WoG 0010 - The Guilt Vs. Time Money Complex
a 90 minute cassette officially attributed to multiple bands all of which were later considered the "band" Walls Of Genius.
JOHNNY PUREHEART (Evan Cantor) - recorded Thursday, November 17, 1983
PYRO MINDS (David Lichtenberg, EC, Melissa Mojica) - Sunday, October 2, 1983
GO FOR IT - selections from KGNU's Go For It program - July-Nov. 1983, mixed 11-22-83
YOU CAN DIGEST A ROCK (DL, EC, Ed Fowler) - Friday, October 7, 1983, on 4-track reel to reel, at the Hall Of Genius, 2473 20th Street, Boulder.
TONS OF FUN (DL, EC, EF, Scott Childress) - Autumn 1983 ?
Evan Cantor:
The album title is existential, alluding to the timeless conundrum of having plenty of time but little money, or vice versa, plenty of money but little time to use it. As poor working stiffs, we were class-conscious and we saw the Reagan years as a not-so-creeping development of fascistic corporatism. I think events in the ensuing 30 years confirm that conclusion. The title is sufficiently unclear, but hopefully makes the listener “wonder” about guilt and money and time...
This was a cassette that we “discontinued” after a while. It is likely that we thought it wasn’t as consistently strong as it should have been. In retrospect, it seems fine, with a lot of strong material. My guess is that I felt that the "Go For It" collage, while it cracks me up to this day, struck me as a kind of “you had to have been there” thing to fully appreciate. I may be wrong as the fun we were having is self-evident in the recording. Also, the Pyro Minds tracks are strangely minimal and I’m not sure why we didn’t overdub more with them. This is consistent with Cultural Sabotage, however, where we were letting listeners know that this was achieved without overdubbing. In other words, it was all “live”. We were soon not to be overly concerned with that.
“Johnny Pureheart” is me (Evan Cantor), overdubbed. I used the Pureheart name instead of Joe Colorado because the track didn’t seem like a “Joe Colorado” track. “Pyro Minds” sounds like one of my band names. Both Ed and I were childhood pyromaniacs, don’t know about David’s firecracker past. At one point in my mischievous youth, I had figured out how to blow little holes in the pavement with home-made incendiary devices that I made by mixing up saltpeter into gunpowder. Those were different times! Go For It was Davide Andrea’s uncensored call-in radio show on KGNU. “You Can Digest A Rock” was likely suggested by advertisements at the time for Euell Gibbons’ television show, in which Euell’s voice intones, “even some parts of the pine tree are edible”. At the time, we had never heard of piñons (pinyon nuts), so we thought this was pretty funny. The track here was an “outtake” from Cultural Sabotage. “Tons Of Fun” is self-explanatory, probably one of my names. One of the tracks (“Lights”) is an out-take from Cultural Sabotage, but the version of “Night In Tunisia” is a real highlight of the session.
If there was any official cover art for this cassette, I don’t have it. Fifteen copies of this title went out into the world. The notes were hand-printed and on the flip side was a collage of phrases, essentially a cut-up poem featuring another photo of Ronald Reagan with the legend typed in “PEACE thru SUICIDE”.
JOHNNY PUREHEART (Evan Cantor) - recorded Thursday, November 17, 1983
PYRO MINDS (David Lichtenberg, EC, Melissa Mojica) - Sunday, October 2, 1983
GO FOR IT - selections from KGNU's Go For It program - July-Nov. 1983, mixed 11-22-83
YOU CAN DIGEST A ROCK (DL, EC, Ed Fowler) - Friday, October 7, 1983, on 4-track reel to reel, at the Hall Of Genius, 2473 20th Street, Boulder.
TONS OF FUN (DL, EC, EF, Scott Childress) - Autumn 1983 ?
Evan Cantor:
The album title is existential, alluding to the timeless conundrum of having plenty of time but little money, or vice versa, plenty of money but little time to use it. As poor working stiffs, we were class-conscious and we saw the Reagan years as a not-so-creeping development of fascistic corporatism. I think events in the ensuing 30 years confirm that conclusion. The title is sufficiently unclear, but hopefully makes the listener “wonder” about guilt and money and time...
This was a cassette that we “discontinued” after a while. It is likely that we thought it wasn’t as consistently strong as it should have been. In retrospect, it seems fine, with a lot of strong material. My guess is that I felt that the "Go For It" collage, while it cracks me up to this day, struck me as a kind of “you had to have been there” thing to fully appreciate. I may be wrong as the fun we were having is self-evident in the recording. Also, the Pyro Minds tracks are strangely minimal and I’m not sure why we didn’t overdub more with them. This is consistent with Cultural Sabotage, however, where we were letting listeners know that this was achieved without overdubbing. In other words, it was all “live”. We were soon not to be overly concerned with that.
“Johnny Pureheart” is me (Evan Cantor), overdubbed. I used the Pureheart name instead of Joe Colorado because the track didn’t seem like a “Joe Colorado” track. “Pyro Minds” sounds like one of my band names. Both Ed and I were childhood pyromaniacs, don’t know about David’s firecracker past. At one point in my mischievous youth, I had figured out how to blow little holes in the pavement with home-made incendiary devices that I made by mixing up saltpeter into gunpowder. Those were different times! Go For It was Davide Andrea’s uncensored call-in radio show on KGNU. “You Can Digest A Rock” was likely suggested by advertisements at the time for Euell Gibbons’ television show, in which Euell’s voice intones, “even some parts of the pine tree are edible”. At the time, we had never heard of piñons (pinyon nuts), so we thought this was pretty funny. The track here was an “outtake” from Cultural Sabotage. “Tons Of Fun” is self-explanatory, probably one of my names. One of the tracks (“Lights”) is an out-take from Cultural Sabotage, but the version of “Night In Tunisia” is a real highlight of the session.
If there was any official cover art for this cassette, I don’t have it. Fifteen copies of this title went out into the world. The notes were hand-printed and on the flip side was a collage of phrases, essentially a cut-up poem featuring another photo of Ronald Reagan with the legend typed in “PEACE thru SUICIDE”.
Side 1
JOHNNY PUREHEART - Without Limbs
PYRO MINDS - Black Hole In The Head
PYRO MINDS - Rainbow Curves
PYRO MINDS - Kristin Called
JOHNNY PUREHEART - Without Limbs
PYRO MINDS - Black Hole In The Head
PYRO MINDS - Rainbow Curves
PYRO MINDS - Kristin Called
“Without Limbs” (Johnny Pureheart)
EC:
This was a cover of 100 Flowers. My junior high pal, John Jones, had been in a seminal L.A. punk band called The Urinals which developed into a post-punk project, 100 Flowers. I liked their music and asked permission to do a cover version. I had to solicit the lyrics from John and actually asked permission to do a cover of the song. This is a combined folk-music psychedelic post-punk approach. I like the fuzzy feedback-y guitar and the cabasa jumping from speaker to speaker in the stereo mix. My vocals are very punk oriented on this.
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
“Without Limbs” was all Evan. Well, except for the composition. It was originally a song by an L.A. band called 100 Flowers. Evan had been high school friends in northern Virginia with one of their members, John Talley-Jones, who moved to L.A. and started a band called The Urinals who were part of the original wave of L.A. punk that was documented in the movie, The Decline of Western Civilization, though they didn’t make it into that flick (but one of their instruments did!). Evan told me they changed their name to 100 Flowers to make it easier to get gigs (per Wikipedia they’ve since gotten back together under their original name!). Anyway, it was Evan who took a shine to this song and decided to make a personal overdub project out of it, combining folk and punk in his own idiosyncratic way, as he says himself in his catalog overview of the tape. When we went to L.A. a year and a half later for our ill-fated Anti-Club gig, we stayed overnight at the home of John Talley-Jones and his wife and their turtles. Nice folks!!
“Black Hole In The Head” (Pyro Minds)
EC:
This was probably titled by David, as it features three verses of his existential verse. It starts with my rhythm guitar line, almost like a bass-line, with lots of nice percussion going on. David had obtained a primitive drum-machine by this time and I had a set of Rototoms, so the two combined to sound pretty good. David’s lyric features a lot of ‘clutching’, ‘quagmire’, ‘ultimate nightmare’, ‘shock and heartbreak.’ He invokes the listener to “obey the command!” It’s a strong piece. The lyrics, as clear as they are, were likely overdubbed.
LF:
The Pyro Minds continued our guest star tradition with the inclusion of Melissa Mojica, whom I’d first met during my time in “the Charlie band,” what I called the ongoing efforts of our friend Charlie Verrette to form a band around his lead vocals and lyrics that eventually saw concrete realization under the name of Doll Parts, who later moved to San Francisco and released an LP called Carnival At Sea -- and then broke up! (Well actually they made one more cassette after the LP, albeit without Charlie, except for lyrics.) Anyway, before I got involved with WoG, I occupied myself musically by trying to play guitar in the Charlie band. And during at least part of that short time, Melissa was there too, probably playing keyboards. I got let go before long cause Charlie wanted a guitarist to be able to play ambient atmospherics (and probably leads) à la Bill Nelson of Be-Bop Deluxe, about as opposite as you could get to my chunky whole chord attempts to rock out. I wasn’t prepared for the musical developments he was championing! (Human League, Heaven 17, etc.) At least Charlie convinced me to get the flanger I ended up using plenty of in WoG, my first effects pedal since my adolescent era fuzz-wah. By the time Charlie left town in the late 80’s, it occurred to me that he was probably the best friend I’d made in Colorado (he was also roommates with me for a while in the former Hall Of Genius after Evan had moved out). Me and Evan both got to know Melissa through Charlie, and I seem to remember the title of the cassette coming out of a conversation with her in which she was lamenting some of the trade-offs she was facing in her life (though the final wording was surely Evan's)….
Charlie, BTW, still lives in the Bay area and his current project is a metal band called Scorn Pole!
So anyway, Melissa came over to the Hall Of Genius one day (hey this was our second tape to be largely recorded there – forgot to say something about that for our first one there, Cultural Sabotage!) with a drum machine and a little electronic keyboard and maybe some additional percussion – and we jammed! Classic WoG MO!! (A mandolin was brought, too, according to the reel box notes, though I don’t remember it!)
I think the first of the three Pyro Minds tracks, “Black Hole In The Head,” was the only one we overdubbed on. I remembered the title as coming from the prose I wrote for it, but I see from the reel box notes that we seemed to have the title right away. Listening to my words now, I recognize how much their style owes to Evan’s poetry, including the stuff he gave to me to vocalize for WoG, though perhaps even more overtly gloomy in outlook? Resemblances aside, I was trying to reflect both my own personal sense of lowliness and what seemed to me the pathetic condition of the world at large as well as trying to draw connections between the two as possible within a largely stream of consciousness rant that also includes a (hopefully) health dose of mockery of the whole mess, including of myself…. I don’t know if Melissa did more than operate the drum machine on this one (though I believe that included midstream additions). Evan played the rad fuzz guitar and I played synthesizer, all in the original jam, that is. When it came time to overdub (sometime after Melissa was gone, most likely a whole ‘nother day – it’s funny how we never dated the overdub sessions, maybe it would have just gotten too involved and confusing?), I wanted Evan to play bass, but once he picked up his bass, he said all he could think to do was to double the guitar line he had already played, which would just be boring and redundant, so he said he’d rather play his rototom drums. I actually had a bass line in mind that I thought would be a good compliment to the guitar riff, but timidity took over and I swallowed my tongue. But what the hell, he plays some real cool stuff on the rototoms, so maybe I didn’t say anything cause I could tell that’s what he really wanted to do! When I wasn’t reciting my spiel on my overdub track, I also played the scratchy part of that little Jamaican drum I first played (and described) on “America Futura.”
“Rainbow Curves” (Pyro Minds)
EC:
Rainbow Curve is the name of an overlook on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. Melissa Mojica is on the synth while David and I are doing percussion. Notice how gentle Melissa’s approach on the synthesizer is compared to David. It morphs into a melodic theme from Melissa. This piece is strangely minimal. Why we didn’t overdub more into it, I cannot say.
LF:
So again in keeping with tradition, on the next jam, Evan and I switched instruments, I to his rototoms and he to Melissa’s drum machine. I believe Melissa stuck to her own keyboard, though maybe she (also?) played my synthesizer? This is kind of her moment in the limelight as her keyboard takes the lead. She sounds a little hesitant at times, but I think that contributed to the piece’s nice feeling of peaceful quirkiness. The title “Rainbow Curves” was my idea, a reference to an overlook in Rocky Mountain National Park, about 40 miles northwest of Boulder, called Rainbow Curve, only I made it plural because I thought the piece snaked around into many curves (and/or maybe I was confused?)….
“Kristin Called” (Pyro Minds)
EC:
This title comes from the session being interrupted by a phone call for Melissa from Kristin. Evan is playing a minor key theme on the electric guitar throughout (Em>Fm Ebm>Em) that has occasional turnarounds in a major key. In the middle, Evan devolves into a loud feedback solo, using the flanger. There is a nice synth solo, likely David at the keyboard creating a wild knob-twirling sound. We return to the main theme and then end, fading out the drum machine, which would keep playing until the end of time if we let it.
LF:
I believe that in some later catalog or promotional materials, “Kristin Called” was hailed as the first WoG piece to be called “good music,” which was based on the surprise our friend Davide Andrea (who mostly liked European artsy stuff) expressed when he heard the piece and, yes, found it to be actual good music, not just some kind of joke or slapped together balderdash! Evan played guitar, I played my synthesizer and Melissa played her drum machine as well as her little keyboard (sticking to our own equipment on this one!). A little ways into the portion of the jam that made the cut for release, the music mostly quiets down but then picks back up. This was due to a phone call from Melissa’s girlfriend, Kristin! We could have edited the piece to start after that point (since it was edited in midstream anyway), but I guess we liked some of what went on before that point too much to exclude it, plus we probably liked the absurdity of a jam being interrupted in such a manner! (I seem to remember being able to hear the phone ringing in the background, though I wasn’t able to make it out just now….) I like how Evan carries the piece with his rhythmic chords and yet it still works when he goes into noise mode before returning to the chords. From a 2004 review at the Aural Innovations website: “’Kristin Called’ is a 13 minute raw rockin' basement jam with lots of strange, spaced out and mucho fun electronics. I like the oddball combination of funky electric guitar and synth weirdness. And after about nine minutes the guitar decides that the synth is outdoing it and goes into feedback laden acid freakout land... and the two are finally in harmony.” What could I possibly add to that? Well, other than that it was in our living room, not a basement….
EC:
This was a cover of 100 Flowers. My junior high pal, John Jones, had been in a seminal L.A. punk band called The Urinals which developed into a post-punk project, 100 Flowers. I liked their music and asked permission to do a cover version. I had to solicit the lyrics from John and actually asked permission to do a cover of the song. This is a combined folk-music psychedelic post-punk approach. I like the fuzzy feedback-y guitar and the cabasa jumping from speaker to speaker in the stereo mix. My vocals are very punk oriented on this.
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
“Without Limbs” was all Evan. Well, except for the composition. It was originally a song by an L.A. band called 100 Flowers. Evan had been high school friends in northern Virginia with one of their members, John Talley-Jones, who moved to L.A. and started a band called The Urinals who were part of the original wave of L.A. punk that was documented in the movie, The Decline of Western Civilization, though they didn’t make it into that flick (but one of their instruments did!). Evan told me they changed their name to 100 Flowers to make it easier to get gigs (per Wikipedia they’ve since gotten back together under their original name!). Anyway, it was Evan who took a shine to this song and decided to make a personal overdub project out of it, combining folk and punk in his own idiosyncratic way, as he says himself in his catalog overview of the tape. When we went to L.A. a year and a half later for our ill-fated Anti-Club gig, we stayed overnight at the home of John Talley-Jones and his wife and their turtles. Nice folks!!
“Black Hole In The Head” (Pyro Minds)
EC:
This was probably titled by David, as it features three verses of his existential verse. It starts with my rhythm guitar line, almost like a bass-line, with lots of nice percussion going on. David had obtained a primitive drum-machine by this time and I had a set of Rototoms, so the two combined to sound pretty good. David’s lyric features a lot of ‘clutching’, ‘quagmire’, ‘ultimate nightmare’, ‘shock and heartbreak.’ He invokes the listener to “obey the command!” It’s a strong piece. The lyrics, as clear as they are, were likely overdubbed.
LF:
The Pyro Minds continued our guest star tradition with the inclusion of Melissa Mojica, whom I’d first met during my time in “the Charlie band,” what I called the ongoing efforts of our friend Charlie Verrette to form a band around his lead vocals and lyrics that eventually saw concrete realization under the name of Doll Parts, who later moved to San Francisco and released an LP called Carnival At Sea -- and then broke up! (Well actually they made one more cassette after the LP, albeit without Charlie, except for lyrics.) Anyway, before I got involved with WoG, I occupied myself musically by trying to play guitar in the Charlie band. And during at least part of that short time, Melissa was there too, probably playing keyboards. I got let go before long cause Charlie wanted a guitarist to be able to play ambient atmospherics (and probably leads) à la Bill Nelson of Be-Bop Deluxe, about as opposite as you could get to my chunky whole chord attempts to rock out. I wasn’t prepared for the musical developments he was championing! (Human League, Heaven 17, etc.) At least Charlie convinced me to get the flanger I ended up using plenty of in WoG, my first effects pedal since my adolescent era fuzz-wah. By the time Charlie left town in the late 80’s, it occurred to me that he was probably the best friend I’d made in Colorado (he was also roommates with me for a while in the former Hall Of Genius after Evan had moved out). Me and Evan both got to know Melissa through Charlie, and I seem to remember the title of the cassette coming out of a conversation with her in which she was lamenting some of the trade-offs she was facing in her life (though the final wording was surely Evan's)….
Charlie, BTW, still lives in the Bay area and his current project is a metal band called Scorn Pole!
So anyway, Melissa came over to the Hall Of Genius one day (hey this was our second tape to be largely recorded there – forgot to say something about that for our first one there, Cultural Sabotage!) with a drum machine and a little electronic keyboard and maybe some additional percussion – and we jammed! Classic WoG MO!! (A mandolin was brought, too, according to the reel box notes, though I don’t remember it!)
I think the first of the three Pyro Minds tracks, “Black Hole In The Head,” was the only one we overdubbed on. I remembered the title as coming from the prose I wrote for it, but I see from the reel box notes that we seemed to have the title right away. Listening to my words now, I recognize how much their style owes to Evan’s poetry, including the stuff he gave to me to vocalize for WoG, though perhaps even more overtly gloomy in outlook? Resemblances aside, I was trying to reflect both my own personal sense of lowliness and what seemed to me the pathetic condition of the world at large as well as trying to draw connections between the two as possible within a largely stream of consciousness rant that also includes a (hopefully) health dose of mockery of the whole mess, including of myself…. I don’t know if Melissa did more than operate the drum machine on this one (though I believe that included midstream additions). Evan played the rad fuzz guitar and I played synthesizer, all in the original jam, that is. When it came time to overdub (sometime after Melissa was gone, most likely a whole ‘nother day – it’s funny how we never dated the overdub sessions, maybe it would have just gotten too involved and confusing?), I wanted Evan to play bass, but once he picked up his bass, he said all he could think to do was to double the guitar line he had already played, which would just be boring and redundant, so he said he’d rather play his rototom drums. I actually had a bass line in mind that I thought would be a good compliment to the guitar riff, but timidity took over and I swallowed my tongue. But what the hell, he plays some real cool stuff on the rototoms, so maybe I didn’t say anything cause I could tell that’s what he really wanted to do! When I wasn’t reciting my spiel on my overdub track, I also played the scratchy part of that little Jamaican drum I first played (and described) on “America Futura.”
“Rainbow Curves” (Pyro Minds)
EC:
Rainbow Curve is the name of an overlook on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. Melissa Mojica is on the synth while David and I are doing percussion. Notice how gentle Melissa’s approach on the synthesizer is compared to David. It morphs into a melodic theme from Melissa. This piece is strangely minimal. Why we didn’t overdub more into it, I cannot say.
LF:
So again in keeping with tradition, on the next jam, Evan and I switched instruments, I to his rototoms and he to Melissa’s drum machine. I believe Melissa stuck to her own keyboard, though maybe she (also?) played my synthesizer? This is kind of her moment in the limelight as her keyboard takes the lead. She sounds a little hesitant at times, but I think that contributed to the piece’s nice feeling of peaceful quirkiness. The title “Rainbow Curves” was my idea, a reference to an overlook in Rocky Mountain National Park, about 40 miles northwest of Boulder, called Rainbow Curve, only I made it plural because I thought the piece snaked around into many curves (and/or maybe I was confused?)….
“Kristin Called” (Pyro Minds)
EC:
This title comes from the session being interrupted by a phone call for Melissa from Kristin. Evan is playing a minor key theme on the electric guitar throughout (Em>Fm Ebm>Em) that has occasional turnarounds in a major key. In the middle, Evan devolves into a loud feedback solo, using the flanger. There is a nice synth solo, likely David at the keyboard creating a wild knob-twirling sound. We return to the main theme and then end, fading out the drum machine, which would keep playing until the end of time if we let it.
LF:
I believe that in some later catalog or promotional materials, “Kristin Called” was hailed as the first WoG piece to be called “good music,” which was based on the surprise our friend Davide Andrea (who mostly liked European artsy stuff) expressed when he heard the piece and, yes, found it to be actual good music, not just some kind of joke or slapped together balderdash! Evan played guitar, I played my synthesizer and Melissa played her drum machine as well as her little keyboard (sticking to our own equipment on this one!). A little ways into the portion of the jam that made the cut for release, the music mostly quiets down but then picks back up. This was due to a phone call from Melissa’s girlfriend, Kristin! We could have edited the piece to start after that point (since it was edited in midstream anyway), but I guess we liked some of what went on before that point too much to exclude it, plus we probably liked the absurdity of a jam being interrupted in such a manner! (I seem to remember being able to hear the phone ringing in the background, though I wasn’t able to make it out just now….) I like how Evan carries the piece with his rhythmic chords and yet it still works when he goes into noise mode before returning to the chords. From a 2004 review at the Aural Innovations website: “’Kristin Called’ is a 13 minute raw rockin' basement jam with lots of strange, spaced out and mucho fun electronics. I like the oddball combination of funky electric guitar and synth weirdness. And after about nine minutes the guitar decides that the synth is outdoing it and goes into feedback laden acid freakout land... and the two are finally in harmony.” What could I possibly add to that? Well, other than that it was in our living room, not a basement….
Side 2
GO FOR IT
YOU CAN DIGEST A ROCK - Foxy Lady
TONS OF FUN - Lights
TONS OF FUN - A Night In Tunisia
GO FOR IT
YOU CAN DIGEST A ROCK - Foxy Lady
TONS OF FUN - Lights
TONS OF FUN - A Night In Tunisia
“Go For It”--
LF:
Ah, “Go For It”! I first described this phenomenon for a song on Cultural Sabotage, but to recap, Davide (mentioned also just above) hosted a Friday night radio show on public radio station KGNU on which he would let people call up and say or do whatever they wanted till they chose to hang up. He’d say, “Go for it,” so the caller would know he or she was on the air, then it was all up to the caller, with (mostly) no interference or input from Davide. Maybe there were a few times over the (I think) several months that this show was on the air that Davide hung up on someone for one reason or another, but this was very rare, and the call would have to be pretty damn extreme for that! As you might guess (and you can hear!), many calls did violate FCC language rules, and it’s no surprise that the show got pulled eventually. In fact it’s actually kind of amazing that it lasted as long as it did! (Davide has since done plenty more radio on KGNU, just not with the direct call-in feature!) I’d been listening to this show on my own for a little while and maybe had called in a couple of times and didn’t really think that much about it before Evan caught wind of it – and then, kaboom! Evan really got into it!! He started making up characters that he could bring back repeatedly, like in a comedy variety show like Laugh-In or Hee-Haw or Saturday Night! He urged me on too, and I did some of the same. We started to recognize other people who would return to the show repeatedly themselves, most particularly Helen Broderick, the sexy poetry lady. Eventually a party was thrown for the Go For It participants and listeners, which was where we first met Frank Zygmunt, who became a lifelong friend and contributed some instruments to WoG as a result of his dumpster diving ways…. Anyway, we decided to make a collage based on our favorite bits from several of the shows that we participated in and recorded and put it on one of our Walls of Genius tapes! I remember Davide’s reaction was that he thought there was too much of us (i.e., me and Evan and cohorts) in our collage until he realized that that’s what it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be about us. I didn’t bother to tell him that we didn’t think of it that way but rather thought we were being pretty open about just including whatever and whoever caught our fancy from those shows we had recordings for, but I guess it would only be human nature if we were most taken by ourselves. That said, I think we did become a major factor in the show and any objective compendium of the show would have to include a healthy dose of our antics. But then, who wants to be objective with their art, anyway? Well it is what it is and it includes a lot of us (especially at the beginning and end) but it was definitely not just us…..
The first bit on the tape is Evan with I think Scott Childress in the background. Then you hear Davide hiccupping and then describing the show in his own words and finishing up his little intro with a reference to a famous gaffe by then Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. The next bit after that is me, and then there’s Evan in his character of Roy Watkins from Mud Flat, Wyoming. I think that’s college friend Chris Norden in the background. Later you hear us banging things and screaming. It occurs to me that this is almost like the Beatles’ Abbey Road medley, it gave us the chance to do lots of little bits and string them together! Ah, the first caller that wasn’t us is Helen Broderick, though only questioning where all the cowboys went (Roy?) rather than reading one of her poems. A few bits after that there’s a guy who seems to be making fun of Deadheads, saying something about mushrooms and one-eyed trouser snakes, and that’s the very first person on the collage who we never had any idea who it was. While Davide generally never interacted directly with the callers, he would sometimes make reference to calls in his own comments between calls or with what he played, such as following one of our “voice of God” bits with Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag.” That “This is the voice of God!” bit was Evan speaking through the bullhorn he used on “Abandon Ship” along with me and Chris Norden conversing with “God”. Ah, then we hear from Helen again, this time reading one of her poems, which we later found out were composed cut-up style, with all the text coming from newspaper text (a style I believe Evan was inspired by Helen to emulate in his artwork on the insert that came with the tape, on the opposite side of the liner notes). After the initial flurry of WoG bits, you do hear a bunch of other people. Although Davide rarely if ever cut anyone off (intentionally), sometimes he would pod up the music to try to mildly shove someone off the air.
Okay, I just heard a couple of anonymous callers who had evidently heard Evan as Roy Watkins multiple times previously and make some challenging comments to him! And then we hear Roy himself reading an eee-rotic poem to Helen. Later, Evan sings a song that gets cut off for some reason and Davide suggests he’d made a mistake and then I call up and tell him it was all a mistake and he should just climb up his mother’s cunt and go to sleep! You hear Davide laughing at that. Y’know, I find myself wondering if South Park’s Towelly character was inspired by me asking God if He wants to smoke a joint! Hear the similarity? Well, I realize I’m probably just being an egotistical big-mouthed jerk…. I still occasionally recall the words of that guy saying we have so many Vietnams right now and that’s our future – he was pretty prophetic! He was another caller we didn’t know at all, followed by another. And then there’s Scott Childress taking a solo! I think Davide was taking some flak from station management for all the profanity that made it onto his show (despite his request to people to be nice!) and I think that’s why I called in to melodramatically pledge my support to him (with Evan in the background taking the very tongue-in-cheek contra position) and then Davide made some reference to explaining it to us later, which concludes the entire collage….
One more thing to mention about the “Go For It” collage. We did it all without permission. I’m pretty sure we didn’t even ask Davide’s permission before we released the tape, and as you could have deduced on your own, we certainly didn’t ask the permission of any of the callers whose identities we didn’t know and never learned. We usually gave out free copies of our tapes to anyone who participated on them, but of course we weren’t able to do even that with these anonymous folks (certainly we gave a copy to Davide since we knew him!). One might very well question the ethics of such an undertaking, but I think any “harm” done is purely on a very abstract level (since these people can’t be identified by anyone else either, at least not without some sophisticated voice recognition software!) and likely minimal to boot. It was a rare and very unique cultural artifact and I’m glad and proud that we documented it. Even if we may have tilted the participation representation towards ourselves!!
LF:
Ah, “Go For It”! I first described this phenomenon for a song on Cultural Sabotage, but to recap, Davide (mentioned also just above) hosted a Friday night radio show on public radio station KGNU on which he would let people call up and say or do whatever they wanted till they chose to hang up. He’d say, “Go for it,” so the caller would know he or she was on the air, then it was all up to the caller, with (mostly) no interference or input from Davide. Maybe there were a few times over the (I think) several months that this show was on the air that Davide hung up on someone for one reason or another, but this was very rare, and the call would have to be pretty damn extreme for that! As you might guess (and you can hear!), many calls did violate FCC language rules, and it’s no surprise that the show got pulled eventually. In fact it’s actually kind of amazing that it lasted as long as it did! (Davide has since done plenty more radio on KGNU, just not with the direct call-in feature!) I’d been listening to this show on my own for a little while and maybe had called in a couple of times and didn’t really think that much about it before Evan caught wind of it – and then, kaboom! Evan really got into it!! He started making up characters that he could bring back repeatedly, like in a comedy variety show like Laugh-In or Hee-Haw or Saturday Night! He urged me on too, and I did some of the same. We started to recognize other people who would return to the show repeatedly themselves, most particularly Helen Broderick, the sexy poetry lady. Eventually a party was thrown for the Go For It participants and listeners, which was where we first met Frank Zygmunt, who became a lifelong friend and contributed some instruments to WoG as a result of his dumpster diving ways…. Anyway, we decided to make a collage based on our favorite bits from several of the shows that we participated in and recorded and put it on one of our Walls of Genius tapes! I remember Davide’s reaction was that he thought there was too much of us (i.e., me and Evan and cohorts) in our collage until he realized that that’s what it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be about us. I didn’t bother to tell him that we didn’t think of it that way but rather thought we were being pretty open about just including whatever and whoever caught our fancy from those shows we had recordings for, but I guess it would only be human nature if we were most taken by ourselves. That said, I think we did become a major factor in the show and any objective compendium of the show would have to include a healthy dose of our antics. But then, who wants to be objective with their art, anyway? Well it is what it is and it includes a lot of us (especially at the beginning and end) but it was definitely not just us…..
The first bit on the tape is Evan with I think Scott Childress in the background. Then you hear Davide hiccupping and then describing the show in his own words and finishing up his little intro with a reference to a famous gaffe by then Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. The next bit after that is me, and then there’s Evan in his character of Roy Watkins from Mud Flat, Wyoming. I think that’s college friend Chris Norden in the background. Later you hear us banging things and screaming. It occurs to me that this is almost like the Beatles’ Abbey Road medley, it gave us the chance to do lots of little bits and string them together! Ah, the first caller that wasn’t us is Helen Broderick, though only questioning where all the cowboys went (Roy?) rather than reading one of her poems. A few bits after that there’s a guy who seems to be making fun of Deadheads, saying something about mushrooms and one-eyed trouser snakes, and that’s the very first person on the collage who we never had any idea who it was. While Davide generally never interacted directly with the callers, he would sometimes make reference to calls in his own comments between calls or with what he played, such as following one of our “voice of God” bits with Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag.” That “This is the voice of God!” bit was Evan speaking through the bullhorn he used on “Abandon Ship” along with me and Chris Norden conversing with “God”. Ah, then we hear from Helen again, this time reading one of her poems, which we later found out were composed cut-up style, with all the text coming from newspaper text (a style I believe Evan was inspired by Helen to emulate in his artwork on the insert that came with the tape, on the opposite side of the liner notes). After the initial flurry of WoG bits, you do hear a bunch of other people. Although Davide rarely if ever cut anyone off (intentionally), sometimes he would pod up the music to try to mildly shove someone off the air.
Okay, I just heard a couple of anonymous callers who had evidently heard Evan as Roy Watkins multiple times previously and make some challenging comments to him! And then we hear Roy himself reading an eee-rotic poem to Helen. Later, Evan sings a song that gets cut off for some reason and Davide suggests he’d made a mistake and then I call up and tell him it was all a mistake and he should just climb up his mother’s cunt and go to sleep! You hear Davide laughing at that. Y’know, I find myself wondering if South Park’s Towelly character was inspired by me asking God if He wants to smoke a joint! Hear the similarity? Well, I realize I’m probably just being an egotistical big-mouthed jerk…. I still occasionally recall the words of that guy saying we have so many Vietnams right now and that’s our future – he was pretty prophetic! He was another caller we didn’t know at all, followed by another. And then there’s Scott Childress taking a solo! I think Davide was taking some flak from station management for all the profanity that made it onto his show (despite his request to people to be nice!) and I think that’s why I called in to melodramatically pledge my support to him (with Evan in the background taking the very tongue-in-cheek contra position) and then Davide made some reference to explaining it to us later, which concludes the entire collage….
One more thing to mention about the “Go For It” collage. We did it all without permission. I’m pretty sure we didn’t even ask Davide’s permission before we released the tape, and as you could have deduced on your own, we certainly didn’t ask the permission of any of the callers whose identities we didn’t know and never learned. We usually gave out free copies of our tapes to anyone who participated on them, but of course we weren’t able to do even that with these anonymous folks (certainly we gave a copy to Davide since we knew him!). One might very well question the ethics of such an undertaking, but I think any “harm” done is purely on a very abstract level (since these people can’t be identified by anyone else either, at least not without some sophisticated voice recognition software!) and likely minimal to boot. It was a rare and very unique cultural artifact and I’m glad and proud that we documented it. Even if we may have tilted the participation representation towards ourselves!!
EC:
This is a collage mixed from seven different recordings of the Go For It program. The call-in’s are as follows:
- Evan and Scott discuss fraternity life, reading from TKE literature. Davide hiccups and makes some mention of sobriety.
- Davide explains how the show works, “direct democracy” and “complete freedom”.
- David, using what I called his ‘Smedley’ voice, says he is “so bored” he thinks he’ll start a nuclear war. Evan is laughing in the background.
- Roy Watkins (Evan) discusses “Amurrikin music”, says he finds Joni Mitchell kind of dull while Chris Norden, on the bullhorn in the background, goes on about a “parking lot”, referencing a Joni Mitchell tune.
- Evan on the bullhorn: “Achtung! you hippies clear the area!”
- Evan calling “from Grand Junction”, a west-slope Colorado town, requesting Judas Priest.
- Evan singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in a faux-autistic maniacal voice.
- Bells ringing with gong, Evan and David wailing, screaming, laughter and monkey hooting.
- Veronica (Helen Broderick) speaks about “phone in rodeo” (as opposed to phone-in radio).
- David barks “This oughta straighten you out! Put this in your brain and shake it around!”
- Roy Watkins discusses Randy Newman’s song “Short People” and concludes that “you don’t have to be an American to be full of shit, but it sure helps!”
- an anonymous voice mentions ‘one eyed trouser snakes’
- an anonymous voice says this doesn’t even ‘come close to Judas Priest’.
- David and Chris discuss God, with Evan on the bullhorn announcing “This is the Voice of God”.
- Helen Broderick reads a poem about a woman’s sense of body.
- an anonymous voice says that “James Kirk is getting slaughtered”
- Evan tries to wake up Smedley (David), who is dreaming of breasts.
- an anonymous voice discusses cow mutilation.
- an anonymous voice discusses sheep fornication and veneral anthrax.
- an anonymous voice accuses all the callers of being dicks and on dope, then devolves into seeing spiders on the wall.
- David and Evan mooing and bleating through a digital delay.
- an anonymous voice invites “the guy from Wyoming” (Roy) to meet him for a homosexual rendezvous.
- an anonymous voice declares that the “guy from Wyoming” is probably a Jew from Boston.
- Roy Watkins, “the guy from Wyoming”, announces himself from Mud Flats, Wyoming, traveling from Rancho de Taos, New Mexico, asks after the weird poetry lady and then reads his “erotic poem” for Veronica. You can hear me cracking up during this, I couldn’t stop laughing. Too much pot? Just enough? Your call!
- Evan starts performing “I Call Your Name”, autistic-style, but gets cut off. Davide asks if that was a mistake?
- David barks “Everything you’ve ever done is a mistake!”
- Chris and David speak once again with God, Evan on the bull-horn. God invokes them, “You will get drunk!”
- an anonymous voice, maybe Evan or Chris Norden doing a female interpretation, offers her cherry up to God.
- an anonymous voice says that all the egotistic bigmouth jerks have deep fried brains.
- Roy discusses deep fried brains.
- an anonymous voice says something about impressing Jodi Foster (a la John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin).
- Scott Childress reads a short poem.
- an anonymous voice says he’s seen people croak, he’s pushed them out the window himself.
- David and Evan, a lot of growling and moaning.
- Smedley (David) talks about supporting Davide and the radio station while Evan is hollering in the background, “Davide is a communist!”
- Davide replays a bit of the last piece and says “Oh groan…” and then bids the listeners “good night”.
“Foxy Lady” (You Can Digest A Rock)
EC:
Ed plays the Hendrix riff, with Evan and David singing. It finishes with Evan declaring “Excuse me while I kiss this guy!”, the famous misinterpretation of Hendrix’s lyrics from “Purple Haze”.
LF:
The rest of the tape is more material from two sessions first heard on Cultural Sabotage. It was probably inevitable that we did “Foxy Lady”, being that Jimi was Ed’s biggest guitar hero and idol (not that he was alone in that regard!). I believe we overdubbed some or all of the vocals. There’s some weird undulation in the sound that kept our mania from coming across clearly, IMO….
“Lights” (Tons Of Fun)
EC:
Evan leads an impromptu chant of “lights, lights, lights” with Scott Childress and David gibbering.
LF:
I think someone was turning the lights on and off at some point, leading to either Evan or Scott to chant “Lights”, giving that jam at Ed’s house its name.
“A Night In Tunisia” (Tons of Fun)
EC:
This was a jazz tune that I had played the rhythm guitar for in Virginia (1980) with The Mystic Knights of The Sea, a duo with me on rhythm guitar and Kevin Landes (of Wash DC punk bands The French Are From Hell and The Young Turds) on saxophone. The sheet music was in “The Real Book”, one of a series of jazz fakebooks originally produced only as Xeroxes by music students at the Berklee School of Music. Here I take the chords and break them up until the song is unrecognizable until the very end, when I play the bonafide sequence of the chord progression. We never once played the actual melody of the Dizzy Gillespie song. There was a jazz show on KGNU called “Night In Tunisia” which always opened with a version of that song and, one night, our version was featured, which probably confounded a lot of listeners. But it works as an off-the-wall improvisation.
LF:
I had no idea Evan was playing “A Night In Tunisia” at the time we recorded our ostensible version of that. Even at the time these two Tons Of Fun pieces were cut onto the master copy of this cassette, I had no clear impression of them as being separate entities, one a jam and the other a “cover”. I was just playing weird noises on my synthesizer as the others strummed and picked and banged! By the time Evan brought this song out again for a live performance on KGNU, I was a little more clued in to what he was doing! It’s pretty funny how the Unsound reviewer says neither this nor “Foxy Lady” resemble the originals. At least “Foxy Lady” somewhat resembled the original! And it all ends with a sigh….
This is a collage mixed from seven different recordings of the Go For It program. The call-in’s are as follows:
- Evan and Scott discuss fraternity life, reading from TKE literature. Davide hiccups and makes some mention of sobriety.
- Davide explains how the show works, “direct democracy” and “complete freedom”.
- David, using what I called his ‘Smedley’ voice, says he is “so bored” he thinks he’ll start a nuclear war. Evan is laughing in the background.
- Roy Watkins (Evan) discusses “Amurrikin music”, says he finds Joni Mitchell kind of dull while Chris Norden, on the bullhorn in the background, goes on about a “parking lot”, referencing a Joni Mitchell tune.
- Evan on the bullhorn: “Achtung! you hippies clear the area!”
- Evan calling “from Grand Junction”, a west-slope Colorado town, requesting Judas Priest.
- Evan singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in a faux-autistic maniacal voice.
- Bells ringing with gong, Evan and David wailing, screaming, laughter and monkey hooting.
- Veronica (Helen Broderick) speaks about “phone in rodeo” (as opposed to phone-in radio).
- David barks “This oughta straighten you out! Put this in your brain and shake it around!”
- Roy Watkins discusses Randy Newman’s song “Short People” and concludes that “you don’t have to be an American to be full of shit, but it sure helps!”
- an anonymous voice mentions ‘one eyed trouser snakes’
- an anonymous voice says this doesn’t even ‘come close to Judas Priest’.
- David and Chris discuss God, with Evan on the bullhorn announcing “This is the Voice of God”.
- Helen Broderick reads a poem about a woman’s sense of body.
- an anonymous voice says that “James Kirk is getting slaughtered”
- Evan tries to wake up Smedley (David), who is dreaming of breasts.
- an anonymous voice discusses cow mutilation.
- an anonymous voice discusses sheep fornication and veneral anthrax.
- an anonymous voice accuses all the callers of being dicks and on dope, then devolves into seeing spiders on the wall.
- David and Evan mooing and bleating through a digital delay.
- an anonymous voice invites “the guy from Wyoming” (Roy) to meet him for a homosexual rendezvous.
- an anonymous voice declares that the “guy from Wyoming” is probably a Jew from Boston.
- Roy Watkins, “the guy from Wyoming”, announces himself from Mud Flats, Wyoming, traveling from Rancho de Taos, New Mexico, asks after the weird poetry lady and then reads his “erotic poem” for Veronica. You can hear me cracking up during this, I couldn’t stop laughing. Too much pot? Just enough? Your call!
- Evan starts performing “I Call Your Name”, autistic-style, but gets cut off. Davide asks if that was a mistake?
- David barks “Everything you’ve ever done is a mistake!”
- Chris and David speak once again with God, Evan on the bull-horn. God invokes them, “You will get drunk!”
- an anonymous voice, maybe Evan or Chris Norden doing a female interpretation, offers her cherry up to God.
- an anonymous voice says that all the egotistic bigmouth jerks have deep fried brains.
- Roy discusses deep fried brains.
- an anonymous voice says something about impressing Jodi Foster (a la John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin).
- Scott Childress reads a short poem.
- an anonymous voice says he’s seen people croak, he’s pushed them out the window himself.
- David and Evan, a lot of growling and moaning.
- Smedley (David) talks about supporting Davide and the radio station while Evan is hollering in the background, “Davide is a communist!”
- Davide replays a bit of the last piece and says “Oh groan…” and then bids the listeners “good night”.
“Foxy Lady” (You Can Digest A Rock)
EC:
Ed plays the Hendrix riff, with Evan and David singing. It finishes with Evan declaring “Excuse me while I kiss this guy!”, the famous misinterpretation of Hendrix’s lyrics from “Purple Haze”.
LF:
The rest of the tape is more material from two sessions first heard on Cultural Sabotage. It was probably inevitable that we did “Foxy Lady”, being that Jimi was Ed’s biggest guitar hero and idol (not that he was alone in that regard!). I believe we overdubbed some or all of the vocals. There’s some weird undulation in the sound that kept our mania from coming across clearly, IMO….
“Lights” (Tons Of Fun)
EC:
Evan leads an impromptu chant of “lights, lights, lights” with Scott Childress and David gibbering.
LF:
I think someone was turning the lights on and off at some point, leading to either Evan or Scott to chant “Lights”, giving that jam at Ed’s house its name.
“A Night In Tunisia” (Tons of Fun)
EC:
This was a jazz tune that I had played the rhythm guitar for in Virginia (1980) with The Mystic Knights of The Sea, a duo with me on rhythm guitar and Kevin Landes (of Wash DC punk bands The French Are From Hell and The Young Turds) on saxophone. The sheet music was in “The Real Book”, one of a series of jazz fakebooks originally produced only as Xeroxes by music students at the Berklee School of Music. Here I take the chords and break them up until the song is unrecognizable until the very end, when I play the bonafide sequence of the chord progression. We never once played the actual melody of the Dizzy Gillespie song. There was a jazz show on KGNU called “Night In Tunisia” which always opened with a version of that song and, one night, our version was featured, which probably confounded a lot of listeners. But it works as an off-the-wall improvisation.
LF:
I had no idea Evan was playing “A Night In Tunisia” at the time we recorded our ostensible version of that. Even at the time these two Tons Of Fun pieces were cut onto the master copy of this cassette, I had no clear impression of them as being separate entities, one a jam and the other a “cover”. I was just playing weird noises on my synthesizer as the others strummed and picked and banged! By the time Evan brought this song out again for a live performance on KGNU, I was a little more clued in to what he was doing! It’s pretty funny how the Unsound reviewer says neither this nor “Foxy Lady” resemble the originals. At least “Foxy Lady” somewhat resembled the original! And it all ends with a sigh….
above from the third Walls Of Genius catalog, Give The Gift Of Genius
below a review from Unsound magazine, as re-printed in the fourth WoG catalog, The Face Of The Fiend
below a review from Unsound magazine, as re-printed in the fourth WoG catalog, The Face Of The Fiend
EC:
We thanked yet more people than ever before on this one:
Jeff & Andrea DiNapoli—Andrea had been participating over the course of the last several releases. Jeff was likely her husband.
Chris Norden—fraternity brother of David and I, house-sitting in Eldorado Springs that summer and hanging out.
Dave Styles (sp? Stiles?)-- fraternity brother of David and I, hanging out at Eldorado Springs.
Scott Childress—a co-worker of mine at Trust Company of America who was hanging out, playing percussion and sometimes vocalizing.
Lisa Mother Earth—was thanked for the “3 Eds and Edna”, the publicity photo of Ed, Dena, Evan and David (which was on the cover of Little Victor Meets Violent Vince). Lisa was probably one of Dena’s friends.
Melissa Mojica—a great mystery for me—perhaps a friend of David’s? She was a major participant on the Pyro Minds session.
Joel Haertling—future leader of Architects Office.
Diana—I think she was Joel’s girlfriend.
Charlie—Charles Verrette, of Doll Parts, musical contemporaries in the growing underground scene in Boulder.
Lynn Ablondi—Charlie’s girlfriend and a player in Doll Parts.
Marsha Wooley, Roger Boraas, Glenn Swanson—all members of Ed’s old Telethon Party group, participants in Dirt Clods and Chariots of Beer.
Paul from Illinois—likely a friend of the Telethon Party people
Dena Zocher—the one, the only!
Paul Metters—a dj at KGNU
Davide Andrea—a dj at KGNU
Helen—Helen Broderick, a local feminist poet, the voice of “Veronica” the cowgirl on Davide’s "Go-For-It" program.
Schaun Gilson—a dj at KGNU
The entire sick bunch at KGNU—self-explanatory
Judith Buchanan & Fergus Stone—more KGNU dj’s. Judith was a music director (I believe) and Fergus ran a bluegrass show. Thanking them was likely a way to embarrass them or to mock them, but I recall Fergus as a nice fellow.
John Talley-Jones—a junior-high-school buddy of mine from Fairfax, Virginia, leader of L.A. punk bands The Urinals and 100 Flowers. We had both attended Luther Jackson Junior High, perhaps the first or second year after this once all-black high school had been integrated.
100 Flowers—John Talley-Jones’ post-punk band in L.A. (after The Urinals)
George Parsons—don’t know
Al Margolis—the Sound of Pig cassette distributor and leading light of If, Bwana, a contemporary underground band.
Bob Forward—an underground participant
Roy—“Roy Watkins” was a satiric character that I (Evan Cantor) invented for Davide’s "Go-For-It" program.
Brian Ladd—of the Psyclones, Ladd-Frith Music and Objekt fanzine, from Eureka, CA.
Bill Bored—don’t know
Ricky Starbuster—I remember this name, but I don’t recall who he was.
Kiki Fulker—Andrea DiNapoli’s girlfriend, an occasional WoG participant
LF:
Of the many people thanked, I’d like to call out Schaun (sp?) Gilson, who was another radio personality at KGNU who at some point did an interview with me and Evan as part of a series about contemporary musicians. The others interviewed were primarily of the “serious” or “modern classical” ilk. Schaun (sp?) very much liked that we were so much less serious than the others. He has since died of a hepatitis infection…. Fergus Stone was the head honcho at KGNU when we first arrived in Boulder and was the one who first put me on the air! Al Margolis ran a cassette label called “Sound Of Pig” and was the first to put us on a compilation (the tape was Slave Ant Raid and our chosen song was “Amerika Futura”). Bill Bored ran a punk zine in Alaska called Warning, one issue of which included an interview with us. Ricky Starbuster was a fellow hometaper who made music with his Prophet 5 synthesizer while his 10 year old niece vocalized improvised lyrics! His music was so lush that we were surprised that he liked ours, but he did and we quoted him for some of the promotional material for Cultural Sabotage. Brian Ladd was also a fellow hometaper (Psyclones) and also put out the zine, Objekt, in which he often reviewed our tapes. I think Bob Forward was another hometaper, but I forget what he did! Lynn Ablondi was Charlie Verrette’s girlfriend and keyboardist when I first met Charlie. In retrosepect, I’m surprised Melissa was ever his keyboardist in light of Lynn, but I guess he and Lynn had their ups and downs….
We thanked yet more people than ever before on this one:
Jeff & Andrea DiNapoli—Andrea had been participating over the course of the last several releases. Jeff was likely her husband.
Chris Norden—fraternity brother of David and I, house-sitting in Eldorado Springs that summer and hanging out.
Dave Styles (sp? Stiles?)-- fraternity brother of David and I, hanging out at Eldorado Springs.
Scott Childress—a co-worker of mine at Trust Company of America who was hanging out, playing percussion and sometimes vocalizing.
Lisa Mother Earth—was thanked for the “3 Eds and Edna”, the publicity photo of Ed, Dena, Evan and David (which was on the cover of Little Victor Meets Violent Vince). Lisa was probably one of Dena’s friends.
Melissa Mojica—a great mystery for me—perhaps a friend of David’s? She was a major participant on the Pyro Minds session.
Joel Haertling—future leader of Architects Office.
Diana—I think she was Joel’s girlfriend.
Charlie—Charles Verrette, of Doll Parts, musical contemporaries in the growing underground scene in Boulder.
Lynn Ablondi—Charlie’s girlfriend and a player in Doll Parts.
Marsha Wooley, Roger Boraas, Glenn Swanson—all members of Ed’s old Telethon Party group, participants in Dirt Clods and Chariots of Beer.
Paul from Illinois—likely a friend of the Telethon Party people
Dena Zocher—the one, the only!
Paul Metters—a dj at KGNU
Davide Andrea—a dj at KGNU
Helen—Helen Broderick, a local feminist poet, the voice of “Veronica” the cowgirl on Davide’s "Go-For-It" program.
Schaun Gilson—a dj at KGNU
The entire sick bunch at KGNU—self-explanatory
Judith Buchanan & Fergus Stone—more KGNU dj’s. Judith was a music director (I believe) and Fergus ran a bluegrass show. Thanking them was likely a way to embarrass them or to mock them, but I recall Fergus as a nice fellow.
John Talley-Jones—a junior-high-school buddy of mine from Fairfax, Virginia, leader of L.A. punk bands The Urinals and 100 Flowers. We had both attended Luther Jackson Junior High, perhaps the first or second year after this once all-black high school had been integrated.
100 Flowers—John Talley-Jones’ post-punk band in L.A. (after The Urinals)
George Parsons—don’t know
Al Margolis—the Sound of Pig cassette distributor and leading light of If, Bwana, a contemporary underground band.
Bob Forward—an underground participant
Roy—“Roy Watkins” was a satiric character that I (Evan Cantor) invented for Davide’s "Go-For-It" program.
Brian Ladd—of the Psyclones, Ladd-Frith Music and Objekt fanzine, from Eureka, CA.
Bill Bored—don’t know
Ricky Starbuster—I remember this name, but I don’t recall who he was.
Kiki Fulker—Andrea DiNapoli’s girlfriend, an occasional WoG participant
LF:
Of the many people thanked, I’d like to call out Schaun (sp?) Gilson, who was another radio personality at KGNU who at some point did an interview with me and Evan as part of a series about contemporary musicians. The others interviewed were primarily of the “serious” or “modern classical” ilk. Schaun (sp?) very much liked that we were so much less serious than the others. He has since died of a hepatitis infection…. Fergus Stone was the head honcho at KGNU when we first arrived in Boulder and was the one who first put me on the air! Al Margolis ran a cassette label called “Sound Of Pig” and was the first to put us on a compilation (the tape was Slave Ant Raid and our chosen song was “Amerika Futura”). Bill Bored ran a punk zine in Alaska called Warning, one issue of which included an interview with us. Ricky Starbuster was a fellow hometaper who made music with his Prophet 5 synthesizer while his 10 year old niece vocalized improvised lyrics! His music was so lush that we were surprised that he liked ours, but he did and we quoted him for some of the promotional material for Cultural Sabotage. Brian Ladd was also a fellow hometaper (Psyclones) and also put out the zine, Objekt, in which he often reviewed our tapes. I think Bob Forward was another hometaper, but I forget what he did! Lynn Ablondi was Charlie Verrette’s girlfriend and keyboardist when I first met Charlie. In retrosepect, I’m surprised Melissa was ever his keyboardist in light of Lynn, but I guess he and Lynn had their ups and downs….