of one of Michael’s poems. When Michael started selling off his record collection to get cash to move, Joel Haertling showed up with a blond chick on one arm and a French Horn on another. He jammed with us, bought some records, and disappeared. He would reappear a couple years later with his own experimental music project, Architects Office. I bought a few of Michael’s records, discs by The Undertones and Magazine, punky-new-wave groups that I liked.
Finally, Michael and Riann bolted for NYC at the end of that summer and I moved into Rich Schaffer's place in south Boulder. The room-mates didn't like punk-rock at the house. One of Schaffer’s friends remembered how bad Stand In The Yard was, because he had worked at the Bagel Bakery and heard them practicing upstairs. I tried to turn my roommates on to bands like The Clash, but they were too far down the Billy Joel rabbit-hole to appreciate it. By January of 1983, I was escaping on weekends and heading down to Denver to visit Ed Fowler to party and jam. These were the first Dirt Clods (et al) sessions. By this time, I really had “had it” with the traditional music business. I had been in and out of so many bands where charismatic band-leaders imploded, taking the band down with them, that all I wanted to do was just jam. I was ticked off at David because of the issues with the recordings, so I started migrating from Boulder down to Denver on the weekends to visit with guitarist Ed Fowler. We would jam all day, drink all night, crash on the couch, get breakfast and watch the Broncos, then jam some more. We would run a cassette machine the whole time and recorded everything. We dragged Ed’s friends into the sessions and made them sing and play also. We became the Ed’n Evan Hullabaloo, the Dirt Clods, Jerry’s Kids, whatever name suited us on that particular day. We used regular instruments, guitars, basses and keyboards, but also kid’s toys, home-made shakers and knockers and whatever we could get our hands on. It was mainly about having a lot of intoxicated fun and not having some charismatic taskmaster trying to lead us in tow. Finally! Of course we eventually invited David to join what was becoming our own little scene and I suppose I eventually took on the role of charismatic taskmaster with Walls of Genius myself. When Walls of Genius was obviously happening, we were trying to create the illusion (or joke) of a whole scene of off-beat bands in Boulder, Colorado. In an effort to beef up the catalog, we added two Rumours of Marriage cassettes to the catalog list (The Essential Rumours Of Marriage and More Rumours Of Marriage/ Couch Dots). We never sold or traded any of these and eventually discontinued them because we had plenty of actual Walls of Genius material to release and Rumours of Marriage would have been of no interest to our audience. It wouldn’t have done Walls of Genius any good to promote these recordings, so that was the final end of Rumours of Marriage. |
Little Fyodor:
Shortly after arriving in Boulder I think on August 10, 1981, Evan and I found a place with two rooms for rent in the Gunbarrel subdivision northeast of Boulder where we both moved into on September 1 after spending the remainder of August crashing at my cousin Ellen’s south Boulder apartment and taking a trip to Wyoming to backpack in the Grand Tetons and camp in and drive around Yellowstone. During our time in Gunbarrel, we both took turns recording original material on Evan’s reel to reel recorder, including the very first recordings ever of Little Fyodor songs I still perform to this day. After a few months there, maybe partly because of difficulties we were having getting along but probably mostly because he was attracted to a cool new opportunity, Evan moved out of Gunbarrel and into a spacious house with lots of sunlight on the outskirts of a nearby town to the east called Lafayette. He was invited to live there by a massage therapist who did her massage thing in the office building where Evan had found work as a bill collector and who was big into new age spirituality and a “positive attitude” ideology. Another woman who was one of his new roommates there started dating someone I think was named Bill Snow. Probably because he knew Evan was a musician with recording equipment, Bill invited Evan to check out the band he was in, and this became Evan’s introduction to the band that became Rumours of Marriage, via which both of us came to meet Ed Fowler. I remember how blown away I was when I first showed up at Michael Bellan’s place in Louisville (Louisville, Lafayette and Longmont, all east of Boulder, are often locally called “the L towns”), walking in as the band was playing, in glorious mode. This being probably the second or third time Evan was there, with the goal just of recording them. In my short time in Boulder, I had already internalized its image as the inter-galactic capital of “mellowness” and had even begun writing songs reflecting my mixture of attraction to and alienation from this aspect of the place, like, “I believe in peace and love and everyone I know does too, so why am I down, why am I down, I jog five miles every day and then relax in a hot tub, so why am I down, why am I down,” etc. But this band, lemme tell ya, was not mellow! I was greeted by a wonderful cacophony of noise, and I became an instant fan! LF:
As Evan has explained, a sea change took place in the band resulting in three members (including the aforementioned person possibly named Bill Snow, who played guitar) getting canned (or leaving of their own accord?) and Evan getting invited to play bass in their stead. I continued hanging out with the band as a friend or “hanger on”. Eventually, Evan asked me to watch his four-track recorder as it was recording the band practicing so that he didn’t have to worry about it while playing bass. I had had absolutely no experience running sound equipment up to this point other than in broadcasting as a public radio station disc jockey, which did involve keeping the VU meters in check, but that was it. In a stroke of cheekiness over good sense, I immediately turned the bass knob (not sure if this was on the recorder itself or on Evan’s six track mixer) all the way up on the track recording Evan’s bass guitar and, even more cringe-worthily, turned the treble all the way up on the track recording the drums. The latter decision was largely a function of once having heard a high school friend turn the treble way up on his stereo to make the drums sound cool. In retrospect, both moves were stupendously stupid, and my inexperience doesn’t really explain my chutzpah in a situation where sticking to the part of the limb closer to the tree trunk was clearly more called for. By the time Evan revealed to me that Bellan had begun questioning whether my watching the recording equipment was really doing any good and that Evan had to admit to him that he couldn’t tell if the sound of the recordings was any better on the days I was there than on the days that I wasn’t, my days as the band’s “sound man” were already about to become numbered anyway largely because of…. So, one night, the band had a gig! At a party. Excitement, a gig!! I was very socially insecure at that time (not that I’m not now, but maybe I’m a little better), so I thought I’d have a couple of drinks before I even left for the party, and then I started drinking more as soon as I got there. Then when the band went on, I learned for the first time that they were expecting me to run sound for them! Now, whether I should have known that before hand or not, who knows. They may have been referring to me as their sound man before that point so maybe that was a big fat hint that the responsibility of running their sound at a live gig (which probably involved Evan’s equipment, such as his mixer) would fall to me. But running sound at a gig and watching the recording equipment in the practice room aren’t exactly the same thing, and ultimately, for whatever reason, I just didn’t know I was going to be responsible for anything at this party and gig till I was already pretty trashed! Shortly after that night, Evan described my behavior at the party in terms I considered encouraging. “You were outside of yourself!” he said, “Brad [Carton, the RoM and later WoG and later LF drummer] found things you said particularly fascinating!” I didn’t remember any of that, but I took away the message that maybe getting trashed was a good thing for me! Or, maybe not? I immediately proceeded to get trashed the very next time I was at Bellan’s house, which I mainly remember as a band social occasion but which maybe involved some playing and recording too. When I went to the bathroom at one point, rather shnockered, I saw a can of shaving cream and decided to spray it into the bathroom sink into some shape I found clever, maybe a big smiley face or something. Apparently, Michael later got this shaving cream on his clothing and got real pissed off about it. Soon, Evan suggested to me that he and I go take a walk together outside during which time he told me that I was having a negative impact on the evening’s proceedings and informed me that there was a lot of disappointment within the band over my drunken and irresponsible behavior and that he couldn’t deny to them that I had a drinking problem. Even in my drunken, albeit sobering up by then, state, I was rather shocked to hear this! I was sure it was really only these two times that my drinking had been extreme or problematic and that otherwise I hadn’t partied any more than anyone else. But how do you deny that you have a drinking problem when that’s what people with drinking problems always say? After that point, my status as band “sound man” was very much in doubt as I was very undecided myself over what I wanted to do about the new state of affairs. I knew I could do better for the band were I only given another chance, and they were a great band who deserved it too, but I still really had no experience at sound engineering nor had I ever had a particular desire to pursue it as such. And without being fully confident in my skills or ambition, I didn’t know what kind of case I could make for myself in light of their doubts about me. I remember the band discussing the difficulties and seeming futility of their general situation around that time and Ed saying, repeatedly, right in front of me, “If we could only find a sound man,” and my pain over my own indecision borne silence in the face of that…. Anyway, Michael and Riann, the leaders of the band and the ones rumoured to be getting married (“Rumours of Marriage” was something Evan originally said as part of an offhand comment in reference to this that someone in the band decided would make a good band name), finally decided to deal with the seeming futility of the band’s prospects by bailing and moving to New York City. But, as mentioned elsewhere in this archive, in the period of time between when this decision was made and announced and when it was effected, the band continued to gather to play and record, but instead of playing their “Standard Repertoire” (taking my cue here from Evan’s liner notes for The Essential Rumours of Marriage tape), which had been rendered pointless by said decision, they decided to open-endedly jam, in various ways, and to record it all as unrehearsed original material. Now, as I’ve also said elsewhere in this archive, it’s hardly like I’m trying to claim this approach was invented at this time and place, but it was definitely the seeds and origins of Ed and especially Evan taking to this particular process. One time when the band was jamming and I was once again hanging out, Ed gave me a severe look, the point of which seemed to be, “Don’t just sit there -- JOIN IN!” And so I did, screaming and grunting a bit, howling “Won’t somebody fill the void” (later to be a LF song) one time and maybe shaking something. This was during the jam that came to be called “It Must Be Radio” after Bellan’s repeated manic chant of those words. Evan also chimed in with some barking and a repartee responding to Bellan’s rant, maybe the first time he ever vocalized on a Rumours of Marriage recording himself. By the way, I was not aware at the time that the jams were being attributed to Couch Dots, a name I only learned of later when Evan assembled the More Rumours of Marriage / Couch Dots tape, and I thus sure can’t tell you exactly when the one became the other, though we can guess it was after RoM was effectively broken up by Michael and Riann’s decision to move away. At another point during this phase of things, Michael asked me to read some poetry he’d written while the band jammed because he wanted a New Jersey accent. No one suspected I had any potential performance talent. The last words in his poem were “thank you” and when we listened to it back (no one could hear me while it was being recorded), Michael immediately exclaimed, “Thank YOU!” right afterwards, he liked what I did so much.
I think this success played an important role in Evan eventually enlisting me as a vocalist for what was to become Walls Of Genius, which may have first happened when he stuck a microphone in front of me and commanded me to “sing” Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen” (and I enthusiastically complied, thus a monster was born!) as he and Ed played guitars at Natasha’s house some several months later, released on the eponymous Walls Of Genius cassette….
I think Evan was sincerely enthused to share this music with the Walls Of Genius audience when he first assembled these two cassettes and listed them in our catalog as Walls Of Genius releases, but he very soon “deleted” them. He may or may not have asked Bellan’s permission to do this in the first place (we were still in contact with him for a little while after he moved), and I think he just wanted to shift the focus onto our ongoing efforts and leave the past in the past… |
The Essential Rumours Of Marriage
Side A
Snakeskin
Screwed Again
Amerika Futura (Take Snot Version)
Ray-Gun Rhapsodie
Put On Your Walkin' Boots
Bouldertown/I Hate Elvis
Frenzy Of Entreaty
One More Time
I Don't Want To Funk
Why Am I So Angry?
Give Up
Side A
Snakeskin
Screwed Again
Amerika Futura (Take Snot Version)
Ray-Gun Rhapsodie
Put On Your Walkin' Boots
Bouldertown/I Hate Elvis
Frenzy Of Entreaty
One More Time
I Don't Want To Funk
Why Am I So Angry?
Give Up
Side B
Come On Sunday
Velvet Snow
Witches Lament
Splinters
It Must Be Radio
Amerika Futura (Texas Version)
Hands Off
Outside The Structure
Come On Sunday
Velvet Snow
Witches Lament
Splinters
It Must Be Radio
Amerika Futura (Texas Version)
Hands Off
Outside The Structure
More Rumours Of Marriage / Couch Dots
Side A - Couch Dots
What Is The Beautiful?
a) In Your Body, All Bodies Lie
b) Cocoon
c) Death Unto Lost Parts
d) Pink Shell Morning
e) "Let's Do That Song Again"
Recorded April-June 1982
Side A - Couch Dots
What Is The Beautiful?
a) In Your Body, All Bodies Lie
b) Cocoon
c) Death Unto Lost Parts
d) Pink Shell Morning
e) "Let's Do That Song Again"
Recorded April-June 1982
Side B - Rumours of Marriage
Chat With Hitler
Stuff Me With Your Hate
Mother's Day Prayer
Paranoia (with Little Fyodor)
Highwire
Amerika Futura
Starships Descending
In Public, Hah!
Circular Saw
Chat With Hitler
Stuff Me With Your Hate
Mother's Day Prayer
Paranoia (with Little Fyodor)
Highwire
Amerika Futura
Starships Descending
In Public, Hah!
Circular Saw
More selected tracks by Rumours Of Marriage and Couch Dots