WoG 0019 - Walls Of Genius - Before ...and After
LITTLE FYODOR -- "vocals", Farfisa, Synthesizer, Gong, Bongoes, Guitar, Electronic Percussion, Flutophone
JOE COLORADO -- Vocals, Acoustic & Electric Guitars, Percussion, Spoken Word, Keyboards, Tapes, & Gong
RED ED -- Stratocaster Guitar & Echoplex
Recorded November 1984.
Buy a CD-R version on Little Fyodor's website (click on Order Stuff!!! tab)
JOE COLORADO -- Vocals, Acoustic & Electric Guitars, Percussion, Spoken Word, Keyboards, Tapes, & Gong
RED ED -- Stratocaster Guitar & Echoplex
Recorded November 1984.
Buy a CD-R version on Little Fyodor's website (click on Order Stuff!!! tab)
|
Evan Cantor:
After Crazed To The Core and Wanna Beer?, we got serious again. This is the beginning of the presumably “late-period” WoG. Before …and After was likely our best-received release of all time. Anne Addison of Unsound magazine called us “the new sound terrorists of America”, of which we were justly proud. Richie Unterberger (of Option Magazine) later offered WoG it’s first internet immortality by reviewing this particular title on the All Music Guide and wrote an entry to WoG as a band on the All Music Guide website. The title implies that there was a “before” (the crazed silly-ass beer-soaked lunatics) and now an “after” (serious sociopolitically-inclined experimental musicians). It was also a socio-politically themed collection of songs, a “concept album” if you will. Thus begins the late period WoG modus-operandi, mostly a lot of overdubbed projects from David and Evan, with each other assisting due to the limitations imposed by 4-track recording. For instance, if you could get percussion and keys overdubbed on a single track, it was like having an added track. By doubling stuff up on tracks, we could get more going on simultaneously. I did not bounce tracks because the sound quality was already going to suffer once it got mixed down onto a master cassette and then dubbed from that. Our “product” was already third-generation magnetic tape and I didn’t want to further reduce the sound quality by bouncing tracks on the 4-track. It’s not like we had expensive microphones, either. Several of the microphones I used for our live recordings were Radio Shack cheapos. I was lucky to own a Shure SM58, a Shure SM57 and an Electro-Voice mic no longer in production. As for band names, plain and simple, it’s Walls Of Genius. I think we knew who we were by this time! Plus, the joke of having all the different band names was played out. The cassette culture knew who we were and what we were up to, so there was no more fooling anybody. Plus, there was no need to create an illusion of a multi-band underground scene in Boulder and Denver, since there actually was one. Surprising to me today is that back then we could get WoG onto the bill with punk-rock and metal bands. We confounded those audiences, certainly, but were always received well for our uninhibited approach. The cover featured three sets of skulls, labeled (from bottom to top) “Neanderthal, Homo Sapiens, Genius”. The Neanderthal and Homo sapiens skulls were accurate in their labeling, but the “Genius” skull was actually an Australopithecus or Homo erectus. The thanks went out to Ed Granat, “for his contribution to ‘Dracula & His Victim’ on the Objekt #2 compilation”, to Elizabeth North “for her sincere self-analysis”, to Felicia Duncan “for additional vocals on ‘I Followed You For Years’” and to Paul Metters and Martha Roskowski of KGNU Radio. Ed Granat was/is a high school pal of David’s. Elizabeth North was the author of some self-analysis that David had gotten hold of somehow. I doubt that Ms. North ever saw or heard this music. Felicia was a student employee at the CU Recreation Center and I somehow got her interested in this avant-garde music. The tape itself featured a cassette label with designs I had drawn based on ancient Puebloan pottery, stamped “A” and “B” for each side. This was an unusual release in that Ed Fowler appeared on only one track. By this time, David and I were focusing on so-called ‘solo’ tracks, which allowed us to do a lot of overdubbing and mixing in a ‘studio’ atmosphere as opposed to the live party-jam sessions that had been so much a part of what we were doing. We were cognizant of the many musical strains running through the cassette culture and wanted to explore each of them (punk, noise, industrial, musique concrète, sound collage). This did not lend itself to Ed’s undisciplined approach. Overdubbing and mixing can be tedious, time-intensive detailed work and there’s no way you’d ever get Ed to do that. So we ended up with a whole lot of material that did not include him. Although we had steadfastly stuck to the 90-minutes for so long, we had decided that 45-minute length cassettes would be more commercially acceptable in the cassette underground and this forced us to tighten up our editing. The result was a tight, nearly-professional product with no filler whatsoever. (Not that we had inserted filler before, but different ears have different takes on that subject!) |
Little Fyodor:
Before …and After was a milestone. It was kind of our Sgt. Pepper and White Album all rolled into one. It was our most popular and most critically acclaimed tape and also reflected a huge departure in approach. Of the 13 listed tracks (there was one unlisted, but we’ll skip that for this statistical analysis), seven were complete solo projects without any direct participation from anyone else, and two or three more were very close to that. There are no party jams. Only one song is even semi-improvisational. Ed only appears once! (On the semi-improvisational one.) There’s only one outside guest who appears on one song only. There’s two cover songs but nothing completely off the cuff or spur of the moment. And the whole tape is only 45 minutes long, our shortest yet! This was largely an Evan and Dave show, though, as I alluded to already, it was almost even more Evan or Dave. It drew consistently good reviews and years later critic and historian Ritchie Unterberger praised it on the AllMusic.com website as a “lost avant-rock classic” that was “ripe for excavation on CD reissue by some company that doesn't mind losing money for art's sake.” Heh…. Like most things WoG (Ludovico Treatment notwithstanding), I do not believe there was any collectively conscious effort to move in the directions this tape took. Sure, Evan made a conscious decision to release a 45 minute tape instead of our usual 90 minutes or occasional 60. I think this was a bit of an experiment on his part to see if it would “help”, i.e., garner more attention and sales by not overwhelming people. I don’t remember any big signpost pointing towards doing this since Kent Hotchkiss’s roundabout admonitions approximately a year earlier. Maybe there was something I don’t remember, but it may have just been frustration with the lack of attention we thought we deserved and thus a yearning to try something new. And it apparently worked! As for the overdub projects, I think that just happened. I certainly don’t remember any plan toward that end, and I can’t imagine why there would have been. Five of those seven completely solo tracks were mine, and I had just become more comfortable working on my own and realizing ideas I had since gaining permission from Evan to use his equipment on my own and after living in the Hall Of Genius for a full year. Tensions had been arising between Evan and myself, as will happen between band mates and roommates (and we were both!), and that may or may not have been a factor in my own hermit-like approach. Evan and I were just both full of musical ideas at the time, and I guess we just plowed ahead, without regard for how much Ed had the chance to keep up…. Another distinct facet of this tape was a bit of a dive into politics. Evan had been letting the world know about some of his political concerns and how he viewed certain things via text and imagery in his liner notes, as well as in the catalogs, since almost our very beginning, but I don’t think we had yet broached the subject in our music before this with the one exception of the dystopian "Amerika Futura" that was borrowed from Ed and Evan’s former band, Rumours Of Marriage, and warned of a coming police state. This tape is hardly dominated by politics, but the subject does crop up in some significant ways, and in maybe a more overtly topical and contemporary manner, with a presidential election looming…. The packaging also was a significant step forward, if still elegantly simple, but that was all Evan’s doing, as the packaging always was, and I’ll leave the details to him…. It’s interesting that Evan chose this time to list us in the liner notes by our musical or nicknames. A reflection of our individuality coming to the fore? Or maybe just a desire to do something different. The first person thanked was Ed Granat, my childhood best friend, who lived across the street from me in Wayne, NJ and was the first person I ever played music with and smoked dope with (though our earliest bonding experiences were stuff like playing one on one football on his front yard!). By the time we finished this tape we had evidently already submitted “Dracula and His Victim” to the Objekt #2 compilation tape, and we used a portion of a tape that Ed had sent to me for that song. Since we couldn’t acknowledge his contribution on someone else’s compilation, I thought we should do so on this our own next release. Elizabeth North was a woman whose interview in a local newspaper about her schizophrenia formed the basis of my lyrics to the song "Sister Schizo", and since we weren’t giving her song writing credit, I thought we should at least thank her for our use of her words. Felicia Duncan was our one guest musician on the tape, someone Evan had met somewhere somehow. Paul Metters was the Music Director at KGNU and Martha Roskowski another DJ there who both undoubtedly played WoG on their radio programs…. |
Side One...
Four More Years (Cantor)
I Live For The Sun (Henn)
March Slob (Lichtenverg)
Impressions of Denver (Lichtenverg)
Squeezing & Spreading (Lichtenverg)
Twist And Shout (Russell/Medley)
Four More Years (Cantor)
I Live For The Sun (Henn)
March Slob (Lichtenverg)
Impressions of Denver (Lichtenverg)
Squeezing & Spreading (Lichtenverg)
Twist And Shout (Russell/Medley)
“Four More Years”
EC:
This was my masterpiece of mixology. I had recorded presidential debates off the radio or television, thus had Walter Mondale admitting that he “liked President Reagan”. I mixed up a lot of their comments into what becomes an unintelligible mess of political psycho-babble, which is what it was anyway. I just made it more obvious! Finally the babble quits and you hear President Reagan say something tough about letting the boys shoot back. With the announcement by gong, air raid sirens come in over a machine rhythm. The machine was a Gestetner mimeograph machine at my workplace which I recorded one day while printing flyers for the University of Colorado Recreation Center. The combination of the Gestetner and the air raid siren speaks to the idea of America’s “war machine”.
Many of us thought Ronald Reagan was a warmonger and my opinion hasn’t changed in 30 years. I believed then, as now, that Reagan was the philosophical father behind the idea that the United States could police the whole world, that the USA could essentially run the world, that the USA should run the world, that our way of life was superior to all others and our forms of government the very best. He was the ultimate “cold warrior” in a love-it-or-leave-it sense, giving himself credit for causing the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I still believe that the Soviet Union would have imploded under the weight of their untenable economy regardless of Ronald Reagan’s posturing.
Anyway, the piece continues as air raid sirens fade away and a bevy of war noises come in. You hear explosions and soldiers marching and chanting. I had gone to CU’s Norlin Library and recorded military recordings for this, which culminate in a sound recording of an atomic bomb explosion. This is where the doomsday, minor key music comes in with a repetitive and threatening lead guitar over keyboards. The dark music finally cuts off with Ronald Reagan repeating the words “You put your thumb on a button and somebody blows up twenty minutes later.” I can hardly believe he made such a joke in public, much less in some way that I could have recorded it off television or radio, but, to paraphrase the man himself, there you are (“There you go again,” he repeats at the beginning of the piece, taunting Walter Mondale in the debates). This is a dark, pessimistic piece and is no less apropos today than it was thirty years ago. It’s actually a little bit scary and I don’t think I would play it for little children.
LF:
The tape starts out with “Four More Years”, and what can I say, while this tape garnered the most attention of any of our releases, it was largely because of this one track which most definitely had the biggest impact of any one track of ours. It’s primarily a tape collage based around the Reagan-Mondale presidential debates [October 7 and 21, 1984], plus some other stuff. It certainly wasn’t the only use of Ronald Reagan sound bites to make music in that time period, and in fact I wonder if Reagan is still the biggest star of sound collage music based on total output to this day. But I think this could easily be the very best of Reagan cutup of them all. It certainly wipes that Jerry Harrison dance track (based on the “We begin bombing in five minutes” sample) all over the floor. I played this track for my classical music loving professorial aunt and she said, “That was great! That was great!” It’s basically all Evan. I had two and only two bits of indirect contribution, and I’ll tell you what they were.
Evan recorded the first debate (well, the first debate that he recorded, I don’t know if it was the first debate of the campaign) by pointing a microphone at the cheap little television we had at our house. Just like with the sexual moans from the couple downstairs, he just set up a mike and stuck it at the TV. And that’s why you hear some buzzing amidst some of the sound clips, because they were recorded in such a primitive fashion. Afterwards, Evan was ready to make his sound collage just from what he’d gotten from that, but I made a twofold suggestion. I pointed out that there was another debate coming up and he may as well get more material to use, and I suggested that this time he record the debate off the radio, which could be done without any open air microphone but rather with, well, what would you call that, line-in technology? It’s all wires when you just stick a tape in your cassette deck and point your tuner to the radio. Evan took me up on both suggestions and that’s why some of the clips are cleaner sounding than others.
I also played engineer for some of the music he overdubbed onto his collage, which led to some anger on Evan’s part when he saw that his organ playing was recorded way into the red on the VU meter, which he attributed to the same lack of attention he felt I was guilty of during my Rumours of Marriage four-track running days. But I knew I was paying attention, at the least in this case, only I realized it wouldn’t have been practical to try to adjust the volume in the middle of the sustained keyboard part Evan was holding at the time. I didn’t have the gumption to stick up for myself, and the issue remained unresolved, perhaps to simmer and fester beneath the surface….
Regardless, the organ track was usable and used and sounded great, and I think the piece is an anti-war classic. The middle part, that starts off with the ubiquitous WoG gong, has recordings from World War II that he found at the library – all that marching around and shooting of guns and chanting of soldier chants -- and concludes with an actual recording of an atomic bomb. Boom. Evan overdubbed my Farfisa organ through a flanger and also played some of his most effective guitar ever, or at least up to that point. It didn’t have a lot of notes, but it communicated what it had to. He also used a recording of some sort of specialized printing or mimeographing machine that he made at his work place, to give a mechanized feel of automatons following their leaders into war. This machine had a particular name, maybe starting with a G, hopefully Evan still remembers it…. The overall effect was of dire warning of a coming nuclear holocaust as a result of Reagan’s reckless militarism, but not entirely without humor. “You put your thumb on a button and somebody blows up 20 minutes later….” What a card!
“I Live For The Sun”
EC:
This is the companion piece to “Four More Years”. After the doom-and-gloom of the reality piece that precedes it, this is a nihilistically happy response, almost insanely cheerful. If the thought of atomic Armageddon bums you out, just go to the beach and “live for the sun”! The song itself was a hit for one-hit-wonder The Sunrays who made it to #51 on the Billboard charts in 1965 with this song. The author of the song, Rick Henn, was a friend of Mike Love of the Beach Boys, so they had a surf music connection. I had always had a love-hate relationship with surf music and would do more parodies along this line related to WoG in the future. On this one, it’s just me doing everything, including the Roches-like dissonant harmonies on the last verse. Unterberger described this as something like a chorus of crazed hippies with plastic smiles attached to their faces. Exactly!
LF:
Then the doom and gloom mood changes radically with the sound of Evan’s sunshiny acoustic and shaky cabasa! “I Live For the Sun” was entirely Evan’s idea, a cover of a sixties surf tune by some one hit wonder. All I do on it is play bongos. I remember Charlie Verrette reacting to this track by saying we played a sort of “inside-out industrial music”, and I think he must have been reacting to my bongo playing, cause while I keep the beat decently and even manage to survive some over ambitious syncopation, it hardly, um, shall we say, flows. Well, whether it’s the perfect foil for Evan’s sunshine or merely fails to interfere with it, that’s what I do and Evan does the rest, which is mainly that acoustic guitar and lead and harmony vocals. And some finger snapping and situational percussion (can’t go long without that gong!). Sixties cover songs had of course become a WoG staple by this point, but this represented a new level of intentionality and maybe even (gasp?) sophistication. One reviewer said this song sounded like it was sung by someone with a smile glued on his face, and Evan said that was exactly the effect he was going for! I like how Evan slurs or “fakes” a word or two that he evidently couldn’t make out from the record, in the grand tradition of pre internet cover songs like the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie”!
“March Slob”
LF:
“March Slob” was all me. I think the electronic rhythm is being kept by my synthesizer in white noise mode. I believe that I noticed that it sounded almost like chains dragging, and I sculpted a piece around that feeling. The melody is shared between my Farfisa and my flutophone, a kind of toy recorder that was originally owned by my older brother when we were kids. I do some scratching on my little Jamaican drum. And then I cover it all with a sort of lead part on, what else, GONG (heh, look who’s talking now!). I thought of the title later, which is a play on the title of a Tchaikovsky piece I had remembered as being “March Slav". My song really had nothing to do with Tchaikovsky, but I thought it maybe had a bit of an Eastern European and marching sound, and I thought that title sounded funny. The flutophone has the final (slobby) say, in another of those times I let one instrument take over the ending as the rest is faded away…. I’m not sure what one would call this style of music, except maybe, quirky? I was just using what I had at hand. I’m not sure where this came from, either. Seems the closest thing I’d done to it before was “Industrial Daydream”. Like that, it probably grew out of playing around with the synthesizer.... That’s a neat toy, after all!
EC:
This is David’s solo work, based loosely on Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave in B-flat minor, Op. 31”. I believe he is playing a flutophone on this, it sounds like an ocarina. This minor key theme sort of takes the insanely happy edge off, coming right after “Sun”.
“Impressions Of Denver”
LF:
So, you’re not impressed? Well, get this story. They were building new houses right across the street from the Hall Of Genius. There had been ruins there before, ruins of old houses, right in the middle of Beautiful Boulder. They didn’t rise up over the ground, they were mostly about ground level or maybe even below. About two or three ex-houses we’re talking about here. Evan and I rummaged through these ruins and found a few interesting oddities. I still have children’s records record jackets up on my basement wall that we found there! But they tore up the old ruins and started putting in brand new houses. Bang, bang, bang went the hammers of the house builders! I put a microphone on our front porch and recorded the process, complete with cars going by on the street in between. I had a two chord riff, kind of weird chords, I think. I stretched one of the chords either which way with the whammy bar, and played them through my flanger. And I programmed a little arpeggio on the synthesizer, which I faded in and out. Evan said that made it sound more like electronic music. Which sounds kind of obvious, but it made sense, too. And then one day, well, let’s back up. Did you know I worked a graveyard shift? It was one of the sources of tension between me and Evan cause I had to sleep during the day, something I never fully got used to even after three years of it. It ain’t natural, but I won’t belabor that. Occasionally, I would stay up to do stuff right after my shift rather than go right to bed as I usually did. Those were weird times when I did that. Here I was staying up late past my bedtime and the sun was up and shining. It was a dreamy and disorienting experience. I wrote “Everybody’s Fucking” on one of those days. And one day I took a trip into Denver right after a shift. I sure don’t remember why now, maybe to run some errands. I know I bought some records at Wax Trax. “Spending money wisely defeats the purpose”, I thought, walking away with these frivolous records. So that went into the song. I saw someone looking at me from a bus and wondered what was up with that, so that went in there, too. It takes a little more attention to cross the street than in mellow Boulder, so that went in there. I was a little hyper conscious of the pollution, just cause living in Boulder trained you to think of Denver as where the pollution was, so I imagined myself coughing from being in Denver, and that went in there. “So you’re not impressed” was me thinking about my father, who when I told him that I’d heard Denver had changed a real lot in recent years said it’s like that everywhere. I originally called this “Impressions In Denver” cause that’s what it literally was, thoughts I had while roaming around Denver in my graveyard shifted daze. But Evan kept making it “Of” instead of “In” and I gave up and it was “Of”. Oh, and then there’s the line about boring people everywhere: the more people there are, the more boring people there are. I think that was my way of rationalizing living in Boulder rather than Denver, where some said it was more interesting and metropolitan. I live in Denver now, and, well…. So I kind of wove all this together, semi intentionally and semi randomly. Kind of ironic that all that industrial construction sound came from Boulder, not Denver. I did all this straight from scratch, there’s no tapes or loops when I repeat myself, I’m just repeating myself. But yeah, I know -- you’re not impressed!
EC:
This is, again, David’s solo work, a sociological criticism of mainstream society. The background sounds like a recording of construction sites with a lot of pounding noises. David’s voice repeats key phrases: “So you’re not impressed”, “there are boring people everywhere, the more people there are, the more boring people there are” and “Why is the man in the bus looking at me?” His anomie is expressed perfectly.
“Squeezing & Spreading”
LF:
Frank Zygmunt, friend and dumpster diver extraordinaire, found us this autoharp. He kind of gave it to us care of Evan, but I got my mitts on it first. I just liked the sound I got thrashing at it over and over, the cool labyrinthian reverberations, I didn’t care what I was actually playing. I overdubbed my synthesizer, in a slow building up kind of way. Then they both fade, an acoustic fade coupled with an electronic fade. Hmmm…. Oh, “Squeezing and Spreading” is a term I learned in typing class, it was how you corrected mistakes when the correction had one more or one fewer letters than the mistake. But then, it could mean other things, too….
EC:
Another of David’s solo pieces. David is playing the out-of-tune autoharp that Frank Zygmunt gave us. I had used it, or would shortly, for the “Dracula & His Victim” piece that we donated to the Objekt #2 compilation. The autoharp created a fabulous dissonant sound, like an angelic harp warped by demoniac energies, that was perfectly suited to the expression of psychological alienation and anomie. This is, I think, what David was trying to get at.
“Twist And Shout”
EC:
This is one of my WoG favorites. Not a part of my regular repertoire by any means, but it is an iconically easy song to play and it fit the WoG approach like a glove. I give my laconic emotionless approach with heavy reverb on the verses and then we go manic on the “ahh ahh ahh ahh” ascending vocal part. This song is connected by our mutual admiration for John Lennon, as well as the uninhibited almost punk-rock-like approach of the very early Beatles. Both David and I were doing the backup vocals.
LF:
Evan had a concept. He was going to sing the lead part of “Twist and Shout” in his ultra straight and stoic style, what he’s been calling “laconic”, and then he and I both would do crazed background vocals for the answer part, the response to the call. It was a real distilling down of the choice attributes of what WoG had been doing and working on all along. It’s almost like it was all practice leading up to this. He played acoustic guitar and kept up such a good rhythm that you don’t notice there’s no percussion of any kind, not to mention no rock ‘n’ roll trap set. I played the organ, on his instructions. Under two minutes of that ol’ WoG mania, but it was enough to stick in people’s minds. I told Ritchie Unterberger that I thought there was a lot of variety on this tape, and he said yeah, it was rather variotous, in fact. But almost all the riot on the tape is in this minute forty-nine. We turned it on, shot it out, and cleaned it all up afterwards, without breaking a sweat….
“Four More Years (revisited)”
LF:
I know some of my contributions to this tape were inspired by my graveyard shift work schedule, but I know I recorded a radio show special called “Ronald Reagan and the Prophecy of Armageddon” while I was on the day shift, so I must have made that change during the making of this tape. After three years of graveyard, I lasted on that daytime shift another six months and then I was fired! Meanwhile, I heard this show come on KGNU, and I thought, hey, Evan might like this, so I stuck a tape in the combo radio and tape player (aka ghetto blaster) on my desk and recorded it. There’s some interference from imperfect radio reception (so I guess recording off the radio isn’t necessarily perfect either?). But yeah, I recorded this show and brought it to Evan and he cut it up to what’s on there, and ran it to the end of the tape. I remember we called it “Four More Years (revisited)” but I don’t remember why we didn’t list it on the liner notes….
EC:
This was a “secret” track, not listed in the notes. Ronald Reagan talks about Armageddon as “Onward Christian Soldiers” plays. Then Billy Graham comes in, discussing Armageddon. Next up is Jerry Falwell discussing Armageddon. He calls it “a reality, a horrible reality”. Reagan returns to say “America was set apart in a special way” and you can just tell that he’s ready to start the War of Armageddon. Give him a Biblical Inch and he’ll give you a Biblical End of the World. Thanks a lot, Ronald Reagan. I had (still do) a poster of somebody named “Hilton Sutton” that advertised Hilton in a very exhortative pose with the words ‘Armageddon’ in huge letters above him. I thought it was so ridiculous it was funny. I think Hilton appears in some of the living room photographs from the Hall Of Genius. Now… is it Hall? or Halls? Well, the house, I think, I refer to as the “Hall”, but inside there are a number of rooms, hence the “Halls”. Both work and neither one takes precedence. I very likely sat in front of Sunday morning radio with a small cassette player to record these snippets. The piece cuts off at the end of side A.
EC:
This was my masterpiece of mixology. I had recorded presidential debates off the radio or television, thus had Walter Mondale admitting that he “liked President Reagan”. I mixed up a lot of their comments into what becomes an unintelligible mess of political psycho-babble, which is what it was anyway. I just made it more obvious! Finally the babble quits and you hear President Reagan say something tough about letting the boys shoot back. With the announcement by gong, air raid sirens come in over a machine rhythm. The machine was a Gestetner mimeograph machine at my workplace which I recorded one day while printing flyers for the University of Colorado Recreation Center. The combination of the Gestetner and the air raid siren speaks to the idea of America’s “war machine”.
Many of us thought Ronald Reagan was a warmonger and my opinion hasn’t changed in 30 years. I believed then, as now, that Reagan was the philosophical father behind the idea that the United States could police the whole world, that the USA could essentially run the world, that the USA should run the world, that our way of life was superior to all others and our forms of government the very best. He was the ultimate “cold warrior” in a love-it-or-leave-it sense, giving himself credit for causing the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I still believe that the Soviet Union would have imploded under the weight of their untenable economy regardless of Ronald Reagan’s posturing.
Anyway, the piece continues as air raid sirens fade away and a bevy of war noises come in. You hear explosions and soldiers marching and chanting. I had gone to CU’s Norlin Library and recorded military recordings for this, which culminate in a sound recording of an atomic bomb explosion. This is where the doomsday, minor key music comes in with a repetitive and threatening lead guitar over keyboards. The dark music finally cuts off with Ronald Reagan repeating the words “You put your thumb on a button and somebody blows up twenty minutes later.” I can hardly believe he made such a joke in public, much less in some way that I could have recorded it off television or radio, but, to paraphrase the man himself, there you are (“There you go again,” he repeats at the beginning of the piece, taunting Walter Mondale in the debates). This is a dark, pessimistic piece and is no less apropos today than it was thirty years ago. It’s actually a little bit scary and I don’t think I would play it for little children.
LF:
The tape starts out with “Four More Years”, and what can I say, while this tape garnered the most attention of any of our releases, it was largely because of this one track which most definitely had the biggest impact of any one track of ours. It’s primarily a tape collage based around the Reagan-Mondale presidential debates [October 7 and 21, 1984], plus some other stuff. It certainly wasn’t the only use of Ronald Reagan sound bites to make music in that time period, and in fact I wonder if Reagan is still the biggest star of sound collage music based on total output to this day. But I think this could easily be the very best of Reagan cutup of them all. It certainly wipes that Jerry Harrison dance track (based on the “We begin bombing in five minutes” sample) all over the floor. I played this track for my classical music loving professorial aunt and she said, “That was great! That was great!” It’s basically all Evan. I had two and only two bits of indirect contribution, and I’ll tell you what they were.
Evan recorded the first debate (well, the first debate that he recorded, I don’t know if it was the first debate of the campaign) by pointing a microphone at the cheap little television we had at our house. Just like with the sexual moans from the couple downstairs, he just set up a mike and stuck it at the TV. And that’s why you hear some buzzing amidst some of the sound clips, because they were recorded in such a primitive fashion. Afterwards, Evan was ready to make his sound collage just from what he’d gotten from that, but I made a twofold suggestion. I pointed out that there was another debate coming up and he may as well get more material to use, and I suggested that this time he record the debate off the radio, which could be done without any open air microphone but rather with, well, what would you call that, line-in technology? It’s all wires when you just stick a tape in your cassette deck and point your tuner to the radio. Evan took me up on both suggestions and that’s why some of the clips are cleaner sounding than others.
I also played engineer for some of the music he overdubbed onto his collage, which led to some anger on Evan’s part when he saw that his organ playing was recorded way into the red on the VU meter, which he attributed to the same lack of attention he felt I was guilty of during my Rumours of Marriage four-track running days. But I knew I was paying attention, at the least in this case, only I realized it wouldn’t have been practical to try to adjust the volume in the middle of the sustained keyboard part Evan was holding at the time. I didn’t have the gumption to stick up for myself, and the issue remained unresolved, perhaps to simmer and fester beneath the surface….
Regardless, the organ track was usable and used and sounded great, and I think the piece is an anti-war classic. The middle part, that starts off with the ubiquitous WoG gong, has recordings from World War II that he found at the library – all that marching around and shooting of guns and chanting of soldier chants -- and concludes with an actual recording of an atomic bomb. Boom. Evan overdubbed my Farfisa organ through a flanger and also played some of his most effective guitar ever, or at least up to that point. It didn’t have a lot of notes, but it communicated what it had to. He also used a recording of some sort of specialized printing or mimeographing machine that he made at his work place, to give a mechanized feel of automatons following their leaders into war. This machine had a particular name, maybe starting with a G, hopefully Evan still remembers it…. The overall effect was of dire warning of a coming nuclear holocaust as a result of Reagan’s reckless militarism, but not entirely without humor. “You put your thumb on a button and somebody blows up 20 minutes later….” What a card!
“I Live For The Sun”
EC:
This is the companion piece to “Four More Years”. After the doom-and-gloom of the reality piece that precedes it, this is a nihilistically happy response, almost insanely cheerful. If the thought of atomic Armageddon bums you out, just go to the beach and “live for the sun”! The song itself was a hit for one-hit-wonder The Sunrays who made it to #51 on the Billboard charts in 1965 with this song. The author of the song, Rick Henn, was a friend of Mike Love of the Beach Boys, so they had a surf music connection. I had always had a love-hate relationship with surf music and would do more parodies along this line related to WoG in the future. On this one, it’s just me doing everything, including the Roches-like dissonant harmonies on the last verse. Unterberger described this as something like a chorus of crazed hippies with plastic smiles attached to their faces. Exactly!
LF:
Then the doom and gloom mood changes radically with the sound of Evan’s sunshiny acoustic and shaky cabasa! “I Live For the Sun” was entirely Evan’s idea, a cover of a sixties surf tune by some one hit wonder. All I do on it is play bongos. I remember Charlie Verrette reacting to this track by saying we played a sort of “inside-out industrial music”, and I think he must have been reacting to my bongo playing, cause while I keep the beat decently and even manage to survive some over ambitious syncopation, it hardly, um, shall we say, flows. Well, whether it’s the perfect foil for Evan’s sunshine or merely fails to interfere with it, that’s what I do and Evan does the rest, which is mainly that acoustic guitar and lead and harmony vocals. And some finger snapping and situational percussion (can’t go long without that gong!). Sixties cover songs had of course become a WoG staple by this point, but this represented a new level of intentionality and maybe even (gasp?) sophistication. One reviewer said this song sounded like it was sung by someone with a smile glued on his face, and Evan said that was exactly the effect he was going for! I like how Evan slurs or “fakes” a word or two that he evidently couldn’t make out from the record, in the grand tradition of pre internet cover songs like the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie”!
“March Slob”
LF:
“March Slob” was all me. I think the electronic rhythm is being kept by my synthesizer in white noise mode. I believe that I noticed that it sounded almost like chains dragging, and I sculpted a piece around that feeling. The melody is shared between my Farfisa and my flutophone, a kind of toy recorder that was originally owned by my older brother when we were kids. I do some scratching on my little Jamaican drum. And then I cover it all with a sort of lead part on, what else, GONG (heh, look who’s talking now!). I thought of the title later, which is a play on the title of a Tchaikovsky piece I had remembered as being “March Slav". My song really had nothing to do with Tchaikovsky, but I thought it maybe had a bit of an Eastern European and marching sound, and I thought that title sounded funny. The flutophone has the final (slobby) say, in another of those times I let one instrument take over the ending as the rest is faded away…. I’m not sure what one would call this style of music, except maybe, quirky? I was just using what I had at hand. I’m not sure where this came from, either. Seems the closest thing I’d done to it before was “Industrial Daydream”. Like that, it probably grew out of playing around with the synthesizer.... That’s a neat toy, after all!
EC:
This is David’s solo work, based loosely on Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave in B-flat minor, Op. 31”. I believe he is playing a flutophone on this, it sounds like an ocarina. This minor key theme sort of takes the insanely happy edge off, coming right after “Sun”.
“Impressions Of Denver”
LF:
So, you’re not impressed? Well, get this story. They were building new houses right across the street from the Hall Of Genius. There had been ruins there before, ruins of old houses, right in the middle of Beautiful Boulder. They didn’t rise up over the ground, they were mostly about ground level or maybe even below. About two or three ex-houses we’re talking about here. Evan and I rummaged through these ruins and found a few interesting oddities. I still have children’s records record jackets up on my basement wall that we found there! But they tore up the old ruins and started putting in brand new houses. Bang, bang, bang went the hammers of the house builders! I put a microphone on our front porch and recorded the process, complete with cars going by on the street in between. I had a two chord riff, kind of weird chords, I think. I stretched one of the chords either which way with the whammy bar, and played them through my flanger. And I programmed a little arpeggio on the synthesizer, which I faded in and out. Evan said that made it sound more like electronic music. Which sounds kind of obvious, but it made sense, too. And then one day, well, let’s back up. Did you know I worked a graveyard shift? It was one of the sources of tension between me and Evan cause I had to sleep during the day, something I never fully got used to even after three years of it. It ain’t natural, but I won’t belabor that. Occasionally, I would stay up to do stuff right after my shift rather than go right to bed as I usually did. Those were weird times when I did that. Here I was staying up late past my bedtime and the sun was up and shining. It was a dreamy and disorienting experience. I wrote “Everybody’s Fucking” on one of those days. And one day I took a trip into Denver right after a shift. I sure don’t remember why now, maybe to run some errands. I know I bought some records at Wax Trax. “Spending money wisely defeats the purpose”, I thought, walking away with these frivolous records. So that went into the song. I saw someone looking at me from a bus and wondered what was up with that, so that went in there, too. It takes a little more attention to cross the street than in mellow Boulder, so that went in there. I was a little hyper conscious of the pollution, just cause living in Boulder trained you to think of Denver as where the pollution was, so I imagined myself coughing from being in Denver, and that went in there. “So you’re not impressed” was me thinking about my father, who when I told him that I’d heard Denver had changed a real lot in recent years said it’s like that everywhere. I originally called this “Impressions In Denver” cause that’s what it literally was, thoughts I had while roaming around Denver in my graveyard shifted daze. But Evan kept making it “Of” instead of “In” and I gave up and it was “Of”. Oh, and then there’s the line about boring people everywhere: the more people there are, the more boring people there are. I think that was my way of rationalizing living in Boulder rather than Denver, where some said it was more interesting and metropolitan. I live in Denver now, and, well…. So I kind of wove all this together, semi intentionally and semi randomly. Kind of ironic that all that industrial construction sound came from Boulder, not Denver. I did all this straight from scratch, there’s no tapes or loops when I repeat myself, I’m just repeating myself. But yeah, I know -- you’re not impressed!
EC:
This is, again, David’s solo work, a sociological criticism of mainstream society. The background sounds like a recording of construction sites with a lot of pounding noises. David’s voice repeats key phrases: “So you’re not impressed”, “there are boring people everywhere, the more people there are, the more boring people there are” and “Why is the man in the bus looking at me?” His anomie is expressed perfectly.
“Squeezing & Spreading”
LF:
Frank Zygmunt, friend and dumpster diver extraordinaire, found us this autoharp. He kind of gave it to us care of Evan, but I got my mitts on it first. I just liked the sound I got thrashing at it over and over, the cool labyrinthian reverberations, I didn’t care what I was actually playing. I overdubbed my synthesizer, in a slow building up kind of way. Then they both fade, an acoustic fade coupled with an electronic fade. Hmmm…. Oh, “Squeezing and Spreading” is a term I learned in typing class, it was how you corrected mistakes when the correction had one more or one fewer letters than the mistake. But then, it could mean other things, too….
EC:
Another of David’s solo pieces. David is playing the out-of-tune autoharp that Frank Zygmunt gave us. I had used it, or would shortly, for the “Dracula & His Victim” piece that we donated to the Objekt #2 compilation. The autoharp created a fabulous dissonant sound, like an angelic harp warped by demoniac energies, that was perfectly suited to the expression of psychological alienation and anomie. This is, I think, what David was trying to get at.
“Twist And Shout”
EC:
This is one of my WoG favorites. Not a part of my regular repertoire by any means, but it is an iconically easy song to play and it fit the WoG approach like a glove. I give my laconic emotionless approach with heavy reverb on the verses and then we go manic on the “ahh ahh ahh ahh” ascending vocal part. This song is connected by our mutual admiration for John Lennon, as well as the uninhibited almost punk-rock-like approach of the very early Beatles. Both David and I were doing the backup vocals.
LF:
Evan had a concept. He was going to sing the lead part of “Twist and Shout” in his ultra straight and stoic style, what he’s been calling “laconic”, and then he and I both would do crazed background vocals for the answer part, the response to the call. It was a real distilling down of the choice attributes of what WoG had been doing and working on all along. It’s almost like it was all practice leading up to this. He played acoustic guitar and kept up such a good rhythm that you don’t notice there’s no percussion of any kind, not to mention no rock ‘n’ roll trap set. I played the organ, on his instructions. Under two minutes of that ol’ WoG mania, but it was enough to stick in people’s minds. I told Ritchie Unterberger that I thought there was a lot of variety on this tape, and he said yeah, it was rather variotous, in fact. But almost all the riot on the tape is in this minute forty-nine. We turned it on, shot it out, and cleaned it all up afterwards, without breaking a sweat….
“Four More Years (revisited)”
LF:
I know some of my contributions to this tape were inspired by my graveyard shift work schedule, but I know I recorded a radio show special called “Ronald Reagan and the Prophecy of Armageddon” while I was on the day shift, so I must have made that change during the making of this tape. After three years of graveyard, I lasted on that daytime shift another six months and then I was fired! Meanwhile, I heard this show come on KGNU, and I thought, hey, Evan might like this, so I stuck a tape in the combo radio and tape player (aka ghetto blaster) on my desk and recorded it. There’s some interference from imperfect radio reception (so I guess recording off the radio isn’t necessarily perfect either?). But yeah, I recorded this show and brought it to Evan and he cut it up to what’s on there, and ran it to the end of the tape. I remember we called it “Four More Years (revisited)” but I don’t remember why we didn’t list it on the liner notes….
EC:
This was a “secret” track, not listed in the notes. Ronald Reagan talks about Armageddon as “Onward Christian Soldiers” plays. Then Billy Graham comes in, discussing Armageddon. Next up is Jerry Falwell discussing Armageddon. He calls it “a reality, a horrible reality”. Reagan returns to say “America was set apart in a special way” and you can just tell that he’s ready to start the War of Armageddon. Give him a Biblical Inch and he’ll give you a Biblical End of the World. Thanks a lot, Ronald Reagan. I had (still do) a poster of somebody named “Hilton Sutton” that advertised Hilton in a very exhortative pose with the words ‘Armageddon’ in huge letters above him. I thought it was so ridiculous it was funny. I think Hilton appears in some of the living room photographs from the Hall Of Genius. Now… is it Hall? or Halls? Well, the house, I think, I refer to as the “Hall”, but inside there are a number of rooms, hence the “Halls”. Both work and neither one takes precedence. I very likely sat in front of Sunday morning radio with a small cassette player to record these snippets. The piece cuts off at the end of side A.
Side Two...
Sister Schizo (Lichtenverg)
The Lemon Rock Rag (Cantor)
What You Do (Cantor)
I Followed You For Years (Cantor/Lichtenverg)
Eternal Secretions (Lichtenverg)
Night Rat (Lichtenverg)
It's A Scary World Out There (Cantor)
Sister Schizo (Lichtenverg)
The Lemon Rock Rag (Cantor)
What You Do (Cantor)
I Followed You For Years (Cantor/Lichtenverg)
Eternal Secretions (Lichtenverg)
Night Rat (Lichtenverg)
It's A Scary World Out There (Cantor)
“Sister Schizo”
EC:
Side B starts off with David’s solo piece, channeling Elizabeth North’s self-analysis about feeling alienated from other people. I introduce a “schizophrenic’s tale of broken dreams”. I don’t know where David got the text for this, he’ll have to tell us about it!
LF:
So I read this article in a local paper, probably The Denver Post (but maybe the Boulder Camera?) (I had lots of time to read on the front desk graveyard shift!), about this schizophrenic lady named Elizabeth North describing what her schizophrenia was like to a newspaper reporter. I could definitely relate in lots of ways to a lot of what she said – maybe I’m not entirely normal myself? Imagine that! But then, I found it funny, too. I guess I’m kind of sick that way. I don’t make big distinctions between the serious and the frivolous, between the sacred and the profane, at least not in how you’re supposed to treat them or react to them. They kind of all roll into one for me in that regard. So I don’t really think I’m making fun of this lady. Though maybe I sort of am. I’m having fun with her plight, that’s for sure. But it’s largely my plight, too. Though I’m not quite as bad off as her. But still I can relate to what she’s saying. Up to a point. Am I making sense? Oh, who knows why I do things, who put me up to analyzing myself like this, anyway? [Editor's Note: me!] It’ll make you schizophrenic, it will!
Anyway, I kept the beat on my old Mattel Synsonics drum machine, the one that’s good at the lurchy rhythms. For some reason I didn’t realize I could keep an even rhythm all the way through and so I switched between threes and fours to make the drum patterns work out mathematically with the drum machine’s capabilities. I had a little tweeter tom go every so often to let me know when it switched. I played a real complex one chord riff on my guitar and a single dissonant two note chord on my Farfisa. My synth lead is way more sophisticated, it alternates between two different sounds. You might notice that the Farfisa goes away when the synthesizer leads come in. That was for lack of tracks (both instruments used the same one). I had my digital delay in hand as I, um, rapped. That way I kept changing the level and type of echo on my voice. I really ramped it up at the end! “Whoa!” said Evan, when he heard it! The improvised bass at the end was originally a mistake that I ran with. The whole bass part is played on the bass section of my Farfisa, there’s one octave of bass notes on the left hand side. My quasi lead guitar at the end is me touching the high E string lightly with my left hand so the string is mostly deaded out, but there’s still some semblance of notes. I also accidentally bumped the mike at the end. I re-did this song on a later solo record of mine, in a professional studio, and it’s cleaner sounding with no overt mistakes and it has enough tracks for both the Farfisa and the synth and I programmed the drum machine right and I played a more involved synth lead (backwards, even!) and on top of all that it has some great guitar from local guitar whiz John Martinez… but this version has a certain charm I couldn’t replicate. Oh yeah, there’s also my vocal rhythm thing, kind of a loud breathing through the delay.
I recorded this all on my own one weekend when Evan was gone camping, probably with Scott Childress. It was a sign of our deteriorating relationship that he chose to go camping with Scott instead of me as he used to. But it was a bit much, being roommates and band mates AND camping mates. It’ll drive you schizophrenic, it will…. Oh and if it’s not clear yet, I chose specific lines from the interview with this poor woman to incorporate into this song. I changed a couple of words here and there just to make it fit better, but otherwise it all came from her. “Some people get better, some don’t.” Thank you, and God bless you, Elizabeth…. Fyodor adds later: In doing my, um, statistical analysis above (in my introductory notes about the tape), I had forgotten that I had gotten Evan to say one line in Sister Schizo as an intro the rest of it. What I had him say was, "Schizophrenic Tells of Broken Dreams", which was the headline of the newspaper story from which I mostly just transcribed quotes of Ms. North's for the remainder of the lyrics.
“Lemon Rock Rag”
EC:
This is Evan’s solo piece with David adding terrific dissonant keyboards. This is an homage, again, to the early Beatles as my riff recalls the screaming intro to the song “Honey Don’t”, which had long been in my regular repertoire and had been visited by WoG as well. “Lemon” references “Lennon”. The guitar moves into dissonant territory around the middle as it morphs into a less cheerful sounding mode, as if we can no longer simply rock out and be happy with happy-rocking out. The dissonance tells you that all is not right in this world.
LF:
“The Lemon Rock Rag” is Evan being an electric acoustic folkie with a bit of screaming. Real old timey, old schooly stuff! But then for some reason he let me play my synthesizer on it, too. Who ever heard of a synthesizer on a rag? I kind of tried to follow what his music was doing, but I hadn’t really studied what it was doing before trying to do that, so it’s a rather abstract sort of following. I was just wondering now if the title was some well worn cliche, but when I Google it, references to this piece are all I get! One hit reminds me that Aural Innovations called it “a wild combination of mind fucked contrasts!” What I tell you? I never knew what Evan thought of my overdub, I don’t think he ever said. It probably wasn’t what he originally had in mind for what his “rag” should sound like, but I guess he thought what the hell, it’s Walls Of Genius! Oh, and he potted up his electric guitar right at the end for cool effect on his final swoosh (we’re talking mix down, here)….
“What You Do”
EC:
This is my spoken word piece, using the voice of Roy Watkins, or something very much like it, a redneck accent. It is a meditation on sex and politics and all the different ways that the word “fuck” can be utilized. What can be said of this other than it’s all still true? We were obviously not too worried about the obscenity at this point. I had done a similar thing with the word “but/butt” in a previous release.
LF:
The next track is just Evan laying down a little solo a cappella spoken word redneck rap. The repetitions of the titular line couplet act as something of a chorus giving the piece a sense of musicality despite being all spoken not sung and having no accompaniment. The vocal delivery and content are reminiscent of the “Roy Watkins from Mud Flats, Wyoming” character Evan performed frequently on the KGNU “Go For It” call-in show. One might say that akin to WoG’s “so bad it’s good” aesthetic, Evan liked creating a character that was so dumb he was smart! Well, or maybe we should say it’s a character whose plainspokenness revealed great wisdom…? People liked quoting this one a lot!
“I Followed You For Years"
EC:
This is the one true collaborative piece on the cassette. David starts it with a rhythmic part on the synth and drum machines, I come in with a lead guitar part that morphs into evil-sounding minor-key power-chords for the chorus. The vocals are wordless harmonies, assisted by Felicia Duncan. I don’t recall how I got her interested in what we were doing. She was a student employee at the CU Recreation Center, where I worked.
LF:
“I Followed You For Years” was really mostly Evan; he got the ball rolling with a guitar riff plus two more distinct sections that he wrote melodies for. The music and title reflected a continuation of his spy/noir fascination, albeit with a brighter (major key?) feel, at least for that first section. It’s certainly gone minor by the third part (not sure about the second, which seems “in between” in feel). I believe Evan originally planned to write lyrics to this and make it a complete song, and one can definitely sing the titular line to the opening notes of his leading guitar riff, but I guess the song never came to him but he had this musical outline and so we sculpted a piece around that. I get co-writing credits just for the synthesizer part I programmed to go along with it that may be seen to act either as a harmonic backdrop or a multi-toned bass line. Evan lamented not having enough tracks to be able to add a bass line of his own, and I just shrugged cause I thought my synth part came close enough. Just as with “The Lemon Rock Rag,” Evan’s electric guitar and my synth are somewhat odd bedfellows, though not nearly as much so here. The piece starts off with my programmed synth part getting faded up, then I play a rhythm guitar part with no notes, I had deadened all the strings with my left hand for a purely rhythmic effect. Then Evan comes in with his lead guitar part. When he moves to the 2nd part of his composition, we hear Felicia’s vocals. By the third section, she’s singing harmony (with herself or with Evan?), and Evan is shaking the cabasa. I sure don’t remember how or where Evan met Felicia, and I don’t believe I ever saw her before or after we made this song together. She brought over one of those percussion boxes that were big then, they were a hollow box with semi-circular logs of varying size carved into the top to create percussion sounds of varying tone, which were usually played with hard mallets that resembled super balls on a stick. [Friend and musician Farrell Lowe has since informed me that this instrument is known as a "slit drum".] This device shows up elsewhere in the WoG catalog, but I don’t know if we owned one ourselves, and I know Felicia brought one over in a plastic shopping bag and I played it on this piece. Oddly, one thing I remember was that this was the very first time I ever saw one of those plastic shopping bags reused to transport something else after its initial use bringing home the groceries! I played a slightly different part on this device for that third part of the composition than for the other two parts. Otherwise, I just keep doing the same thing over and over. Evan returns to his lead riff and ends, and then my synthesizer ends the song again!
“Eternal Secretions"
EC:
Finally, a track with Ed Fowler playing on it, the only one for this release. This is a duet between David on guitar and Ed on lead guitar, both heavily manipulated by effects.
LF:
“Eternal Secretions” is a duet between me and Ed, with no Evan: probably the only duet between just the two of us in the entire WoG catalog. Evan was there, but he just engineered it and left the playing to us two. It is also the only piece on this release that has any improvisation to speak of (as it’s normally thought of) and the only one to include Ed, maybe not coincidentally. I wish I remember what Ed was doing at the Hall Of Genius that day, and whether we recorded anything else, but alas. I had a two part two chord riff, using the fingering for a C chord up at the 9th and 7th frets. It was a way to get neat sounding chords that I had no idea what they were. Evan let me know that I wasn’t the first one to ever use this technique, but it was new to me, so I felt like it was all mine anyway. For one of the two parts, I’d arpeggiate the chord up at the 9th fret real slowly, and the notes alternated between high notes where my fingers were and low notes where the strings were open. For the other part I’d strum out real fast between the aforementioned two chords. I think I was using both the distortion and chorus features of my Jazz Chorus 120 amp. I didn’t really know when I would switch between the two parts, I just went by feel. So that was an improvisational element of this, even though the notes themselves were planned. And then Ed improvised along with what I was doing, playing differently for each part, and of course he didn’t know when I was going to change parts either since I didn’t! He reacted to my unpredictability right on the spot in one take and plays some interesting stuff, wizard that he is! The name sounds like something else, which I thought made it sound funny (us parodists always like making references!), but I also thought it sounded neat in and of itself, and for some ineffable reason it seemed to fit the music, too…. (I later brought this two chord two part riff back on a solo album for an instrumental called “Nothing To Say”….)
“Night Rat”
EC:
Another David solo piece. David is on the ruined autoharp, then his voice comes in doing throaty noises, sounding like a baby choking. A weird cranking sound comes and goes, returns again and leaves. This piece has a very alienating sound, as if society is choking the author, the “night rat” of the title. David was likely still working the night shift at the Hotel Boulderado at this time.
LF:
“Night Rat” was a bit of an experiment with minimalism and odd sound sources, but it was also an attempt to describe in sound the effect working the graveyard shift was having on me. Though not the actual working part so much as the nights off, when I’d still be up all night cause that was my schedule, that’s what I was used to. I’d work from midnight till 8 AM, so I was usually up those same hours when I didn’t work, too. And I’d spend the wee-est of those hours mostly by myself. It was a weird and isolating and lonely type of existence. Sometimes I’d start the night off partying with friends only to still be up long after they’d all have hit the hay. One such night, I wandered around the town drunk, probably around 4 AM or so, opening car doors that I’d found unlocked. I didn’t steal anything or do any (other) harm, I’d just leave the door open and then drunkenly wander on. That’s how weird it was. I believe I recorded most or all of “Night Rat” during some of these wee hours by myself, so the feeling of it was right there with me. Most of the sound is carried by the autoharp, the one I played on “Squeezing and Spreading” and Evan played on “Dracula and His Victim”. I also do some weird vocalizing, conjuring up the rattiness of it all straight from my throat. Whenever Ed would hear this vocalizing, he’d start cracking up. Hey, it’s not supposed to be funny, Ed! Ha-ha. There’s also some slow strumming of some normally unused part of my guitar, probably the part of the strings between the top of the neck and the tuning knobs. And the rest is stuff from the Hall Of Genius kitchen. A faucet dripping, cabinet drawers shaking and creaking. And the whole thing ends with the oven door dropping open…. Dig those reverberations!
“It’s A Scary World Out There”
EC:
This is an Evan solo piece, some of the most intense lead guitar I ever played with Walls of Genius. It’s a rockin’ piece, but is morbidly repetitive. The minor key echoes the message of the chorus which are the only vocals on it. The song ends with a triumphant evil laugh and guitar feedback. The message of the chorus (same as the title) sums up all the sociopolitical commentary of the whole, the conclusion being that all this crap, psychological, sociological and political, makes for a very scary world in which to live. As true today as it was then.
LF:
“It’s A Scary World Out There” was Evan’s stab at a Halloween song. It was that time of year, as you can tell from all the election stuff (hmmm, coincidence…?). Like “I Followed You For Years”, it’s a bit more of a sketch of a song than a fully fleshed out song, skeletal even (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) though at least the titular line does get sung this time. Many times, in fact!
I told my friend Brian Kraft that Evan was trying to combine a Ventures like surf sound with the hypnotic minimalism of Kraftwerk, and Brian cracked up (and he was rarely one to even crack a smile) and said that that has got to be the first time anyone has ever tried to combine those two particular bands! The Ventures and Kraftwerk, ha!
Evan sings (double tracked) and plays acoustic rhythm guitar and a fuzz drenched electric lead guitar. He alternates playing chords on the acoustic and playing this very cool, noirish riff. I play bongos and Farfisa. The one bang I make in the middle of the riffs was Evan’s idea. On the Farfisa, I interestingly play completely different chords than what Evan was playing on guitar, and they were probably chords I didn’t know the names of and probably would have been hard pressed to replicate even a couple of days later. I just picked out some notes that seemed to fit at the time. This was one reason I sometimes liked to say that WoG was so spontaneous and “free-form” and improvisational that even our original songs were improvisations in that we cooked them up right on the spot and probably couldn’t remember them again a week later! I probably can’t really speak for Evan on that account, but the point is that we wrote and learned original songs specifically to record them, not to add them to some repertoire or setlist that we would practice, like a normal band would. Whether Evan could have remembered the chords to this song x number of days later or not, I’m pretty sure we never did attempt to play it again. Back to my organ playing, I kept switching between a held or sustained chord and a more staccato type part – and then in-between there’s a part where I do a combination of both, holding a chord with my left hand and playing staccato style with my right -- wow! I also add a neat little downward run during every other space of Evan’s guitar riff. I was playing a newer and more resonant pair of bongos than the older and deader sounding ones I played on “I Live for the Sun”. Well, in classic Kraftwerkian and primitive pop fashion, we pretty much repeat it all over and over again except for changes in Evan’s lead guitar and my bongos, and also I varied the rhythm of my staccato organ stuff a little at least once, too, when I had to cover for a mistake. And then Evan ends it all by giving us his best Halloween laugh amidst the lingering guitar fuzz (maybe potted up)…. Somebody wrote to us about this tape once (someone who bought it or traded for it) and said, “You’re right, it is a scary world out there – and you guys don’t help!” Ha-ha!!
EC:
Side B starts off with David’s solo piece, channeling Elizabeth North’s self-analysis about feeling alienated from other people. I introduce a “schizophrenic’s tale of broken dreams”. I don’t know where David got the text for this, he’ll have to tell us about it!
LF:
So I read this article in a local paper, probably The Denver Post (but maybe the Boulder Camera?) (I had lots of time to read on the front desk graveyard shift!), about this schizophrenic lady named Elizabeth North describing what her schizophrenia was like to a newspaper reporter. I could definitely relate in lots of ways to a lot of what she said – maybe I’m not entirely normal myself? Imagine that! But then, I found it funny, too. I guess I’m kind of sick that way. I don’t make big distinctions between the serious and the frivolous, between the sacred and the profane, at least not in how you’re supposed to treat them or react to them. They kind of all roll into one for me in that regard. So I don’t really think I’m making fun of this lady. Though maybe I sort of am. I’m having fun with her plight, that’s for sure. But it’s largely my plight, too. Though I’m not quite as bad off as her. But still I can relate to what she’s saying. Up to a point. Am I making sense? Oh, who knows why I do things, who put me up to analyzing myself like this, anyway? [Editor's Note: me!] It’ll make you schizophrenic, it will!
Anyway, I kept the beat on my old Mattel Synsonics drum machine, the one that’s good at the lurchy rhythms. For some reason I didn’t realize I could keep an even rhythm all the way through and so I switched between threes and fours to make the drum patterns work out mathematically with the drum machine’s capabilities. I had a little tweeter tom go every so often to let me know when it switched. I played a real complex one chord riff on my guitar and a single dissonant two note chord on my Farfisa. My synth lead is way more sophisticated, it alternates between two different sounds. You might notice that the Farfisa goes away when the synthesizer leads come in. That was for lack of tracks (both instruments used the same one). I had my digital delay in hand as I, um, rapped. That way I kept changing the level and type of echo on my voice. I really ramped it up at the end! “Whoa!” said Evan, when he heard it! The improvised bass at the end was originally a mistake that I ran with. The whole bass part is played on the bass section of my Farfisa, there’s one octave of bass notes on the left hand side. My quasi lead guitar at the end is me touching the high E string lightly with my left hand so the string is mostly deaded out, but there’s still some semblance of notes. I also accidentally bumped the mike at the end. I re-did this song on a later solo record of mine, in a professional studio, and it’s cleaner sounding with no overt mistakes and it has enough tracks for both the Farfisa and the synth and I programmed the drum machine right and I played a more involved synth lead (backwards, even!) and on top of all that it has some great guitar from local guitar whiz John Martinez… but this version has a certain charm I couldn’t replicate. Oh yeah, there’s also my vocal rhythm thing, kind of a loud breathing through the delay.
I recorded this all on my own one weekend when Evan was gone camping, probably with Scott Childress. It was a sign of our deteriorating relationship that he chose to go camping with Scott instead of me as he used to. But it was a bit much, being roommates and band mates AND camping mates. It’ll drive you schizophrenic, it will…. Oh and if it’s not clear yet, I chose specific lines from the interview with this poor woman to incorporate into this song. I changed a couple of words here and there just to make it fit better, but otherwise it all came from her. “Some people get better, some don’t.” Thank you, and God bless you, Elizabeth…. Fyodor adds later: In doing my, um, statistical analysis above (in my introductory notes about the tape), I had forgotten that I had gotten Evan to say one line in Sister Schizo as an intro the rest of it. What I had him say was, "Schizophrenic Tells of Broken Dreams", which was the headline of the newspaper story from which I mostly just transcribed quotes of Ms. North's for the remainder of the lyrics.
“Lemon Rock Rag”
EC:
This is Evan’s solo piece with David adding terrific dissonant keyboards. This is an homage, again, to the early Beatles as my riff recalls the screaming intro to the song “Honey Don’t”, which had long been in my regular repertoire and had been visited by WoG as well. “Lemon” references “Lennon”. The guitar moves into dissonant territory around the middle as it morphs into a less cheerful sounding mode, as if we can no longer simply rock out and be happy with happy-rocking out. The dissonance tells you that all is not right in this world.
LF:
“The Lemon Rock Rag” is Evan being an electric acoustic folkie with a bit of screaming. Real old timey, old schooly stuff! But then for some reason he let me play my synthesizer on it, too. Who ever heard of a synthesizer on a rag? I kind of tried to follow what his music was doing, but I hadn’t really studied what it was doing before trying to do that, so it’s a rather abstract sort of following. I was just wondering now if the title was some well worn cliche, but when I Google it, references to this piece are all I get! One hit reminds me that Aural Innovations called it “a wild combination of mind fucked contrasts!” What I tell you? I never knew what Evan thought of my overdub, I don’t think he ever said. It probably wasn’t what he originally had in mind for what his “rag” should sound like, but I guess he thought what the hell, it’s Walls Of Genius! Oh, and he potted up his electric guitar right at the end for cool effect on his final swoosh (we’re talking mix down, here)….
“What You Do”
EC:
This is my spoken word piece, using the voice of Roy Watkins, or something very much like it, a redneck accent. It is a meditation on sex and politics and all the different ways that the word “fuck” can be utilized. What can be said of this other than it’s all still true? We were obviously not too worried about the obscenity at this point. I had done a similar thing with the word “but/butt” in a previous release.
LF:
The next track is just Evan laying down a little solo a cappella spoken word redneck rap. The repetitions of the titular line couplet act as something of a chorus giving the piece a sense of musicality despite being all spoken not sung and having no accompaniment. The vocal delivery and content are reminiscent of the “Roy Watkins from Mud Flats, Wyoming” character Evan performed frequently on the KGNU “Go For It” call-in show. One might say that akin to WoG’s “so bad it’s good” aesthetic, Evan liked creating a character that was so dumb he was smart! Well, or maybe we should say it’s a character whose plainspokenness revealed great wisdom…? People liked quoting this one a lot!
“I Followed You For Years"
EC:
This is the one true collaborative piece on the cassette. David starts it with a rhythmic part on the synth and drum machines, I come in with a lead guitar part that morphs into evil-sounding minor-key power-chords for the chorus. The vocals are wordless harmonies, assisted by Felicia Duncan. I don’t recall how I got her interested in what we were doing. She was a student employee at the CU Recreation Center, where I worked.
LF:
“I Followed You For Years” was really mostly Evan; he got the ball rolling with a guitar riff plus two more distinct sections that he wrote melodies for. The music and title reflected a continuation of his spy/noir fascination, albeit with a brighter (major key?) feel, at least for that first section. It’s certainly gone minor by the third part (not sure about the second, which seems “in between” in feel). I believe Evan originally planned to write lyrics to this and make it a complete song, and one can definitely sing the titular line to the opening notes of his leading guitar riff, but I guess the song never came to him but he had this musical outline and so we sculpted a piece around that. I get co-writing credits just for the synthesizer part I programmed to go along with it that may be seen to act either as a harmonic backdrop or a multi-toned bass line. Evan lamented not having enough tracks to be able to add a bass line of his own, and I just shrugged cause I thought my synth part came close enough. Just as with “The Lemon Rock Rag,” Evan’s electric guitar and my synth are somewhat odd bedfellows, though not nearly as much so here. The piece starts off with my programmed synth part getting faded up, then I play a rhythm guitar part with no notes, I had deadened all the strings with my left hand for a purely rhythmic effect. Then Evan comes in with his lead guitar part. When he moves to the 2nd part of his composition, we hear Felicia’s vocals. By the third section, she’s singing harmony (with herself or with Evan?), and Evan is shaking the cabasa. I sure don’t remember how or where Evan met Felicia, and I don’t believe I ever saw her before or after we made this song together. She brought over one of those percussion boxes that were big then, they were a hollow box with semi-circular logs of varying size carved into the top to create percussion sounds of varying tone, which were usually played with hard mallets that resembled super balls on a stick. [Friend and musician Farrell Lowe has since informed me that this instrument is known as a "slit drum".] This device shows up elsewhere in the WoG catalog, but I don’t know if we owned one ourselves, and I know Felicia brought one over in a plastic shopping bag and I played it on this piece. Oddly, one thing I remember was that this was the very first time I ever saw one of those plastic shopping bags reused to transport something else after its initial use bringing home the groceries! I played a slightly different part on this device for that third part of the composition than for the other two parts. Otherwise, I just keep doing the same thing over and over. Evan returns to his lead riff and ends, and then my synthesizer ends the song again!
“Eternal Secretions"
EC:
Finally, a track with Ed Fowler playing on it, the only one for this release. This is a duet between David on guitar and Ed on lead guitar, both heavily manipulated by effects.
LF:
“Eternal Secretions” is a duet between me and Ed, with no Evan: probably the only duet between just the two of us in the entire WoG catalog. Evan was there, but he just engineered it and left the playing to us two. It is also the only piece on this release that has any improvisation to speak of (as it’s normally thought of) and the only one to include Ed, maybe not coincidentally. I wish I remember what Ed was doing at the Hall Of Genius that day, and whether we recorded anything else, but alas. I had a two part two chord riff, using the fingering for a C chord up at the 9th and 7th frets. It was a way to get neat sounding chords that I had no idea what they were. Evan let me know that I wasn’t the first one to ever use this technique, but it was new to me, so I felt like it was all mine anyway. For one of the two parts, I’d arpeggiate the chord up at the 9th fret real slowly, and the notes alternated between high notes where my fingers were and low notes where the strings were open. For the other part I’d strum out real fast between the aforementioned two chords. I think I was using both the distortion and chorus features of my Jazz Chorus 120 amp. I didn’t really know when I would switch between the two parts, I just went by feel. So that was an improvisational element of this, even though the notes themselves were planned. And then Ed improvised along with what I was doing, playing differently for each part, and of course he didn’t know when I was going to change parts either since I didn’t! He reacted to my unpredictability right on the spot in one take and plays some interesting stuff, wizard that he is! The name sounds like something else, which I thought made it sound funny (us parodists always like making references!), but I also thought it sounded neat in and of itself, and for some ineffable reason it seemed to fit the music, too…. (I later brought this two chord two part riff back on a solo album for an instrumental called “Nothing To Say”….)
“Night Rat”
EC:
Another David solo piece. David is on the ruined autoharp, then his voice comes in doing throaty noises, sounding like a baby choking. A weird cranking sound comes and goes, returns again and leaves. This piece has a very alienating sound, as if society is choking the author, the “night rat” of the title. David was likely still working the night shift at the Hotel Boulderado at this time.
LF:
“Night Rat” was a bit of an experiment with minimalism and odd sound sources, but it was also an attempt to describe in sound the effect working the graveyard shift was having on me. Though not the actual working part so much as the nights off, when I’d still be up all night cause that was my schedule, that’s what I was used to. I’d work from midnight till 8 AM, so I was usually up those same hours when I didn’t work, too. And I’d spend the wee-est of those hours mostly by myself. It was a weird and isolating and lonely type of existence. Sometimes I’d start the night off partying with friends only to still be up long after they’d all have hit the hay. One such night, I wandered around the town drunk, probably around 4 AM or so, opening car doors that I’d found unlocked. I didn’t steal anything or do any (other) harm, I’d just leave the door open and then drunkenly wander on. That’s how weird it was. I believe I recorded most or all of “Night Rat” during some of these wee hours by myself, so the feeling of it was right there with me. Most of the sound is carried by the autoharp, the one I played on “Squeezing and Spreading” and Evan played on “Dracula and His Victim”. I also do some weird vocalizing, conjuring up the rattiness of it all straight from my throat. Whenever Ed would hear this vocalizing, he’d start cracking up. Hey, it’s not supposed to be funny, Ed! Ha-ha. There’s also some slow strumming of some normally unused part of my guitar, probably the part of the strings between the top of the neck and the tuning knobs. And the rest is stuff from the Hall Of Genius kitchen. A faucet dripping, cabinet drawers shaking and creaking. And the whole thing ends with the oven door dropping open…. Dig those reverberations!
“It’s A Scary World Out There”
EC:
This is an Evan solo piece, some of the most intense lead guitar I ever played with Walls of Genius. It’s a rockin’ piece, but is morbidly repetitive. The minor key echoes the message of the chorus which are the only vocals on it. The song ends with a triumphant evil laugh and guitar feedback. The message of the chorus (same as the title) sums up all the sociopolitical commentary of the whole, the conclusion being that all this crap, psychological, sociological and political, makes for a very scary world in which to live. As true today as it was then.
LF:
“It’s A Scary World Out There” was Evan’s stab at a Halloween song. It was that time of year, as you can tell from all the election stuff (hmmm, coincidence…?). Like “I Followed You For Years”, it’s a bit more of a sketch of a song than a fully fleshed out song, skeletal even (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) though at least the titular line does get sung this time. Many times, in fact!
I told my friend Brian Kraft that Evan was trying to combine a Ventures like surf sound with the hypnotic minimalism of Kraftwerk, and Brian cracked up (and he was rarely one to even crack a smile) and said that that has got to be the first time anyone has ever tried to combine those two particular bands! The Ventures and Kraftwerk, ha!
Evan sings (double tracked) and plays acoustic rhythm guitar and a fuzz drenched electric lead guitar. He alternates playing chords on the acoustic and playing this very cool, noirish riff. I play bongos and Farfisa. The one bang I make in the middle of the riffs was Evan’s idea. On the Farfisa, I interestingly play completely different chords than what Evan was playing on guitar, and they were probably chords I didn’t know the names of and probably would have been hard pressed to replicate even a couple of days later. I just picked out some notes that seemed to fit at the time. This was one reason I sometimes liked to say that WoG was so spontaneous and “free-form” and improvisational that even our original songs were improvisations in that we cooked them up right on the spot and probably couldn’t remember them again a week later! I probably can’t really speak for Evan on that account, but the point is that we wrote and learned original songs specifically to record them, not to add them to some repertoire or setlist that we would practice, like a normal band would. Whether Evan could have remembered the chords to this song x number of days later or not, I’m pretty sure we never did attempt to play it again. Back to my organ playing, I kept switching between a held or sustained chord and a more staccato type part – and then in-between there’s a part where I do a combination of both, holding a chord with my left hand and playing staccato style with my right -- wow! I also add a neat little downward run during every other space of Evan’s guitar riff. I was playing a newer and more resonant pair of bongos than the older and deader sounding ones I played on “I Live for the Sun”. Well, in classic Kraftwerkian and primitive pop fashion, we pretty much repeat it all over and over again except for changes in Evan’s lead guitar and my bongos, and also I varied the rhythm of my staccato organ stuff a little at least once, too, when I had to cover for a mistake. And then Evan ends it all by giving us his best Halloween laugh amidst the lingering guitar fuzz (maybe potted up)…. Somebody wrote to us about this tape once (someone who bought it or traded for it) and said, “You’re right, it is a scary world out there – and you guys don’t help!” Ha-ha!!
Below, from the January 1985 Cause And Effect Cassette Distribution Catalog,
description written by Hal McGee
description written by Hal McGee
review from Unsound, Vol. 2 #1, by Anne Addison
review from Option, as re-printed in the seventh Walls Of Genius catalog, A Tale Of Two Twits
See the Walls Of Genius article on the "W" issue of Op that Unterberger mentions
review from Option, as re-printed in the seventh Walls Of Genius catalog, A Tale Of Two Twits
See the Walls Of Genius article on the "W" issue of Op that Unterberger mentions
Review by Jerry Kranitz of the CD-R version of Before ...and After
in Aural Innovations #30 (February 2005):
"Four More Years" opens the set and showcases the more sound and tape splicing experimental side of WoG, taking loads of Ronald Reagan blathering and glomming it all together along with an assortment of other voice samples, a parade of field recordings like machinery, planes and air raid sirens, soundscapes, drones and acidic industrial explorations. Wow… what a ride. "Impressions Of Denver" is a similar mixture of ranting, field recordings and free-wheeling improv music. "March Slob" is an oddball instrumental that comes across like the theme to some Middle Eastern kids TV show. And "Night Rat" features WoG at their most avant-garde, mixing piano string mutilation with from-the-throat gurgling.
Among my favorites tracks are "Sister Schizo", which blends cool 60's styled electro-jazz and completely alien grooves. WoG crank out more grooves on "I Followed You For Years", though this time we're in brain scraping funky acid soul territory. WoG really get down with the aptly titled but completely spaced out "The Lemon Rock Rag", a wild combination of mind fucked contrasts! "Eternal Secretions" is like lo-fi basement tapes Manuel Göttsching. And of course no WoG release would be complete without some cover tunes, and on this outing we get "I Live For The Sun", a song by 60's band The Sunrays, and a rocking fun version of the classic "Twist And Shout".
in Aural Innovations #30 (February 2005):
"Four More Years" opens the set and showcases the more sound and tape splicing experimental side of WoG, taking loads of Ronald Reagan blathering and glomming it all together along with an assortment of other voice samples, a parade of field recordings like machinery, planes and air raid sirens, soundscapes, drones and acidic industrial explorations. Wow… what a ride. "Impressions Of Denver" is a similar mixture of ranting, field recordings and free-wheeling improv music. "March Slob" is an oddball instrumental that comes across like the theme to some Middle Eastern kids TV show. And "Night Rat" features WoG at their most avant-garde, mixing piano string mutilation with from-the-throat gurgling.
Among my favorites tracks are "Sister Schizo", which blends cool 60's styled electro-jazz and completely alien grooves. WoG crank out more grooves on "I Followed You For Years", though this time we're in brain scraping funky acid soul territory. WoG really get down with the aptly titled but completely spaced out "The Lemon Rock Rag", a wild combination of mind fucked contrasts! "Eternal Secretions" is like lo-fi basement tapes Manuel Göttsching. And of course no WoG release would be complete without some cover tunes, and on this outing we get "I Live For The Sun", a song by 60's band The Sunrays, and a rocking fun version of the classic "Twist And Shout".
