WoG 0006 - Johnny Rocco
Johnny Rocco originally existed before WoG 0001 as
"Greatest Hits Vol. 2: From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet", and came after The Dirt Clods, Etc. in chronological order.
This music was recorded at Ed's House on Dahlia Street in Denver and at Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs in January, February & March 1983.
- Ed'n Evan - recorded at Ed's House, January or February 1983
- Fabian Policy - recorded at Ed's House, January or February, 1983
- Charity Cases - recorded at Natasha's, Saturday, March 5, 1983
- Psychotic Bozos - recorded at Natasha's, Sunday, March 6, 1983
- The Ed'n Evan Hullabaloo - recorded, Sunday, March 13, 1983
"Greatest Hits Vol. 2: From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet", and came after The Dirt Clods, Etc. in chronological order.
This music was recorded at Ed's House on Dahlia Street in Denver and at Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs in January, February & March 1983.
- Ed'n Evan - recorded at Ed's House, January or February 1983
- Fabian Policy - recorded at Ed's House, January or February, 1983
- Charity Cases - recorded at Natasha's, Saturday, March 5, 1983
- Psychotic Bozos - recorded at Natasha's, Sunday, March 6, 1983
- The Ed'n Evan Hullabaloo - recorded, Sunday, March 13, 1983
Side A
ED'N EVAN - Johnny Rocco FABIAN POLICY - Born On The Bayou FABIAN POLICY - Prey On The Mind FABIAN POLICY - Camped With The Mongols |
Side B
CHARITY CASES - Medley: Cookin' With Fyodor/The Prep Quiz FABIAN POLICY - Edka Limbo THE ED'N EVAN HULLABALOO - March Of The Lost Wormsouls CHARITY CASES - Dogshit Drool PSYCHOTIC BOZOS - The Murderer's Nightmare PSYCHOTIC BOZOS - Orgasmic Warrior, Part 1 THE ED'N EVAN HULLABALOO - I Want To Be A Jamaican |
Description of WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco from the one sheet catalog list of WoG tapes, July 27, 1983
HM:
Little Fyodor's WoG Discography states:
"Johnny Rocco originally existed before WoG 0001 as 'Greatest Hits Vol 2: From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet'. Its inclusion in the WoG catalogue was almost a reissue, except that it was never actually issued in its first incarnation."
"What does the phrase "From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet" mean? Was there a "Greatest Hits Vol 1"? WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco is first listed in the second WoG catalog. In the liner notes of the album it says that it was long out-of-print.
LF:
Evan didn't originally include it in the catalog he made to announce to the world that our material was available for sale or whatnot, so neither did he originally give it a catalog #. But then we decided, hell, why not? There's good shit on there! So we changed the name to something manageable, gave it a # and put it in the catalog. Thrills and chills, I know! I guess the most interesting thing about this process is that we hadn't come up with the name Walls Of Genius yet at the time that tape was originally created, so maybe that was part of why it wasn't originally included. Walls Of Genius was originally the name of the next tape we did, and that then became WoG 001 once we realized that "we" were also WoG!
We recorded it in the living room and then Evan put the recording apparatus (recording machine and tapes) back in the closet so that's simply where the material went, that's where it traveled, from the one place to the other. Until we took it back out of the closet!
Some things are just up to interpretation and your fevered imagination... Y'know, there's a dj on WFMU who plays lots of very obscure stuff, especially from the 60's and 70's, and he once commented that a lot of bands titled their first record "Volume 1" only to never release a 2nd record! While WoG was no stranger to hubris, I suppose one might say that Evan was cautious enough not to number a tape by volume until he got to the 2nd one and came to realize, hey, there's a pattern going on here!
The title was ironic sure but simultaneously descriptive. I believe that after culling through the available material from the recording sessions and mixing down the best parts, it felt like a "greatest hits." The "greatest hits" of those several recording sessions!
Just out of print cause it wasn't in the first catalog and thus hadn't been getting distributed. I suppose we should let on that that was a joke as we printed them up at will and it was only a long time if you're constantly craving all the WoG you can digest, as you should be, of course. Kinda makes you wonder what "out of print" even means when you think of it since production of anything is generally started and stopped as needed. Only with us, it was one at a time....
EC:
"From the Living Room All the Way To The Closet" is basically a joke, meaning that the music wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't going to leave the living room. It started in the living room and then... made it's way all the way to the closet. As opposed to a radio station or recording studio or anywhere else in the world. I don't recall storing the recording equipment in a closet--at both Eldorado Springs and the Hall of Genius, the living-room had been turned into a recording studio and the equipment stayed put. I hated to move the Dokorder around for reasons previously discussed.
"Volume 1" and "Volume 2" were, once again, basically joke titles, as we had no conception that anybody in the world wanted to hear this music at the time. The tapes were for us and maybe a few friends. "Vol 1" was the Dirt Clods, Etc. tape. It wasn't as consistently strong as "Vol 2". Eventually the best selections from "Vol 1" were included on future WoG releases and "Vol 2" was re-named "Johnny Rocco" and released in its entirety. "Greatest Hits" just meant the best material from the sessions.
The business about Rocco being "long out of print" was yet another joke. It never had been "in print" in the first place. Plus, as David indicates, we were dubbing cassettes on demand. Eventually I had a set-up with three cassette decks so we could dub 2 at a time, in real-time. In those days, there were no "double" cassette decks that we were aware of or speed-dubbing devices.
Little Fyodor's WoG Discography states:
"Johnny Rocco originally existed before WoG 0001 as 'Greatest Hits Vol 2: From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet'. Its inclusion in the WoG catalogue was almost a reissue, except that it was never actually issued in its first incarnation."
"What does the phrase "From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet" mean? Was there a "Greatest Hits Vol 1"? WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco is first listed in the second WoG catalog. In the liner notes of the album it says that it was long out-of-print.
LF:
Evan didn't originally include it in the catalog he made to announce to the world that our material was available for sale or whatnot, so neither did he originally give it a catalog #. But then we decided, hell, why not? There's good shit on there! So we changed the name to something manageable, gave it a # and put it in the catalog. Thrills and chills, I know! I guess the most interesting thing about this process is that we hadn't come up with the name Walls Of Genius yet at the time that tape was originally created, so maybe that was part of why it wasn't originally included. Walls Of Genius was originally the name of the next tape we did, and that then became WoG 001 once we realized that "we" were also WoG!
We recorded it in the living room and then Evan put the recording apparatus (recording machine and tapes) back in the closet so that's simply where the material went, that's where it traveled, from the one place to the other. Until we took it back out of the closet!
Some things are just up to interpretation and your fevered imagination... Y'know, there's a dj on WFMU who plays lots of very obscure stuff, especially from the 60's and 70's, and he once commented that a lot of bands titled their first record "Volume 1" only to never release a 2nd record! While WoG was no stranger to hubris, I suppose one might say that Evan was cautious enough not to number a tape by volume until he got to the 2nd one and came to realize, hey, there's a pattern going on here!
The title was ironic sure but simultaneously descriptive. I believe that after culling through the available material from the recording sessions and mixing down the best parts, it felt like a "greatest hits." The "greatest hits" of those several recording sessions!
Just out of print cause it wasn't in the first catalog and thus hadn't been getting distributed. I suppose we should let on that that was a joke as we printed them up at will and it was only a long time if you're constantly craving all the WoG you can digest, as you should be, of course. Kinda makes you wonder what "out of print" even means when you think of it since production of anything is generally started and stopped as needed. Only with us, it was one at a time....
EC:
"From the Living Room All the Way To The Closet" is basically a joke, meaning that the music wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't going to leave the living room. It started in the living room and then... made it's way all the way to the closet. As opposed to a radio station or recording studio or anywhere else in the world. I don't recall storing the recording equipment in a closet--at both Eldorado Springs and the Hall of Genius, the living-room had been turned into a recording studio and the equipment stayed put. I hated to move the Dokorder around for reasons previously discussed.
"Volume 1" and "Volume 2" were, once again, basically joke titles, as we had no conception that anybody in the world wanted to hear this music at the time. The tapes were for us and maybe a few friends. "Vol 1" was the Dirt Clods, Etc. tape. It wasn't as consistently strong as "Vol 2". Eventually the best selections from "Vol 1" were included on future WoG releases and "Vol 2" was re-named "Johnny Rocco" and released in its entirety. "Greatest Hits" just meant the best material from the sessions.
The business about Rocco being "long out of print" was yet another joke. It never had been "in print" in the first place. Plus, as David indicates, we were dubbing cassettes on demand. Eventually I had a set-up with three cassette decks so we could dub 2 at a time, in real-time. In those days, there were no "double" cassette decks that we were aware of or speed-dubbing devices.
This is a re-release of rare early material, the protowall of WoG…although at times the recording is primitive, the music is, as usual, transcendent…On the title track, gangsters snarl as the guitars float through the atmosphere, the world's first example of Silly Ambience! (Who says you can't giggle as you meditate?). "The Murderer's Nightmare" tells a twisted tale of lust, torture, and revenge, and the "March Of The Lost Wormsouls" pushes the Bolero motif to the cacophonic gates of Hell! Johnny Rocco includes "Born On The Bayou", "Edka Limbo", "Camped With The Mongols", and much more!
- Walls Of Genius Catalogue No. 2, October/November 1983
- Walls Of Genius Catalogue No. 2, October/November 1983
HM:
Evan, "On The Rough Side", Side A of the cassette originally titled "From The Living Room All The Way To The Closet: Vol. 2", was recorded at Ed's House in Denver; and "On The Smooth Side", Side B, was recorded at Natasha Brown's house in Eldorado Springs. What precipitated the move from Ed's to Tasha's house, and what were the differences in style, approach and methods that arose as a result? EC: Ed and I were having jam sessions at his place because I couldn’t have them at mine. I was living with 3 other roommates in Boulder, 785 36th Street, across Baseline Road from the Williams Village dorms. I described this living situation in previous notes (Dirt Clods, Etc.). At some point during this time, I gave Dave Lichtenberg a copy of the Dirt Clods recordings because he had a late-night radio show on KGNU-Boulder, and he was playing all kinds of bizarre, off-the-wall, avant-garde materials. Very likely I had hoped that he would play something of it on his radio show and he did. David had made the acquaintance of Natasha Brown, quite likely via the radio program. Natasha was a rich lady with her own house in the village of Eldorado Springs, 8 miles south-west of Boulder, tucked behind the first ridge of hogbacks at the very farthest southwest corner of Boulder Valley, backing up to Eldorado Canyon, a Colorado state park. She wanted to move to New York City and was hoping to rent her place to some arty type(s). Since I wanted a place where I could set up my recording equipment and have jam sessions without worrying about roommates, David and I negotiated a way for me to rent Natasha’s house. I couldn’t afford the rent entirely by myself, so David helped out a little bit each month. Natasha’s house became our recording studio. Natasha Brown
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This allowed us to dedicate an entire living-room to music. You can see the pictures of the place in the WoG scrapbook—I set up a row of hooks on one wall so that I could hang microphone and guitar cords, plus headphones, guitar straps, my baroque recorder, an acoustic guitar pick-up, RCA cords for the recorder and mixer, and one of the earliest incarnations of a Korg electric guitar tuner.
All of this faced out to a wall with lots of big windows opening up on south Boulder Creek. Very picturesque. There is one photo where you can see that side of the house with a couple of guitars getting some sunshine on them. With this set-up and space, we were able to multi-track the project for the first time. We also had the freedom to jam anytime we liked and had a larger space to do it in.
One of the primary results of this process was that I was able to do more recording more often and wasn’t dependent on Ed’s living-room, so that’s when Ed stopped contributing as much material and ideas. When it was just Ed and I, he had to contribute, but when David was introduced to the mix as well as the revolving cast of others, Ed became, in a way, just one member of that revolving cast. Nonetheless, Ed was a primary member of the group, his electric guitar playing was always legitimately transcendent, and we would brow-beat him to bring ideas to the table.
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HM:
When the cassette was officially listed in the Walls Of Genius Catalogue #2 as WoG 0006 it was re-titled as Johnny Rocco. "Johnny Rocco" was the opening track on The Rough Side, an epic 32-minute jam extract of you and Ed (under the name Ed'n Evan) playing guitars alongside a section of the movie Key Largo (1948, starring Humphrey Bogart). In WoG Catalogue #2 it is described this way: "On the title track, gangsters snarl as the guitars float through the atmosphere, the world's first example of Silly Ambience! (Who says you can't giggle as you meditate?)." Tell me how you and Ed developed that improvisation and what the ideas behind it were. EC: I remember absolutely nothing about this session. However, I can tell you this… I had always loved the old black-n-white gangster movies, mostly featuring Humphrey Bogart, either as a simpering bad-guy or the ultimately cool Sam Spade detective character. I could do impressions of Jimmy Cagney, Bogart and Edward G. Robinson (who played Rocco in Key Largo). There were no videos in those days, nothing like that. You could only see these movies when they played on tv. Ed says that we “played along” with the tv. There is no way we could have done that. What about the commercials? We couldn’t have made the recording “Johnny Rocco” by stopping and starting for commercials. However, in those days, the television wasn’t littered with commercials the way it is now. A movie might run for fifteen minutes without a commercial. Nonetheless, I don’t think we just “played along” with the tv. Most likely I put a microphone in front of the tv with a cassette recorder and taped the movie off Ed’s tv. The tv at my place in Boulder would not have been available for that. Too many roommates wanting to use the livingroom. We had already demonstrated that we could run vocal microphones through a guitar amp, so we most likely ran the recording through a guitar amplifier and played along with that. I had all kinds of “adapters” so that we could take the RCA output plugs of a cassette deck and run them into quarter-inch plugs on a guitar amp. Whether or not the sound quality was clean didn’t matter. Why would we do this? I’m not sure how we came up with the idea to do it. We may have been thinking about it in terms of a movie soundtrack. My notes from the Rocco cassette indicate that this was the case. Another piece of it may have been related to the old psychedelic trick of watching television with the sound turned off and music playing. The visual presentation takes on a completely different perspective without the dialogue and often the results were hilarious, or, if you were high enough, existential. In the case of “Johnny Rocco”, we were transferring this approach from the visual to the audio. By playing along with the movie soundtrack, we would not only get some background sounds to fill in, we would get this terrific forties’ tough-guy dialogue, courtesy of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson’s voices. We had already played along with other audio sources on the Dirt Clods, Etc. sessions, incorporating those into our own work, a kind of audio non-sequitir. HM: Also, on The Rough Side there are three tracks by Fabian Policy, on which we hear (perhaps) the first WoG recordings to include Little Fyodor. How did David become involved in your recording activities at this time? Where did the name Fabian Policy come from? EC: Fabian Policy was one of Ed’s names for a group. He claims to remember nothing about those sessions whatsoever. None of us were particularly interested in “Fabian”, a fifties’ surfer singer/actor of blond Disneyesque wholesomeness. I was ticked off at David for a while because I thought he had messed up a bunch of the Rumours of Marriage recordings by drinking too much at the controls of the Dokorder. So my first sessions (Dirt Clods, Etc.) with Ed were at Ed’s place without David (Little Fyodor). Eventually I wasn’t ticked off anymore, plus I wanted David to play our tape on his radio show. So he became involved in the project at that time and we both went down to Ed’s place to jam and party. This was documented by the Fabian Policy session. “Karen, Lisa & Floyd” on Fabian Policy are unidentified. None of us remember who they were. HM: Over on the Smooth Side there are actually some recordings by just you and David, without Ed involved. EC: Yes, this is because once we set up the recording equipment in Eldorado Springs, we could have sessions independent of Ed and his schedule. So we did and the first results were on the Johnny Rocco tape. Then, since we had the space in a house not attached to other apartments, we could have drums, too, so we had Brad Carton (from Rumours Of Marriage & The Lepers) come and play. He brought his girlfriend Rachel, who played some synth. Obviously Ed made it up to Eldorado, too, and perhaps he is the one who brought Dena with him. |
HM:
Fyodor, you are listed as a participant in the three Fabian Policy tracks "On The Rough Side" of WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco, all of which were recorded at Ed's House in Denver in January or February of 1983. Were these the first WoG-related recordings you were involved in, other than the Couch Dots sessions (Summer 1982)? And how did you become involved in Evan and Ed's recording sessions at this time? Were there any undocumented sessions that you were involved in? LF: I would guess that was the 2nd session I participated in, maybe the first where I really felt at ease about joining in. I know there was an earlier instance (how much earlier I don't know exactly, maybe just a week, almost certainly not more than 2 or 3) in which I was invited to go to a recording/playing/jam session (what the hell to call it?) at Dena Zocher's house, aka "The People's House", at 10th and Marion in Denver, and to bring along one Natasha Brown, a woman I had met as a result of her calling me up during my experimental radio show on KGNU and who, as I had subsequently passed on to Evan, was looking for an artistic type to rent to at her house in the relatively secluded hamlet of Eldorado Springs, located a few miles south of Boulder at the mouth of Eldorado Canyon State Park. Evan had described to me his frustration over his living situation at the time, maybe even saying he felt like a caged animal, because he couldn't setup his recording equipment and just play and record stuff, which is what he most wanted to do (well, other than going camping and hiking and that kinda stuff). I definitely wondered how much Evan's invitation to me was influenced by my being able to bring along Natasha, but regardless, I was excited to join in the goings on that had produced the Dirt Clods, Etc. tape, which I understood to be something of an "all comers" type jam in league with the latter stages of the Rumours of Marriage/Couch Dots jams, when everyone in the room, including myself, was often encouraged to join in. I had been a little perturbed that in light of the nature of these jams that it took this long to allow me to show up, which I took up with Evan at one point and he responded by saying that he didn't want to upset the chemistry he had with Ed and then he asked me pointedly if I thought I got along with Ed. I hadn't had any doubt that I did up to that point, but his question gave me pause to wonder. I didn't necessarily have a great rapport built up with Ed, which is just a lifelong problem I have with people in general. Still, I thought I got along "okay" with Ed (who's extremely easy going and thus not much of a stickler about such things), but I was (and still am) socially awkward with a lot of self-esteem issues (less so of that latter now), and so I didn't feel up to asserting that I didn't really think Ed would mind my presence. Anyway, I certainly recognized that Evan had every right to invite whomever he did or didn't. So even though there seemed to be people who had little to no interest in experimental music, maybe some who weren't musicians at all, who were freely allowed and invited to participate, I had to bide my time, just because of some vague misgivings Evan seemed to have about me, despite that we were ostensibly best friends. During the conversations leading up to this interview, I've learned that Evan remembers his antipathy to me at that time as being based on my failures as a soundman for Rumours of Marriage, but I didn't know that then. Looking back, I do have some sympathy for Evan's reluctance to include me in the sense that it's true enough that I very much became the "volatile element". This project was largely Evan's baby, and while I ultimately added a lot to it, a lot more than, say, friends who just laughed or yelled or played toy instruments while Ed and Evan's jamming formed the bulk of the sound, my doing so and my presence may have contributed to the friction that led to its ultimate demise, too. Insecurities and self-esteem issues notwithstanding, I wasn't the type to only join in a peripheral manner, at least not while there was the opportunity to do more. But it does occur to me now that the project may have remained more fun and easy going had it remained Ed and Evan and their more peripheral friends without my more intense and intensive involvement, and thus it might have lasted a lot longer, maybe even to this day! (This kind of reminds me of Lennon's decision to invite McCartney into his band, knowing it would make the band stronger but that he would lose power, too.) Anyway, I went to Dena's place and brought along Natasha and then Evan turned on the recording apparatus, whatever it was, probably a boom box or some other type of cassette recorder (or at least he thought he turned it on), and I watched from the stairway as Ed and Evan and Dena jammed away in Dena's living room, sometimes with participation from some of the several other people who were there. One of those others was a kid, maybe about 9 years old, and she had these toy bongos she was playing at times. But at one point she hadn't played them in a while and she was just sitting with them on the stairs behind me. I was becoming very, very anxious to join in the jam. I figured since this girl wasn't playing at the time and since it was an open jam, that I should be able to play those bongos myself. But mindful of the recording I thought was being made, I didn't want to say anything, so I smiled at the little girl -- and then swiped the bongos out of her hands and proceeded to play!! That's how I first participated in what was to become Walls Of Genius!! Once I got over that hurdle, I felt like I fit right in! This session, as I already alluded to, was never recorded. After everyone was done jamming, Evan went over to the recording equipment, scrunched up his face a little in perplexity, and said, "Hmm, that's funny, it didn't record!" It's easy to forget to hit the play button or to think you did but it didn't really "take" or whatever, especially on analog machines that require you to hit both record and play at the same time, maybe as a safety mechanism against accidental erasure, and I assume that's what happened in this case, although certainly one can't rule out mischievous gremlins and such. But I did get my feet dipped into the proto Walls Of Genius waters and it was never in doubt again that I could and would participate. And Evan did befriend Natasha and got the ball rolling towards moving into her home in Eldorado Springs, where WoG as such was actually born! |
HM:
Most of the songs on "The Smooth Side" of the tape were recorded at Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs. You are involved in all of those recordings, and Ed was not involved in the recordings by Charity Cases and Psychotic Bozos. There is a reference to "Fyodor" in one of the song titles. How did those early sessions at Tasha's transpire and what stylistic changes occurred after that move to her house?
LF:
I lived in Boulder, which was a hell of a lot closer to Eldorado Springs than where Ed lived in Denver. You might say that I was also more motivated or driven than Ed. So Evan's move to ES, where he could setup his recording equipment and not have to journey elsewhere to make music, was quite the boon to my participation and something of a major deterrent to Ed's, though it's not like the door wasn't always open to Ed, which it most certainly was. But, well, you can do the "math" yourself, between the geography of the situation and Ed's lesser drive to do this stuff and Evan's not needing to leave his home to do it himself, and Evan was the most motivated and driven of all of us, and he was the one doing all the recording, which he could now do on his Dokorder 4 track reel to reel machine....
I'm not sure what to say about the stylistic changes per se other than that I'm me and not Ed and so the duos between me and Evan (which I believe includes Charity Cases?) would inevitably be different than his jams with Ed. Well, I'll say this, any duos with me would based less on traditional musical sensibilities and also less on psychedelic sounds because that's not what I did. It wasn't as natural, you might say, for Evan to jam with me as compared to with Ed, so there was maybe more of a "stretch" musically. OTOH, I didn't have the amazing "bad" record collection that Ed had, so there was less playing along with weird bad records. I originally offered to help pay Evan's rent at Natasha's in return for a certain number of hours of Evan recording my Little Fyodor songs on his 4 track. We did one or two such recording sessions, using Brad Carton, whom we knew from Rumours Of Marriage, on drums. Eventually, I blew off my requirement of having my own songs recorded as the jamming that became WoG proved much more fun, and this participation made me feel like I was still getting my money's worth. I wonder now if the Psychotic Bozos session, which included Brad but not Ed, grew out of a session to record Little Fyodor songs, but I really have no idea. I remember Brad brought a quasi drum set that I think he called "the five drums" that were these skinny drums setup on a rack, and I got to play them while Brad played his own drum set or something else. Brad also brought a synthesizer which I think we all took turns playing. I played rhythm guitar for the Ed 'n' Evan Hullabaloo session. At one point I started playing two diminished chords a half step from each other. Now, I know enough about music and about the guitar to know I was playing two diminished chords half a step from each other, but I'm nowhere need fluid enough to just fall into something like that and then just seamlessly move into something else. So once I started playing these two chords and everyone else seemed to be playing to them, I kinda felt trapped into continuing to keep playing them! Sometimes I varied the rhythm pattern, but it seemed to get real sloppy sounding if I did anything other than the most basic thing, so I'd usually return to a very basic pattern real quick so as not to fuck things up too bad! So that's how March of the Lost Wormsouls came about, which was excerpted DOWN to an 18 minute jam with these two damn chords going over and over! When I first played it on my radio show, some old codger called up and said he wondered at first if the record was skipping but then realized there were things in the background that seemed to be slowly changing. He concluded it was pretty fascinating! BTW, I remember noticing the words "You make me feel like I feel" on one of the reel to reel tape boxes, and I believe that was a comment Natasha made in response to the aforementioned jam and may have been its "original name" before Evan changed it to March of the Lost Wormsouls....
To be more specific about how these sessions "transpired", it was probably mostly Evan's doing, inviting people over to jam. Maybe Ed didn't feel like coming over to that Psychotic Bozos session, or maybe, like I say, it may have evolved out of a Little Fyodor song recording session, and thus maybe Ed wouldn't have needed to be there if we thought that's all that was necessarily going to happen. And I believe I went over to Evan's place on my own sometimes during the week after work (well, it would have been after work for Evan but after sleep for me, as I was working a graveyard shift and sleeping during the day), so that may have been how Charity Cases came about. (The other two session were surely on weekends.)
I think Evan may have named one piece "Cookin' With Fyodor" just because my participation may have still seemed like something of a novelty at that point. Plus Evan liked including others' names, thus all the Ed 'n' Evan stuff. I had some riff I wanted to play on the guitar and this idea about "chile in a bowl". I think I had had that for dinner recently, and while it was good enough, it also seemed like a reflection of my poverty, that I would just open up a can of chile beans and make that my dinner. So that was a satirical take on my life at the time, kinda like you gotta learn to dig your poverty, even if at a certain level you understood its decrepitude. I knew this project was based on improvisation, so I made no effort to write an actual song about this concept but rather used it as the basis for some improvised lyricizing. Heh, improvising words really isn't my strong suit, so I ended up doing a lot of grunting and uncategorizable vocalizing! Then Evan started reading a "prep quiz" I had swiped from work! (I worked at a hotel that also had a few restaurants on the premises.) So the anything goes aesthetic most definitely continued, even if the greater participation of me and lesser of Ed would inevitably entail some differences.....
Oh! One more thing! One big difference is that now we recorded on Evan's 4 track, meaning independently mixable tracks, and -- OVERDUBBING! I don't recall what overdubbing there may have been on that particular tape, I don't have the song titles in front of me, and we may have gotten into that slowly as the original idea was spontaneity. I know that sooner or later, a common pattern that developed was that we'd all get together and jam, using maybe 2 or 3 of the tracks, and Evan would overdub stuff onto it later, while the rest of us weren't around! Worked out pretty good that way! No one could care less if this may have been at odds with the original "all of this was made up right on the spot straight out of thin air" conception Evan seemed to associate with the first "Dirt Clods, etc" tape. I've sometimes liked to say that WoG was so free-form that we didn't care if everything was purely free-form or not. We just went with whatever drew us along....
Most of the songs on "The Smooth Side" of the tape were recorded at Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs. You are involved in all of those recordings, and Ed was not involved in the recordings by Charity Cases and Psychotic Bozos. There is a reference to "Fyodor" in one of the song titles. How did those early sessions at Tasha's transpire and what stylistic changes occurred after that move to her house?
LF:
I lived in Boulder, which was a hell of a lot closer to Eldorado Springs than where Ed lived in Denver. You might say that I was also more motivated or driven than Ed. So Evan's move to ES, where he could setup his recording equipment and not have to journey elsewhere to make music, was quite the boon to my participation and something of a major deterrent to Ed's, though it's not like the door wasn't always open to Ed, which it most certainly was. But, well, you can do the "math" yourself, between the geography of the situation and Ed's lesser drive to do this stuff and Evan's not needing to leave his home to do it himself, and Evan was the most motivated and driven of all of us, and he was the one doing all the recording, which he could now do on his Dokorder 4 track reel to reel machine....
I'm not sure what to say about the stylistic changes per se other than that I'm me and not Ed and so the duos between me and Evan (which I believe includes Charity Cases?) would inevitably be different than his jams with Ed. Well, I'll say this, any duos with me would based less on traditional musical sensibilities and also less on psychedelic sounds because that's not what I did. It wasn't as natural, you might say, for Evan to jam with me as compared to with Ed, so there was maybe more of a "stretch" musically. OTOH, I didn't have the amazing "bad" record collection that Ed had, so there was less playing along with weird bad records. I originally offered to help pay Evan's rent at Natasha's in return for a certain number of hours of Evan recording my Little Fyodor songs on his 4 track. We did one or two such recording sessions, using Brad Carton, whom we knew from Rumours Of Marriage, on drums. Eventually, I blew off my requirement of having my own songs recorded as the jamming that became WoG proved much more fun, and this participation made me feel like I was still getting my money's worth. I wonder now if the Psychotic Bozos session, which included Brad but not Ed, grew out of a session to record Little Fyodor songs, but I really have no idea. I remember Brad brought a quasi drum set that I think he called "the five drums" that were these skinny drums setup on a rack, and I got to play them while Brad played his own drum set or something else. Brad also brought a synthesizer which I think we all took turns playing. I played rhythm guitar for the Ed 'n' Evan Hullabaloo session. At one point I started playing two diminished chords a half step from each other. Now, I know enough about music and about the guitar to know I was playing two diminished chords half a step from each other, but I'm nowhere need fluid enough to just fall into something like that and then just seamlessly move into something else. So once I started playing these two chords and everyone else seemed to be playing to them, I kinda felt trapped into continuing to keep playing them! Sometimes I varied the rhythm pattern, but it seemed to get real sloppy sounding if I did anything other than the most basic thing, so I'd usually return to a very basic pattern real quick so as not to fuck things up too bad! So that's how March of the Lost Wormsouls came about, which was excerpted DOWN to an 18 minute jam with these two damn chords going over and over! When I first played it on my radio show, some old codger called up and said he wondered at first if the record was skipping but then realized there were things in the background that seemed to be slowly changing. He concluded it was pretty fascinating! BTW, I remember noticing the words "You make me feel like I feel" on one of the reel to reel tape boxes, and I believe that was a comment Natasha made in response to the aforementioned jam and may have been its "original name" before Evan changed it to March of the Lost Wormsouls....
To be more specific about how these sessions "transpired", it was probably mostly Evan's doing, inviting people over to jam. Maybe Ed didn't feel like coming over to that Psychotic Bozos session, or maybe, like I say, it may have evolved out of a Little Fyodor song recording session, and thus maybe Ed wouldn't have needed to be there if we thought that's all that was necessarily going to happen. And I believe I went over to Evan's place on my own sometimes during the week after work (well, it would have been after work for Evan but after sleep for me, as I was working a graveyard shift and sleeping during the day), so that may have been how Charity Cases came about. (The other two session were surely on weekends.)
I think Evan may have named one piece "Cookin' With Fyodor" just because my participation may have still seemed like something of a novelty at that point. Plus Evan liked including others' names, thus all the Ed 'n' Evan stuff. I had some riff I wanted to play on the guitar and this idea about "chile in a bowl". I think I had had that for dinner recently, and while it was good enough, it also seemed like a reflection of my poverty, that I would just open up a can of chile beans and make that my dinner. So that was a satirical take on my life at the time, kinda like you gotta learn to dig your poverty, even if at a certain level you understood its decrepitude. I knew this project was based on improvisation, so I made no effort to write an actual song about this concept but rather used it as the basis for some improvised lyricizing. Heh, improvising words really isn't my strong suit, so I ended up doing a lot of grunting and uncategorizable vocalizing! Then Evan started reading a "prep quiz" I had swiped from work! (I worked at a hotel that also had a few restaurants on the premises.) So the anything goes aesthetic most definitely continued, even if the greater participation of me and lesser of Ed would inevitably entail some differences.....
Oh! One more thing! One big difference is that now we recorded on Evan's 4 track, meaning independently mixable tracks, and -- OVERDUBBING! I don't recall what overdubbing there may have been on that particular tape, I don't have the song titles in front of me, and we may have gotten into that slowly as the original idea was spontaneity. I know that sooner or later, a common pattern that developed was that we'd all get together and jam, using maybe 2 or 3 of the tracks, and Evan would overdub stuff onto it later, while the rest of us weren't around! Worked out pretty good that way! No one could care less if this may have been at odds with the original "all of this was made up right on the spot straight out of thin air" conception Evan seemed to associate with the first "Dirt Clods, etc" tape. I've sometimes liked to say that WoG was so free-form that we didn't care if everything was purely free-form or not. We just went with whatever drew us along....
HM:
Evan,
I did not know what a Fabian Policy is either, so I looked it up and it is "a slow strategy to wear down opposition; avoiding direct confrontation", usually in either a military campaign or a political strategy. That is a funny group name, because I wonder if it has any relevance to the way the music was created?!
The Fabian Policy tracks on the first side of the tape start out with a riproaring rocking yet pie-in-the-face rendition of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit "Born On The Bayou", with Lichtenberg on vocals. Then we are treated to a couple of impressionistic ensemble improvisations consisting of electric instruments, lots of percussion, and some cello that seem similar in feeling to the material on the Dirt Clods tape.
Johnny Rocco was the first collection of WoG material that documented David Lichtenberg's participation in your recording activities. His participation and presence changed things. It is a little hard to put my finger on, but his influence can be felt in an at least slightly edgier, more aggressive, or more awkward feeling to the tracks he played on. They seem a little off-balance, like there was a new kind of push-and-pull dynamic in the music, a sort of "happy conflict", a wild hair up the ass. Did this seem apparent at the time? Or is it just my imagination?
Over on the second side (all/most of which was recorded in March 1983 at Eldorado Springs) there are some great exploratory instrumental improvs by Fabian Policy and the Ed'n Evan Hullabaloo: including some kalimba-based jamming; wind instruments; tons of percussion; some nice touches by Dina on cello; a little reggae flavor; and the epic "March Of The Lost Wormsouls" jam extract; which has a circular, hypnotic groove to it (the breakdown/breakout at the end is especially thrilling!).
Things get, well, freaky, on the tracks by Charity Cases and Psychotic Bozos, with you and David reciting texts from the mundane to the murderous and damned demented. "Dogshit Drool" and "The Murderer's Nightmare" are real stand-outs, if you want to put it that way.
EC:
Regarding the Group Names:
Hal has discovered that a “Fabian Policy” is "a slow strategy to wear down opposition; avoiding direct confrontation, usually in either a military campaign or a political strategy.” This was one of Ed’s names for the groups and he says he remembers nothing about these sessions. I never knew what “Fabian Policy” meant, maybe Ed did. It quite presciently describes WoG’s approach to promotion later on as we kept churning out material to the underground, essentially a slow strategy to wear down opposition to what we were doing. Not everybody liked it, but almost everybody eventually acknowledged that we were doing something uniquely our own. “Charity Cases” was likely Ed’s name for a group, harkening back to the Telethons and the time we used “Jerry’s Kids” as a band name. Nowadays that would be seen as a Jerry Garcia reference, but we never even considered that in 1983. “Psychotic Bozos” was likely my name for a track. In those days, we could use terms like ‘psychotic’ without summoning up images of school shootings and terrorist attacks. As far as I know, this predates the Insane Clown Posse by many years. “The Ed’n Evan Hullabaloo” was my name for the group, harkening back to childhood years watching a television program called “Hullabaloo” that featured performances by all the folk-pop bands at the time.
Notes On Individual Tracks:
“Johnny Rocco”: Ed and Evan are both credited with “tapes” on this trac. I suspect that it was Ed’s idea and Evan’s execution, since it was also credited as a “Fowler, Cantor” composition. Ed’s name coming first indicates that it was his brainchild. The original liner notes also indicate that this was concocted in the “sunny Colorado winter of ‘83”, so probably recorded in January or February ’83. The original liner notes also indicate that all these songs were recorded in January, February or March of ’83. The piece opens with Edward G. Robinson as Johnny Rocco (in the film “Key Largo”) saying “Shut Up, Ya Scum!”. Evan’s trance-like flange guitar comes in with Ed on percussion and kalimba. Ed had quite a collection of odd instruments, including a gong and a toy piano. As Humphrey Bogart mock-apologizes to Rocco, saying “America is sorry…welcome back Rocco”, the rhythm guitar changes mode. Ed comes in with some wailing noise on the electric guitar and Evan’s rhythm plays some bass lines. Ed works up to a lead over the same rhythm, it waxes and wanes, the dialogue between Robinson and Bogart continues. This is pretty lively for “ambient music”. The rhythm guitar pursues a herky-jerky ascending phrase that leads into a rhythmic line, Ed plays mellow chords in the background. Rocco’s voice is heard clearly, “Come over hear, I’d like to spit on ya!” The rhythm comes to a stop as Rocco’s voice comes in, “There is only one Johnny Rocco!”. Bogart eggs him on and they exchange the infamous dialogue about what Rocco wants. “You want more, don’t ya Rocco?” “Yeah,” snarls Rocco. This is a part of Rocco’s diatribe that I have recited numerous times over the years in my own snarling impression of Rocco. For some reason, I find Johnny Rocco absolutely hilarious. So, anyway, the guitars flounder around for a little bit after this intense emotional moment and then intertwine some abstract parts. Ed comes in strong with a rhythm line that sounds like Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, carrying the rhythm while Evan plays bass lines on the other guitar. Ed carries on and we hit another groove. We’re clearly in a trance by this time. Ed gets his Echoplex going and the rhythm guitar hits another groove. The Echoplex winds down as a woman’s voice comes in loud and clear singing a nineteen-forty’s style torch song, something about “a kind a man needs a kind a woman”. She is begging Rocco for something and he has promised to give if he sings a song, but now he has changed his mind. “You were rotten!” he exclaims. The tape cuts off and you hear my voice (Evan) mimicking Rocco: “I want cake and coffee, too, yeah..” As Evan’s Rocco soliloquy fades out, you can hear Ed saying something but it is unintelligible. I still do Rocco impressions to this day. My interest in forties gangster film-noir is discussed above. “Ya Scum!” It’s not unlikely that Muddy Mudskipper on the Ren’n’Stimpy show (many years later) was also channeling Edward G. Robinson’s distinctive accent. John Kricfalusi also used Larry Fine’s accent (voice of Stimpy) and Peter Lorre (voice of Ren), so he was clearly influenced by film-noir and the Three Stooges, as was WoG.
“Born On The Bayou”—Hal, I like your description of this as a rollicking rip-roaring pie-in-the-face. That really does sum it up! This opens with Ed’s blazing electric guitar. He knew the signature riff and probably just started playing it out of the blue. Neither David nor I knew the words, so we chimed in with what little we could recall. I’m singing the first verse, David eggs me on asking “what’d he do? what’d he do?” and then sings a second verse himself. At this point in our development, we hadn’t really thought of David or his Little Fyodor alter-ego as a lead vocalist. This was entirely ad-hoc. Evan reprises the first verse and adds some scat singing to fill in for words he has no idea about. There seems to be two guitars at this point—did we overdub Ed? Was Ed manipulating his Echoplex to make it sound like two guitars? I suspect the latter as there is no evidence that I am playing the guitar on this track. I’m playing the harmonica and singing in a beer addled holler. Ditto for David (Li’l Fyo). This is so raw, I doubt there was any overdubbing and I can’t recall which machines we used to record Fabian Policy. The end of the tune features intertwining “I wanna go back to the Bayou” chants by David and Evan with an incredible Echoplex solo by Ed.
“Prey On The Mind”—the assemblage (Fabian Policy) is jamming. Ed hits a groove and then Evan reads from Roget’s Thesaurus. This is essentially a cut-up poem, although I wasn’t aware of that tradition at this time (see William Burroughs and the Beats). I’m picking paranoid phrases out of the book, one of which is “prey on the mind”. The reading works up to, you guessed it, a desperate maniacal climax and then the jam fades out.
“Camped With The Mongols”—Ed’s rhythm guitar, Evan playing bass lines with a flanged electric guitar. Evan plays the bass line he wrote for the bridge on “I Don’t Want To Funk” (Rumours of Marriage). Ed moves into a threatening doom-metal rhythm before this fades out. The Mongols thing was somehow suggested by the music on an otherwise ad-hoc jam. I recognize this as one of my titles, assigned after the fact.
“Cookin’ With Fyodor” and “The Prep Quiz”—This starts with David’s rhythm guitar, Evan playing flange bass. This is quite likely the first time that David’s guitar playing appears on a WoG-related recording. His approach is quite distinctive. Although he rocks, there is an element of awkwardness or geekiness to it. Having David playing rhythm guitar freed me to do other things, such as the bull-horn rap “Abandon Ship”. David quite freely fit in to the general scheme of the activity, picking up on my spontaneous zany approach. Although I was fond of using many different voices, accents and impressions, David’s vocalizations are edgier, raspier with a more threatening or dangerous sound. This became one of WoG’s signature sounds. At the time we didn’t think about any change in approach or intent. David simply joined in the fun and we rolled with it, all three of us. Back to the trac: Evan is chanting “hey” and David joins in, then begins a hilarious rap about “chili in a bowl”. It sounds like I overdubbed some lead guitar onto this. We have entered WoG’s era of the 4-trac Dokorder with this trac, so it’s quite likely. You hear me blathering, essentially flapping my lips with a finger while muttering, in the background while David continues rapping. The bass takes a lead, the rhythm continues, then there is more overdubbed lead guitar. You can always recognize my lead guitar playing because I don’t have any hot-licks. We go back to more “hey”s and “ho”s as the trac winds down. The rhythm steadies and there’s more blathering, noises and grunting culminating in an ape-call as the rhythm changes. With this new rhythm, the track opens up. It is now only David’s rhythm guitar and Evan’s voice, reading a cooking school test, “The Prep Quiz”. This is a non-sequitur as poetry and works up to the usual desperate mania.
“Edka Limbo”—the title is a play on Ed’s kalimba, another of my titles. Ed would never have enshrined himself this way. The jam is based on the kalimba sound, with Ed’s Echoplex in the background. Evan plays lead guitar with a flanger. The track finishes with Ed playing an old bluesy piece, a la Leon Redbone, on the ukelele as the Echoplex, playing itself, winds down. The Echoplex, once started, could play itself for quite a while. A very interesting machine, utilizing a reel-to-reel tape loop to create echoing effects.
“March of the Lost Wormsouls”—This is an epic 2-chord bolero that fades in. Lord knows how long we had been jamming before the fade in! Brad is playing martial marching drums to David’s relentless rhythm guitar. Again, David’s approach to the guitar is plainly evident. Not only does he rock, but he sounds almost as if he’s going to fall off the edge of the earth at any moment—in many ways, this approach reminds me of Thelonious Monk’s odd-times and off-beat approach to the piano. Evan is playing a wild trilling recorder lead that may have been overdubbed—hard to imagine how the recorder could compete with the drum set. Dena’s cello is finally audible, comping the rhythm. After a long while, Evan comes in with some lead guitar and comps the rhythm, along with the relentless cello. The lead guitar shares some call-and-response with the drums. Evan’s guitar turns to a rhythm part and the drums pick up the new rhythm. David’s guitar picks up the groove and Evan goes back to leads and faux-bass-lines. Is it about to fade out? No! It’s just quieting down and the cello takes a lead. Ed finally abandons percussion and brings in the Echoplex guitar, Evan plays some discordant rhythm parts, and together the two of them build up the groove. The drums rise up nicely and the jam achieves a critical mass climax. It quickly fades out before anything else starts up. You can hear Brad go back to the original drum part on the quick fade-out. This was a lengthy piece, who knows how much longer we went with it in the studio. I picked the best section for “release”. Once again, this was titled after the fact. I had used a worm theme previously (“Leading the Worms To Slaughter”) and would revisit this same music with lyrics at a future date. I was into the idea of worms, how they came out of the soil when it rained and wriggled around, apparently suicidal in a lemming-like way. I was also very impressed by the book “Seven Years In Tibet” wherein the author described how the young Dalai Lama took such care to save the worms when they were excavating around the Potala Palace. David had more of a “salted slug” theme that he would pursue later on.
“Dogshit Drool”—David is reciting a poem that I wrote (and drew). I accompany on fuzz guitar. This is an early example of me giving David material to recite in his snarling Fyodor persona while I played another instrument. This had occurred one time previously with Couch Dots a number of months earlier when Mikal Bellan (Rumours Of Marriage) gave David a poem about paranoia to recite in a New Jersey accent. In the “Dogshit Drool” poem, there is a line about “gruel” and an exclamation “Oh give me more!”. This references Charles Dickens’ “Oliver”. In my senior class play (“Oliver”), I played the part of Mr. Bumble, who runs the kids’ work-house. Oliver begs him for more gruel, “May I have some more?” and Bumble has a fit. “Gruel” rhymes with “drool” and that’s how it got in there.
Evan,
I did not know what a Fabian Policy is either, so I looked it up and it is "a slow strategy to wear down opposition; avoiding direct confrontation", usually in either a military campaign or a political strategy. That is a funny group name, because I wonder if it has any relevance to the way the music was created?!
The Fabian Policy tracks on the first side of the tape start out with a riproaring rocking yet pie-in-the-face rendition of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit "Born On The Bayou", with Lichtenberg on vocals. Then we are treated to a couple of impressionistic ensemble improvisations consisting of electric instruments, lots of percussion, and some cello that seem similar in feeling to the material on the Dirt Clods tape.
Johnny Rocco was the first collection of WoG material that documented David Lichtenberg's participation in your recording activities. His participation and presence changed things. It is a little hard to put my finger on, but his influence can be felt in an at least slightly edgier, more aggressive, or more awkward feeling to the tracks he played on. They seem a little off-balance, like there was a new kind of push-and-pull dynamic in the music, a sort of "happy conflict", a wild hair up the ass. Did this seem apparent at the time? Or is it just my imagination?
Over on the second side (all/most of which was recorded in March 1983 at Eldorado Springs) there are some great exploratory instrumental improvs by Fabian Policy and the Ed'n Evan Hullabaloo: including some kalimba-based jamming; wind instruments; tons of percussion; some nice touches by Dina on cello; a little reggae flavor; and the epic "March Of The Lost Wormsouls" jam extract; which has a circular, hypnotic groove to it (the breakdown/breakout at the end is especially thrilling!).
Things get, well, freaky, on the tracks by Charity Cases and Psychotic Bozos, with you and David reciting texts from the mundane to the murderous and damned demented. "Dogshit Drool" and "The Murderer's Nightmare" are real stand-outs, if you want to put it that way.
EC:
Regarding the Group Names:
Hal has discovered that a “Fabian Policy” is "a slow strategy to wear down opposition; avoiding direct confrontation, usually in either a military campaign or a political strategy.” This was one of Ed’s names for the groups and he says he remembers nothing about these sessions. I never knew what “Fabian Policy” meant, maybe Ed did. It quite presciently describes WoG’s approach to promotion later on as we kept churning out material to the underground, essentially a slow strategy to wear down opposition to what we were doing. Not everybody liked it, but almost everybody eventually acknowledged that we were doing something uniquely our own. “Charity Cases” was likely Ed’s name for a group, harkening back to the Telethons and the time we used “Jerry’s Kids” as a band name. Nowadays that would be seen as a Jerry Garcia reference, but we never even considered that in 1983. “Psychotic Bozos” was likely my name for a track. In those days, we could use terms like ‘psychotic’ without summoning up images of school shootings and terrorist attacks. As far as I know, this predates the Insane Clown Posse by many years. “The Ed’n Evan Hullabaloo” was my name for the group, harkening back to childhood years watching a television program called “Hullabaloo” that featured performances by all the folk-pop bands at the time.
Notes On Individual Tracks:
“Johnny Rocco”: Ed and Evan are both credited with “tapes” on this trac. I suspect that it was Ed’s idea and Evan’s execution, since it was also credited as a “Fowler, Cantor” composition. Ed’s name coming first indicates that it was his brainchild. The original liner notes also indicate that this was concocted in the “sunny Colorado winter of ‘83”, so probably recorded in January or February ’83. The original liner notes also indicate that all these songs were recorded in January, February or March of ’83. The piece opens with Edward G. Robinson as Johnny Rocco (in the film “Key Largo”) saying “Shut Up, Ya Scum!”. Evan’s trance-like flange guitar comes in with Ed on percussion and kalimba. Ed had quite a collection of odd instruments, including a gong and a toy piano. As Humphrey Bogart mock-apologizes to Rocco, saying “America is sorry…welcome back Rocco”, the rhythm guitar changes mode. Ed comes in with some wailing noise on the electric guitar and Evan’s rhythm plays some bass lines. Ed works up to a lead over the same rhythm, it waxes and wanes, the dialogue between Robinson and Bogart continues. This is pretty lively for “ambient music”. The rhythm guitar pursues a herky-jerky ascending phrase that leads into a rhythmic line, Ed plays mellow chords in the background. Rocco’s voice is heard clearly, “Come over hear, I’d like to spit on ya!” The rhythm comes to a stop as Rocco’s voice comes in, “There is only one Johnny Rocco!”. Bogart eggs him on and they exchange the infamous dialogue about what Rocco wants. “You want more, don’t ya Rocco?” “Yeah,” snarls Rocco. This is a part of Rocco’s diatribe that I have recited numerous times over the years in my own snarling impression of Rocco. For some reason, I find Johnny Rocco absolutely hilarious. So, anyway, the guitars flounder around for a little bit after this intense emotional moment and then intertwine some abstract parts. Ed comes in strong with a rhythm line that sounds like Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, carrying the rhythm while Evan plays bass lines on the other guitar. Ed carries on and we hit another groove. We’re clearly in a trance by this time. Ed gets his Echoplex going and the rhythm guitar hits another groove. The Echoplex winds down as a woman’s voice comes in loud and clear singing a nineteen-forty’s style torch song, something about “a kind a man needs a kind a woman”. She is begging Rocco for something and he has promised to give if he sings a song, but now he has changed his mind. “You were rotten!” he exclaims. The tape cuts off and you hear my voice (Evan) mimicking Rocco: “I want cake and coffee, too, yeah..” As Evan’s Rocco soliloquy fades out, you can hear Ed saying something but it is unintelligible. I still do Rocco impressions to this day. My interest in forties gangster film-noir is discussed above. “Ya Scum!” It’s not unlikely that Muddy Mudskipper on the Ren’n’Stimpy show (many years later) was also channeling Edward G. Robinson’s distinctive accent. John Kricfalusi also used Larry Fine’s accent (voice of Stimpy) and Peter Lorre (voice of Ren), so he was clearly influenced by film-noir and the Three Stooges, as was WoG.
“Born On The Bayou”—Hal, I like your description of this as a rollicking rip-roaring pie-in-the-face. That really does sum it up! This opens with Ed’s blazing electric guitar. He knew the signature riff and probably just started playing it out of the blue. Neither David nor I knew the words, so we chimed in with what little we could recall. I’m singing the first verse, David eggs me on asking “what’d he do? what’d he do?” and then sings a second verse himself. At this point in our development, we hadn’t really thought of David or his Little Fyodor alter-ego as a lead vocalist. This was entirely ad-hoc. Evan reprises the first verse and adds some scat singing to fill in for words he has no idea about. There seems to be two guitars at this point—did we overdub Ed? Was Ed manipulating his Echoplex to make it sound like two guitars? I suspect the latter as there is no evidence that I am playing the guitar on this track. I’m playing the harmonica and singing in a beer addled holler. Ditto for David (Li’l Fyo). This is so raw, I doubt there was any overdubbing and I can’t recall which machines we used to record Fabian Policy. The end of the tune features intertwining “I wanna go back to the Bayou” chants by David and Evan with an incredible Echoplex solo by Ed.
“Prey On The Mind”—the assemblage (Fabian Policy) is jamming. Ed hits a groove and then Evan reads from Roget’s Thesaurus. This is essentially a cut-up poem, although I wasn’t aware of that tradition at this time (see William Burroughs and the Beats). I’m picking paranoid phrases out of the book, one of which is “prey on the mind”. The reading works up to, you guessed it, a desperate maniacal climax and then the jam fades out.
“Camped With The Mongols”—Ed’s rhythm guitar, Evan playing bass lines with a flanged electric guitar. Evan plays the bass line he wrote for the bridge on “I Don’t Want To Funk” (Rumours of Marriage). Ed moves into a threatening doom-metal rhythm before this fades out. The Mongols thing was somehow suggested by the music on an otherwise ad-hoc jam. I recognize this as one of my titles, assigned after the fact.
“Cookin’ With Fyodor” and “The Prep Quiz”—This starts with David’s rhythm guitar, Evan playing flange bass. This is quite likely the first time that David’s guitar playing appears on a WoG-related recording. His approach is quite distinctive. Although he rocks, there is an element of awkwardness or geekiness to it. Having David playing rhythm guitar freed me to do other things, such as the bull-horn rap “Abandon Ship”. David quite freely fit in to the general scheme of the activity, picking up on my spontaneous zany approach. Although I was fond of using many different voices, accents and impressions, David’s vocalizations are edgier, raspier with a more threatening or dangerous sound. This became one of WoG’s signature sounds. At the time we didn’t think about any change in approach or intent. David simply joined in the fun and we rolled with it, all three of us. Back to the trac: Evan is chanting “hey” and David joins in, then begins a hilarious rap about “chili in a bowl”. It sounds like I overdubbed some lead guitar onto this. We have entered WoG’s era of the 4-trac Dokorder with this trac, so it’s quite likely. You hear me blathering, essentially flapping my lips with a finger while muttering, in the background while David continues rapping. The bass takes a lead, the rhythm continues, then there is more overdubbed lead guitar. You can always recognize my lead guitar playing because I don’t have any hot-licks. We go back to more “hey”s and “ho”s as the trac winds down. The rhythm steadies and there’s more blathering, noises and grunting culminating in an ape-call as the rhythm changes. With this new rhythm, the track opens up. It is now only David’s rhythm guitar and Evan’s voice, reading a cooking school test, “The Prep Quiz”. This is a non-sequitur as poetry and works up to the usual desperate mania.
“Edka Limbo”—the title is a play on Ed’s kalimba, another of my titles. Ed would never have enshrined himself this way. The jam is based on the kalimba sound, with Ed’s Echoplex in the background. Evan plays lead guitar with a flanger. The track finishes with Ed playing an old bluesy piece, a la Leon Redbone, on the ukelele as the Echoplex, playing itself, winds down. The Echoplex, once started, could play itself for quite a while. A very interesting machine, utilizing a reel-to-reel tape loop to create echoing effects.
“March of the Lost Wormsouls”—This is an epic 2-chord bolero that fades in. Lord knows how long we had been jamming before the fade in! Brad is playing martial marching drums to David’s relentless rhythm guitar. Again, David’s approach to the guitar is plainly evident. Not only does he rock, but he sounds almost as if he’s going to fall off the edge of the earth at any moment—in many ways, this approach reminds me of Thelonious Monk’s odd-times and off-beat approach to the piano. Evan is playing a wild trilling recorder lead that may have been overdubbed—hard to imagine how the recorder could compete with the drum set. Dena’s cello is finally audible, comping the rhythm. After a long while, Evan comes in with some lead guitar and comps the rhythm, along with the relentless cello. The lead guitar shares some call-and-response with the drums. Evan’s guitar turns to a rhythm part and the drums pick up the new rhythm. David’s guitar picks up the groove and Evan goes back to leads and faux-bass-lines. Is it about to fade out? No! It’s just quieting down and the cello takes a lead. Ed finally abandons percussion and brings in the Echoplex guitar, Evan plays some discordant rhythm parts, and together the two of them build up the groove. The drums rise up nicely and the jam achieves a critical mass climax. It quickly fades out before anything else starts up. You can hear Brad go back to the original drum part on the quick fade-out. This was a lengthy piece, who knows how much longer we went with it in the studio. I picked the best section for “release”. Once again, this was titled after the fact. I had used a worm theme previously (“Leading the Worms To Slaughter”) and would revisit this same music with lyrics at a future date. I was into the idea of worms, how they came out of the soil when it rained and wriggled around, apparently suicidal in a lemming-like way. I was also very impressed by the book “Seven Years In Tibet” wherein the author described how the young Dalai Lama took such care to save the worms when they were excavating around the Potala Palace. David had more of a “salted slug” theme that he would pursue later on.
“Dogshit Drool”—David is reciting a poem that I wrote (and drew). I accompany on fuzz guitar. This is an early example of me giving David material to recite in his snarling Fyodor persona while I played another instrument. This had occurred one time previously with Couch Dots a number of months earlier when Mikal Bellan (Rumours Of Marriage) gave David a poem about paranoia to recite in a New Jersey accent. In the “Dogshit Drool” poem, there is a line about “gruel” and an exclamation “Oh give me more!”. This references Charles Dickens’ “Oliver”. In my senior class play (“Oliver”), I played the part of Mr. Bumble, who runs the kids’ work-house. Oliver begs him for more gruel, “May I have some more?” and Bumble has a fit. “Gruel” rhymes with “drool” and that’s how it got in there.
“The Murderer’s Nightmare”—My original prose piece recited along with or overdubbed on a jam session, a sado-masochist fantasy of sorts. We hadn’t yet discovered the underground cassette culture’s fascination with sado-masochism, so this came out of my dark imagination unbidden. It’s sort of an introduction to a murder-horror-mystery that was never intended to be written. I don’t know why I lapse into “up-talk” towards the end, as if I am questioning my own authorship or what I had written. I abhor up-talk most of the time, although I tolerate it because so many people do it. What was the meaning of a “blanket bought in Texas with longhorn steers upon it”? I have no idea in retrospect, but I can tell you that there has long been animus in Colorado about Texans coming and crowding and over-developing ski areas. I used to see the following poem scrawled on men’s rooms walls: “Here I sit, buns a’flexin’, givin’ birth to another Texan”. I’ve got nothing in particular against Texas myself, other than it’s mostly flat, either hot as a freakin’ hell sauna or steam-room depending on whether you’re in East or West Texas.
“Orgasmic Warrior, Part I”—I have no idea what Part II was nor why we titled this jam as we did. Perhaps we thought of the jams as building to orgasmic climaxes. It fades in on a lot of Evan’s blathering. The lead vocal is just Evan blathering away—I can still blather like this, flapping my lips with my finger, and occasionally entertain babies and very young children with the effect. Hearing this again made me laugh out loud. There is continued blathering and some screaming. Rachel’s synthesizer parts become audible and I stop blathering. I come in with a halting electric guitar part and Brad, the drummer, plays rumbling bass. I play some chords with the digital delay and establish a halting rhythm before the track fades out.
“I Want To Be A Jamaican”—this was David’s brainchild. He likely showed us the chords and was attempting a reggae vibe. It’s his rhythm guitar again. I’ve got a nice bass line going. Ed plays the slidewhistle and finally chimes in with the Echoplex guitar to introduce an ascending chord progression before we return to the head and it fades out. We never could play reggae very well. We probably thought it was a good joke just that we would even try. The one thing we had in common with the Rasta culture was that we smoked a lot of weed. But who didn’t in those days?
“Orgasmic Warrior, Part I”—I have no idea what Part II was nor why we titled this jam as we did. Perhaps we thought of the jams as building to orgasmic climaxes. It fades in on a lot of Evan’s blathering. The lead vocal is just Evan blathering away—I can still blather like this, flapping my lips with my finger, and occasionally entertain babies and very young children with the effect. Hearing this again made me laugh out loud. There is continued blathering and some screaming. Rachel’s synthesizer parts become audible and I stop blathering. I come in with a halting electric guitar part and Brad, the drummer, plays rumbling bass. I play some chords with the digital delay and establish a halting rhythm before the track fades out.
“I Want To Be A Jamaican”—this was David’s brainchild. He likely showed us the chords and was attempting a reggae vibe. It’s his rhythm guitar again. I’ve got a nice bass line going. Ed plays the slidewhistle and finally chimes in with the Echoplex guitar to introduce an ascending chord progression before we return to the head and it fades out. We never could play reggae very well. We probably thought it was a good joke just that we would even try. The one thing we had in common with the Rasta culture was that we smoked a lot of weed. But who didn’t in those days?
HM:
Fyodor,
The tracks on Johnny Rocco by Charity Cases were recorded by you and Evan on Saturday, March 5, 1983 at Eldorado Springs. Brad and Rachel came over with percussion and a synth on Sunday. That must have been one hell of a weekend of jamming! I'm guessing that that was the first weekend-long all-out partying and recording session at Natasha's house. The one-two punch of "Dogshit Drool" and "The Murderer's Nightmare is astounding! Those, along with the "March Of The Lost Wormsouls" jam can certainly be summed up as "over the edge", and "demented" to put it another way. As you have suggested in your previous comments above, your increased involvement in Evan's recording efforts sent things in different directions.
Do you have any recollections from that/those first weekend jam session(s) at Natasha's that you can share, vignettes, scenes, memorable conversations, insights, etc. that could help create a picture of what it was like? Evan's photos of the inside of the house in the WoG Scrapbook give us a good look at what the space was like. Would you drink and jam and smoke and then crash until you couldn't do it any longer, and then get up the next day and do it all over again? Was Natasha there?
Seems to me that the relative isolation of the house probably stimulated that sense of reckless freedom and sound adventure that you talked about when you said that "We just went with whatever drew us along...." What were those things that drew you along? What were you after? What were you pursuing?
LF:
Well, heh, at this point I must join the likes of Rudolph Hess and plead a lack of memory! I really don't remember what our schedule was like or even much about the atmosphere other than that of course there was a sense of the excitement of total freedom and of hatching something new, though we really had no idea where we were heading with it. I don't think we were motivated by any thought of what the end product would be or what we were trying to achieve in any goal oriented sense. It was all process! We were just having fun doing whatever struck us at the moment! It's funny that I don't remember Natasha being around, other than her "you make me feel like I feel" comment. The isolation and the location in a scenic little town were great, though I don't know how much you can credit that for what we did, other than that it didn't hurt that it was a fun place to visit with plenty of elbow room. Maybe my only other anecdote is that I was very proud to have come up with a reggae like riff of two chords for "I Want to Be a Jamaican" that, played in a certain rhythm, seemed to approximate reggae while the two other much more talented guitarists in attendance couldn't figure out how to play reggae at all, but then that's only my insecurity at the time preening with compensatory conceit. It was fun when Brad brought his "five drum" and synthesizer and we all had fun trying out these gadgets. It was all discovery, with no concern about mastery. Well, it helped that Ed and Evan were actually really proficient on their instruments. And Dena too, on her cello. (And oh yeah, Brad on his drums!) Their mastery helped us goof around. I know Evan played my guitar on Orgasmic Warrior, trying to imitate the echo of Ed's echoplex via repetition. I've said at times that we released about 70% of what we recorded, but I don't know about that now that I see from the reel to reel box notes that there was an awful lot we didn't release, especially from the Psychotic Bozos day. I wonder what it sounds like....... (I have the reels and the machine, so maybe I'll find out someday......) (though actually I might need a mixer too to hear all the tracks at once!) I don't think we had any idea what Evan was reading on Murderer's Nightmare, we just kept chugging along and then heard it all afterwards. I remember a female deejay at KGNU who, we had reason to believe from something or other she did at the station, had strong feminist leanings, really loved The Murderer's Nightmare. Evan expressed his surprise at that to me, since it's about a guy plotting to murder his girlfriend. But then the casual listener might not pick up on that, or even be in denial about what it really meant when the protagonist vowed to eliminate the "sweet crack" sleeping next to him! I believe that was excerpted from something longer he had been working on that I don't know if he ever completed.....
Fyodor,
The tracks on Johnny Rocco by Charity Cases were recorded by you and Evan on Saturday, March 5, 1983 at Eldorado Springs. Brad and Rachel came over with percussion and a synth on Sunday. That must have been one hell of a weekend of jamming! I'm guessing that that was the first weekend-long all-out partying and recording session at Natasha's house. The one-two punch of "Dogshit Drool" and "The Murderer's Nightmare is astounding! Those, along with the "March Of The Lost Wormsouls" jam can certainly be summed up as "over the edge", and "demented" to put it another way. As you have suggested in your previous comments above, your increased involvement in Evan's recording efforts sent things in different directions.
Do you have any recollections from that/those first weekend jam session(s) at Natasha's that you can share, vignettes, scenes, memorable conversations, insights, etc. that could help create a picture of what it was like? Evan's photos of the inside of the house in the WoG Scrapbook give us a good look at what the space was like. Would you drink and jam and smoke and then crash until you couldn't do it any longer, and then get up the next day and do it all over again? Was Natasha there?
Seems to me that the relative isolation of the house probably stimulated that sense of reckless freedom and sound adventure that you talked about when you said that "We just went with whatever drew us along...." What were those things that drew you along? What were you after? What were you pursuing?
LF:
Well, heh, at this point I must join the likes of Rudolph Hess and plead a lack of memory! I really don't remember what our schedule was like or even much about the atmosphere other than that of course there was a sense of the excitement of total freedom and of hatching something new, though we really had no idea where we were heading with it. I don't think we were motivated by any thought of what the end product would be or what we were trying to achieve in any goal oriented sense. It was all process! We were just having fun doing whatever struck us at the moment! It's funny that I don't remember Natasha being around, other than her "you make me feel like I feel" comment. The isolation and the location in a scenic little town were great, though I don't know how much you can credit that for what we did, other than that it didn't hurt that it was a fun place to visit with plenty of elbow room. Maybe my only other anecdote is that I was very proud to have come up with a reggae like riff of two chords for "I Want to Be a Jamaican" that, played in a certain rhythm, seemed to approximate reggae while the two other much more talented guitarists in attendance couldn't figure out how to play reggae at all, but then that's only my insecurity at the time preening with compensatory conceit. It was fun when Brad brought his "five drum" and synthesizer and we all had fun trying out these gadgets. It was all discovery, with no concern about mastery. Well, it helped that Ed and Evan were actually really proficient on their instruments. And Dena too, on her cello. (And oh yeah, Brad on his drums!) Their mastery helped us goof around. I know Evan played my guitar on Orgasmic Warrior, trying to imitate the echo of Ed's echoplex via repetition. I've said at times that we released about 70% of what we recorded, but I don't know about that now that I see from the reel to reel box notes that there was an awful lot we didn't release, especially from the Psychotic Bozos day. I wonder what it sounds like....... (I have the reels and the machine, so maybe I'll find out someday......) (though actually I might need a mixer too to hear all the tracks at once!) I don't think we had any idea what Evan was reading on Murderer's Nightmare, we just kept chugging along and then heard it all afterwards. I remember a female deejay at KGNU who, we had reason to believe from something or other she did at the station, had strong feminist leanings, really loved The Murderer's Nightmare. Evan expressed his surprise at that to me, since it's about a guy plotting to murder his girlfriend. But then the casual listener might not pick up on that, or even be in denial about what it really meant when the protagonist vowed to eliminate the "sweet crack" sleeping next to him! I believe that was excerpted from something longer he had been working on that I don't know if he ever completed.....
LF:
A couple of notes. I believe I recall Evan once telling me that Fabian Policy was the result of an idea of Ed's (that maybe he got from somewhere else) that band names should be comprised of words that have nothing at all to do with each other, associated completely at random.
I believe we came up with "Orgasmic Warrior" as a parody of the band Jade Warrior, since the music had a meditative feel somewhat reminiscent to that band only much sillier (a combination that characterized much of WoG's output around that time, such as Johnny Rocco). Thinking about this and the "Part 1" bit, I found myself wondering if Jade Warrior too had title names that included "part 1" and "part 2", and sure enough, to wit: Waves, Jade Warrior album on Wikipedia.
So it's not altogether unlikely that the Part 1 was another very tongue-in-cheek reference to Jade Warrior!
A couple of notes. I believe I recall Evan once telling me that Fabian Policy was the result of an idea of Ed's (that maybe he got from somewhere else) that band names should be comprised of words that have nothing at all to do with each other, associated completely at random.
I believe we came up with "Orgasmic Warrior" as a parody of the band Jade Warrior, since the music had a meditative feel somewhat reminiscent to that band only much sillier (a combination that characterized much of WoG's output around that time, such as Johnny Rocco). Thinking about this and the "Part 1" bit, I found myself wondering if Jade Warrior too had title names that included "part 1" and "part 2", and sure enough, to wit: Waves, Jade Warrior album on Wikipedia.
So it's not altogether unlikely that the Part 1 was another very tongue-in-cheek reference to Jade Warrior!