WoG 0007 - Little Victor Meets Violent Vince
a 90 minute cassette officially attributed to multiple bands all of which were later considered the "band" Walls Of Genius.
- CLOVIS POINT REMAINS (Evan Cantor, David Lichtenberg, Claude Martz), Thursday, July 21, 1983
- Outer Space, Leo's Party, Lyons, Colorado, Saturday, July 23, 1983 (Ed Fowler, Dena Zocher, Leo Goya, DL, EC, Andrea DiNapoli, Kiki)
- RUNAWAY TRUCKS (EF, EC, DL, LG), Live at The Brillig, Boulder, Colorado, Sunday, July 31, 1983
- GOLFING MONSTERS (EC, EF, DL), Sunday, August 7, 1983
- Wild Stuff, The Pots'n Pans Party, Friday, August 12, 1983 (EC, DL, Chris Norden, Scott Childress, David Stiles, Sean)
- THE SCHISMS (EC, DL, SC, EF)
- THE JUNIOR LEPERS (Brad Carton, EF, EC, DL)
- THE TENDER YOUNG ASPEN (EC, DL)
EC:
The album title continues an alliterative theme. Rumours of Marriage had done a song called “Violent Violet” that may have inspired this particular example.
The Schisms were originally noted on the reel box as “The Soul Schisms”, but we must have decided to abbreviate the name. Clovis Point Remains reflects my interest in archeology and frequent visitations to ancient Puebloan (Anasazi) ruins dotted all around the four corners area. Clovis points were stone tool pieces associated with pre-historic Puebloans found near Clovis, New Mexico. The Junior Lepers were originally noted on the reel box as “The Little Lepers”, but, again, we must have thought to make a change. The Lepers was a Denver punk band in which Brad Carton was the drummer. Brad, Evan and Ed had all played together previously in Rumours of Marriage and Walls of Genius was fortunate to occasionally get Brad to come to a session. Golfing Monsters sounds like one of Ed’s band-names. He was always the most sports-oriented of the three of us. The Tender Young Aspen was one of my names, dating to a visit to Florissant Fossil Beds with Chris Norden wherein we were both taken by the sexy female forms of aspen trees. The Pots’n Pans Party is self-explanatory, as is Leo’s Party. Runaway Trucks derives from my fascination with runaway truck ramps on Colorado’s mountain highways. The idea of runaway trucks appealed to us. The momentum of an out-of-control truck was a good metaphor for some of our wilder, more outside, musical excursions. Once again, Joe Colorado is Evan Cantor on his own.
The cover art features a bad Xerox of the “promo photo” taken with Dena Zocher at her place in Denver. Ed is wearing his “Edward the Barbarian” home-made art t-shirt and a furball hat. I am wearing a fuzzy wig or hat, hard to say which.
- Outer Space, Leo's Party, Lyons, Colorado, Saturday, July 23, 1983 (Ed Fowler, Dena Zocher, Leo Goya, DL, EC, Andrea DiNapoli, Kiki)
- RUNAWAY TRUCKS (EF, EC, DL, LG), Live at The Brillig, Boulder, Colorado, Sunday, July 31, 1983
- GOLFING MONSTERS (EC, EF, DL), Sunday, August 7, 1983
- Wild Stuff, The Pots'n Pans Party, Friday, August 12, 1983 (EC, DL, Chris Norden, Scott Childress, David Stiles, Sean)
- THE SCHISMS (EC, DL, SC, EF)
- THE JUNIOR LEPERS (Brad Carton, EF, EC, DL)
- THE TENDER YOUNG ASPEN (EC, DL)
EC:
The album title continues an alliterative theme. Rumours of Marriage had done a song called “Violent Violet” that may have inspired this particular example.
The Schisms were originally noted on the reel box as “The Soul Schisms”, but we must have decided to abbreviate the name. Clovis Point Remains reflects my interest in archeology and frequent visitations to ancient Puebloan (Anasazi) ruins dotted all around the four corners area. Clovis points were stone tool pieces associated with pre-historic Puebloans found near Clovis, New Mexico. The Junior Lepers were originally noted on the reel box as “The Little Lepers”, but, again, we must have thought to make a change. The Lepers was a Denver punk band in which Brad Carton was the drummer. Brad, Evan and Ed had all played together previously in Rumours of Marriage and Walls of Genius was fortunate to occasionally get Brad to come to a session. Golfing Monsters sounds like one of Ed’s band-names. He was always the most sports-oriented of the three of us. The Tender Young Aspen was one of my names, dating to a visit to Florissant Fossil Beds with Chris Norden wherein we were both taken by the sexy female forms of aspen trees. The Pots’n Pans Party is self-explanatory, as is Leo’s Party. Runaway Trucks derives from my fascination with runaway truck ramps on Colorado’s mountain highways. The idea of runaway trucks appealed to us. The momentum of an out-of-control truck was a good metaphor for some of our wilder, more outside, musical excursions. Once again, Joe Colorado is Evan Cantor on his own.
The cover art features a bad Xerox of the “promo photo” taken with Dena Zocher at her place in Denver. Ed is wearing his “Edward the Barbarian” home-made art t-shirt and a furball hat. I am wearing a fuzzy wig or hat, hard to say which.
Side A
THE SCHISMS - You Give Me The Creeps
CLOVIS POINT REMAINS - You Smell Like A Coconut
CLOVIS POINT REMAINS - An Evening With Uncle Henry
CLOVIS POINT REMAINS - Lunchtime At The Flats/Coming Off A Rough One
THE SCHISMS - Slipped Gear
THE SCHISMS - Pardon My Tires
THE JUNIOR LEPERS - Inebriated Souls Dance
GOLFING MONSTERS - In The Rough
THE TENDER YOUNG ASPEN - Limp Useless Manhood
THE SCHISMS - You Give Me The Creeps
CLOVIS POINT REMAINS - You Smell Like A Coconut
CLOVIS POINT REMAINS - An Evening With Uncle Henry
CLOVIS POINT REMAINS - Lunchtime At The Flats/Coming Off A Rough One
THE SCHISMS - Slipped Gear
THE SCHISMS - Pardon My Tires
THE JUNIOR LEPERS - Inebriated Souls Dance
GOLFING MONSTERS - In The Rough
THE TENDER YOUNG ASPEN - Limp Useless Manhood
“You Give Me The Creeps” (The Schisms)
EC:
This is my guitar piece, with David using a guitar and effects to create odd crying-out sounds. Scott Childress shakes the maraca a couple of times. This has always been one of my favorites. It has a nice menacing atmosphere and a good ending.
LF:
Hey, I’m playing lead guitar again! What the hell? Who allowed THAT??? Non-tonal swoops through a heavy flange help me get away with it…. Well here we are again, just me and Evan, taking advantage of our proximity and drive to do Woggy things. I see this Schisms session isn’t dated on the reel box, but I know there were times I came over on weekday evenings, when it wouldn’t have been as easy for the out of town contingent, like Denverites Ed and Dena or even Leo, who lived in Lyons, a little mountain-esque town about a half hour north (still on the plains actually but at the foot of the final approach to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park). Andrea lived in Broomfield, a more bedroom suburban type burg a little closer but still 20 minutes away, just to round out that bizz…. Evan has a riff again! And just as with “The Chichen Itza Walk,” he has me play lead guitar! Once again showing a lot of faith in someone who doesn’t really know how to do such a thing (didja know John Lennon laments that he’s really no good at soloing while preparing to record “Get Back”?). I believe there’s no overdub but rather Evan shakes a maraca with one hand while playing his guitar with the other….
“You Smell Like A Coconut” (Clovis Point Remains)
EC:
This fades in with David squealing over an insistent bass line. Claude Martz’s bass clarinet wails away in the background. David’s rhythm guitar is another two-chord drone punching away. Claude works up to a clarinet solo. Why “coconut’? It’s David’s tune, so only he would know.
LF:
Clovis Point Remains was another weekday evening session (a Thursday, based on the reel box date), but with a brand new participant, as was our wont, this being Alsatian immigrant Claude Martz. The way he pronounced his first name almost sounded like “clode”. I believe Evan met him via one of the one or two Boulder Creative Music Ensemble sessions he attended. I know Claude was hanging with Joel Haertling (who called him “clude” for some reason) a little later on (and we were probably hanging with Joel ourselves at this time), so we may have met him through Joel, but I’m going with the BCME. He plays bass clarinet! Not exactly your typical sound for any type of conglomeration, which was only one nice thing about playing with Claude! This piece is based on some guitar chords I had, which I mostly strum, though occasionally I arpeggiate a bit before becoming scared of my inability to do so fluently and thus returning to the safety of strumming. Evan plays bass, I think just a single note for a while to create a trancelike effect before following the chords, and Claude improvises on his bass clarinet on top of all this. And then – I overdub strange scatty vocals!! I was doing what I thought a soloist should do, playing (or in this case singing) what he feels, going with what the music brings out in him, on a gut or intuitive level. I may have also been feeling around for vocal sounds ranging or alternating between soothing or sensuous and yearning, not that I thought about it in any great detail. I heard afterwards from Evan that every time this song came on, visiting college and hippie fraternity friend Chris Norden would get totally tweaked out by my vocals. They drove him nuts and made him cringe and put his hair on end and the like! I did witness him hearing the song once and he laughed and said something like "Oh that Fyodor" and left the room (guess he was being diplomatic?). This made me realize myself how the vocals might actually just sound more annoying than anything else, like maybe you heard too much of the inside of my mouth and maybe I’m just an annoying vocalist in general. And I had thought of these vocals as being mildly brilliant up till then! It was a bit of a shock to see my work from outside of my own personal aesthetic bubble! Well, we always knew we were exploring the thin line between genius and idiocy…. BTW, I believe this song was originally entitled “You Give Me The Creeps” (as it appears on the reel box) until Evan used that title for the preceding/above piece, recorded later, and this one was changed to “You Smell Like a Coconut”, which was taken from an observation of mine that that’s what a lot of sunscreen products did to you….
“An Evening With Uncle Henry” (Clovis Points Remain)
EC:
I believe that Uncle Henry was one of David’s family members. Another fade-in indicates that a jam was happening and we’re cherry-picking the best parts for release. There is a lot of free-styling bass, a kind of bass solo with nice clarinet moaning alongside. There is a lot of triplets played on an ascending scale on the bass with squeaky 80s synth sounds. The bass finally falls into a groove. I likely overdubbed percussion onto this. There is a nice duel between the bass and the clarinet and then they return to the groove, then back to dueling. A nice clean ending on this one.
LF:
The next piece is a more totally free form improvisation, with no forethought. It’s also the introduction to the entire WoG proceedings of – my SYNTHESIZER!!! I decided that since WoG was making weird sounds, what better way to add to that but with a synthesizer? I searched the want ads and found a used synth being offered in the southern cul-de-sac laden suburb of Sheridan. Boulder, a good half hour of mostly undeveloped land northwest of Denver, felt very detached from Denver back then, in more ways than one, and it seemed a bit of an adventure to venture all the way across Denver to the southern burbs, and I swear, this seemed a strange land that through streets forgot. The seller was a kid living with his parents and I bought his Sequential Circuits Pro-One for I think $150. This unit is kind of the monophonic little brother to the polyphonic Prophet-Five. It seemed to be on the cutting edge of synthetic noise making at the time, though I think it gets kind of forgotten nowadays as it was soon overtaken by the digital age of synths and those looking for pure analog sounds usually prefer to go back even further into more vintage territory. No matter, I was always proud of the variety of wacky noises I could coax out of it! This piece starts out as a jam between Claude, Evan and myself, with me playing my new toy, and I believe Evan on bass and then he probably overdubbed bongos afterward (maybe vice-versa on Evan’s playing, but sounds like we’re reacting to the bass!). The “Uncle Henry” of the title was my own uncle, a distinguished and popular professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a best selling Psych 101 textbook author. Evan only knew of Henry through me, but I guess he liked the image he gleaned from my description. I’ve often noted that artistic types are often the bad sheep of good families, they got good genes but express them via anti-social means! Heh. Henry was a big influence on me, showing me that intellectuality could be coupled with a mischievous side (maybe much as Glenn Swanson showed Ed), not that that those things should be at odds, but for some reason we often think of them that way. Henry lives in a nursing home these days…. Re-reading my bit about Boulder’s isolation above, the thought occurs to note that while the wild open spaces between Denver and Boulder have sadly been mostly filled in and developed in the 30 years hence, Boulder almost seems more isolated now as I hear pretty much nothing at all about any music scene or new music bands from Boulder nowadays. There may have been a whiff of underlying hostility or suspicion between the two scenes back in the 80’s (human, oh so human), but at least there WERE two scenes, then. Of course, having lived in Denver since 1993, maybe I’m just oblivious to any goings on back in Boulder…? (Well, I do know about Evan’s folk oriented bands, but that’s about it!)
“Lunchtime At The Flats/Coming Off A Rough One” (Clovis Points Remain)
EC:
“The Flats” is a reference to Rocky Flats, a Department of Energy nuclear-bomb-trigger factory a few miles south of Boulder. Hence the story-line of Joe Nukehead on the liner notes. This opens with bass volume-knob effects and a droning synth in the background that I overdubbed later for a mechanical menacing atmospheric effect. The bass clarinet goes out front while I’m using the volume knob on the bass to create a groove. The bass cuts out—are we now into “Coming Off A Rough One”? Perhaps, but there is no clear-cut delineation. The synth comes out front while the clarinet adopts a watery tone, played through a microphone with a flanger. There is nice percussion here, David and Evan together, with no bass at this point. There is a nice clarinet solo with the droning synth. The synth is now mimicking the bass volume-knob effect. The gong comes in, sounds like me playing it. Then the percussion switches over to bongos and the clarinet picks up the groove, then drops it, the bongos continue until the end.
LF:
The next piece, or medley of two, also starts out as a jam between the three of us, Evan, Claude and myself, with overdubbing added later, an apparent MO for this “band”! This time I played percussion (the clangy three-bell thing and some chimey, shakey stuff) while Evan starts out on bass (mostly nobs, I think) and then switches to bongos and then overdubs his own first try on my new synthesizer. This is actually two jams linked as one via the constant of Evan's overdubbed synth, which is played throughout both jams and actually does a nice job of obscuring the transition between the two by playing over the second or two or three of quiet in between them. But we obviously stopped the tape recorder during the original live jamming since Evan switches from bass to percussion and a flanger has been placed on Claude’s bass clarinet! I like Evan’s synth playing, actually a lot more than mine on the preceding/above piece (sorry, Henry!). Evan later told me he was just trying to follow Claude (though maybe he was talking about the percussion). It’s possible I overdubbed percussion, too, as I sometimes seem to be following Evan’s synth….
“Slipped Gear” (The Schisms)
EC:
This is another David two-chord rhythm guitar work-out, with Evan on bass and Ed playing effects with his guitar. This is essentially lead bass as David’s guitar part carries on and then we hit a clean ending. Why this is the only Schisms track with Ed on it is a mystery to me.
LF:
On “Slipped Gear” I struggle through a guitar riff of mine, while Evan plays a sort of lead bass. I think Ed overdubbed his kinda noise guitar later. I alter my rhythm a little here and there, a la “March of the Lost Wormsouls”….
“Pardon My Tires” (The Schisms)
EC:
Evan’s lead guitar fades in on a minor-key theme while David’s guitar is run though effects alongside. This one is a very short piece. These two automotive-related titles sound like mine.
DF:
“Pardon My Tires” is a fuzzy guitar duel of sorts between me and Evan. I think the titles and description of these pieces reflect the somewhat awkward and slipshod nature of my guitar playing, for better or (and?) worse….
“Inebriated Souls Dance” (Junior Lepers)
EC:
Junior Lepers features Brad Carton playing the drums. This piece starts with bass and drums, then Ed’s lead guitar joins in, his classic screaming metal sound. David’s rhythm guitar is playing a percussive two-chord drone. The bass tries to introduce a change and succeeds, then returns to the main theme. There’s nice interplay between David’s rhythm and Ed’s smokin’ hot lead guitar. The bass introduces another change and the bass and rhythm guitar get a nice interaction going before we fade out on Ed’s guitar noodling.
LF:
During my description of the Psychotic Bozos session on Johnny Rocco, I speculated that the presence of Brad Carton on drums may have been the result of an attempt to record Little Fyodor songs. The reel to reel box’s accompanying notes seem to bear that out more for this session, as the notes flow out of a description of Little Fyodor songs into The Little Lepers jams (apparently later renamed to The Junior Lepers). The Lepers were a band that Brad had joined after the breakup of Rumours of Marriage. They were a pretty straight ahead punk band. Their biggest success for my money was a song putting their own music to some lyrics written by would-be assassin John Hinckley called “So We Can Talk” about the alienating effects of family TV watching. They also did a video for an original piece called “Christmas in Reverse”. “Inebriated Souls Dance” is based on a four note guitar riff of mine with Brad on drums and Evan on bass and Ed on overdubbed lead. Evan’s title. He always liked the drunken theme!
“In The Rough” (Golfing Monsters)
EC:
I am playing the guitar with Ed’s effects, creating a rhythm and letting the feedback rise to a climax, then cutting off the feedback and repeating the entire process. There is some nice slide whistle by Ed. He has a breathier sound on the whistle than either David or I. There is another nice clean ending.
LF:
Golfing Monsters had me, Evan and Ed all present, maybe when Ed came over to overdub on the previous pieces. (Note that the delineation of “bands” was beginning to get a little bit abstract and arbitrary.) On this, Evan makes use of an effects box’s tendency to feedback when fed enough sound before being clicked off to, um, effect. The band name came from something in the sports pages that seemed funny. I reissued this piece on a CD-R and I included the band name in the song title to make it “Golfing Monsters: In the Rough” cause you don’t get the joke of the latter without the former! No overdubs on this one.
“Limp Useless Manhood” (Tender Young Aspen)
EC:
This is the first track on the cassette that reflects the manic absurdity that has so far been WoG’s trademark. The title came from some promotional material for a sexual enhancer of some kind. This is years before Viagra. This track makes me laugh out loud. It starts with Evan’s lead guitar and a lot of gibbering by David and Evan. This piece likely started with bass and percussion and then we added guitar and vocals. There is a terrific gibbering duel between David and Evan. David’s gibbering has a harder, more desperate edge to it than mine. Mine features a lot of cheek-shaking, a technique I learned from emulating Bluto when he shakes himself to clear his head after Popeye has given him a beating. The piece ends with just the bass line and then a little more gibbering unaccompanied. This is the first time I have finally mixed the cassette to “fill” the 45-minute side.
LF:
I believe “Limp Useless Manhood” began as a jam between me on bongos and Evan on bass and then he overdubbed his guitar and we both overdubbed dueling dimwit vocals! That’s probably Evan clapping. At some point I got a new set of bongos that had better resonance than the one I already had, and I think by the sound this may be its debut. The band name, Tender Young Aspen, was taken from a little rhyme the afore mentioned Chris Norden left for Evan when he left to go explore more of Colorado, something like, “Up in the mountain air I’ll be gaspin’, as I hike among the tender young aspen.” I remember Chris observing that aspen trees never seem to get very old…. Oh, and the song title comes from some ad for some pre-Viagra boner fixer upper miracle cure stuff. I believe somewhere in the scrapbook appears the entire line, “Limp useless manhood rises up proud and strong once again!” I remember Evan reporting that there was joking around about this at his workplace and girls there told him he should take this miracle cure stuff himself to which Evan responded that he needed pills to calm himself down to which the girls responded by accusing him of bragging (all in good fun, presumably!)….
EC:
This is my guitar piece, with David using a guitar and effects to create odd crying-out sounds. Scott Childress shakes the maraca a couple of times. This has always been one of my favorites. It has a nice menacing atmosphere and a good ending.
LF:
Hey, I’m playing lead guitar again! What the hell? Who allowed THAT??? Non-tonal swoops through a heavy flange help me get away with it…. Well here we are again, just me and Evan, taking advantage of our proximity and drive to do Woggy things. I see this Schisms session isn’t dated on the reel box, but I know there were times I came over on weekday evenings, when it wouldn’t have been as easy for the out of town contingent, like Denverites Ed and Dena or even Leo, who lived in Lyons, a little mountain-esque town about a half hour north (still on the plains actually but at the foot of the final approach to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park). Andrea lived in Broomfield, a more bedroom suburban type burg a little closer but still 20 minutes away, just to round out that bizz…. Evan has a riff again! And just as with “The Chichen Itza Walk,” he has me play lead guitar! Once again showing a lot of faith in someone who doesn’t really know how to do such a thing (didja know John Lennon laments that he’s really no good at soloing while preparing to record “Get Back”?). I believe there’s no overdub but rather Evan shakes a maraca with one hand while playing his guitar with the other….
“You Smell Like A Coconut” (Clovis Point Remains)
EC:
This fades in with David squealing over an insistent bass line. Claude Martz’s bass clarinet wails away in the background. David’s rhythm guitar is another two-chord drone punching away. Claude works up to a clarinet solo. Why “coconut’? It’s David’s tune, so only he would know.
LF:
Clovis Point Remains was another weekday evening session (a Thursday, based on the reel box date), but with a brand new participant, as was our wont, this being Alsatian immigrant Claude Martz. The way he pronounced his first name almost sounded like “clode”. I believe Evan met him via one of the one or two Boulder Creative Music Ensemble sessions he attended. I know Claude was hanging with Joel Haertling (who called him “clude” for some reason) a little later on (and we were probably hanging with Joel ourselves at this time), so we may have met him through Joel, but I’m going with the BCME. He plays bass clarinet! Not exactly your typical sound for any type of conglomeration, which was only one nice thing about playing with Claude! This piece is based on some guitar chords I had, which I mostly strum, though occasionally I arpeggiate a bit before becoming scared of my inability to do so fluently and thus returning to the safety of strumming. Evan plays bass, I think just a single note for a while to create a trancelike effect before following the chords, and Claude improvises on his bass clarinet on top of all this. And then – I overdub strange scatty vocals!! I was doing what I thought a soloist should do, playing (or in this case singing) what he feels, going with what the music brings out in him, on a gut or intuitive level. I may have also been feeling around for vocal sounds ranging or alternating between soothing or sensuous and yearning, not that I thought about it in any great detail. I heard afterwards from Evan that every time this song came on, visiting college and hippie fraternity friend Chris Norden would get totally tweaked out by my vocals. They drove him nuts and made him cringe and put his hair on end and the like! I did witness him hearing the song once and he laughed and said something like "Oh that Fyodor" and left the room (guess he was being diplomatic?). This made me realize myself how the vocals might actually just sound more annoying than anything else, like maybe you heard too much of the inside of my mouth and maybe I’m just an annoying vocalist in general. And I had thought of these vocals as being mildly brilliant up till then! It was a bit of a shock to see my work from outside of my own personal aesthetic bubble! Well, we always knew we were exploring the thin line between genius and idiocy…. BTW, I believe this song was originally entitled “You Give Me The Creeps” (as it appears on the reel box) until Evan used that title for the preceding/above piece, recorded later, and this one was changed to “You Smell Like a Coconut”, which was taken from an observation of mine that that’s what a lot of sunscreen products did to you….
“An Evening With Uncle Henry” (Clovis Points Remain)
EC:
I believe that Uncle Henry was one of David’s family members. Another fade-in indicates that a jam was happening and we’re cherry-picking the best parts for release. There is a lot of free-styling bass, a kind of bass solo with nice clarinet moaning alongside. There is a lot of triplets played on an ascending scale on the bass with squeaky 80s synth sounds. The bass finally falls into a groove. I likely overdubbed percussion onto this. There is a nice duel between the bass and the clarinet and then they return to the groove, then back to dueling. A nice clean ending on this one.
LF:
The next piece is a more totally free form improvisation, with no forethought. It’s also the introduction to the entire WoG proceedings of – my SYNTHESIZER!!! I decided that since WoG was making weird sounds, what better way to add to that but with a synthesizer? I searched the want ads and found a used synth being offered in the southern cul-de-sac laden suburb of Sheridan. Boulder, a good half hour of mostly undeveloped land northwest of Denver, felt very detached from Denver back then, in more ways than one, and it seemed a bit of an adventure to venture all the way across Denver to the southern burbs, and I swear, this seemed a strange land that through streets forgot. The seller was a kid living with his parents and I bought his Sequential Circuits Pro-One for I think $150. This unit is kind of the monophonic little brother to the polyphonic Prophet-Five. It seemed to be on the cutting edge of synthetic noise making at the time, though I think it gets kind of forgotten nowadays as it was soon overtaken by the digital age of synths and those looking for pure analog sounds usually prefer to go back even further into more vintage territory. No matter, I was always proud of the variety of wacky noises I could coax out of it! This piece starts out as a jam between Claude, Evan and myself, with me playing my new toy, and I believe Evan on bass and then he probably overdubbed bongos afterward (maybe vice-versa on Evan’s playing, but sounds like we’re reacting to the bass!). The “Uncle Henry” of the title was my own uncle, a distinguished and popular professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a best selling Psych 101 textbook author. Evan only knew of Henry through me, but I guess he liked the image he gleaned from my description. I’ve often noted that artistic types are often the bad sheep of good families, they got good genes but express them via anti-social means! Heh. Henry was a big influence on me, showing me that intellectuality could be coupled with a mischievous side (maybe much as Glenn Swanson showed Ed), not that that those things should be at odds, but for some reason we often think of them that way. Henry lives in a nursing home these days…. Re-reading my bit about Boulder’s isolation above, the thought occurs to note that while the wild open spaces between Denver and Boulder have sadly been mostly filled in and developed in the 30 years hence, Boulder almost seems more isolated now as I hear pretty much nothing at all about any music scene or new music bands from Boulder nowadays. There may have been a whiff of underlying hostility or suspicion between the two scenes back in the 80’s (human, oh so human), but at least there WERE two scenes, then. Of course, having lived in Denver since 1993, maybe I’m just oblivious to any goings on back in Boulder…? (Well, I do know about Evan’s folk oriented bands, but that’s about it!)
“Lunchtime At The Flats/Coming Off A Rough One” (Clovis Points Remain)
EC:
“The Flats” is a reference to Rocky Flats, a Department of Energy nuclear-bomb-trigger factory a few miles south of Boulder. Hence the story-line of Joe Nukehead on the liner notes. This opens with bass volume-knob effects and a droning synth in the background that I overdubbed later for a mechanical menacing atmospheric effect. The bass clarinet goes out front while I’m using the volume knob on the bass to create a groove. The bass cuts out—are we now into “Coming Off A Rough One”? Perhaps, but there is no clear-cut delineation. The synth comes out front while the clarinet adopts a watery tone, played through a microphone with a flanger. There is nice percussion here, David and Evan together, with no bass at this point. There is a nice clarinet solo with the droning synth. The synth is now mimicking the bass volume-knob effect. The gong comes in, sounds like me playing it. Then the percussion switches over to bongos and the clarinet picks up the groove, then drops it, the bongos continue until the end.
LF:
The next piece, or medley of two, also starts out as a jam between the three of us, Evan, Claude and myself, with overdubbing added later, an apparent MO for this “band”! This time I played percussion (the clangy three-bell thing and some chimey, shakey stuff) while Evan starts out on bass (mostly nobs, I think) and then switches to bongos and then overdubs his own first try on my new synthesizer. This is actually two jams linked as one via the constant of Evan's overdubbed synth, which is played throughout both jams and actually does a nice job of obscuring the transition between the two by playing over the second or two or three of quiet in between them. But we obviously stopped the tape recorder during the original live jamming since Evan switches from bass to percussion and a flanger has been placed on Claude’s bass clarinet! I like Evan’s synth playing, actually a lot more than mine on the preceding/above piece (sorry, Henry!). Evan later told me he was just trying to follow Claude (though maybe he was talking about the percussion). It’s possible I overdubbed percussion, too, as I sometimes seem to be following Evan’s synth….
“Slipped Gear” (The Schisms)
EC:
This is another David two-chord rhythm guitar work-out, with Evan on bass and Ed playing effects with his guitar. This is essentially lead bass as David’s guitar part carries on and then we hit a clean ending. Why this is the only Schisms track with Ed on it is a mystery to me.
LF:
On “Slipped Gear” I struggle through a guitar riff of mine, while Evan plays a sort of lead bass. I think Ed overdubbed his kinda noise guitar later. I alter my rhythm a little here and there, a la “March of the Lost Wormsouls”….
“Pardon My Tires” (The Schisms)
EC:
Evan’s lead guitar fades in on a minor-key theme while David’s guitar is run though effects alongside. This one is a very short piece. These two automotive-related titles sound like mine.
DF:
“Pardon My Tires” is a fuzzy guitar duel of sorts between me and Evan. I think the titles and description of these pieces reflect the somewhat awkward and slipshod nature of my guitar playing, for better or (and?) worse….
“Inebriated Souls Dance” (Junior Lepers)
EC:
Junior Lepers features Brad Carton playing the drums. This piece starts with bass and drums, then Ed’s lead guitar joins in, his classic screaming metal sound. David’s rhythm guitar is playing a percussive two-chord drone. The bass tries to introduce a change and succeeds, then returns to the main theme. There’s nice interplay between David’s rhythm and Ed’s smokin’ hot lead guitar. The bass introduces another change and the bass and rhythm guitar get a nice interaction going before we fade out on Ed’s guitar noodling.
LF:
During my description of the Psychotic Bozos session on Johnny Rocco, I speculated that the presence of Brad Carton on drums may have been the result of an attempt to record Little Fyodor songs. The reel to reel box’s accompanying notes seem to bear that out more for this session, as the notes flow out of a description of Little Fyodor songs into The Little Lepers jams (apparently later renamed to The Junior Lepers). The Lepers were a band that Brad had joined after the breakup of Rumours of Marriage. They were a pretty straight ahead punk band. Their biggest success for my money was a song putting their own music to some lyrics written by would-be assassin John Hinckley called “So We Can Talk” about the alienating effects of family TV watching. They also did a video for an original piece called “Christmas in Reverse”. “Inebriated Souls Dance” is based on a four note guitar riff of mine with Brad on drums and Evan on bass and Ed on overdubbed lead. Evan’s title. He always liked the drunken theme!
“In The Rough” (Golfing Monsters)
EC:
I am playing the guitar with Ed’s effects, creating a rhythm and letting the feedback rise to a climax, then cutting off the feedback and repeating the entire process. There is some nice slide whistle by Ed. He has a breathier sound on the whistle than either David or I. There is another nice clean ending.
LF:
Golfing Monsters had me, Evan and Ed all present, maybe when Ed came over to overdub on the previous pieces. (Note that the delineation of “bands” was beginning to get a little bit abstract and arbitrary.) On this, Evan makes use of an effects box’s tendency to feedback when fed enough sound before being clicked off to, um, effect. The band name came from something in the sports pages that seemed funny. I reissued this piece on a CD-R and I included the band name in the song title to make it “Golfing Monsters: In the Rough” cause you don’t get the joke of the latter without the former! No overdubs on this one.
“Limp Useless Manhood” (Tender Young Aspen)
EC:
This is the first track on the cassette that reflects the manic absurdity that has so far been WoG’s trademark. The title came from some promotional material for a sexual enhancer of some kind. This is years before Viagra. This track makes me laugh out loud. It starts with Evan’s lead guitar and a lot of gibbering by David and Evan. This piece likely started with bass and percussion and then we added guitar and vocals. There is a terrific gibbering duel between David and Evan. David’s gibbering has a harder, more desperate edge to it than mine. Mine features a lot of cheek-shaking, a technique I learned from emulating Bluto when he shakes himself to clear his head after Popeye has given him a beating. The piece ends with just the bass line and then a little more gibbering unaccompanied. This is the first time I have finally mixed the cassette to “fill” the 45-minute side.
LF:
I believe “Limp Useless Manhood” began as a jam between me on bongos and Evan on bass and then he overdubbed his guitar and we both overdubbed dueling dimwit vocals! That’s probably Evan clapping. At some point I got a new set of bongos that had better resonance than the one I already had, and I think by the sound this may be its debut. The band name, Tender Young Aspen, was taken from a little rhyme the afore mentioned Chris Norden left for Evan when he left to go explore more of Colorado, something like, “Up in the mountain air I’ll be gaspin’, as I hike among the tender young aspen.” I remember Chris observing that aspen trees never seem to get very old…. Oh, and the song title comes from some ad for some pre-Viagra boner fixer upper miracle cure stuff. I believe somewhere in the scrapbook appears the entire line, “Limp useless manhood rises up proud and strong once again!” I remember Evan reporting that there was joking around about this at his workplace and girls there told him he should take this miracle cure stuff himself to which Evan responded that he needed pills to calm himself down to which the girls responded by accusing him of bragging (all in good fun, presumably!)….
Side B
Wild Stuff 8-12-83 The Pots'n Pans Party
Outer Space 7-23-83 Leo's Party
RUNAWAY TRUCKS - IN The Halls Of The Krell
RUNAWAY TRUCKS - Making A Deal With The Druids
RUNAWAY TRUCKS - Loon Poem
JOE COLORADO - Trail Of The Ute
Wild Stuff 8-12-83 The Pots'n Pans Party
Outer Space 7-23-83 Leo's Party
RUNAWAY TRUCKS - IN The Halls Of The Krell
RUNAWAY TRUCKS - Making A Deal With The Druids
RUNAWAY TRUCKS - Loon Poem
JOE COLORADO - Trail Of The Ute
“Wild Stuff” (Pots’n Pans Party)
EC:
This was a 8-12-83 party at the Eldorado Springs house to which people were invited to participate in a jam session using only “pots’n pans”. Of course, we cheated by setting up microphones into a guitar amp with a digital delay to get prodigious echo. Everything on this one is heavily echoed. As the pots’n pans clang along, my voice comes in first, David answers, my voice laughs and hoots. David’s voice challenges my laughing sounds and I give out with a triumphant “yee-hawwwww”. It goes on like this and then fades out. “Sean” is mentioned as a participant on this. I have no idea who that is.
LF:
Ah, the famous and infamous Pots ‘n Pans Party! I can’t listen to this without remembering a review that called this “mass self-indulgence” that was only barely saved by “copious use of echo” or some such. I’m listening to it right now and cracking up over Evan’s vocals! I remember Evan responding to the review by saying that “self-indulgence” was a good thing because it meant we were doing what we wanted! There are vocals by me too, that sound less grandiosely evil like Evan’s and more strained and tortured.
EC:
This was a 8-12-83 party at the Eldorado Springs house to which people were invited to participate in a jam session using only “pots’n pans”. Of course, we cheated by setting up microphones into a guitar amp with a digital delay to get prodigious echo. Everything on this one is heavily echoed. As the pots’n pans clang along, my voice comes in first, David answers, my voice laughs and hoots. David’s voice challenges my laughing sounds and I give out with a triumphant “yee-hawwwww”. It goes on like this and then fades out. “Sean” is mentioned as a participant on this. I have no idea who that is.
LF:
Ah, the famous and infamous Pots ‘n Pans Party! I can’t listen to this without remembering a review that called this “mass self-indulgence” that was only barely saved by “copious use of echo” or some such. I’m listening to it right now and cracking up over Evan’s vocals! I remember Evan responding to the review by saying that “self-indulgence” was a good thing because it meant we were doing what we wanted! There are vocals by me too, that sound less grandiosely evil like Evan’s and more strained and tortured.
“Outer Space” (Leo’s Party)
EC:
This was a 7-23-83 party at Leo’s house in Lyons, Colorado. It starts with Evan’s bass volume-knob effects. Hard to say who’s doing what, but as it goes along you can parse it out. Ed is playing some guitar through the Echoplex, I hear Leo’s talking drum, then I come in with a recorder. Andrea’s violin perks up, then Dena’s cello plays some chords. The bass returns with volume-knob effects. I am likely keeping the bass strapped on as I pick up the recorder. I hear David crying out (a voice in the wilderness?) and someone is playing a toy xylophone. The bass hits a groove to match Ed’s lead guitar. Another groove develops and then we fade it out.
LF:
Leo’s Party continued the tradition of the Dirt Clods to turn a party into a jam session! To some degree, all of our jams were like that, especially the Pots ‘n Pans Party immediately before this. This may have been the first time since Evan moved into Natasha’s house that we brought the show on the party jam road! Of course, Leo was every bit as into jamming as we were, so it wasn’t much of a stretch! For years, Leo wanted pretty much every party at his home to include jamming. The party nature of the situation probably was what made it difficult for Evan to assign credits, but you can hear Ed’s spacey guitar and Leo’s talking drum and that must be Evan on recorder. Then I make some vocal sounds, perhaps sounding a little more exultant and less strained than other times. I hear Leo’s wooden marimba (something that was a little harder to cart around than his bells and whistles), and as I just now turned the tape off to catch up on my description, I realize I was hearing Dena’s cello underneath! But I don’t hear it now when I turn the tape back on, it must be subliminal! Hmm, Evan’s on bass now, no wonder there’s no more recorder! I think I just switched from shaking something to bongos. Now I hear the cello (consciously), following the bass line….
EC:
This was a 7-23-83 party at Leo’s house in Lyons, Colorado. It starts with Evan’s bass volume-knob effects. Hard to say who’s doing what, but as it goes along you can parse it out. Ed is playing some guitar through the Echoplex, I hear Leo’s talking drum, then I come in with a recorder. Andrea’s violin perks up, then Dena’s cello plays some chords. The bass returns with volume-knob effects. I am likely keeping the bass strapped on as I pick up the recorder. I hear David crying out (a voice in the wilderness?) and someone is playing a toy xylophone. The bass hits a groove to match Ed’s lead guitar. Another groove develops and then we fade it out.
LF:
Leo’s Party continued the tradition of the Dirt Clods to turn a party into a jam session! To some degree, all of our jams were like that, especially the Pots ‘n Pans Party immediately before this. This may have been the first time since Evan moved into Natasha’s house that we brought the show on the party jam road! Of course, Leo was every bit as into jamming as we were, so it wasn’t much of a stretch! For years, Leo wanted pretty much every party at his home to include jamming. The party nature of the situation probably was what made it difficult for Evan to assign credits, but you can hear Ed’s spacey guitar and Leo’s talking drum and that must be Evan on recorder. Then I make some vocal sounds, perhaps sounding a little more exultant and less strained than other times. I hear Leo’s wooden marimba (something that was a little harder to cart around than his bells and whistles), and as I just now turned the tape off to catch up on my description, I realize I was hearing Dena’s cello underneath! But I don’t hear it now when I turn the tape back on, it must be subliminal! Hmm, Evan’s on bass now, no wonder there’s no more recorder! I think I just switched from shaking something to bongos. Now I hear the cello (consciously), following the bass line….
“In The Halls Of The Krell” (Runaway Trucks)
EC:
This is from the 7-31-83 live performance at the Brillig Works Coffee house on the Hill in Boulder. The Krell were the alien race whose civilization vanished in the film Forbidden Planet. But they have left a huge dynamo of some kind that powers the mad scientist’s “id” to create the “monster from the id” that bedevils the astronaut explorers. The Krell’s huge dynamo is the “halls” of the Krell. We connected our spacey music with this classic fifties sci-fi movie. It opens with bass volume-knob effects, with Ed playing the lead guitar through the echoplex and David on synth. The bass starts up a groove and there are great spacey sounds from Ed, with nice jangling bells along with it. The groove builds nicely, and then finally collapses. The bass solos a bit and then finds the groove again, then repeats the process. Ed’s lead guitar rises up with Leo’s talking drum and the groove turns into John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”. Nice lead work from Ed throughout. The bass morphs the “Love Supreme” line into a menacing minor key variant. This goes on for a bit and finally collapses into the end.
LF:
Okay, next we move to our second live show and the first with Leo (and third time we had jammed with him altogether, having just met him two weeks prior!). “In The Halls of The Krell” is obviously driven by Evan’s bass. I was making tweating sounds on my synthesizer but trying to keep them in the background. Actually, I put the synth on automatic while I also played intermittent percussion. The song title came from something Leo’s then girlfriend (now wife) Jeanne said the music reminded her of, out of the movie Forbidden Planet. This is a plain old psychedelic jam, done WoG way, with lots of guitar by Ed. Fades out on Ed’s echoplex and a little Leo talking drum….
“Making A Deal With The Druids” (Runaway Trucks)
EC:
This fades in during the applause at the end of “I’m Eighteen”. I start up the ‘druid’ scales immediately. Leo is on talking drum and siren and somebody is on slide whistle. This is the “fully realized” version of the song, a song that could never be played the same way twice, but would always return to the same little chord progression that I had introduced since the last time it had been recorded. After a while, I segue into a Latin-like groove a-la-Santana and Ed plays tasteful leads with effects. This goes on for a bit when I briefly revisit the ‘druid’ weird scales and we move on to Ed’s rhythm with me doing a recorder solo. This segues into the next piece, “Loon Poem”.
LF:
The next piece starts with the end of “I’m 18” and me singing and “and I like it” to a wee smattering of applause. Then Evan reprises his “Making a Deal With The Druids” playing, first meandering and then into the riff, and then meandering again (etc.). That’s all it needs to be that “song”. The rest of us just did whatever, including Leo who probably knew nothing about this “song”. I’m also playing some synthesizer swoops, which I didn’t have access to on the original. Leo on ocarina! At one point I keep playing on my synth the rhythm Evan had set up on his guitar only for Evan to stop playing it while I kept going! For a beat or two, anyway. Evan’s setting the tone and we were all trying to follow. I picked up my flanged guitar and was very happy with how it fit in! (Though I’m not sure you hear more than the flange effect!) For a while Leo is the only one not playing guitar and he keeps a crazy beat on his talking drum. Then Evan breaks down the rhythm and we all spazz out. Lots of twists and turns (all led by Evan)! That’s probably me on gong. I’m trying to make it go up and down in volume like I did with the cymbals during “Hangover’s Suite” on Almost Groovy!. There’s a recorder so that must be Evan while Ed keeps it going on guitar. It sounds like a planned transition next, though I’m sure it wasn’t, as the music mostly drops out save for a low guitar note, and Leo reads his first poem with Walls Of Genius. It was about a loon counting project he was part of once. I only learned after WoG ended quite how much of a passion it was for Leo to read his poetry accompanied by improvised music. Evan vocalizes through an effect. The Brillig Works was a much smaller space than the Left Hand Bookstore, which had become unavailable, maybe it had even closed down at that point (rents were going up in Boulder and it was probably becoming impossible for something other than a high powered business to rent large spaces downtown!). Evan gets back on his acoustic guitar and I’m spazzing flourishes on the bongos, but in a somewhat rhythmic manner. Then the rhythm evens out again, while being led by Ed’s spacey guitar. Where have we heard that before? I suspect that’s Evan on maracas. Leo liked playing his ocarinas in short rhythmic blasts. Now I think it’s just Ed and lots of little percussion thingies played by the rest of us. Did the music even stop since “In the Halls of the Krell” began? Ah, it finally has! “No trespassing by Leo” says Evan, Leo must have been shaking a sign that said that! (Whoops, there’s a space after “Krell”, but what the hell!)
“Loon Poem” (Runaway Trucks)
EC:
Leo recites a poem about loons while we jam along. He takes a talking drum solo and there are nice Ed guitar effects. Ed leads the jam into nice territory here—I am back on the ‘druids’ guitar, the jam continues and I start in with maracas. There are nice bongos (likely David) as Ed sails along and the groove builds. It finally winds down to applause and you hear me announce “No Trespassing, by Leo”… whatever that means!
“Trail of The Ute” (Joe Colorado)
EC:
This is my solo guitar piece, played on an un-amplified 1961 Gibson SG electric guitar. I placed my jaw on the guitar to pick up the vibrations, opened my mouth to amplify them, and then placed a microphone to record it. So you hear some breathy sounds along the way. This works along the same lines as a bone-enhanced hearing aid. The vibration traveled from the guitar through my jaw, out my amplification chamber (mouth) to the microphone.
LF:
Almost like “Little Fyodor”, “Joe Colorado” was a persona that Evan returned to variously, though he occasionally varied it with monikers like Manic Joe Colorado or Wally Bob Colorado. It was his way of being a slightly wacky folky and new icon of the old west. Here, playing his unplugged electric in such a way that you hear his breath and segueing into a Roy Rogers episode finale of rather varied tone. I’ve always wondered how it ends so happy right after someone (who sounds like a good guy!) gets shot! The music turns all ominous too, and then – HAPPY! Maybe I’ll have to watch it someday….
EC:
Then it’s time for “Bonus material” to fill out the 45-minute cassette side. I mix in a clip of Johnny Rocco threatening “I’ll let’em have it!” and then you hear some dialogue from a cheesy t.v. western, “Trading horses all my life”. This segues into an even cheesier cowboy band singing, “Say but ain’t it peaceful out tonight…” This fades out as the tape comes to an end and the machine clicks off with a thunk. Wish I knew who the cheesy cowboys were.
LF:
The relative lack of silliness on Little Victor was not planned. It just happened that way! Certainly the involvement of Claude and Leo moved us toward the jazzy free improv side of things. Plus me and Evan were both in a mode where we were coming up with things on our respective guitars and when we came up with things like that, next thing was we then wanted to record them, without regard to whether they were consistent with any particular notion of what WoG was ostensibly about. So ultimately it was just another expression of spontaneity and freedom, the same stuff that allowed us to be as silly as we wanted to be, too!
-------
Little Victor Meets Violent Vince Liner Notes:
EC:
There are a lot of musicians on this tape and a lot of “special thanks”. First of all, there is Claude Martz playing the bass clarinet. It’s quite likely that Claude was an associate of Joel Haertling and the fledgling Architects Office, a group that did not yet exist. Claude lived close by and in addition to his clarinet, possessed some kind of a synthesizer.
Andrea DiNapoli appears again at Leo’s Party. She had already appeared with Walls of Genius on The Many Faces Of Mr. Morocco and Almost Groovy! . Leo Goya has moved up from our first meeting (Christmas in July, Almost Groovy!) to hosting improvisational music at his place in Lyons, Colorado. Also at Leo’s Party is Kiki Fulker, the daughter of a University of Colorado professor. At the time, I did not know her last name, so she is credited and thanked simply as “Kiki”. I had a passing romantic interest in Kiki until I found out that she was Andrea DiNapoli’s live-in girlfriend. I wasn’t interested in getting involved in bisexual activity, plus I thought “why would she be interested in me if she’s a lesbian?” Andrea’s response to this was that she thought David and I were gay partners and that if Kiki were to get involved with a man, it would be nice if he were a “nice” man, like me. Oh well. Dena Zocher (I misspelled her name again in these notes) and Ed were also at the party, plus “a host of Leo’s friends”. Certainly Leo’s long-time partner, Jeanne Sztrelewicz would have been there and I’ve thanked her in these notes as “Jean at Leo’s”. This shows that I did not know either of them very well at the time. I also thank Leo’s mother Bea, who I met around this time because she was visiting Jeanne & Leo at their home in Lyons, Colorado. Bea remarked to me how odd it was that all of Jim’s friends called him Leo. The story of how Leo’s name evolved is told in the notes to Almost Groovy!
“The entire crazed crew of fans at T.C.A.” are thanked. This is the Trust Company of America, my employer at the time. Kathy Juhl is singled out, but I’m not exactly sure why. She used to have parties out at her family’s property northeast of town, beside a large pond called “Juhl’s Lake” but Walls of Genius never played those parties. Scott Childress is also thanked, another fellow employee at TCA. The TCA employee who should have been thanked and was not is Patti Young. Patti and I still see each other occasionally and she remembers these times fondly. Unfortunately no photo of her from those days existed for the scrapbook, but there is an abstract cartoon of her in the scrapbook, “Patti’s slip was showing”.
Willie McGurn is thanked, as is David Stiles and Chris Norden. All three were Evan and David’s TKE fraternity brothers from University of Virginia. Willie was in town with “Big Mack”, an old-time kind of blues-jazz piano player for whom he was working at the time. David Stiles is listed in the reel boxes as “Dr. High In Action”, but I don’t recall why. Chris Norden had already spent some time in Colorado camped out in my garage at Rich Schaffer’s house the previous summer and was back again, visiting at Eldorado Springs. He is currently an English professor teaching at Lewis And Clark College in Lewiston, Idaho.
We thanked “Own The Whole World”, an underground zine. I don’t recall what “SPEX” was, probably another underground zine. We also thank Brian Ladd and Julie Frith of the Psyclones, another underground band at the time from Eureka, California. We thank the “whole demented bunch at Objekt”, which, in retrospect, was probably just Brian and Julie. Objekt was their version of a “label” as well as a zine.
LF:
Of note in the liner notes are thanks to Brian Ladd and Julie Frith of, you guessed it, Ladd-Frith, probably cause they reviewed our cassettes in Objekt Magazine plus Evan had a nice correspondence going with Brian. Kiki was a friend of Andrea’s, I do believe. Buddy booked us at the Brillig. Willie McGurn was another friend and frater from college, like Chris Norden and David Stiles, who were visiting.
EC:
We thanked “Buddy at the Brillig”. He was the guy who booked us to play at the Brilligworks Coffee house. We also thanked Brad Carton and The Lepers. We thanked “all of Leo’s pals”, whoever they were, people likely hanging out at the party where we set up the recorder. We thanked Ken Stock and D&E Exchange. Ken was “Space”, our repair guy, and “D&E” was the pawn shop downstairs from his repair shop (currently the “Frisk” boutique).
The notes concluded with “this time around no thanks Asha!” This reflected the now completely broken relationship between me and my landlady at Eldorado Springs, Natasha Brown. By the time this tape was being released, I had essentially been kicked out of the Eldorado house. Natasha accused me of living in a pig-sty. I guarantee you she had never seen such a thing… She called my parents on the telephone and told them this, too. She had come back to Eldorado Springs before the end-of-the-month, “early” so to speak, and I was still in the process of getting ready to move out. It wasn’t so bad. I had lived in a fraternity house and had even inherited a room there that required disinfection, so I knew what a pig-sty looked like and this was not it.
LF:
And then there’s the “no thanks Asha,” a kiss off to former landlady and former friend Natasha, who smashed Evan’s alarm clock and yelled at us to go back to NY (a barely couched reference to our being Jewish) when we had the audacity to take Evan’s turntable which she wanted to keep as collateral to get Evan to come back and clean better. Place looked fine to me, and that’s just not, um, kosher behavior, to hold someone’s property like that when they’re moving out. When Evan told me she had done that, I told him to distract her in the kitchen, and he started talking to her there and I simply took the turntable out of her closet and put it in his car. We were just backing up to skadoodle out of there when she ran out screaming at us. A relationship that didn’t end well….
EC:
Most of the music on Little Victor was made in July and August of 1983. David and I moved into the Hall of Genius in north downtown that September. Both David and Scott Childress helped me move out of Natasha’s house. Chris Norden, who had house-sat for me that summer, nicknamed Natasha “Sna-tatcha”. I recall her smashing my alarm clock on the front stoop as I finally got out of there and hollering at David and I, “why don’t you Jews go back to New York where you came from.” That was the last time I ever saw or heard of Natasha. Scott Childress made one last mercy trip to the house on my behalf to see if anything had been left in the madness. He was strangely intrigued by Natasha.
EC:
This is from the 7-31-83 live performance at the Brillig Works Coffee house on the Hill in Boulder. The Krell were the alien race whose civilization vanished in the film Forbidden Planet. But they have left a huge dynamo of some kind that powers the mad scientist’s “id” to create the “monster from the id” that bedevils the astronaut explorers. The Krell’s huge dynamo is the “halls” of the Krell. We connected our spacey music with this classic fifties sci-fi movie. It opens with bass volume-knob effects, with Ed playing the lead guitar through the echoplex and David on synth. The bass starts up a groove and there are great spacey sounds from Ed, with nice jangling bells along with it. The groove builds nicely, and then finally collapses. The bass solos a bit and then finds the groove again, then repeats the process. Ed’s lead guitar rises up with Leo’s talking drum and the groove turns into John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”. Nice lead work from Ed throughout. The bass morphs the “Love Supreme” line into a menacing minor key variant. This goes on for a bit and finally collapses into the end.
LF:
Okay, next we move to our second live show and the first with Leo (and third time we had jammed with him altogether, having just met him two weeks prior!). “In The Halls of The Krell” is obviously driven by Evan’s bass. I was making tweating sounds on my synthesizer but trying to keep them in the background. Actually, I put the synth on automatic while I also played intermittent percussion. The song title came from something Leo’s then girlfriend (now wife) Jeanne said the music reminded her of, out of the movie Forbidden Planet. This is a plain old psychedelic jam, done WoG way, with lots of guitar by Ed. Fades out on Ed’s echoplex and a little Leo talking drum….
“Making A Deal With The Druids” (Runaway Trucks)
EC:
This fades in during the applause at the end of “I’m Eighteen”. I start up the ‘druid’ scales immediately. Leo is on talking drum and siren and somebody is on slide whistle. This is the “fully realized” version of the song, a song that could never be played the same way twice, but would always return to the same little chord progression that I had introduced since the last time it had been recorded. After a while, I segue into a Latin-like groove a-la-Santana and Ed plays tasteful leads with effects. This goes on for a bit when I briefly revisit the ‘druid’ weird scales and we move on to Ed’s rhythm with me doing a recorder solo. This segues into the next piece, “Loon Poem”.
LF:
The next piece starts with the end of “I’m 18” and me singing and “and I like it” to a wee smattering of applause. Then Evan reprises his “Making a Deal With The Druids” playing, first meandering and then into the riff, and then meandering again (etc.). That’s all it needs to be that “song”. The rest of us just did whatever, including Leo who probably knew nothing about this “song”. I’m also playing some synthesizer swoops, which I didn’t have access to on the original. Leo on ocarina! At one point I keep playing on my synth the rhythm Evan had set up on his guitar only for Evan to stop playing it while I kept going! For a beat or two, anyway. Evan’s setting the tone and we were all trying to follow. I picked up my flanged guitar and was very happy with how it fit in! (Though I’m not sure you hear more than the flange effect!) For a while Leo is the only one not playing guitar and he keeps a crazy beat on his talking drum. Then Evan breaks down the rhythm and we all spazz out. Lots of twists and turns (all led by Evan)! That’s probably me on gong. I’m trying to make it go up and down in volume like I did with the cymbals during “Hangover’s Suite” on Almost Groovy!. There’s a recorder so that must be Evan while Ed keeps it going on guitar. It sounds like a planned transition next, though I’m sure it wasn’t, as the music mostly drops out save for a low guitar note, and Leo reads his first poem with Walls Of Genius. It was about a loon counting project he was part of once. I only learned after WoG ended quite how much of a passion it was for Leo to read his poetry accompanied by improvised music. Evan vocalizes through an effect. The Brillig Works was a much smaller space than the Left Hand Bookstore, which had become unavailable, maybe it had even closed down at that point (rents were going up in Boulder and it was probably becoming impossible for something other than a high powered business to rent large spaces downtown!). Evan gets back on his acoustic guitar and I’m spazzing flourishes on the bongos, but in a somewhat rhythmic manner. Then the rhythm evens out again, while being led by Ed’s spacey guitar. Where have we heard that before? I suspect that’s Evan on maracas. Leo liked playing his ocarinas in short rhythmic blasts. Now I think it’s just Ed and lots of little percussion thingies played by the rest of us. Did the music even stop since “In the Halls of the Krell” began? Ah, it finally has! “No trespassing by Leo” says Evan, Leo must have been shaking a sign that said that! (Whoops, there’s a space after “Krell”, but what the hell!)
“Loon Poem” (Runaway Trucks)
EC:
Leo recites a poem about loons while we jam along. He takes a talking drum solo and there are nice Ed guitar effects. Ed leads the jam into nice territory here—I am back on the ‘druids’ guitar, the jam continues and I start in with maracas. There are nice bongos (likely David) as Ed sails along and the groove builds. It finally winds down to applause and you hear me announce “No Trespassing, by Leo”… whatever that means!
“Trail of The Ute” (Joe Colorado)
EC:
This is my solo guitar piece, played on an un-amplified 1961 Gibson SG electric guitar. I placed my jaw on the guitar to pick up the vibrations, opened my mouth to amplify them, and then placed a microphone to record it. So you hear some breathy sounds along the way. This works along the same lines as a bone-enhanced hearing aid. The vibration traveled from the guitar through my jaw, out my amplification chamber (mouth) to the microphone.
LF:
Almost like “Little Fyodor”, “Joe Colorado” was a persona that Evan returned to variously, though he occasionally varied it with monikers like Manic Joe Colorado or Wally Bob Colorado. It was his way of being a slightly wacky folky and new icon of the old west. Here, playing his unplugged electric in such a way that you hear his breath and segueing into a Roy Rogers episode finale of rather varied tone. I’ve always wondered how it ends so happy right after someone (who sounds like a good guy!) gets shot! The music turns all ominous too, and then – HAPPY! Maybe I’ll have to watch it someday….
EC:
Then it’s time for “Bonus material” to fill out the 45-minute cassette side. I mix in a clip of Johnny Rocco threatening “I’ll let’em have it!” and then you hear some dialogue from a cheesy t.v. western, “Trading horses all my life”. This segues into an even cheesier cowboy band singing, “Say but ain’t it peaceful out tonight…” This fades out as the tape comes to an end and the machine clicks off with a thunk. Wish I knew who the cheesy cowboys were.
LF:
The relative lack of silliness on Little Victor was not planned. It just happened that way! Certainly the involvement of Claude and Leo moved us toward the jazzy free improv side of things. Plus me and Evan were both in a mode where we were coming up with things on our respective guitars and when we came up with things like that, next thing was we then wanted to record them, without regard to whether they were consistent with any particular notion of what WoG was ostensibly about. So ultimately it was just another expression of spontaneity and freedom, the same stuff that allowed us to be as silly as we wanted to be, too!
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Little Victor Meets Violent Vince Liner Notes:
EC:
There are a lot of musicians on this tape and a lot of “special thanks”. First of all, there is Claude Martz playing the bass clarinet. It’s quite likely that Claude was an associate of Joel Haertling and the fledgling Architects Office, a group that did not yet exist. Claude lived close by and in addition to his clarinet, possessed some kind of a synthesizer.
Andrea DiNapoli appears again at Leo’s Party. She had already appeared with Walls of Genius on The Many Faces Of Mr. Morocco and Almost Groovy! . Leo Goya has moved up from our first meeting (Christmas in July, Almost Groovy!) to hosting improvisational music at his place in Lyons, Colorado. Also at Leo’s Party is Kiki Fulker, the daughter of a University of Colorado professor. At the time, I did not know her last name, so she is credited and thanked simply as “Kiki”. I had a passing romantic interest in Kiki until I found out that she was Andrea DiNapoli’s live-in girlfriend. I wasn’t interested in getting involved in bisexual activity, plus I thought “why would she be interested in me if she’s a lesbian?” Andrea’s response to this was that she thought David and I were gay partners and that if Kiki were to get involved with a man, it would be nice if he were a “nice” man, like me. Oh well. Dena Zocher (I misspelled her name again in these notes) and Ed were also at the party, plus “a host of Leo’s friends”. Certainly Leo’s long-time partner, Jeanne Sztrelewicz would have been there and I’ve thanked her in these notes as “Jean at Leo’s”. This shows that I did not know either of them very well at the time. I also thank Leo’s mother Bea, who I met around this time because she was visiting Jeanne & Leo at their home in Lyons, Colorado. Bea remarked to me how odd it was that all of Jim’s friends called him Leo. The story of how Leo’s name evolved is told in the notes to Almost Groovy!
“The entire crazed crew of fans at T.C.A.” are thanked. This is the Trust Company of America, my employer at the time. Kathy Juhl is singled out, but I’m not exactly sure why. She used to have parties out at her family’s property northeast of town, beside a large pond called “Juhl’s Lake” but Walls of Genius never played those parties. Scott Childress is also thanked, another fellow employee at TCA. The TCA employee who should have been thanked and was not is Patti Young. Patti and I still see each other occasionally and she remembers these times fondly. Unfortunately no photo of her from those days existed for the scrapbook, but there is an abstract cartoon of her in the scrapbook, “Patti’s slip was showing”.
Willie McGurn is thanked, as is David Stiles and Chris Norden. All three were Evan and David’s TKE fraternity brothers from University of Virginia. Willie was in town with “Big Mack”, an old-time kind of blues-jazz piano player for whom he was working at the time. David Stiles is listed in the reel boxes as “Dr. High In Action”, but I don’t recall why. Chris Norden had already spent some time in Colorado camped out in my garage at Rich Schaffer’s house the previous summer and was back again, visiting at Eldorado Springs. He is currently an English professor teaching at Lewis And Clark College in Lewiston, Idaho.
We thanked “Own The Whole World”, an underground zine. I don’t recall what “SPEX” was, probably another underground zine. We also thank Brian Ladd and Julie Frith of the Psyclones, another underground band at the time from Eureka, California. We thank the “whole demented bunch at Objekt”, which, in retrospect, was probably just Brian and Julie. Objekt was their version of a “label” as well as a zine.
LF:
Of note in the liner notes are thanks to Brian Ladd and Julie Frith of, you guessed it, Ladd-Frith, probably cause they reviewed our cassettes in Objekt Magazine plus Evan had a nice correspondence going with Brian. Kiki was a friend of Andrea’s, I do believe. Buddy booked us at the Brillig. Willie McGurn was another friend and frater from college, like Chris Norden and David Stiles, who were visiting.
EC:
We thanked “Buddy at the Brillig”. He was the guy who booked us to play at the Brilligworks Coffee house. We also thanked Brad Carton and The Lepers. We thanked “all of Leo’s pals”, whoever they were, people likely hanging out at the party where we set up the recorder. We thanked Ken Stock and D&E Exchange. Ken was “Space”, our repair guy, and “D&E” was the pawn shop downstairs from his repair shop (currently the “Frisk” boutique).
The notes concluded with “this time around no thanks Asha!” This reflected the now completely broken relationship between me and my landlady at Eldorado Springs, Natasha Brown. By the time this tape was being released, I had essentially been kicked out of the Eldorado house. Natasha accused me of living in a pig-sty. I guarantee you she had never seen such a thing… She called my parents on the telephone and told them this, too. She had come back to Eldorado Springs before the end-of-the-month, “early” so to speak, and I was still in the process of getting ready to move out. It wasn’t so bad. I had lived in a fraternity house and had even inherited a room there that required disinfection, so I knew what a pig-sty looked like and this was not it.
LF:
And then there’s the “no thanks Asha,” a kiss off to former landlady and former friend Natasha, who smashed Evan’s alarm clock and yelled at us to go back to NY (a barely couched reference to our being Jewish) when we had the audacity to take Evan’s turntable which she wanted to keep as collateral to get Evan to come back and clean better. Place looked fine to me, and that’s just not, um, kosher behavior, to hold someone’s property like that when they’re moving out. When Evan told me she had done that, I told him to distract her in the kitchen, and he started talking to her there and I simply took the turntable out of her closet and put it in his car. We were just backing up to skadoodle out of there when she ran out screaming at us. A relationship that didn’t end well….
EC:
Most of the music on Little Victor was made in July and August of 1983. David and I moved into the Hall of Genius in north downtown that September. Both David and Scott Childress helped me move out of Natasha’s house. Chris Norden, who had house-sat for me that summer, nicknamed Natasha “Sna-tatcha”. I recall her smashing my alarm clock on the front stoop as I finally got out of there and hollering at David and I, “why don’t you Jews go back to New York where you came from.” That was the last time I ever saw or heard of Natasha. Scott Childress made one last mercy trip to the house on my behalf to see if anything had been left in the madness. He was strangely intrigued by Natasha.
catalog listing from the second WoG catalog, the Brand of the Bozo
review in Objekt zine, reprinted in the third WoG catalog, Give the Gift of Genius
review in Objekt zine, reprinted in the third WoG catalog, Give the Gift of Genius
below: review from warning zine, as re-printed in the fourth WoG catalog, The Face Of The Fiend (1984)
