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WoG 0017 - Walls Of Genius - Crazed To The Core
A 90 minute tape officially attributed to the band
"Walls Of Genius" at the time of its release. Buy a CD-R version on Little Fyodor's website (click on Order Stuff!!! tab) Crazed To The Core is now available in streaming audio and as a download in your choice of multiple formats at Bandcamp. |
Evan Cantor:
In the wake of Ludovico Treatment, we followed up with a return to Walls Of Genius’ “other” side, namely maniacal beer-fueled shenanigans. The title says it all. By this time we were ready to indulge the unhinged side of our psyches.
No alternate band names were listed, but you hear Evan’s voice at the very opening of the album announcing “Road Damage, take 4”, which indicates that the song was recorded at a session called Road Damage and that we actually worked it out a little bit before getting a full take. Later in the album, you hear an announcer saying “Let’s hear it for the Pus-Tones” after our (David & Evan) performance of “Green River” at the Festival Of Pain.
I made the cover with large stick-on letters on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of black paper, later reduced in a photocopy machine. I printed it on colored paper so that the letters looked like they were colored, not white. We put no notes or thanks on this insert, only the song titles without any credits at all.
Little Fyodor:
“Wow, your ‘bad music’ is getting good!” I heard that quoted from Marsha Wooley, who seemed to previously have had mixed feelings about us since our humble beginnings, despite being an occasional participant. And she was right! Things really came together and clicked for us to an unprecedented degree on Crazed To The Core, which became a yet new big step forward albeit ironically while also being a simultaneous 90 degree turn back to our pre-Ludovico primitive approach to all out gonzo craziness! This could have almost been Cultural Sabotage II packed as it was with irreverent covers and jams (though there were a few originals, too). I’m very proud of this release, and it’s one of my two or three favorite WoG’s. What happened? Well, I’m not sure….
Maybe we were really getting better? At being bad?!? A major chunk of the tape comes from one crazed and inspired (and drunken!) night, the Road Damage session. I see for myself that this took place on March 3, 1984. We had played with Architects Office at least once already, back in December, and would play with them at another live show 3 nights later. Evan dated “Lingering Household Odours” (whatever facet of it that was) March 16, 13 days later. Road Damage was in the middle of all this! (The crazed Bug Smashers session came just 5 days after our first AO show!) Aural Innovations described what he heard on Crazed as “late night, drunken antics”; “How did he know it was late night?” remarked Ed, with a mischievous little smile.... We were obviously having a good time of it! It’s easy to see Crazed as a reaction to Ludovico, and by the time of its subsequent release to Ludovico, it definitely felt that way. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had learned of Kent Hotchkiss’s rejection of Ludovico by the time we put out Crazed, but either way, I think we were eager to make a statement that this was what we were about. The title was surely Evan’s, alliterative again, but also cutting to the quick and simply laying it on the line. An understated package to compliment the title by reverting back to it and letting the music speak for itself. Now all that said, as I also just (partly) pointed out, this primary session took place before anything on Ludovico, as well as before most of our AO activities, which in fact appear to have enjoyed a surge immediately after this, with three live shows in the subsequent month! No wonder this tape feels like a throwback, it largely was -- if only to a few weeks ago!
Yes, we had fun at that Road Damage session, and it was nice to have Brad and Ed both there (though it was hardly the first time). There was also some new gear involved with this release, stuff I had bought after coming into a bit of money in the form of my Grandmother having just given me a gift of a few thousand dollars! (All five of her grandchildren got the same thing.) Thanks Grandma!! One item I got with this money was a graphic equalizer, which we used to help EQ mix downs. Evan used it very spontaneously, just moving the sliders to where ever it sounded best to him as he was mixing. I observed that he ended up usually just mostly boosting the mid ranges, and I questioned (to him) whether that was really the best strategy. I thought it may just be that the mids are where most of the sound is so boosting them is just making the playback louder, and y’know it always sounds better louder! Well, whatever the value of that logic, it sounded good the way he did it. There was less hiss and maybe the mids gave it more punch. I’ll bring up the other new gear as we get to it in the tape. But things were advancing, even as we were going backwards. It’s ironic that I see this as part of our culminating stage when it was so throwback oriented. Another factor was that my voice was just clicking that Road Damage night. I’m mostly untrained as a vocalist (completely at that time; the first voice teacher I ever used, at the recommendation of Charlie Verrette, faked having to leave the country in order to not have to teach me a 2nd lesson!!!), and my voice has its ups and downs. For some reasons it’s just more free some days or nights than others. Actually, I’ve more recently found that cannabis is very helpful toward that end, so, hmmm…. Oh, and Evan was full of energy and creativity as always and also did some of his very best things! In my estimation….
Brad Carton is actually the only additional musician on this entire tape. That said, he made a major contribution to it. Other than my first solo record, which appeared on WoG in the form of its cassette companion, this was actually Brad’s last hurrah with WoG, though I don’t remember why, or if there even was any particular reason that anyone was aware of. Obviously no one got paid for this, so there could easily be conflicts with the rest of one’s life. For whatever reason, when we formed a more solid live lineup for our final three shows during our last few months, Evan asked someone else to play drums. I think Brad may have played with us live once, but probably not more (well actually, at least twice if you count the radio station performance, see below!), and I sure can’t recall why, maybe because of his stronger commitment to The Lepers. I actually don’t see him listed in any of the live lineups, though I remember him once only half jokingly resisting the wacky lounge jacket aesthetic we employed for live performances at Ed’s prodding. Brad put the wacky clothing on but said it made him feel like we were the Loud Boys! I guess he was used to playing in a t-shirt in his punk band….
Talking of live shows, I remember once at the end of a long night when the band that had booked us made us play last and after them and they proceeded to drive most everyone out before we started, when a couple of girls came up to us after we’d finished and asked us why we did it. Can you imagine that, going up to a band that had just played and asking them why they did it?!? I later suggested maybe it was because I vocalized “March of the Lost Wormsouls” while reading it off a piece of paper, to which Evan commented that they’d probably never been to a poetry reading. Anyway, Evan’s answer to them was that it was a way to do what we really wanted and not have to “kowtow to anyone”! That seemed to baffle them, and they walked quietly away. My point is that’s what Crazed to the Core was, it was Walls Of Genius not kowtowing to anyone! This also recalls for me the thoughts of G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, who in the guise of The Haters makes some of the most extreme noise ever recorded, but who has said that it’s not that he’s extreme that matters, it’s that he “means it”!! One review of Crazed To The Core started off going, “This tape is awful, awful, awful, awfully funny!” (See “kick me” reference with regard to reviews in Cultural Sabotage notes.) Either the same review or a different one ended with, “Walls Of Genius takes the piss out of everything!” Yea!!
In the wake of Ludovico Treatment, we followed up with a return to Walls Of Genius’ “other” side, namely maniacal beer-fueled shenanigans. The title says it all. By this time we were ready to indulge the unhinged side of our psyches.
No alternate band names were listed, but you hear Evan’s voice at the very opening of the album announcing “Road Damage, take 4”, which indicates that the song was recorded at a session called Road Damage and that we actually worked it out a little bit before getting a full take. Later in the album, you hear an announcer saying “Let’s hear it for the Pus-Tones” after our (David & Evan) performance of “Green River” at the Festival Of Pain.
I made the cover with large stick-on letters on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of black paper, later reduced in a photocopy machine. I printed it on colored paper so that the letters looked like they were colored, not white. We put no notes or thanks on this insert, only the song titles without any credits at all.
Little Fyodor:
“Wow, your ‘bad music’ is getting good!” I heard that quoted from Marsha Wooley, who seemed to previously have had mixed feelings about us since our humble beginnings, despite being an occasional participant. And she was right! Things really came together and clicked for us to an unprecedented degree on Crazed To The Core, which became a yet new big step forward albeit ironically while also being a simultaneous 90 degree turn back to our pre-Ludovico primitive approach to all out gonzo craziness! This could have almost been Cultural Sabotage II packed as it was with irreverent covers and jams (though there were a few originals, too). I’m very proud of this release, and it’s one of my two or three favorite WoG’s. What happened? Well, I’m not sure….
Maybe we were really getting better? At being bad?!? A major chunk of the tape comes from one crazed and inspired (and drunken!) night, the Road Damage session. I see for myself that this took place on March 3, 1984. We had played with Architects Office at least once already, back in December, and would play with them at another live show 3 nights later. Evan dated “Lingering Household Odours” (whatever facet of it that was) March 16, 13 days later. Road Damage was in the middle of all this! (The crazed Bug Smashers session came just 5 days after our first AO show!) Aural Innovations described what he heard on Crazed as “late night, drunken antics”; “How did he know it was late night?” remarked Ed, with a mischievous little smile.... We were obviously having a good time of it! It’s easy to see Crazed as a reaction to Ludovico, and by the time of its subsequent release to Ludovico, it definitely felt that way. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had learned of Kent Hotchkiss’s rejection of Ludovico by the time we put out Crazed, but either way, I think we were eager to make a statement that this was what we were about. The title was surely Evan’s, alliterative again, but also cutting to the quick and simply laying it on the line. An understated package to compliment the title by reverting back to it and letting the music speak for itself. Now all that said, as I also just (partly) pointed out, this primary session took place before anything on Ludovico, as well as before most of our AO activities, which in fact appear to have enjoyed a surge immediately after this, with three live shows in the subsequent month! No wonder this tape feels like a throwback, it largely was -- if only to a few weeks ago!
Yes, we had fun at that Road Damage session, and it was nice to have Brad and Ed both there (though it was hardly the first time). There was also some new gear involved with this release, stuff I had bought after coming into a bit of money in the form of my Grandmother having just given me a gift of a few thousand dollars! (All five of her grandchildren got the same thing.) Thanks Grandma!! One item I got with this money was a graphic equalizer, which we used to help EQ mix downs. Evan used it very spontaneously, just moving the sliders to where ever it sounded best to him as he was mixing. I observed that he ended up usually just mostly boosting the mid ranges, and I questioned (to him) whether that was really the best strategy. I thought it may just be that the mids are where most of the sound is so boosting them is just making the playback louder, and y’know it always sounds better louder! Well, whatever the value of that logic, it sounded good the way he did it. There was less hiss and maybe the mids gave it more punch. I’ll bring up the other new gear as we get to it in the tape. But things were advancing, even as we were going backwards. It’s ironic that I see this as part of our culminating stage when it was so throwback oriented. Another factor was that my voice was just clicking that Road Damage night. I’m mostly untrained as a vocalist (completely at that time; the first voice teacher I ever used, at the recommendation of Charlie Verrette, faked having to leave the country in order to not have to teach me a 2nd lesson!!!), and my voice has its ups and downs. For some reasons it’s just more free some days or nights than others. Actually, I’ve more recently found that cannabis is very helpful toward that end, so, hmmm…. Oh, and Evan was full of energy and creativity as always and also did some of his very best things! In my estimation….
Brad Carton is actually the only additional musician on this entire tape. That said, he made a major contribution to it. Other than my first solo record, which appeared on WoG in the form of its cassette companion, this was actually Brad’s last hurrah with WoG, though I don’t remember why, or if there even was any particular reason that anyone was aware of. Obviously no one got paid for this, so there could easily be conflicts with the rest of one’s life. For whatever reason, when we formed a more solid live lineup for our final three shows during our last few months, Evan asked someone else to play drums. I think Brad may have played with us live once, but probably not more (well actually, at least twice if you count the radio station performance, see below!), and I sure can’t recall why, maybe because of his stronger commitment to The Lepers. I actually don’t see him listed in any of the live lineups, though I remember him once only half jokingly resisting the wacky lounge jacket aesthetic we employed for live performances at Ed’s prodding. Brad put the wacky clothing on but said it made him feel like we were the Loud Boys! I guess he was used to playing in a t-shirt in his punk band….
Talking of live shows, I remember once at the end of a long night when the band that had booked us made us play last and after them and they proceeded to drive most everyone out before we started, when a couple of girls came up to us after we’d finished and asked us why we did it. Can you imagine that, going up to a band that had just played and asking them why they did it?!? I later suggested maybe it was because I vocalized “March of the Lost Wormsouls” while reading it off a piece of paper, to which Evan commented that they’d probably never been to a poetry reading. Anyway, Evan’s answer to them was that it was a way to do what we really wanted and not have to “kowtow to anyone”! That seemed to baffle them, and they walked quietly away. My point is that’s what Crazed to the Core was, it was Walls Of Genius not kowtowing to anyone! This also recalls for me the thoughts of G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, who in the guise of The Haters makes some of the most extreme noise ever recorded, but who has said that it’s not that he’s extreme that matters, it’s that he “means it”!! One review of Crazed To The Core started off going, “This tape is awful, awful, awful, awfully funny!” (See “kick me” reference with regard to reviews in Cultural Sabotage notes.) Either the same review or a different one ended with, “Walls Of Genius takes the piss out of everything!” Yea!!
Side A
Abdul, The Bulbul Amir
Magic Carpet Ride
Barbara Ann
Down On The Corner
Motel 6
Abdul, Revisited
Alaska
The Dust Blows Forward'N The Dust Blows Back...
Amapola
Love Potion Number 9
I Like The Way Your Boobs Bounce
Abdul, The Bulbul Amir
Magic Carpet Ride
Barbara Ann
Down On The Corner
Motel 6
Abdul, Revisited
Alaska
The Dust Blows Forward'N The Dust Blows Back...
Amapola
Love Potion Number 9
I Like The Way Your Boobs Bounce
“Abdul The Bulbul Amir”
Evan Cantor:
This is an eighteenth-century ballad written by Percy French around the time of the Napoleonic wars. Of course we didn’t know that at the time we performed this tune. It was in the Folksingers’ Wordbook, uncredited and unexplained. From my childhood, I remembered Popeye and Bluto acting out this epic poem in an animated feature. No doubt Bluto played the rotund Amir and Popeye the lanky Ivan Skivar. We had Brad Carton on drums and took full advantage of him. This is my (Evan’s) arrangement, in a heavy-metal style, and I played rhythm guitar and sang, then overdubbed bass later. Ed recalls how difficult it was for him and Brad to refrain from cracking up, watching me so solemnly intone the lyric. It’s a fabulous track, a greatest hit for WoG if ever there was one.
Little Fyodor:
“Road Damage, song three” is the first thing you hear, an announcement by Evan, and that’s the only hint on the release that we had originally been planning on being a band called “Road Damage” that night! But of course by the time of release, we had become just Walls Of Genius. "Abdul, the Bulbul Amir" came from one of Evan’s song books. Wikipedia dates the words to a poem from 1877, a dire and satirical commentary on war during the Franco-Prussian kerfuffle. I think Evan left out a rhyme or two that makes it clearer that both men battle to the defeat of death. Evan came up with a riff that he played on guitar and the rest of us followed along. Evan later overdubbed the bass. The entire Road Damage session was recorded on three tracks with Evan often overdubbing on the fourth. Evan on vocals. I played a three note synthesizer part over and over with the repeated riff. The riff had more notes than three, but I just played the three and it seemed to work. We made it work! We were crazed! As the song went on, I more often twisted the nobs of my synth while playing my three notes, and Ed got crazier and crazier too. But he was great from the start, too. Everyone was! Brad played a one beat intro after Evan’s reading and we’d launch into Evan’s riff. “The narration is a hoot and is interspersed with excellent bits of raw acid rock” said Aural Innovations. I’ve known people to complain that it’s too raw. What ninnies! But what a perfect song for WoG! A child’s rhyme about the insanity of war that we put to wacko heavy metal! Perfect!!
Evan Cantor:
This is an eighteenth-century ballad written by Percy French around the time of the Napoleonic wars. Of course we didn’t know that at the time we performed this tune. It was in the Folksingers’ Wordbook, uncredited and unexplained. From my childhood, I remembered Popeye and Bluto acting out this epic poem in an animated feature. No doubt Bluto played the rotund Amir and Popeye the lanky Ivan Skivar. We had Brad Carton on drums and took full advantage of him. This is my (Evan’s) arrangement, in a heavy-metal style, and I played rhythm guitar and sang, then overdubbed bass later. Ed recalls how difficult it was for him and Brad to refrain from cracking up, watching me so solemnly intone the lyric. It’s a fabulous track, a greatest hit for WoG if ever there was one.
Little Fyodor:
“Road Damage, song three” is the first thing you hear, an announcement by Evan, and that’s the only hint on the release that we had originally been planning on being a band called “Road Damage” that night! But of course by the time of release, we had become just Walls Of Genius. "Abdul, the Bulbul Amir" came from one of Evan’s song books. Wikipedia dates the words to a poem from 1877, a dire and satirical commentary on war during the Franco-Prussian kerfuffle. I think Evan left out a rhyme or two that makes it clearer that both men battle to the defeat of death. Evan came up with a riff that he played on guitar and the rest of us followed along. Evan later overdubbed the bass. The entire Road Damage session was recorded on three tracks with Evan often overdubbing on the fourth. Evan on vocals. I played a three note synthesizer part over and over with the repeated riff. The riff had more notes than three, but I just played the three and it seemed to work. We made it work! We were crazed! As the song went on, I more often twisted the nobs of my synth while playing my three notes, and Ed got crazier and crazier too. But he was great from the start, too. Everyone was! Brad played a one beat intro after Evan’s reading and we’d launch into Evan’s riff. “The narration is a hoot and is interspersed with excellent bits of raw acid rock” said Aural Innovations. I’ve known people to complain that it’s too raw. What ninnies! But what a perfect song for WoG! A child’s rhyme about the insanity of war that we put to wacko heavy metal! Perfect!!
Lyrics of "Abdul, The Bulbul Amir" from the Folksingers' Wordbook.
“Magic Carpet Ride”
LF:
“Magic Carpet Ride” has quite simply my favorite vocals that I’ve ever done. People think it’s easy to scream like that, but it takes some training, well, to do it consistently. That night, I just did it. We never did it live. One night the best punk band in town, the Rok Tots, sent word up to the stage that they were going to murder us if we didn’t do “Magic Carpet Ride”. But we didn’t do it. I guess they were bluffing. I’d be embarrassed, cause I don’t know if I could sing it like that again. It was a stroke of luck that I did it that one night. The whole band was in synch, balls to the wall, crazy-ass rock ‘n’ roll. Again, Evan played guitar live and overdubbed his bass. I played a one note synth part on the break. You can tell how spontaneous it was when I miss the cue to return from the break. I miss “You don’t know” and start in on “what”! That’s because when I heard Ed and Evan leave the break for the vocal refrain, I had to run from the synthesizer over to the mic! Y’know, Evan says I was exhorted to go apeshit, but usually I tried to do some sort of parody. This time, I did indeed just go apeshit. My vocals were apeshit and they were absurd. They had nothing to do with the concept of the song or the sound of the original vocals. I chirped a high pitch on a Zeppelin song to parody Plant. I fagged out to parody effeminate teen idol Davey Jones on "Daydream Believer". I acted like a confused adolescent on "I’m Eighteen". But on this song I just screamed my lungs out. And loved every second of it! I don’t think I could scream like this every song and have it work. My talentlessness clicked on this one and it was a scream for the ages. People seem to think it’s funny (if they can stand it!) and I love that. And again, the band was going just as apeshit. In maybe a more “normal” way, but it still all just fit together. I was surprised to see in the original reel box notes that we did this one after “Down On the Corner” as I’m surprised that my voice still had that much left in it after already screaming one…
EC:
This is a cover of the Steppenwolf song. Fyodor does a great screaming lead vocal and Ed provides a terrific lead guitar solo. I am playing the rhythm guitar and riff parts in between verse and chorus. Bass was overdubbed later. At one of our gigs, Pearl Street Music Hall in Denver, we followed Paul Church’s group, Fish Music. Fish Music brought a giant aquarium full of fish to put on stage for their show. They played an interminable set that went on forever and we didn’t go on until after midnight. Ed recalls that the fish were left in the hall overnight to freeze. My recollection is that half of them, at least, were already dead by the time the show started. Jimi West of local punk-rockers, the Rok Tots, requested “Magic Carpet Ride.” We had never played it before this recording and had never played it since, but I figured “what the hell” and launched into it. Then Ed stopped in mid-riff and says “That’s not how it goes.” Bloody Hell, I thought, it goes anyway I want to play it, and I launched into “Born To Be Wild” instead, another Steppenwolf cover that I knew much better.
“Barbara Ann”
LF:
We did Barbara Ann later in the night, after we’d abandoned our instruments, but Evan sequenced it here to break up "Magic Carpet Ride" and "Down on the Corner". This is still Road Damage, by the way. It’s all Road Damage through the first eight tracks of this tape. Somehow we got the idea to sing "Barbara Ann". Might have been Brad’s idea. Though you can never rule out Evan! The Beach Boys version kind of set this up for a haphazard treatment as the norm. I’ve known people to dismiss this track as sounding like being “back on the bus.” What’s wrong with that? We had some good playing in WoG, but being able to do something others can’t could never be the entire point of music (or any art) or it’s no different from an athletic event. We were having fun, for sure -- we not only admit that but make a point of it! Hopefully our fun transmits to the listener! Part way through the track, Evan kind of ramps and raves it up. I was focusing on the high parts after that. At some points I was reciting lyrics randomly without regard to whether I was synched up with others or not, maybe I was even trying not to be. Then I went kind of into Curly (of The Three Stooges) mode. We were all impressed by our tight ending!
EC:
This is a cappella silliness very much like some Beach Boys out-takes, except we don’t have the heavenly harmonies. Super Silly beer fueled living-room antics.
“Down On The Corner”
EC:
This is a cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit. Fyodor is taking lead vocals. It sounds like Ed is playing the signature riff on my Gibson SG guitar and I’m playing the bass live at this point. CCR was a big influence on all of us. Ed learned a lot of guitar playing along with CCR records because, amongst other things, CCR songs were all in standard tuning, unlike groups like Crosby Stills & Nash where almost every song was in some alternate tuning. Same thing for me—I played a lot of bass along with CCR records back in the day. They were one of my favorite bands in the late 60s. I used to buy the 45-rpm singles as they were released and then I’d buy the albums which had the same songs.
LF:
Brad does the intro for “Down On The Corner”, then I start shaking the cabasa, then Evan comes in on guitar. Ed is playing bass! He does a nice solo on the bass in the middle. It was because of this that I later asked him to play a bass lead on a song of mine called “I Don’t Know What To Do”, but he responded very quizzically. He ultimately did it, but I found out that this was not an MO for Ed but probably a spur of the moment inspiration! Then I come in with the vocals, which, contrary to my usual memory of this piece, I’m now thinking are even more crazed than my vocals for “Magic Carpet Ride”! And maybe even more absurd as defined as having nothing to do with the source material, not working with it or against it, just having nothing to do with it! These are my second favorite vocals of mine ever. I once thanked KGNU’s program manager, Paul Metters, for playing this on the air, and he said, “Sure, I like the guitar. The vocals, though, I dunno….” Then he laughed. My graveyard shift partner, Bruce Johnson (whose name can be seen on one of the reel boxes because he hired Evan to make him a demo for his singing and acoustic guitar playing), heard this (maybe coming over KGNU which we had on behind the front desk area) and said rather placidly that it sounded like I was working out some anger. Evan’s guitar playing is impressive, if primarily for the great sound he was yanking out of his SG! I shake that ol’ cabasa whenever I’m not singing. I say “down on the fucking corner” near the end, but luckily no one can understand me, or we wouldn’t have gotten that airplay! One more thing, there’s no overdub on this one since Ed was playing bass….
“Motel 6”
EC:
This is one of WoG’s greatest epic jams. It fades in at a chaotic point in a jam session, which collapses, opening an opportunity for the drums and bass to establish the groove. The organ was overdubbed by Evan afterwards. David is going crazy on the synth and Ed is wailing away. Once again, it sounds like he was playing my Gibson SG. The organ drops out while Ed does an outrageous solo. We lose the groove and move into some atmospheric stuff. The bass plays chords, while Ed’s guitar shrieks away without interruption. The bass finally returns to the main riff and then quickly abandons it. The grooves fall apart completely and a space jam begins with Evan’s overdubbed voice intoning “Motel Six”, manipulated by the digital delay to create a “six six six” effect, insinuating a connection between commercial culture and the so-called Mark Of The Beast, 666. The piece moves into a heavy percussion jam led by Brad Carton on the drum set. Brad was always ready to change the groove, create a rave-up or lead on the drums. Evan recites from advertisements for Motel 6, overdubbed after-the-fact. The bass plays a new melodic groove with the percussion orchestra. Evan is now reading from instructions to Motel 6 clients, “no personal checks” etc. The bass starts a walking line and psychedelic guitar keeps wailing away. Essentially, the guitar has never stopped throughout. The organ is re-introduced. The groove devolves once more into a space jam generated by Ed’s Echoplex screaming and then cuts off. I recall that we were very fond of this track at the time. “Six! Six! Six!” Was Walls Of Genius somehow Satanic at this point? Not really, but we did indulge in a lot of devilish musical mischief.
LF:
Oh my, it’s “Motel 6”. There’s a lot to say about this one. And why not, it’s 18 minutes long!! And, just like an 18 minute long jam of ours before it, “March of the Lost Wormsouls,” it’s faded in midstream, so who knows how long we were jamming altogether?!? I think this jam grew out of our unreleased take on the theme to the cartoon, Gigantor, and that’s probably why Evan was playing his bass, to play the riff to Gigantor. My synthesizer is too loud at the start, and Evan podded it down right away when he was mixing. Brian Ladd pointed out my rhythmic synthesizer playing as an example of how everything we did had some humor in it. I remember some reviewer or friend or fellow hometaper calling this piece “epic,” and I think that’s apt! But before I go on, let me tell you about the gear that’s introduced on this piece….
One new thing was my Farfisa organ!! Evan just mentioned at some point that it would be cool to have a Farfisa, to get that cheesy sixties sound. I’m not sure but it seems it must have been after my Grandmother’s gift (see above) that I would have had enough money to think, yeah, that’s a good idea, I’ll go get one! I found two used Farfisas (were there any new ones by 1984?) in the paper, one at a yard sale and one at a music store, both for about $150. I bought the one at the yard sale cause it still had the volume foot pedal that the other didn’t have (not that I ever use it). We made use of it on every major WoG release after this, I believe, and I’ve used it aplenty in my Little Fyodor solo material, too! Evan later asked me what possessed me to buy a Farfisa, and it really started with his suggestion, but it also just seemed like an obviously great idea. A few of my favorite songs as a kid, like “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” by the Blues Magoos and “Incense and Peppermints” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, have that cheesy sixties organ sound, which I assume to be a Farfisa, and if not, well it might as well be…. Anyway, ironically, Evan makes the first use of this new addition (or at least it shows up first) in his overdub to the first section of this track….
The other new piece was my digital delay. I definitely got that as a result of my new money, and I got it on a crazy trip to Denver during which I also bought a Roland Jazz-Chorus 120 amplifier (that’s another new piece of gear there, but not so significant). Evan also makes first use of this one too, during the second section of this track. But hey, you don’t even know why there’s two sections to this piece, so let’s get back to that….
So right after the initial mayhem that I presume to be the transition from Gigantor, Brad lays down a rhythm and Evan follows him with a noirish, bluesy bass line and I follow along with punctuated synth blasts that I occasionally alter with spastic knob twirlings to get crazy sounds and I also throw in some quasi riffs of my own, though you can barely tell. I improvise best when key and tone are not an issue, like with percussion or slide whistle or synthesizer. There’s no right or wrong notes on those things, at least not the way I play them! My main instrument that I ostensibly know is the guitar, but I have the hardest time improvising on that, probably because there’s notes! Back to the song, Ed comes in on lead guitar, playing some crazy sounds of his own. And then another Evan, overdubbing my new used Farfisa! Evan’s mostly doubling his bass line to start, but then he plays some simple lead stuff, too. It’s a veritable polyphony of insanity! In a spot or two, Brad tries his usual trick of raving up the beat, as he did on “I Am Iron Man” and some other jam track too, but we like this sleazy mid tempo groove and we don’t wanna speed it up this time, and luckily Brad, to his great credit, realizes right away that no one’s going with him and returns to the beat as it was without skipping one. I think this piece is best listened to not very closely, just letting it wash over you. It’s a nice blend of insane out-there stuff and more inside, bluesy sentiments. The first 11 minutes fly by and we transition to the next section in which Ed, Evan and myself all abandon our instruments and start playing percussion, though Ed’s Echoplex keeps looping his guitar noise, and it’s at this point that Evan starts chanting “Motel 6” at different speeds through my brand new Boss digital delay! I believe we were brainstorming about what to overdub on this piece when I mentioned that I had this Motel 6 brochure, and a gleam came into Evan’s eyes as he traveled to the part of the house where I was keeping this treasure. One thing I find historically interesting is that Motel 6 did not accept credit cards back in 1984! At one point there’s two Evan overdubs, which was done to mask a dropout due to tape damage. Meanwhile, back in the original jam, Evan has picked up his bass and started playing a different riff while the rest of us keep percussing and the Echoplex keeps echoing. Then Evan returns to the Farfisa on the overdub track playing a new riff on that, too. When we were mixing, Evan was about to fade it out cause it had been going on so long when I told him the ending was real hot, so he let it run to the end and then agreed that it was a good ending….
“Abdul Revisited”
LF:
I don’t think I realized we were doing a “reprise” of Abdul when Ed asked for someone to keep a beat and I obliged with some gum flapping, and the rest of them did the singing. That must be Brad hitting the high notes, though I find it a little hard to picture, but it wasn’t any of the other of us so it must have been him! You also hear him making some joke about the Swinging Jacksons at the outset of this track, and that of course is Evan (at least I hope you recognize his voice by now!) who says “Oh my God!” and then introduces us as the music of venereal disease! I don’t know if this referred to anything outside the moment, but it seemed totally on the spur of it as far as I knew! Evan is singing “bah-dee-yoom-bah” in a bass register, also at the urging of Ed. For a quiet guy, Ed would sometimes take control and give orders! And we were totally up for following them! Brad also says “Yeah, we can sing!” in the fade out…. We were definitely in goofing around mode by this time and having big fun, hopefully contagiously….
EC:
Another living-room impromptu chanting of the Abdul poem, punctuated by a whoopee cushion. The boys are clearly having too much fun.
“Alaska”
EC:
You can hear Ed trying to start Captain Beefheart’s “The Dust Blows Forward” as this fades up to Brad’s voice exclaiming “This brings tears to my eyes.” Evan embarks immediately on a demented version of his song “Alaska”, that first appeared on the White Cassette, in a much straighter version. Drunken shenanigans, no doubt.
LF:
Evan then performs “Alaska”, first recorded on The White Cassette, I believe at Brad’s urging, who says it’s bringing tears to his eyes when he learns Evan is taking him up on it. The high notes in this one are me, and the other noises are mostly Ed. Brad asks “Is that it?” when it’s it….
“The Dust Blows Forward, the Dust Blows Back”
EC:
As “Alaska” finishes up, Ed launches into this Captain Beefheart tune. He was evidently juiced up and wanted to sing. Juiced up was par for the course, but Ed wanted to sing? That was a rare occasion. After a bit, Evan joins him, chanting “Thass right, oh yeah”. More timeless beer fueled shenanigans. We unchained our psyches and went for it whole-hog at this session.
LF:
Then Ed started singing. Just out of the blue, he started singing. None of the rest of us had any idea what he was doing! I thought he was making it up on the spot. It was only later, and I mean a whole ‘nother day, that we found out that he was singing a Captain Beefheart song he had memorized!! You can see on the reel box notes that Evan wrote “ol’ green” for this, not knowing what it was. But Ed had the Trout Mask Replica album and had memorized this song (though he may have missed a couple of lines) and just started singing it, just like that. Pretty impressive! I remember when Evan was mixing it, he told me that he couldn’t get his “oh yeah, that’s right” out of it, meaning I guess that he would have liked to have but it must have been on Ed’s mic. Brad laughs at one point. We were later told that Beefheart covers are very unusual – another stroke of Genius!!
“Amapola”
LF:
“Amapola” was just like the old days, with Ed and Evan recording on a ghetto blaster at Ed’s house. I remember not the occasion nor where was I. I believe they got this song out of a songbook of Ed’s focused on songs of the World War II era, just like “Sunday, Monday or Always”. But I think they just used the book for the lyrics, it doesn’t sound like they used any of the music – and they definitely didn’t sing the “real” melody! Evan’s doing most of the singing but Ed sings too. Along with the previous few tracks, this represented a veritable flurry of Ed vocals! I’m not sure who’s playing the guitar. It seems to be following Evan’s vocal, but the lead at the end sounds like Ed….
EC:
This came from sheet music that Ed had found at his Grandma’s cabin on Lookout Mountain, near Golden, Colorado. We had never heard it before and had no idea how it was supposed to go. So, of course we gave it a go!
“Love Potion #9”
EC:
This is a cover of a fifties pop hit. This is a Fabulous Pus-Tones (David & Evan) live recording. I cannot locate the specific recording, but I think it was from the Brilligworks Coffee House. Fyodor starts with lead vocals and Evan takes over the bridge. This was a tune that I knew in my straight repertoire and had played at Pachamama’s open stage.
LF:
“Love Potion Number 9” was the first real appearance, by release chronology anyway, of the Pus-Tones, as I see that “band” as a cover song and live performance phenomenon, though we may have graduated to being the Fabulous Pus-Tones by this time if this was taken from the Fur-Balls From Outer Space show, as I think it must have been. The Pus-Tones were me and Evan with Evan on acoustic guitar and both of us on vocals, singing covers live. I wouldn’t quite count this as part of our recently ended “a different band every time we played” concept as this was more of an alternative, recurring thing, and I’ve seen other bands do this, either changing instruments in a show and becoming a different “band” or else having a specific subset of the whole taking on a different persona. At the least, I guess our changing band names concept sure made us used to being a different “band” in such a way. I really like the way we split up the singing assignments on this (probably Evan’s doing) and I’ve gotten a kick more than once seeing people start cracking up as soon as they hear me singing! On the fade out you can just barely hear Leo Goya, who was part of the Fur Balls but was sitting in the audience for the Pus-Tones, yell out, “Where’s the pus?” A reference to the “Where’s the beef?” fast food commercial that was all the rage at that time. Y’know, it just occurred that even if the Pus-Tones weren’t necessarily a continuation of the ever changing band names concept, I would think the Fur Balls From Outer Space would still figure in! Leo, by the way, a fan of early rock ‘n’ roll which he grew up with, kind of criticized us in one of his poems over this performance with a line that went something like, “Why do that to such a nice melody?”.
“I Like The Way Your Boobs Bounce”
EC:
Fyodor a cappella all by his lonesome. What can you really say? The title says it all… who doesn’t like boobies? Fyodor indulges trademark libidinous growling.
LF:
And then this whole crazed 45 minute side concludes with its one and only “original song” (not including improvisations or unique interpretations) which was my own, “I Like the Way Your Boobs Bounce”, which I performed and probably recorded all on my own. I was trying to sound like a dirty old man. Yeah, I know -- the “old” part was a stretch!!….
LF:
“Magic Carpet Ride” has quite simply my favorite vocals that I’ve ever done. People think it’s easy to scream like that, but it takes some training, well, to do it consistently. That night, I just did it. We never did it live. One night the best punk band in town, the Rok Tots, sent word up to the stage that they were going to murder us if we didn’t do “Magic Carpet Ride”. But we didn’t do it. I guess they were bluffing. I’d be embarrassed, cause I don’t know if I could sing it like that again. It was a stroke of luck that I did it that one night. The whole band was in synch, balls to the wall, crazy-ass rock ‘n’ roll. Again, Evan played guitar live and overdubbed his bass. I played a one note synth part on the break. You can tell how spontaneous it was when I miss the cue to return from the break. I miss “You don’t know” and start in on “what”! That’s because when I heard Ed and Evan leave the break for the vocal refrain, I had to run from the synthesizer over to the mic! Y’know, Evan says I was exhorted to go apeshit, but usually I tried to do some sort of parody. This time, I did indeed just go apeshit. My vocals were apeshit and they were absurd. They had nothing to do with the concept of the song or the sound of the original vocals. I chirped a high pitch on a Zeppelin song to parody Plant. I fagged out to parody effeminate teen idol Davey Jones on "Daydream Believer". I acted like a confused adolescent on "I’m Eighteen". But on this song I just screamed my lungs out. And loved every second of it! I don’t think I could scream like this every song and have it work. My talentlessness clicked on this one and it was a scream for the ages. People seem to think it’s funny (if they can stand it!) and I love that. And again, the band was going just as apeshit. In maybe a more “normal” way, but it still all just fit together. I was surprised to see in the original reel box notes that we did this one after “Down On the Corner” as I’m surprised that my voice still had that much left in it after already screaming one…
EC:
This is a cover of the Steppenwolf song. Fyodor does a great screaming lead vocal and Ed provides a terrific lead guitar solo. I am playing the rhythm guitar and riff parts in between verse and chorus. Bass was overdubbed later. At one of our gigs, Pearl Street Music Hall in Denver, we followed Paul Church’s group, Fish Music. Fish Music brought a giant aquarium full of fish to put on stage for their show. They played an interminable set that went on forever and we didn’t go on until after midnight. Ed recalls that the fish were left in the hall overnight to freeze. My recollection is that half of them, at least, were already dead by the time the show started. Jimi West of local punk-rockers, the Rok Tots, requested “Magic Carpet Ride.” We had never played it before this recording and had never played it since, but I figured “what the hell” and launched into it. Then Ed stopped in mid-riff and says “That’s not how it goes.” Bloody Hell, I thought, it goes anyway I want to play it, and I launched into “Born To Be Wild” instead, another Steppenwolf cover that I knew much better.
“Barbara Ann”
LF:
We did Barbara Ann later in the night, after we’d abandoned our instruments, but Evan sequenced it here to break up "Magic Carpet Ride" and "Down on the Corner". This is still Road Damage, by the way. It’s all Road Damage through the first eight tracks of this tape. Somehow we got the idea to sing "Barbara Ann". Might have been Brad’s idea. Though you can never rule out Evan! The Beach Boys version kind of set this up for a haphazard treatment as the norm. I’ve known people to dismiss this track as sounding like being “back on the bus.” What’s wrong with that? We had some good playing in WoG, but being able to do something others can’t could never be the entire point of music (or any art) or it’s no different from an athletic event. We were having fun, for sure -- we not only admit that but make a point of it! Hopefully our fun transmits to the listener! Part way through the track, Evan kind of ramps and raves it up. I was focusing on the high parts after that. At some points I was reciting lyrics randomly without regard to whether I was synched up with others or not, maybe I was even trying not to be. Then I went kind of into Curly (of The Three Stooges) mode. We were all impressed by our tight ending!
EC:
This is a cappella silliness very much like some Beach Boys out-takes, except we don’t have the heavenly harmonies. Super Silly beer fueled living-room antics.
“Down On The Corner”
EC:
This is a cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit. Fyodor is taking lead vocals. It sounds like Ed is playing the signature riff on my Gibson SG guitar and I’m playing the bass live at this point. CCR was a big influence on all of us. Ed learned a lot of guitar playing along with CCR records because, amongst other things, CCR songs were all in standard tuning, unlike groups like Crosby Stills & Nash where almost every song was in some alternate tuning. Same thing for me—I played a lot of bass along with CCR records back in the day. They were one of my favorite bands in the late 60s. I used to buy the 45-rpm singles as they were released and then I’d buy the albums which had the same songs.
LF:
Brad does the intro for “Down On The Corner”, then I start shaking the cabasa, then Evan comes in on guitar. Ed is playing bass! He does a nice solo on the bass in the middle. It was because of this that I later asked him to play a bass lead on a song of mine called “I Don’t Know What To Do”, but he responded very quizzically. He ultimately did it, but I found out that this was not an MO for Ed but probably a spur of the moment inspiration! Then I come in with the vocals, which, contrary to my usual memory of this piece, I’m now thinking are even more crazed than my vocals for “Magic Carpet Ride”! And maybe even more absurd as defined as having nothing to do with the source material, not working with it or against it, just having nothing to do with it! These are my second favorite vocals of mine ever. I once thanked KGNU’s program manager, Paul Metters, for playing this on the air, and he said, “Sure, I like the guitar. The vocals, though, I dunno….” Then he laughed. My graveyard shift partner, Bruce Johnson (whose name can be seen on one of the reel boxes because he hired Evan to make him a demo for his singing and acoustic guitar playing), heard this (maybe coming over KGNU which we had on behind the front desk area) and said rather placidly that it sounded like I was working out some anger. Evan’s guitar playing is impressive, if primarily for the great sound he was yanking out of his SG! I shake that ol’ cabasa whenever I’m not singing. I say “down on the fucking corner” near the end, but luckily no one can understand me, or we wouldn’t have gotten that airplay! One more thing, there’s no overdub on this one since Ed was playing bass….
“Motel 6”
EC:
This is one of WoG’s greatest epic jams. It fades in at a chaotic point in a jam session, which collapses, opening an opportunity for the drums and bass to establish the groove. The organ was overdubbed by Evan afterwards. David is going crazy on the synth and Ed is wailing away. Once again, it sounds like he was playing my Gibson SG. The organ drops out while Ed does an outrageous solo. We lose the groove and move into some atmospheric stuff. The bass plays chords, while Ed’s guitar shrieks away without interruption. The bass finally returns to the main riff and then quickly abandons it. The grooves fall apart completely and a space jam begins with Evan’s overdubbed voice intoning “Motel Six”, manipulated by the digital delay to create a “six six six” effect, insinuating a connection between commercial culture and the so-called Mark Of The Beast, 666. The piece moves into a heavy percussion jam led by Brad Carton on the drum set. Brad was always ready to change the groove, create a rave-up or lead on the drums. Evan recites from advertisements for Motel 6, overdubbed after-the-fact. The bass plays a new melodic groove with the percussion orchestra. Evan is now reading from instructions to Motel 6 clients, “no personal checks” etc. The bass starts a walking line and psychedelic guitar keeps wailing away. Essentially, the guitar has never stopped throughout. The organ is re-introduced. The groove devolves once more into a space jam generated by Ed’s Echoplex screaming and then cuts off. I recall that we were very fond of this track at the time. “Six! Six! Six!” Was Walls Of Genius somehow Satanic at this point? Not really, but we did indulge in a lot of devilish musical mischief.
LF:
Oh my, it’s “Motel 6”. There’s a lot to say about this one. And why not, it’s 18 minutes long!! And, just like an 18 minute long jam of ours before it, “March of the Lost Wormsouls,” it’s faded in midstream, so who knows how long we were jamming altogether?!? I think this jam grew out of our unreleased take on the theme to the cartoon, Gigantor, and that’s probably why Evan was playing his bass, to play the riff to Gigantor. My synthesizer is too loud at the start, and Evan podded it down right away when he was mixing. Brian Ladd pointed out my rhythmic synthesizer playing as an example of how everything we did had some humor in it. I remember some reviewer or friend or fellow hometaper calling this piece “epic,” and I think that’s apt! But before I go on, let me tell you about the gear that’s introduced on this piece….
One new thing was my Farfisa organ!! Evan just mentioned at some point that it would be cool to have a Farfisa, to get that cheesy sixties sound. I’m not sure but it seems it must have been after my Grandmother’s gift (see above) that I would have had enough money to think, yeah, that’s a good idea, I’ll go get one! I found two used Farfisas (were there any new ones by 1984?) in the paper, one at a yard sale and one at a music store, both for about $150. I bought the one at the yard sale cause it still had the volume foot pedal that the other didn’t have (not that I ever use it). We made use of it on every major WoG release after this, I believe, and I’ve used it aplenty in my Little Fyodor solo material, too! Evan later asked me what possessed me to buy a Farfisa, and it really started with his suggestion, but it also just seemed like an obviously great idea. A few of my favorite songs as a kid, like “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” by the Blues Magoos and “Incense and Peppermints” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, have that cheesy sixties organ sound, which I assume to be a Farfisa, and if not, well it might as well be…. Anyway, ironically, Evan makes the first use of this new addition (or at least it shows up first) in his overdub to the first section of this track….
The other new piece was my digital delay. I definitely got that as a result of my new money, and I got it on a crazy trip to Denver during which I also bought a Roland Jazz-Chorus 120 amplifier (that’s another new piece of gear there, but not so significant). Evan also makes first use of this one too, during the second section of this track. But hey, you don’t even know why there’s two sections to this piece, so let’s get back to that….
So right after the initial mayhem that I presume to be the transition from Gigantor, Brad lays down a rhythm and Evan follows him with a noirish, bluesy bass line and I follow along with punctuated synth blasts that I occasionally alter with spastic knob twirlings to get crazy sounds and I also throw in some quasi riffs of my own, though you can barely tell. I improvise best when key and tone are not an issue, like with percussion or slide whistle or synthesizer. There’s no right or wrong notes on those things, at least not the way I play them! My main instrument that I ostensibly know is the guitar, but I have the hardest time improvising on that, probably because there’s notes! Back to the song, Ed comes in on lead guitar, playing some crazy sounds of his own. And then another Evan, overdubbing my new used Farfisa! Evan’s mostly doubling his bass line to start, but then he plays some simple lead stuff, too. It’s a veritable polyphony of insanity! In a spot or two, Brad tries his usual trick of raving up the beat, as he did on “I Am Iron Man” and some other jam track too, but we like this sleazy mid tempo groove and we don’t wanna speed it up this time, and luckily Brad, to his great credit, realizes right away that no one’s going with him and returns to the beat as it was without skipping one. I think this piece is best listened to not very closely, just letting it wash over you. It’s a nice blend of insane out-there stuff and more inside, bluesy sentiments. The first 11 minutes fly by and we transition to the next section in which Ed, Evan and myself all abandon our instruments and start playing percussion, though Ed’s Echoplex keeps looping his guitar noise, and it’s at this point that Evan starts chanting “Motel 6” at different speeds through my brand new Boss digital delay! I believe we were brainstorming about what to overdub on this piece when I mentioned that I had this Motel 6 brochure, and a gleam came into Evan’s eyes as he traveled to the part of the house where I was keeping this treasure. One thing I find historically interesting is that Motel 6 did not accept credit cards back in 1984! At one point there’s two Evan overdubs, which was done to mask a dropout due to tape damage. Meanwhile, back in the original jam, Evan has picked up his bass and started playing a different riff while the rest of us keep percussing and the Echoplex keeps echoing. Then Evan returns to the Farfisa on the overdub track playing a new riff on that, too. When we were mixing, Evan was about to fade it out cause it had been going on so long when I told him the ending was real hot, so he let it run to the end and then agreed that it was a good ending….
“Abdul Revisited”
LF:
I don’t think I realized we were doing a “reprise” of Abdul when Ed asked for someone to keep a beat and I obliged with some gum flapping, and the rest of them did the singing. That must be Brad hitting the high notes, though I find it a little hard to picture, but it wasn’t any of the other of us so it must have been him! You also hear him making some joke about the Swinging Jacksons at the outset of this track, and that of course is Evan (at least I hope you recognize his voice by now!) who says “Oh my God!” and then introduces us as the music of venereal disease! I don’t know if this referred to anything outside the moment, but it seemed totally on the spur of it as far as I knew! Evan is singing “bah-dee-yoom-bah” in a bass register, also at the urging of Ed. For a quiet guy, Ed would sometimes take control and give orders! And we were totally up for following them! Brad also says “Yeah, we can sing!” in the fade out…. We were definitely in goofing around mode by this time and having big fun, hopefully contagiously….
EC:
Another living-room impromptu chanting of the Abdul poem, punctuated by a whoopee cushion. The boys are clearly having too much fun.
“Alaska”
EC:
You can hear Ed trying to start Captain Beefheart’s “The Dust Blows Forward” as this fades up to Brad’s voice exclaiming “This brings tears to my eyes.” Evan embarks immediately on a demented version of his song “Alaska”, that first appeared on the White Cassette, in a much straighter version. Drunken shenanigans, no doubt.
LF:
Evan then performs “Alaska”, first recorded on The White Cassette, I believe at Brad’s urging, who says it’s bringing tears to his eyes when he learns Evan is taking him up on it. The high notes in this one are me, and the other noises are mostly Ed. Brad asks “Is that it?” when it’s it….
“The Dust Blows Forward, the Dust Blows Back”
EC:
As “Alaska” finishes up, Ed launches into this Captain Beefheart tune. He was evidently juiced up and wanted to sing. Juiced up was par for the course, but Ed wanted to sing? That was a rare occasion. After a bit, Evan joins him, chanting “Thass right, oh yeah”. More timeless beer fueled shenanigans. We unchained our psyches and went for it whole-hog at this session.
LF:
Then Ed started singing. Just out of the blue, he started singing. None of the rest of us had any idea what he was doing! I thought he was making it up on the spot. It was only later, and I mean a whole ‘nother day, that we found out that he was singing a Captain Beefheart song he had memorized!! You can see on the reel box notes that Evan wrote “ol’ green” for this, not knowing what it was. But Ed had the Trout Mask Replica album and had memorized this song (though he may have missed a couple of lines) and just started singing it, just like that. Pretty impressive! I remember when Evan was mixing it, he told me that he couldn’t get his “oh yeah, that’s right” out of it, meaning I guess that he would have liked to have but it must have been on Ed’s mic. Brad laughs at one point. We were later told that Beefheart covers are very unusual – another stroke of Genius!!
“Amapola”
LF:
“Amapola” was just like the old days, with Ed and Evan recording on a ghetto blaster at Ed’s house. I remember not the occasion nor where was I. I believe they got this song out of a songbook of Ed’s focused on songs of the World War II era, just like “Sunday, Monday or Always”. But I think they just used the book for the lyrics, it doesn’t sound like they used any of the music – and they definitely didn’t sing the “real” melody! Evan’s doing most of the singing but Ed sings too. Along with the previous few tracks, this represented a veritable flurry of Ed vocals! I’m not sure who’s playing the guitar. It seems to be following Evan’s vocal, but the lead at the end sounds like Ed….
EC:
This came from sheet music that Ed had found at his Grandma’s cabin on Lookout Mountain, near Golden, Colorado. We had never heard it before and had no idea how it was supposed to go. So, of course we gave it a go!
“Love Potion #9”
EC:
This is a cover of a fifties pop hit. This is a Fabulous Pus-Tones (David & Evan) live recording. I cannot locate the specific recording, but I think it was from the Brilligworks Coffee House. Fyodor starts with lead vocals and Evan takes over the bridge. This was a tune that I knew in my straight repertoire and had played at Pachamama’s open stage.
LF:
“Love Potion Number 9” was the first real appearance, by release chronology anyway, of the Pus-Tones, as I see that “band” as a cover song and live performance phenomenon, though we may have graduated to being the Fabulous Pus-Tones by this time if this was taken from the Fur-Balls From Outer Space show, as I think it must have been. The Pus-Tones were me and Evan with Evan on acoustic guitar and both of us on vocals, singing covers live. I wouldn’t quite count this as part of our recently ended “a different band every time we played” concept as this was more of an alternative, recurring thing, and I’ve seen other bands do this, either changing instruments in a show and becoming a different “band” or else having a specific subset of the whole taking on a different persona. At the least, I guess our changing band names concept sure made us used to being a different “band” in such a way. I really like the way we split up the singing assignments on this (probably Evan’s doing) and I’ve gotten a kick more than once seeing people start cracking up as soon as they hear me singing! On the fade out you can just barely hear Leo Goya, who was part of the Fur Balls but was sitting in the audience for the Pus-Tones, yell out, “Where’s the pus?” A reference to the “Where’s the beef?” fast food commercial that was all the rage at that time. Y’know, it just occurred that even if the Pus-Tones weren’t necessarily a continuation of the ever changing band names concept, I would think the Fur Balls From Outer Space would still figure in! Leo, by the way, a fan of early rock ‘n’ roll which he grew up with, kind of criticized us in one of his poems over this performance with a line that went something like, “Why do that to such a nice melody?”.
“I Like The Way Your Boobs Bounce”
EC:
Fyodor a cappella all by his lonesome. What can you really say? The title says it all… who doesn’t like boobies? Fyodor indulges trademark libidinous growling.
LF:
And then this whole crazed 45 minute side concludes with its one and only “original song” (not including improvisations or unique interpretations) which was my own, “I Like the Way Your Boobs Bounce”, which I performed and probably recorded all on my own. I was trying to sound like a dirty old man. Yeah, I know -- the “old” part was a stretch!!….
Side B
Henry The Eighth
Timothy Leary
Green River
Baseline And Mohawk
The Butt Song
Theme From A Summer Place
My Heart Would Know
Amerika Futura
Ape Heaven
Publishers Soliloquy
Burning Smurfs
Henry The Eighth
Timothy Leary
Green River
Baseline And Mohawk
The Butt Song
Theme From A Summer Place
My Heart Would Know
Amerika Futura
Ape Heaven
Publishers Soliloquy
Burning Smurfs
“Henry The Eighth”
EC:
This is a cover version of the Herman’s Hermits song. I don’t know if I knew that at the time, though. This was a song that I had sung on the school bus in grade school and at summer day-camp and I remembered it. I (Evan) am doing the lead vocal on this. We sent this to Dr. Demento as a “cassette-single” (with “Timothy Leary”) and received a missive back from him stating “if this is a joke, I laugh!” Apparently we had sent him a blank tape. So we sent another one, not a blank tape, and he played this on The Dr. Demento radio show. I particularly like the overdubbed harmony vocals chanting “H-E-N-R-Y” towards the end. This is the “single” version, as we later introduced a rave-up jam at the end for live versions, which never made it onto tape.
LF:
Okay, so maybe I lied when I said we didn’t kowtow to anyone on this tape because the first two songs on the B side were indeed intended to appeal to a particular audience, that being Dr. Demento! These two songs were basically born of Evan’s idea of what to send to Dr. Demento that might get played on his show. We recorded them and Evan promptly mailed him out a tape. Amazingly, the good doctor wrote us back, but initially just to inform us that our tape had nothing on it, it was blank! He said things like, “if this is your idea of a joke, then I laugh!” and that he was about to file this under “the wit and wisdom of Ronald Reagan” when it occurred to him that this might be a mistake and that he should let us know! It seems amazing in the current day and age that someone like him would be nice enough to bother doing such a thing! Well, Evan tried it again and this time succeeded in getting these two songs to Dr. Demento who may have sent another letter praising them and thanking us. I’m pretty sure at least “Henry the 8th” got played at least once. (Proving that Dr. Demento airplay doesn’t automatically make you as big as Weird Al Yankovic!) Both songs are basically Evan with me on backup vocals. “Henry the 8th” is Evan singing lead and playing acoustic guitar and both of us overdubbing backing vocals, mostly a lot of screaming. That’s what Evan told me he wanted from me, screaming. My screaming wasn’t in good form that day, not like it was for the Road Damage session. I just couldn’t muster much juice behind my screams, they didn’t come out very forcefully and I couldn’t sustain them, so they ended up sounding more like yelps. I felt very outdone and outshone by Evan’s screams. Of course, no one has to know that -- though you do now! It’s a funny song already, and hopefully we made it even funnier. I guess Dr. Demento thought so!
“Timothy Leary”
EC:
This is a cover of the Moody Blues song “Legend Of A Mind”. We didn’t know the real title at the time, hence we called it “Timothy Leary”. The organ is overdubbed. Evan and David are doing tandem vocals. Evan sings the bridge in a high squeaky voice and then switches to a loud exhorting voice. “He’s dead!” exclaim both Evan and David over halting bits and pieces before the main theme returns. This was well before Mr. Leary actually expired, as was the original by the Moodies.
LF:
“Timothy Leary’s Dead” (originally titled “Legend of a Mind”) is pretty much just like “Henry the 8th” except that Evan also overdubs a Farfisa part and I do some actual singing, well to the extent that my singing could be called that. We had a bit of fun declaring Leary dead (though I continued to struggle to get enough oomph in my voice). I also did some sickly high “ah’s” (easier to do) to parody the dreamlike character of the original. Unlike “Henry the 8th”, this song was not originally funny at all. I don’t think I ever knew or even considered whether Evan chose these two songs for that contrast between them.
EC:
This is a cover version of the Herman’s Hermits song. I don’t know if I knew that at the time, though. This was a song that I had sung on the school bus in grade school and at summer day-camp and I remembered it. I (Evan) am doing the lead vocal on this. We sent this to Dr. Demento as a “cassette-single” (with “Timothy Leary”) and received a missive back from him stating “if this is a joke, I laugh!” Apparently we had sent him a blank tape. So we sent another one, not a blank tape, and he played this on The Dr. Demento radio show. I particularly like the overdubbed harmony vocals chanting “H-E-N-R-Y” towards the end. This is the “single” version, as we later introduced a rave-up jam at the end for live versions, which never made it onto tape.
LF:
Okay, so maybe I lied when I said we didn’t kowtow to anyone on this tape because the first two songs on the B side were indeed intended to appeal to a particular audience, that being Dr. Demento! These two songs were basically born of Evan’s idea of what to send to Dr. Demento that might get played on his show. We recorded them and Evan promptly mailed him out a tape. Amazingly, the good doctor wrote us back, but initially just to inform us that our tape had nothing on it, it was blank! He said things like, “if this is your idea of a joke, then I laugh!” and that he was about to file this under “the wit and wisdom of Ronald Reagan” when it occurred to him that this might be a mistake and that he should let us know! It seems amazing in the current day and age that someone like him would be nice enough to bother doing such a thing! Well, Evan tried it again and this time succeeded in getting these two songs to Dr. Demento who may have sent another letter praising them and thanking us. I’m pretty sure at least “Henry the 8th” got played at least once. (Proving that Dr. Demento airplay doesn’t automatically make you as big as Weird Al Yankovic!) Both songs are basically Evan with me on backup vocals. “Henry the 8th” is Evan singing lead and playing acoustic guitar and both of us overdubbing backing vocals, mostly a lot of screaming. That’s what Evan told me he wanted from me, screaming. My screaming wasn’t in good form that day, not like it was for the Road Damage session. I just couldn’t muster much juice behind my screams, they didn’t come out very forcefully and I couldn’t sustain them, so they ended up sounding more like yelps. I felt very outdone and outshone by Evan’s screams. Of course, no one has to know that -- though you do now! It’s a funny song already, and hopefully we made it even funnier. I guess Dr. Demento thought so!
“Timothy Leary”
EC:
This is a cover of the Moody Blues song “Legend Of A Mind”. We didn’t know the real title at the time, hence we called it “Timothy Leary”. The organ is overdubbed. Evan and David are doing tandem vocals. Evan sings the bridge in a high squeaky voice and then switches to a loud exhorting voice. “He’s dead!” exclaim both Evan and David over halting bits and pieces before the main theme returns. This was well before Mr. Leary actually expired, as was the original by the Moodies.
LF:
“Timothy Leary’s Dead” (originally titled “Legend of a Mind”) is pretty much just like “Henry the 8th” except that Evan also overdubs a Farfisa part and I do some actual singing, well to the extent that my singing could be called that. We had a bit of fun declaring Leary dead (though I continued to struggle to get enough oomph in my voice). I also did some sickly high “ah’s” (easier to do) to parody the dreamlike character of the original. Unlike “Henry the 8th”, this song was not originally funny at all. I don’t think I ever knew or even considered whether Evan chose these two songs for that contrast between them.
“Green River”
EC:
Another CCR cover, this one is from the Pus-Tones live performance at the Festival Of Pain. We were lucky to get any material from the Festival of Pain because Joel Haertling was messing around with the recording process, whispering into the microphone periodically. I found his girlfriend, Diana, twiddling the knobs on the recorder at one point, just staring into space and turning the volume knob up and down. But this track survived all that. It starts with a snippet of my recording of the bloodball tournament, a tongue-in-cheek athletic event that opened the Festival of Pain. Then the Pus-Tones come in on applause. Evan is singing the lead, David is playing beer bottle and wearing what Westword magazine called the ‘homeliest sport coat ever’. We got a tremendous round of applause, but the Emcee ushered us off stage promptly, as if to say that this wasn’t really what the Festival organizers had in mind when they asked for “pain”. We should have done an encore!
EC:
Another CCR cover, this one is from the Pus-Tones live performance at the Festival Of Pain. We were lucky to get any material from the Festival of Pain because Joel Haertling was messing around with the recording process, whispering into the microphone periodically. I found his girlfriend, Diana, twiddling the knobs on the recorder at one point, just staring into space and turning the volume knob up and down. But this track survived all that. It starts with a snippet of my recording of the bloodball tournament, a tongue-in-cheek athletic event that opened the Festival of Pain. Then the Pus-Tones come in on applause. Evan is singing the lead, David is playing beer bottle and wearing what Westword magazine called the ‘homeliest sport coat ever’. We got a tremendous round of applause, but the Emcee ushered us off stage promptly, as if to say that this wasn’t really what the Festival organizers had in mind when they asked for “pain”. We should have done an encore!
LF:
Our recording of “Green River” marked the original appearance of The Pus-Tones in real time and was recorded at The Festival of Pain in February of that year (1984), probably the earliest recording on this tape (and maybe the other Pus-Tones piece, from June, was the latest recording?). I imagine it was because industrial music and punk were two of the biggest things going in underground music at the time that someone cooked up the idea of this one time festival theme. It included a few of the luminaries of the Colorado underground at the time, such as Susanne Lewis of Spray Pals and Thinking Plague (by that time), Duane Davis, owner of pivotal record store Wax Trax, and I think someone else later to be of Biota. Neil Feather made some crazy noise with a big sheet of metal. I think the bill had been considered closed when we found out about it and Evan worked real hard to finagle our way into things. Evan’s offer to record the proceedings probably helped. The event took place at a gallery called the Art Department at 772 Santa Fe Drive in Denver, a spot that would later play an even greater significance in my life. The music was held downstairs while upstairs a load of guys played an ad hoc sporting event called “Bloodball”. We spectators huddled on the sidelines with paper or something to protect us from the “blood” (some sort of red liquid).
Evan recorded the sounds of the Bloodball and edited some of this running and yelling onto the front and back of our rendition of “Green River”. Evan played guitar and sang while I played some sort of miniature or found percussion that I could smack with a drumstick while dancing around. I know I played a beer bottle with that drumstick for one of our other two or three songs, and it broke partway through that song, but I don’t think this was that song as I got some rattling sound out of my gizmo whatever it was at one point, which I don’t think I could have done with a single beer bottle (plus no breakage). (Added later: I think now it was an old saucepan I was playing! Most of the time I was smacking the outside of it, but I played the inside to get that clattering!) I seemed to have been undecided between whether to play on the downbeat or the upbeat and what to do during the stops and riffs, so I did a little of everything. With my one note percussion piece. While dancing around. It’s funny to hear us thanked for coming all the way down from Boulder!
Our recording of “Green River” marked the original appearance of The Pus-Tones in real time and was recorded at The Festival of Pain in February of that year (1984), probably the earliest recording on this tape (and maybe the other Pus-Tones piece, from June, was the latest recording?). I imagine it was because industrial music and punk were two of the biggest things going in underground music at the time that someone cooked up the idea of this one time festival theme. It included a few of the luminaries of the Colorado underground at the time, such as Susanne Lewis of Spray Pals and Thinking Plague (by that time), Duane Davis, owner of pivotal record store Wax Trax, and I think someone else later to be of Biota. Neil Feather made some crazy noise with a big sheet of metal. I think the bill had been considered closed when we found out about it and Evan worked real hard to finagle our way into things. Evan’s offer to record the proceedings probably helped. The event took place at a gallery called the Art Department at 772 Santa Fe Drive in Denver, a spot that would later play an even greater significance in my life. The music was held downstairs while upstairs a load of guys played an ad hoc sporting event called “Bloodball”. We spectators huddled on the sidelines with paper or something to protect us from the “blood” (some sort of red liquid).
Evan recorded the sounds of the Bloodball and edited some of this running and yelling onto the front and back of our rendition of “Green River”. Evan played guitar and sang while I played some sort of miniature or found percussion that I could smack with a drumstick while dancing around. I know I played a beer bottle with that drumstick for one of our other two or three songs, and it broke partway through that song, but I don’t think this was that song as I got some rattling sound out of my gizmo whatever it was at one point, which I don’t think I could have done with a single beer bottle (plus no breakage). (Added later: I think now it was an old saucepan I was playing! Most of the time I was smacking the outside of it, but I played the inside to get that clattering!) I seemed to have been undecided between whether to play on the downbeat or the upbeat and what to do during the stops and riffs, so I did a little of everything. With my one note percussion piece. While dancing around. It’s funny to hear us thanked for coming all the way down from Boulder!
“Baseline And Mohawk”
LF:
“Baseline and Mohawk” was recorded live at a performance we did from the KGNU radio studio straight over the air during their spring pledge drive. It starts out real mellow, with Evan playing recorder and I’m playing a repeated line on this box percussion thing, and someone’s playing that piece of Latin percussion that makes changing tones as you hit it. We had the same basic four for this, me, Evan, Ed and Brad. Brad was sure doing a lot for us around then! Then I start getting off the pattern with my percussion and then I stop and move to something else while Evan plays some subtle harmonica. It’s my synthesizer that I moved to. Brad had a synthesizer too, a drum synthesizer that he activated with his drumsticks. Ed’s getting patterns out of his Echoplex. I don’t know if it’s me on slide whistle and Evan on gong or vice versa. We’re being very free form about our free formity! About 4 and a half minutes in, it starts changing tone. And Ed picks up his guitar! And Evan has his bass! While Brad and I exchange synth plinks! Evan actually sets a rhythm with his bass playing. And Ed’s out in acid land already! I do some following of Evan’s bass line on kazoo. Heh, Ed could be louder. I like my kazoo playing but it was intended as rhythm and shouldn’t be so out in front. Evan puts down his bass and, in the WoG tradition of “found media” (a la "The Prep Quiz", "Motel 6"), he picks up a piece of paper laying around in the studio which had on it pledge drive instructions for dee jays and other volunteers and he starts reading it. It’s nice how it’s mixed low so you can only hear some of it. The two synthesizers are now doing a nice duel. Ed’s still in there but making this background noise. Brad’s drumming has become more abstract, and it may be that three or five drum set that he’s playing. I return to the kazoo, in a frenzy. Evan comes to the station’s phone number in the instructions and keeps repeating it, a semi-subliminal pledge rap of his own….
EC:
We’re back to jam city. I don’t recall why this was titled as such. Baseline and Mohawk is an intersection in southeast Boulder, but had no particular significance. Maybe I just liked the way it sounded. Ed starts this with mellow chords and Evan trills on the recorder. It’s very atmospheric and laid-back, a change of pace from several maniacal tracks preceding it. Evan’s bass comes in and, as usual, establishes a groove. There is a lot of unintelligible speech in the background while Ed’s guitar wails away. Eventually you hear Evan’s voice repeating “call 449-4885”, which is the KGNU radio station number, that we would use for the “Go For It” program.
LF:
Evan is correct that the title had no particular significance to the jam we titled thus, but Evan chose that title because he felt that, well, save for one letter, the two words did in fact have great significance to the music scene. I.e., "baseline" sounds like and is one letter away from "bassline," whose significance is obvious, and "mohawk" had significance because of the hairstyle of that name that was big among punk rockers of that time. Evan was actually excited by the coincidence between this and that intersection within the same city limits as our base of operations.
“The Butt Song”
LF:
The key line to Evan’s brilliant hilarious “The Butt Song” is the line, “How many butts does it take to get published?” Evan first wrote this as a poem to rebel against and ridicule the local publications to which he had submitted poetry to no avail. One was called “New Voices” and Evan complained about how that was a misnomer since all they did was keep publishing the old guard of famous beatniks, Ginsberg and gang. So he decided to write something ridiculously obscene and ridiculous. I assume the original intent was to send it in to who or where ever, but I don’t know if he did send it anywhere. I had the temerity to suggest to him that he make the music more adventurous, but that sure didn’t gain any traction and I quickly dropped it. He probably wanted to keep it simple, plus he was always as much a folkie as anything else, and doing that is just totally honest for him. The entire track is all just him singing and playing acoustic guitar, probably three major chords. The light hearted guitar actually compliments the obscene and cynical lyrics very nicely. I’ve had a woman tell me she likes this song because women are always talking about butts! There’s some extremely clever lines in there, I’ll let you find them yourself….
EC:
This is Evan all by himself doing an improvised maniacal meditation on all the uses of the word “but” (or “butt” as the case may be). In many ways, a companion piece to “I Like The Way Your Boobs Bounce”.
"Theme From A Summer Place”
LF:
“Theme From a Summer Place” was my idea. For years as a kid my father would play radio station WPAT whenever we were in the car for any length of time, a genuine “beautiful music” format station. I might actually like it now (though maybe in small doses) but it drove me nuts then. However, over the years I identified two songs, just two songs, that they would play occasionally enough that I recognized them and found that I actually liked them, and one of them was this. I got the sheet music to it and probably found for the first time that it had lyrics. I’ve since seen an episode of The Simpsons in which someone is singing words to this tune that are about how nobody knows the words to this song and I was all, Hey, I not only know them but I’ve recorded myself singing them! I once impressed a lady and her mother singing them to a violin player in a Macaroni Grill! But my WoG version was sick, Evan even told me so, and he wrote and sang “The Butt Song”!! I played the melody on my Farfisa (my own first recorded use of it?) and Evan and I sang the melody and lyrics, which are wonderfully idealistic by the way, fairly straight other than the exaggerated sugaryness of the last word. Then I overdubbed what was intended to be a bass line with a few flourishes on my synthesizer, but it kind of ended up more flourishes than bass line. And finally I overdubbed another vocal, high pitched and through my delay box. I thought I remembered hearing angelic voices on this piece. The most well known rendition, by Percy Faith, doesn’t really have that, but maybe I really did hear that, in some other rendering? Boyd Rice once told me he had 40 different versions in his collection! So I was doing my best to imitate these angelic voices I thought I had heard. The repeated scream at the end was kind of an accident, I probably was aiming for something more stretched out. When Evan first heard it he hesitated and then exclaimed, “It’s Walls Of Genius!!”
EC:
This is a cover of a famous song that I only knew from Muzak. Real elevator music. At least I think that’s the case… it was David’s idea and I think he produced sheet music for it, so maybe he knew the original somehow. I am singing a straight lead vocal while David is mewling and howling along.
“My Heart Would Know”
EC:
Evan sings this Hank Williams standard on the “Go For It” show, live on-air. This is Evan’s faux-autistic approach mixed with some funny voices and general maniacal delivery.
LF:
Now it’s back to Davide’s “Go For It” show! The third release of ours with material we recorded off of it. Interestingly, Evan says something about the pledge drive being the previous week, so this probably happened very shortly after we played at the station. I think this is probably my very favorite Evan vocal performance. There’s a place in the last stanza where he just about blows your brain apart. You hear Davide laughing and clapping near the beginning and then laughing again after that transcendental note, and then applauding afterward.
“Amerika Futura”
LF:
The next track returns us both to the WoG chestnut borrowed from Rumours of Marriage, “Amerika Futura” (first recorded by WoG on Almost Groovy!), as well as to our live performance on the KGNU pledge drive. I’m still playing the little Jamaican drum, even though we have Brad on his trap set this time. Ed is cooking on the guitar, and Evan gives him mucho space to cook on. It’s impressive in retrospect that I recite “shit” and “fuck” but I don’t think there were any repercussions. Evan plays acoustic guitar.
EC:
The old WoG favorite is revisited, the country-punk arrangement. Evan is singing the lead and Ed’s lead solo is transcendent.
“Ape Heaven”
EC:
This is a typical WoG jam with the bass swooping in on volume-knob effects, lots of sounds and percussion. Why “Ape Heaven”? I don’t recall how it got named.
LF:
I have to confess to not knowing where “Ape Heaven” comes from, i.e., when we did it, what session it’s from. It might possibly be from the Road Damage session. Or maybe it goes all the way back to The Dry Heaves? I know that’s me on Brad’s drums and Brad on my synthesizer and Evan making noises on his bass, sometimes using the volume knobs. I might have heard Ed playing some percussion. I envision this being in the Hall Of Genius, so I don’t think it came from a live performance. Brad and I were unlikely to switch instruments like that in front of a live audience, too, though it’s not implausible, either. I do remember how we got the name. Evan and I were brainstorming on it, and I was thinking about how it was dreamy but intense, so I thought, hmm, it’s like seventh heaven plus, so I said out loud, “Eighth Heaven?” and Evan’s eyes grew wide and he said, “Did you just say Ape Heaven?” and I said no that’s not what I said, but that’s MUCH BETTER!!
“Publishers Soliloquoy”
EC:
David is vamping the synthesizer while Evan desperately reads from a telemarketers’ prompt-sheet and adds incentives of his own. I (Evan) had actually worked for two hours doing this when I was looking for a job and that’s where I got the text from. I gave it up after two hours because I couldn’t stand it any longer, after trying to talk some 90-year old woman into buying National Geographic. The people there wanted to know why I was leaving. They said I had been doing a good job. I just couldn’t do it; it was soul-crushing work.
LF:
“Publisher’s Soliloquoy” was yet another example of the found and usurped media thing, though Evan adds a few touches of his own. I think I found that list of things to say for a phone soliciting magazine salesman somewhere. I seem to remember finding it at the radio station, which doesn’t seem to make sense, but who knows now. I play a repeated and harsh riff on Farfisa, sloppily by the end, as Evan reads and takes liberties. We did it both at the same time in one take, so my mistakes remained. I tried to make them fit. I liked a more trebly sound on the Farfisa than Evan did. Where Evan says “Mrs. Blank” there was actually a blank in the instructions to be filled in with the name of whoever you were talking to, whoever you had called on the phone….
“Burning Smurfs”
EC:
Another Evan Cantor original. This starts with me leading the boys in a chant of “I like the way burning Smurfs smell” in the living room. Then in comes my overdubbed rockin’ tune. It was going along just fine until the second bridge when lightning struck the house across the street. You can hear the lightning strike on the tape as a loud explosion ending the song. My voice is heard saying, “whoa” as the reverberations of the lightning strike fade away. Whoa, indeed. It was almost as if God him-or-her-self objected to the burning of Smurfs and had made an editorial comment. And it was absolutely perfect for the song. A happy accident. Later, I burned a Smurf on stage as the climax of this song at our “End of The World” gig at Littleton Town Hall, in Littleton Colorado. Ed recalls that the smoke from my burning Smurf set off the alarms; they had to empty the hall before the next band could come on stage and they never again hosted a rock show at the Littleton Town Hall. I don’t recall any of that myself… again, perhaps that’s the proof that I was actually there.
LF:
The chant, “I like the way burning smurfs smell” was first performed during the Road Damage session and might have been thought up by any of us there for that, or by our group mind, though probably by Evan since I think that’s him leading it. Regardless, Evan wrote an entire song around it at a later date. He edited the original Road Damage chant onto the front of the track, so that’s the first thing you hear. Then you hear a later session recorded one night at the Hall by he and I. It was his song so he was leading and I was assisting. He’s playing acoustic guitar, which is the entire instrumentation except for some hand clapping and cabasa shaking, the former by both of us and the latter by Evan. The titular line has two Evan vocals and one of mine. “They smell so good” is three Evans, doing a three part harmony. I was probably clapping and/or singing at the same time he was singing the lead vocal and playing his acoustic, when the room lit up to a simultaneous BANG! There had been a very close lightning strike and it was so close that the thunder clapped at just the same time, and I do mean clap! You can hear it yourself, it sounds more like a gun shot to me! My friend Brian Kraft figured out that it was a thunder clap cause he could hear the ensuing rumbling afterwards, though it’s somewhat subtle. When it happened, we both just cold stopped what we were doing, and you can hear Evan go, “Whoa!!” Y’know, we were getting near the end of the song, so it happened at just the perfect time. It couldn’t have happened much later and still gotten recorded while we were playing. Had it happened a little earlier, we might have wanted to do the song over. But we got enough of the song on there so that we could make use of this once in a million lifetimes opportunity!! And so it ends, both abruptly but also fading out, but altogether crazed….
LF:
“Baseline and Mohawk” was recorded live at a performance we did from the KGNU radio studio straight over the air during their spring pledge drive. It starts out real mellow, with Evan playing recorder and I’m playing a repeated line on this box percussion thing, and someone’s playing that piece of Latin percussion that makes changing tones as you hit it. We had the same basic four for this, me, Evan, Ed and Brad. Brad was sure doing a lot for us around then! Then I start getting off the pattern with my percussion and then I stop and move to something else while Evan plays some subtle harmonica. It’s my synthesizer that I moved to. Brad had a synthesizer too, a drum synthesizer that he activated with his drumsticks. Ed’s getting patterns out of his Echoplex. I don’t know if it’s me on slide whistle and Evan on gong or vice versa. We’re being very free form about our free formity! About 4 and a half minutes in, it starts changing tone. And Ed picks up his guitar! And Evan has his bass! While Brad and I exchange synth plinks! Evan actually sets a rhythm with his bass playing. And Ed’s out in acid land already! I do some following of Evan’s bass line on kazoo. Heh, Ed could be louder. I like my kazoo playing but it was intended as rhythm and shouldn’t be so out in front. Evan puts down his bass and, in the WoG tradition of “found media” (a la "The Prep Quiz", "Motel 6"), he picks up a piece of paper laying around in the studio which had on it pledge drive instructions for dee jays and other volunteers and he starts reading it. It’s nice how it’s mixed low so you can only hear some of it. The two synthesizers are now doing a nice duel. Ed’s still in there but making this background noise. Brad’s drumming has become more abstract, and it may be that three or five drum set that he’s playing. I return to the kazoo, in a frenzy. Evan comes to the station’s phone number in the instructions and keeps repeating it, a semi-subliminal pledge rap of his own….
EC:
We’re back to jam city. I don’t recall why this was titled as such. Baseline and Mohawk is an intersection in southeast Boulder, but had no particular significance. Maybe I just liked the way it sounded. Ed starts this with mellow chords and Evan trills on the recorder. It’s very atmospheric and laid-back, a change of pace from several maniacal tracks preceding it. Evan’s bass comes in and, as usual, establishes a groove. There is a lot of unintelligible speech in the background while Ed’s guitar wails away. Eventually you hear Evan’s voice repeating “call 449-4885”, which is the KGNU radio station number, that we would use for the “Go For It” program.
LF:
Evan is correct that the title had no particular significance to the jam we titled thus, but Evan chose that title because he felt that, well, save for one letter, the two words did in fact have great significance to the music scene. I.e., "baseline" sounds like and is one letter away from "bassline," whose significance is obvious, and "mohawk" had significance because of the hairstyle of that name that was big among punk rockers of that time. Evan was actually excited by the coincidence between this and that intersection within the same city limits as our base of operations.
“The Butt Song”
LF:
The key line to Evan’s brilliant hilarious “The Butt Song” is the line, “How many butts does it take to get published?” Evan first wrote this as a poem to rebel against and ridicule the local publications to which he had submitted poetry to no avail. One was called “New Voices” and Evan complained about how that was a misnomer since all they did was keep publishing the old guard of famous beatniks, Ginsberg and gang. So he decided to write something ridiculously obscene and ridiculous. I assume the original intent was to send it in to who or where ever, but I don’t know if he did send it anywhere. I had the temerity to suggest to him that he make the music more adventurous, but that sure didn’t gain any traction and I quickly dropped it. He probably wanted to keep it simple, plus he was always as much a folkie as anything else, and doing that is just totally honest for him. The entire track is all just him singing and playing acoustic guitar, probably three major chords. The light hearted guitar actually compliments the obscene and cynical lyrics very nicely. I’ve had a woman tell me she likes this song because women are always talking about butts! There’s some extremely clever lines in there, I’ll let you find them yourself….
EC:
This is Evan all by himself doing an improvised maniacal meditation on all the uses of the word “but” (or “butt” as the case may be). In many ways, a companion piece to “I Like The Way Your Boobs Bounce”.
"Theme From A Summer Place”
LF:
“Theme From a Summer Place” was my idea. For years as a kid my father would play radio station WPAT whenever we were in the car for any length of time, a genuine “beautiful music” format station. I might actually like it now (though maybe in small doses) but it drove me nuts then. However, over the years I identified two songs, just two songs, that they would play occasionally enough that I recognized them and found that I actually liked them, and one of them was this. I got the sheet music to it and probably found for the first time that it had lyrics. I’ve since seen an episode of The Simpsons in which someone is singing words to this tune that are about how nobody knows the words to this song and I was all, Hey, I not only know them but I’ve recorded myself singing them! I once impressed a lady and her mother singing them to a violin player in a Macaroni Grill! But my WoG version was sick, Evan even told me so, and he wrote and sang “The Butt Song”!! I played the melody on my Farfisa (my own first recorded use of it?) and Evan and I sang the melody and lyrics, which are wonderfully idealistic by the way, fairly straight other than the exaggerated sugaryness of the last word. Then I overdubbed what was intended to be a bass line with a few flourishes on my synthesizer, but it kind of ended up more flourishes than bass line. And finally I overdubbed another vocal, high pitched and through my delay box. I thought I remembered hearing angelic voices on this piece. The most well known rendition, by Percy Faith, doesn’t really have that, but maybe I really did hear that, in some other rendering? Boyd Rice once told me he had 40 different versions in his collection! So I was doing my best to imitate these angelic voices I thought I had heard. The repeated scream at the end was kind of an accident, I probably was aiming for something more stretched out. When Evan first heard it he hesitated and then exclaimed, “It’s Walls Of Genius!!”
EC:
This is a cover of a famous song that I only knew from Muzak. Real elevator music. At least I think that’s the case… it was David’s idea and I think he produced sheet music for it, so maybe he knew the original somehow. I am singing a straight lead vocal while David is mewling and howling along.
“My Heart Would Know”
EC:
Evan sings this Hank Williams standard on the “Go For It” show, live on-air. This is Evan’s faux-autistic approach mixed with some funny voices and general maniacal delivery.
LF:
Now it’s back to Davide’s “Go For It” show! The third release of ours with material we recorded off of it. Interestingly, Evan says something about the pledge drive being the previous week, so this probably happened very shortly after we played at the station. I think this is probably my very favorite Evan vocal performance. There’s a place in the last stanza where he just about blows your brain apart. You hear Davide laughing and clapping near the beginning and then laughing again after that transcendental note, and then applauding afterward.
“Amerika Futura”
LF:
The next track returns us both to the WoG chestnut borrowed from Rumours of Marriage, “Amerika Futura” (first recorded by WoG on Almost Groovy!), as well as to our live performance on the KGNU pledge drive. I’m still playing the little Jamaican drum, even though we have Brad on his trap set this time. Ed is cooking on the guitar, and Evan gives him mucho space to cook on. It’s impressive in retrospect that I recite “shit” and “fuck” but I don’t think there were any repercussions. Evan plays acoustic guitar.
EC:
The old WoG favorite is revisited, the country-punk arrangement. Evan is singing the lead and Ed’s lead solo is transcendent.
“Ape Heaven”
EC:
This is a typical WoG jam with the bass swooping in on volume-knob effects, lots of sounds and percussion. Why “Ape Heaven”? I don’t recall how it got named.
LF:
I have to confess to not knowing where “Ape Heaven” comes from, i.e., when we did it, what session it’s from. It might possibly be from the Road Damage session. Or maybe it goes all the way back to The Dry Heaves? I know that’s me on Brad’s drums and Brad on my synthesizer and Evan making noises on his bass, sometimes using the volume knobs. I might have heard Ed playing some percussion. I envision this being in the Hall Of Genius, so I don’t think it came from a live performance. Brad and I were unlikely to switch instruments like that in front of a live audience, too, though it’s not implausible, either. I do remember how we got the name. Evan and I were brainstorming on it, and I was thinking about how it was dreamy but intense, so I thought, hmm, it’s like seventh heaven plus, so I said out loud, “Eighth Heaven?” and Evan’s eyes grew wide and he said, “Did you just say Ape Heaven?” and I said no that’s not what I said, but that’s MUCH BETTER!!
“Publishers Soliloquoy”
EC:
David is vamping the synthesizer while Evan desperately reads from a telemarketers’ prompt-sheet and adds incentives of his own. I (Evan) had actually worked for two hours doing this when I was looking for a job and that’s where I got the text from. I gave it up after two hours because I couldn’t stand it any longer, after trying to talk some 90-year old woman into buying National Geographic. The people there wanted to know why I was leaving. They said I had been doing a good job. I just couldn’t do it; it was soul-crushing work.
LF:
“Publisher’s Soliloquoy” was yet another example of the found and usurped media thing, though Evan adds a few touches of his own. I think I found that list of things to say for a phone soliciting magazine salesman somewhere. I seem to remember finding it at the radio station, which doesn’t seem to make sense, but who knows now. I play a repeated and harsh riff on Farfisa, sloppily by the end, as Evan reads and takes liberties. We did it both at the same time in one take, so my mistakes remained. I tried to make them fit. I liked a more trebly sound on the Farfisa than Evan did. Where Evan says “Mrs. Blank” there was actually a blank in the instructions to be filled in with the name of whoever you were talking to, whoever you had called on the phone….
“Burning Smurfs”
EC:
Another Evan Cantor original. This starts with me leading the boys in a chant of “I like the way burning Smurfs smell” in the living room. Then in comes my overdubbed rockin’ tune. It was going along just fine until the second bridge when lightning struck the house across the street. You can hear the lightning strike on the tape as a loud explosion ending the song. My voice is heard saying, “whoa” as the reverberations of the lightning strike fade away. Whoa, indeed. It was almost as if God him-or-her-self objected to the burning of Smurfs and had made an editorial comment. And it was absolutely perfect for the song. A happy accident. Later, I burned a Smurf on stage as the climax of this song at our “End of The World” gig at Littleton Town Hall, in Littleton Colorado. Ed recalls that the smoke from my burning Smurf set off the alarms; they had to empty the hall before the next band could come on stage and they never again hosted a rock show at the Littleton Town Hall. I don’t recall any of that myself… again, perhaps that’s the proof that I was actually there.
LF:
The chant, “I like the way burning smurfs smell” was first performed during the Road Damage session and might have been thought up by any of us there for that, or by our group mind, though probably by Evan since I think that’s him leading it. Regardless, Evan wrote an entire song around it at a later date. He edited the original Road Damage chant onto the front of the track, so that’s the first thing you hear. Then you hear a later session recorded one night at the Hall by he and I. It was his song so he was leading and I was assisting. He’s playing acoustic guitar, which is the entire instrumentation except for some hand clapping and cabasa shaking, the former by both of us and the latter by Evan. The titular line has two Evan vocals and one of mine. “They smell so good” is three Evans, doing a three part harmony. I was probably clapping and/or singing at the same time he was singing the lead vocal and playing his acoustic, when the room lit up to a simultaneous BANG! There had been a very close lightning strike and it was so close that the thunder clapped at just the same time, and I do mean clap! You can hear it yourself, it sounds more like a gun shot to me! My friend Brian Kraft figured out that it was a thunder clap cause he could hear the ensuing rumbling afterwards, though it’s somewhat subtle. When it happened, we both just cold stopped what we were doing, and you can hear Evan go, “Whoa!!” Y’know, we were getting near the end of the song, so it happened at just the perfect time. It couldn’t have happened much later and still gotten recorded while we were playing. Had it happened a little earlier, we might have wanted to do the song over. But we got enough of the song on there so that we could make use of this once in a million lifetimes opportunity!! And so it ends, both abruptly but also fading out, but altogether crazed….
above, from the January 1985 Cause And Effect cassette distribution catalog, Indianapolis, Indiana - catalog description by Hal McGee
Above, Crazed To The Core listing in the fifth Walls Of Genius catalog, The Gift Of The Geek
Crazed To The Core description in the sixth Walls Of Genius catalog, The Bane Of The Buffoon:
"On CRAZED TO THE CORE, Walls Of Genius utilizes traditional forms of music in order to attack those very same traditions! You haven't heard desecrated classics until you've heard Walls Of Genius decimate them...Rock, Muzak, Nursery Rhymes--these are all fair game for Walls Of Genius! When you've had pretension and superstar idolatry up the yin-yang, there's no better antidote than 90 minutes of guaranteed madness, CRAZED TO THE CORE!"
Below, un-attributed review in the seventh Walls Of Genius catalog, A Tale Of Two Twits
Crazed To The Core description in the sixth Walls Of Genius catalog, The Bane Of The Buffoon:
"On CRAZED TO THE CORE, Walls Of Genius utilizes traditional forms of music in order to attack those very same traditions! You haven't heard desecrated classics until you've heard Walls Of Genius decimate them...Rock, Muzak, Nursery Rhymes--these are all fair game for Walls Of Genius! When you've had pretension and superstar idolatry up the yin-yang, there's no better antidote than 90 minutes of guaranteed madness, CRAZED TO THE CORE!"
Below, un-attributed review in the seventh Walls Of Genius catalog, A Tale Of Two Twits
Review by Jerry Kranitz from Aural Innovations #22, January 2003
Walls Of Genius consisted of Little Fyodor, Evan Cantor, Ed Fowler and Brad Carton, and released about 30 cassettes in the 80's. Crazed To The Core is a 2-CDR set that reissues music originally released in 1984. Much of this is pretty raw but there's some excellent rock music, some fairly annoying stuff that sounds like late night drunken antics, and most of it is loads and loads of fun.
Many of the songs are cover tunes which are stylistically all over the map (at least the originals are). And boy, what a treatment they get. The vocals on "Magic Carpet Ride" can get pretty grating - intentionally I'm sure - though this had to be a riot to experience live. One thing that does come through is what a solid Rock band Walls Of Genius were. It's raucous and raw and brimming with heavy rock acidic bliss. Similar treatment is given to "Down On The Corner", "Green River" (Creedence get dinged twice), Love Potion Number 9", "Timothy Leary", and "Theme From A Summer Place". Captain Beefheart is actually treated with respect on "The Dust Blows Forward ‘n The Dust Blows Back". Walls Of Genius completely trash "Barbara Ann". I understand Brian Wilson has been getting out of the house lately so don't let him hear this or he'll have a total psycho relapse. But I think my favorite of the covers has to be the totally hysterical C&W insane asylum version of "Henry The Eighth". There may be more but these were the ones I recognized.
More good humor can be heard on "Abdul, The Bulbul Amir". The narration is a hoot and is interspersed with excellent bits of raw acid rock. "The Butt Song" and "Publishers Soliloquoy" really got me laughing.
But there's some really good music mixed in with all the wackiness. "Amerika Futura" is a simple tune but has some tasty guitar work. "Ape Heaven" is a cool spaced out experimental excursion into noise and sound. And there are two lengthier tracks on which the band stretch out a bit. "Motel 6" consists of 20 minutes of acid-psych lo-fi freakout fun. Like Bevis Frond run through a salad shooter. Shortly after the 10 minute mark it veers off into more experimental territory backed by an incessant noise pattern and various voice samples. "Baseline And Mohawk" starts off as a dreamy oddball blend of melodic progressive rock and chaotic free-improv, but soon transitions to a strange space rock carnival atmosphere. Lots of fun noises and interesting ideas abound throughout both of these extended excursions.
Walls Of Genius consisted of Little Fyodor, Evan Cantor, Ed Fowler and Brad Carton, and released about 30 cassettes in the 80's. Crazed To The Core is a 2-CDR set that reissues music originally released in 1984. Much of this is pretty raw but there's some excellent rock music, some fairly annoying stuff that sounds like late night drunken antics, and most of it is loads and loads of fun.
Many of the songs are cover tunes which are stylistically all over the map (at least the originals are). And boy, what a treatment they get. The vocals on "Magic Carpet Ride" can get pretty grating - intentionally I'm sure - though this had to be a riot to experience live. One thing that does come through is what a solid Rock band Walls Of Genius were. It's raucous and raw and brimming with heavy rock acidic bliss. Similar treatment is given to "Down On The Corner", "Green River" (Creedence get dinged twice), Love Potion Number 9", "Timothy Leary", and "Theme From A Summer Place". Captain Beefheart is actually treated with respect on "The Dust Blows Forward ‘n The Dust Blows Back". Walls Of Genius completely trash "Barbara Ann". I understand Brian Wilson has been getting out of the house lately so don't let him hear this or he'll have a total psycho relapse. But I think my favorite of the covers has to be the totally hysterical C&W insane asylum version of "Henry The Eighth". There may be more but these were the ones I recognized.
More good humor can be heard on "Abdul, The Bulbul Amir". The narration is a hoot and is interspersed with excellent bits of raw acid rock. "The Butt Song" and "Publishers Soliloquoy" really got me laughing.
But there's some really good music mixed in with all the wackiness. "Amerika Futura" is a simple tune but has some tasty guitar work. "Ape Heaven" is a cool spaced out experimental excursion into noise and sound. And there are two lengthier tracks on which the band stretch out a bit. "Motel 6" consists of 20 minutes of acid-psych lo-fi freakout fun. Like Bevis Frond run through a salad shooter. Shortly after the 10 minute mark it veers off into more experimental territory backed by an incessant noise pattern and various voice samples. "Baseline And Mohawk" starts off as a dreamy oddball blend of melodic progressive rock and chaotic free-improv, but soon transitions to a strange space rock carnival atmosphere. Lots of fun noises and interesting ideas abound throughout both of these extended excursions.