Walls Of Genius AND MIRACLE
Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4
WoG 0026-0029
Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4
WoG 0026-0029
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Little Fyodor:
We first met Leo Goya when his co-worker Andrea DiNapoli invited him over to one of our jams at Natasha’s house, back in July of 1983, a jam documented on our Almost Groovy! release, the notes to which describe a lot about Leo. I’ll reiterate that Leo was big into improvisation and jazz . He claimed to have had impromptu jams with Charles Mingus and I think Rahsaan Roland Kirk during his years growing up in New York City (as well as having been outscored 40 to zip playing against Lew Alcindor, the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in the city basketball league!). He was living in Lyons, Colorado when we first met him, a small town about a half hour north of Boulder, and a jam at a party at his house there is documented on Little Victor Meets Violent Vince as “Leo’s Party”. Leo also figured prominently on WoG releases such as The WoG Sampler! and The White Cassette, always in an improvisational setting. Free improv was a major facet of WoG, especially when we started out, and Leo’s presence certainly helped push us in that direction, often via the use of exotic instruments of his own invention, such as the rebar-ang, a chimes of hanging rebar, or golf ball in jar. Leo also played with us at a few other live performances that were never documented on WoG releases (other than the Fabulous Pustones performing "Love Potion #9", at the end of which Leo can barely be heard calling out from the audience, “Where’s the pus?”). 
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Evan Cantor:
Descriptions of Leo Goya and Jeanne Strzelewicz appear in previous notes and I will recap here: We met Leo through Andrea DiNapoli (a some time WoG collaborator) when they were co-workers at the Crystal Zoo, a place that fashioned little glass animals to sell as tchotchkes. Leo had collaborated us on a number of occasions and appeared on recordings featured in Almost Groovy! and Little Victor Meets Violent Vince. Leo’s physical appearance was, and still is to this day, that of the iconic hippie. With beard and long dark-blonde shoulder-length hair, colorful home-made clothes hung off his lanky frame like iconic freak-flags. He has a whole variety of home-made belts and hats. Nearly all his clothes were/are made by his partner, Jeanne Strzelewicz (now Jeanne Hatherly). Leo kept (and keeps) a journal in which he writes and draws incessantly. As of this writing, he has authored over 200 of these journals, filled with artwork, poems and prose. At one point in time, Leo attempted to document for Guinness Book of Records that he had the longest-running journal of any journal-writer alive in the world at that moment. I don’t recall whether or not he succeeded in this particular quest. Leo was born James Hatherly, but took the name “Leo Goya” when his telephone number once spelled out the letters “L-e-o-g-o-y-a”. He had an active background in theatre and art in New York City, as well as a service experience as a military policeman. He went to school with Ron Perlman (see Hellboy movies) and had jammed with Charles Mingus (likely at a club with his very portable talking drum). As idiosyncratic as Leo’s appearance was (and still is), Leo gets along with every kind of person you can think of. He has always been one of the most creative and upbeat people I have ever known and I have always considered him an inspiration. Still do. The Christmas In July session may very well have been the first time we ever met Leo. He brought his collection of off-the-wall instruments with him, including talking drum, siren, and golf-ball-in-a-bottle, all of which figured in the later Miracle sessions. Jeanne Hatherly is an equally, if not more so, talented musician and artist herself. She looks like Janis Joplin with long silvery-white hair and sings like Bessie Smith. |
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Little Fyodor:
At some point, I think near the start of the winter of ‘84/’85, Leo and his then girlfriend, now wife, Jeanne, moved to the even smaller and more remote mountain town of Eldora. Eldora sits at 8642 feet, right below a ski resort of the same name and also near the Indian Peaks Wilderness, with trails leading up to the Continental Divide and 13,000 foot peaks. (By the way, Boulder is NOT a mountain town but rather sits at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills, as does Lyons.) Eldora was often called Helldora for its formidable climate particularly in the winter, which was when Leo and Jeanne moved there. They moved there to concentrate on their art. I think they both quit their jobs and hoped to survive on their artistic pursuits. Maybe they also received some help from their families, though I’m not sure. They lived in a house there rented to them by a fellow named Joe Ketola who lived next door and who had previously traveled to India as a photographer and had brought back bells and such he had gotten hold of there. Joe also liked to play saxophone… 
Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1985, I came back from a vacation trip (maybe it was the WoG tour to California?) to learn that Leo and Jeanne had left their Eldora apartment just in time to not take advantage of the best time of year to be there and had bought a small trailer and moved it onto the grounds of an abandoned schoolhouse in northeast Boulder. They had worked out a deal with the owner of the schoolhouse, who I think was hoping to sell it to someone willing to move it before it was condemned and destroyed, whereby they could live on the grounds for free in return for being its caretakers, which primarily amounted to kicking out occasional vagrants.
There was no electricity in this ex-schoolhouse, no furniture to speak of, just a complete shell of a building. So what did Leo and Jeanne do there? They setup up all their weird and sundry assorted instruments and JAMMED! By themselves or with whoever would join them. 
Chief among those joining them was George Stone, who also moved into a trailer on the schoolhouse grounds before the summer was over and who already had an upright piano setup in there by the time I wandered into the situation just to see and hang out with my friends. No need for electricity to play a piano. Nor to blow into a siren or a saxophone or to rap on a talking drum (probably Leo’s favorite instrument) – or to bang on a trashcan or other various assorted pieces of trash that were scattered about and were thus turned into instruments! I remember there being an oil can and some big piece of a car, a carburetor maybe, among various other re-purposed items (Leo wrote a poem called “The Use of Refuse” about that time). The clanging of random pieces of metal was hardly the stuff of the music of Leo’s or George’s jazz heroes, but it’s what was available and usable at the schoolhouse, and the “industrial music” movement that they had surely heard about, even if they hadn’t been avid followers of it per se (was it something in the air or in the ether?), only encouraged them more. Though it was still all pretty much jazz and improvisation and an extension of their hippy roots to them…. (I remember Leo once proudly describing the resulting music as the most listenable outside music around….)
Hey, y’know something else that doesn’t require electrical outlets? A battery run ghetto blaster! The jamming and music and jazzy noise making had already been going on by the time I arrived on the scene, but the next time I showed up, I brought my ghetto blaster to record the goings on. For some reason I didn’t want to rely on the built in condenser microphone (maybe I thought it would pick up the sound of the adjacent tape spinning), so I also brought a microphone on a mike stand. So what you would see if you came to this abandoned school house while The Miracle was in action was a bunch of maniacs making improvisational sound any which way they could without the aid of electrical outlets in this big, main room (probably the auditorium/gym?) of the building while a microphone on a mike stand stood in the middle of it all feeding a wire into a ghetto blaster sitting on the dusty floor. (“A microphone? Are you guys taping this?” can be heard uttered by a newcomer at the start of Side B of WoG AND MIRACLE 4!)
Leo and Jeanne and George had already decided that their “group” was The Miracle. I think their idea was that anything they did was a miracle, a miracle that they would be creating music out of nothing in this abandoned space. It was the miracle of creativity, the miracle of life, the miracle of improvisation. It may also have been a reference to the movie, Miracle on 46th Street, an old movie about Santa Claus showing up, tapping into the idea that the most important thing was to believe that something great could happen. I ultimately made about a dozen or more 90-minute cassettes of this activity on my ghetto blaster and along with Evan (who also soon joined in), we created four releases for the Walls Of Genius label. Three of these releases showcased entirely intact 90 minute long jams, exactly as they appeared on the original tapes on which they were originally recorded (except for a subtle fade in and maybe fade out). Two of these three even had both sides coming from the same day (or nighttime) of jamming. The fourth was a heavily edited compendium of shorter segments. Evan and I did all the cataloguing of the raw materials to determine what were the best parts. I think actually it was mostly me, but Evan definitely did some too. I remember his highly critical comments when describing the sound of the microphone being intentionally smacked as a form of instrumentation – he said it gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach! Evan utilized Leo’s unique art and his own attractive calligraphy to create cover art and labels for these releases (well for the first three; for the fourth he used pictures he took of the schoolhouse and from The Miracle’s first live performance, at The Pirate Art Gallery in Denver). It was Evan’s idea to depict the music as a collaboration of the two bands, Walls Of Genius and The Miracle. He probably told the group he was going to do this and probably no one said anything one way or the other and that’s what it became. Personally, I remember thinking of it as pretty much just The Miracle, which I think most of the participants did as well, and Leo did once (somewhat adamantly) express that same opinion to me, though I evidently just went along with Evan’s formulation, judging by my labeling of the cassette recordings, and I have no evidence that Leo ever said anything to Evan about it at that time, either. Not that it matters a whole bunch really anyway as we were all friends and we were all doing it all together and it was what it was whatever it was called (cue Shakespeare line?)…. Though I should also mention that The Miracle actually outlasted WoG by a few years, an endeavor I summarize below…. I should mention too that from my own POV, and likely Evan’s, this all just seemed a continuation of the continuum that began with the Couch Dots sessions in Michael Bellan’s living room and ran through the Dirt Clods sessions and much of Walls of Genius, just the concept of jamming without a bright obvious line separating it from “normal” life (parties, etc.) and which all gets recorded so that the best parts can be presented to the world as art. Leo as a central figure and inspiration definitely brought a special element to this path, and if I haven’t said so already allow me to make clear that I hardly think improvisation was born in Bellan’s living room in 1982. But again, as far as the curve of my own life and pursuits travelled, that’s what it looked like! 
Read Leo Goya's account
of the Miracle recordings Photos of members of The Miracle and the schoolhouse on this page are by Evan Cantor |
Evan Cantor:
Miracle was ostensibly Leo’s “band”, but I don’t think Leo ever really had a “band” per se. He had long hosted parties with jam sessions. I recorded some of these jam sessions and they made their way to Walls of Genius cassettes (“Leo’s Party”, for instance). He had participated in any number of Walls of Genius sessions. When he and his now-wife Jeanne Strzelewicz (now Jeanne Hatherly) moved into a trailer home alongside the unused schoolhouse (Pleasantview School, 1896, now demolished), they had the idea to hold jam sessions in this shell of a building. They were literally the caretakers of the building for the year before it was to be demolished, to prevent street people from squatting in it. The building was located in the northeast corner of Boulder, Colorado, where the intersection of highway 154 and 119 now stands. There was no electricity in the building and windows were broken and old bathroom stalls graffiti’d. 
George Stone was a friend of Leo and Jeanne’s. He and his dog, Mingus, moved into another small trailer next to theirs and the three of them formed the core of what Leo was now calling “Miracle”. Since there was no electricity in the schoolhouse, all the instrumentation was acoustic, including George’s upright piano. George is an accomplished jazz pianist and he lent some jazz chops to the project. He currently plays, according to his own testimony, in six bands, but most of the time in a professional jazz-fusion outfit called Fat Rabbit.
Leo had already brought his collection of home-made percussion objects to Walls of Genius jams and we had lots of them at the schoolhouse, including my collection of garbage cans upon which we beat as drums. Listening to this music, I hear lots of interesting percussion sounds that I cannot for the life of me identify. Ed Fowler came with an acoustic guitar one day. I would play the piano, the saxophone and various percussions. At this time, there were only two saxes in the group. I had bought mine from a local horn repairman for $100. It was made in Czechoslovakia, behind the “iron curtain” of the Soviet era. The other horn was likely Leo or George’s and both of them would play it occasionally, as did Joe Ketola. David was mostly on percussion and slide-whistle.
Another prominent participant involved in this project was Joe Ketola. Joe lived in Eldora, a former mining village a few miles west of Nederland, Colorado, where Leo and Jeanne lived after moving out of Lyons (when we met them) and before moving to the schoolhouse. Eldora was incorporated after a ‘salted’ mine strike in the nineteenth century. In other words, the gold or silver strike was a fake, designed to generate activity for some unscrupulous entrepeneur. The town lives on today as mostly a bunch of summer vacation cabins, but there are year-round residents as well. We used to call it “Hell-dora” because the snow didn’t fall in Eldora, it blew through horizontally on raging winds. We had had numerous jam sessions at Joe’s place in Eldora (the “Gold Miner”, an old store building). We would go cross-country skiing up the road (the Hessie Trailhead in the summer, the Eldora trailhead in the winter) and then come back to Joe’s place and jam. Joe once said, “Of all the places in the world I had to inherit a house, it had to be Eldora!” His picture appears in the scrapbook opposite the Twits catalog, above Leo Goya and George Stone (playing toy flute). Aaron “Eldora” was Aaron Morris, who lived up the street on the second floor of a little barn building in Eldora. I listed him as Aaron Eldora because I didn’t know his last name at the time. Leo and Jeanne eventually nicknamed him “Moochie” because he apparently drank and smoke a lot of their goods. He appears in the WoG scrapbook wearing a cap and playing what looks like a Gibson SG bass, on a page with lots of live Miracle photos. Del Hoeft and Sparka Houts were from the local band Iceplants. I don’t recall anything about them or the band, they may have been friends of Leo’s somehow. Riff Randall (Randall Cunningham, I think) was a Walls of Genius hanger-on and became a frequent participant. You can see him in the WoG scrapbook playing the drums at the “Gala Farewell” WoG show and opposite Stacy Benedict in some photos taken at KGNU. 
Strangely enough, Riff was a friend of this guy, Donny, who had been the original bassist in the group that became Rumours of Marriage, after I had replaced both Donny and Bill (bass & gtr, respectively). When I moved out of the Hall of Genius into the little carriage house on the Hill in Boulder, Riff brought Donny by and we became re-acquainted. They were mainly interested in buying pot, and I was still interested in selling it. The guy I bought my pounds from had shown me a little leather-and-spike bracelet one day. He said it fell off somebody’s arm and did I know anybody who might like it? Donny was culturally “punk”, so I gave it to him. Later, when my house was broken into, a pound of Thai stick stolen, and all the Walls of Genius master cassettes along with a lot of other tapes, I found the bracelet on the floor of my living room! It had fallen off Donny’s wrist just like it had somebody else’s previously. So I knew who had broken in. I busted Donny’s chops pretty good, got back the WoG tapes and some others, and even got some of the pot back. Donny’s father wondered why I was so agitated over some bunch of tapes. It wasn’t just tapes. It was a pound of pot. AND the WoG masters! Not to mention breaking-and-entering. On top of that, he also stole a cassette of me singing a lead role in my high-school play, which I did not recover (wearing a fat-suit as Mr. Bumble in “Oliver”). Anyway, I had to eventually press charges against Donny for breaking-and-entering in order to get back all of what I did. It turned out that he had been in trouble with the law before and that’s why his father was as agitated as he was. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I never saw him or Riff ever again.
“Scott Van Der” is listed. I don’t know who he was, no recollection. It is notable that on these recordings there are so few musicians. After these sessions were done, winter came and it was freezing cold in the schoolhouse and eventually the schoolhouse was itself demolished according to plan. Leo and Jeanne moved back to Nederland and began assembling great armies of musicians in their living room. I remember one session with five people on saxophones all blaring simultaneously. I eventually gave up jamming with the Miracle because of this. I liked it better when there were fewer musicians and you could hear the interaction between them, when there was actually open space in the music and the rhythm was cogent and coherent. The Miracle eventually devolved into a wall of noise. Leo was upset that I called the albums “Walls of Genius AND MIRACLE”. He felt that it should have just been Miracle or that, of the two, Miracle should have been listed first. I felt that this free-jazz was so unlike anything else going on in the cassette culture scene that nobody would listen to it if it was just Miracle. I felt that the name Walls of Genius had cachet in the scene at that time. My compromise was to make the name “Miracle” appear in big capital letters, larger than the words “Walls of Genius”. I can (and could) see his point, but considering that David and I (and Ed on one of the sessions) were two of five primary participants, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to have called it what we did. In retrospect, I can only hope I was right about that. Listening to these tapes thirty years after the fact confirms for me the listenable and addictive nature of Miracle’s music. The influence informing Miracle was the free-jazz movement, most notably embraced by John Coltrane. Whereas I found Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders’ free-jazz nearly unlistenable, the Miracle is addictive. The rhythms establish a kind of primitive groove, reminiscent of some of the stuff I had done with Jane Carpenter in her machine shop. George Stone played actual jazz piano and I was able to do musical things on the piano as well. It amazes me that I even busted out some lines from “Begin The Beguine” and “Ravel’s Bolero” on the saxophone, since I had never before played a horn and had no lessons whatsoever. I was mostly into using the saxophone as a way of making sounds, or noise. I’ve been in and out of touch with Leo and Jeanne over the years, but we’ve never had a falling out. Even when I haven’t seen them in years, we’re always happy to get together. They’ve moved around a lot and currently live in Loveland, Colorado, as does George Stone. One time, hiking on an unmarked trail to some waterfalls near Eldora, I ran into some people and our conversation led to gossip about Eldora people and it turned out I was talking to Joe Ketola’s sister. My recollection is that he moved somewhere in the NYC area. The others have all disappeared into the limbo-land of the past… ///////////// Walls of Genius (David and I, anyway) did a number of live performances with Miracle, culminating with the infamous show with performance-artist tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, at the Pirate Art Gallery in Denver. Tent (a/k/a Tim Ore) was on tour from his home in Baltimore (“Ball Tim Ore”, get it?) and we scheduled a show with him opening for Miracle. His show went on at length and he was boring the crowd. Finally, he managed to gross everybody out with a video or film of golden showers sex. It didn’t bother me, but I got a lot of flack for it from the Miracle people. This was to be the last Walls of Genius “presents” anything and I knew it, so I just sat back and let whatever happen happen. One of the things that I did with the Miracle at that show was to set up my saxophone on a stand, place a mic inside the bell, run the cord into a flanger and then the flanger into a guitar amp. With a little encouragement, the saxophone began playing itself, a flanged feedback loop. Then I got on my drum-set and flailed away, dueting with the self-playing sax. Maybe somewhere I have a cassette with a recording of this, I don’t know. 
audio excerpt from 6 Fingers Crossed Country T.Ore/Tour (K7C) cassette, courtesy of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE.
Editor's Note: on his website tENt describes it this way:
Mad Scientist Didaction - the Pirate Contemporary Art Oasis, Denver, us@ - Sunday, May 11, 1986, 9PM - Film, vaudeo, anecdotes, "work ball & chain" ankle bell "6 tits" nudist character-armored "robo-porn" "dancing", "booed usic", etc.. Mostly memorable for the boorish rudeness of "Miracle" (who were on the same bill) & for Evan Cantor's remarkable feedback-alto-sax & milk-can drum set-up. Here is the poster announcing the show. |
WoG 0026 - Walls Of Genius AND MIRACLE
Evan Cantor:
Volume 1 (recording dates: 7/13/85 and 7/28/85): Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, George Stone, Evan Cantor, Ed Fowler, Dave Lichtenverg (sic a/k/a David Lichtenberg or Little Fyodor), Riff Randall (sic), Joe Ketola, Scott Van Der (sic). Cover art was a drawing by Leo Goya. It is unclear whether or not the art or the music is called “No More Mistakes” (title by Leo), perhaps both. The ‘back’ page features a scroll drawn by Evan Cantor, with lettering hand-drawn by Evan Cantor.
Little Fyodor:
Jams would just go on and on at the schoolhouse. From the afternoon into the night. Ed made it to one of the early ones after I let it be known I was recording these happenings, and you can hear him playing acoustic guitar (no place to plug in an electric!) on Side A of the first release, informally titled “No More Mistakes”, a phrase cooked up either by Leo or George that they both thought was emblematic of the Miracle’s frame of mind. I remember wandering around the schoolhouse with Ed during the jamming that day, kind of exploring the whole place, and we went down to the basement, underneath the big jam room, and the cacophony was just continuing unabated above us, and Ed laughingly took a broom handle he found lying around and pretended to be a downstairs neighbor and banged it on the roof above us (the floor of the jam room), going, “Hey! Cut it out up there! Hey! Cut it out!” (There wasn’t much chance anyone would hear him, though maybe the recording picked up his banging?)
Everyone switched around on whatever instruments were around, just like with WoG, only there were a lot more. Including George’s piano! George liked calling the piano the ultimate percussive instrument. I’m guessing that’s probably George himself playing on it as side A of the first release starts out, since it has that flowing George feel. It’s probably Evan who’s playing more regular parts later on that everyone else played off of. That would happen sometimes, someone would get into some groove and others would play off of it. Other times it was more free flowing. All sorts of things happened!
Several different people played saxophone at various times. That wasn’t always my favorite part of it and I never tried my own hand at it, but hey, they all loved doing it, and just as with WoG, the Miracle was about fun as much as final results! Evan and Joe Ketola were among the primary sax proponents, and George and Leo partook at times, too (Leo liked to call his sax persona “Spiderbite”!). Sometimes all of ‘em played at the same time! Sometimes George or Evan would just play the mouthpiece, which had a neat squeaky but still full sound.
I’m never sure which of the WoG & Miracle releases is my favorite. The first one is probably the most free spirited and anarchic. That’s quite a powerful cascade of noise toward the end of Side B!
Volume 1 (recording dates: 7/13/85 and 7/28/85): Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, George Stone, Evan Cantor, Ed Fowler, Dave Lichtenverg (sic a/k/a David Lichtenberg or Little Fyodor), Riff Randall (sic), Joe Ketola, Scott Van Der (sic). Cover art was a drawing by Leo Goya. It is unclear whether or not the art or the music is called “No More Mistakes” (title by Leo), perhaps both. The ‘back’ page features a scroll drawn by Evan Cantor, with lettering hand-drawn by Evan Cantor.
Little Fyodor:
Jams would just go on and on at the schoolhouse. From the afternoon into the night. Ed made it to one of the early ones after I let it be known I was recording these happenings, and you can hear him playing acoustic guitar (no place to plug in an electric!) on Side A of the first release, informally titled “No More Mistakes”, a phrase cooked up either by Leo or George that they both thought was emblematic of the Miracle’s frame of mind. I remember wandering around the schoolhouse with Ed during the jamming that day, kind of exploring the whole place, and we went down to the basement, underneath the big jam room, and the cacophony was just continuing unabated above us, and Ed laughingly took a broom handle he found lying around and pretended to be a downstairs neighbor and banged it on the roof above us (the floor of the jam room), going, “Hey! Cut it out up there! Hey! Cut it out!” (There wasn’t much chance anyone would hear him, though maybe the recording picked up his banging?)
Everyone switched around on whatever instruments were around, just like with WoG, only there were a lot more. Including George’s piano! George liked calling the piano the ultimate percussive instrument. I’m guessing that’s probably George himself playing on it as side A of the first release starts out, since it has that flowing George feel. It’s probably Evan who’s playing more regular parts later on that everyone else played off of. That would happen sometimes, someone would get into some groove and others would play off of it. Other times it was more free flowing. All sorts of things happened!
Several different people played saxophone at various times. That wasn’t always my favorite part of it and I never tried my own hand at it, but hey, they all loved doing it, and just as with WoG, the Miracle was about fun as much as final results! Evan and Joe Ketola were among the primary sax proponents, and George and Leo partook at times, too (Leo liked to call his sax persona “Spiderbite”!). Sometimes all of ‘em played at the same time! Sometimes George or Evan would just play the mouthpiece, which had a neat squeaky but still full sound.
I’m never sure which of the WoG & Miracle releases is my favorite. The first one is probably the most free spirited and anarchic. That’s quite a powerful cascade of noise toward the end of Side B!
a page of notes about the Miracle sessions by Little Fyodor
review of Walls Of Genius And Miracle 1 by Mike Gunderloy in Factsheet Five
review of Walls Of Genius And Miracle 1 by Lang Thompson in an unidentified publication [the editor guesses Unsound]
review of Walls Of Genius And Miracle 1 by Lang Thompson in an unidentified publication [the editor guesses Unsound]
WoG 0027 - Walls Of Genius AND MIRACLE 2
EC:
Volume 2 (recording date 8/11/85): Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, George Stone, Evan Cantor, David Lichtenverg. The cover features a drawing by Leo Goya. Again, the art (or the music) is called “The Denver Duck Don’t Give A Cluck” (title by Leo). The art goes over the fold to the ‘back’ side and shares the space with Evan’s hand-drawn letters.
LF:
The second tape featured the quartet, just me, Evan, Leo and George throughout the whole thing. It was informally called “The Denver Duck Don’t Give A Cluck”, partly because Leo’s “chance objectivism” artwork (Leo’s own description of his art, referring to how you could see things in it that he hadn’t planned to be there!) resulted in what might seem like a duck at its outer edge. Also Leo had a fantasy of pitching himself to the Denver Nuggets basketball team as a mascot called The Denver Duck, with him wearing a duck suit. He was pretty outgoing and a sports fan, so he felt he could do it! The music is a bit more spare and subdued and thought out with just the four of us playing and we having had a few recording sessions at the schoolhouse under our belts and the beginnings of an inkling of where we wanted to go with this thing. So it was maybe more staid and self-conscious looking at it negatively, more articulate and spacious looked at positively. There have been times I’ve felt annoyed recognizing myself doing some seemingly very self-conscious things on this one. It’s a lot harder to impossible for me to tell what I’m doing on the other tapes. That’s most likely Evan playing the saxophone ostinato when Side A opens. The ostinato is repeated later percussively, probably by George on a trashcan. Evan really gives the sax a workout as that’s still him playing "Bolero" a ways later. Then Evan moves over to the piano and sets the tone there. It IS rather WoG like at times in that regard! Near the middle of Side B you can hear Evan chanting “There’s no place like home” and then George yells, “Hey, Toto!” In this section you can also hear some dynamics between stuff played near the mike and other stuff played from further away, as well as someone('s) (Evan and/or George?) vocalizing through sax mouthpieces. One of the sounds I hear are wooden salad bowls being clapped together. (Not all the found object instruments were metal!) That might be me on those a lot of the time as I liked that sound, it was like a celebratory applause! There were also chains lying about that could be dragged around, either on the floor or over other accoutrements of found instrument sound. After 90 minutes, it almost seems to be just picking up steam when it cuts off!
Volume 2 (recording date 8/11/85): Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, George Stone, Evan Cantor, David Lichtenverg. The cover features a drawing by Leo Goya. Again, the art (or the music) is called “The Denver Duck Don’t Give A Cluck” (title by Leo). The art goes over the fold to the ‘back’ side and shares the space with Evan’s hand-drawn letters.
LF:
The second tape featured the quartet, just me, Evan, Leo and George throughout the whole thing. It was informally called “The Denver Duck Don’t Give A Cluck”, partly because Leo’s “chance objectivism” artwork (Leo’s own description of his art, referring to how you could see things in it that he hadn’t planned to be there!) resulted in what might seem like a duck at its outer edge. Also Leo had a fantasy of pitching himself to the Denver Nuggets basketball team as a mascot called The Denver Duck, with him wearing a duck suit. He was pretty outgoing and a sports fan, so he felt he could do it! The music is a bit more spare and subdued and thought out with just the four of us playing and we having had a few recording sessions at the schoolhouse under our belts and the beginnings of an inkling of where we wanted to go with this thing. So it was maybe more staid and self-conscious looking at it negatively, more articulate and spacious looked at positively. There have been times I’ve felt annoyed recognizing myself doing some seemingly very self-conscious things on this one. It’s a lot harder to impossible for me to tell what I’m doing on the other tapes. That’s most likely Evan playing the saxophone ostinato when Side A opens. The ostinato is repeated later percussively, probably by George on a trashcan. Evan really gives the sax a workout as that’s still him playing "Bolero" a ways later. Then Evan moves over to the piano and sets the tone there. It IS rather WoG like at times in that regard! Near the middle of Side B you can hear Evan chanting “There’s no place like home” and then George yells, “Hey, Toto!” In this section you can also hear some dynamics between stuff played near the mike and other stuff played from further away, as well as someone('s) (Evan and/or George?) vocalizing through sax mouthpieces. One of the sounds I hear are wooden salad bowls being clapped together. (Not all the found object instruments were metal!) That might be me on those a lot of the time as I liked that sound, it was like a celebratory applause! There were also chains lying about that could be dragged around, either on the floor or over other accoutrements of found instrument sound. After 90 minutes, it almost seems to be just picking up steam when it cuts off!
WoG 0028 - Walls Of Genius AND MIRACLE 3
EC:
Volume 3 (recording date: 8/18/85): Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, George Stone, Evan Cantor, Dave Lichtenverg (sic a/k/a David Lichtenberg), Joe Ketola, Del Hoeft, Sparka Houts, “Angela”, Aaron “Eldora” (a/k/a Aaron Morris), “Mingus” (the dog). The cover features art by Leo Goya called “Best Of All Is Least Of It” and music called “Chalkboard Jungle”, both titles by Leo. “Chalkboard Jungle” speaks to the school-house atmosphere. The art bleeds over to the ‘back’ side and shares it with Evan’s hand-drawn lettering, which appears within a ‘ten commandments’ style tablet.
Volume 3 (recording date: 8/18/85): Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, George Stone, Evan Cantor, Dave Lichtenverg (sic a/k/a David Lichtenberg), Joe Ketola, Del Hoeft, Sparka Houts, “Angela”, Aaron “Eldora” (a/k/a Aaron Morris), “Mingus” (the dog). The cover features art by Leo Goya called “Best Of All Is Least Of It” and music called “Chalkboard Jungle”, both titles by Leo. “Chalkboard Jungle” speaks to the school-house atmosphere. The art bleeds over to the ‘back’ side and shares it with Evan’s hand-drawn lettering, which appears within a ‘ten commandments’ style tablet.
below: a page of notes by Evan Cantor and Little Fyodor about the Miracle sessions
LF:
Tape 3 was sort of in between the first two, with the biggest cast of characters and plenty of craziness but also with more quiet parts and definitely showing more signs of intentionality than the first tape.
One participant on this one was Del Hoeft, who had his own DIY band called Iceplants and who is still a good friend of mine to this day and who I first met in the flesh at the schoolhouse where he was already in 7th heaven jamming away after first learning about the Miracle jams when I played some of the schoolhouse music on my radio show and he called me up at the station to find out what the hell it was about and was very excited to find out he could actually participate himself!
Sparka Houts was Del’s girlfriend at the time (and also in Iceplants). “Aaron Eldora” was a fellow named Aaron who lived in Eldora (see above). We later learned his real last name (Cook, I think?) but Evan evidently didn’t know it when it was time for the calligraphy! Mingus I think was George’s dog! (You can hear him “performing” near the end of Side A!) I don’t know who Angela was (nor Scott Van Der from the first tape).
Del liked comparing the music being made to a gamelan. Iceplants was more mutant pop, but he later joined an industrial band based in Boulder called Naram Sin whose fourth and final release (a cassette) was a long improvisation somewhat reminiscent of Miracle music (though Naram Sin member John Martinez, while a roommate of mine, expressed some envy at how much more “swing” the Miracle had: “That’s what we need, to swing like that!” he said.)
This tape was informally called “Chalkboard Jungle” in honor of all the scraping sounds that came from George scraping on trashcans, I think with a shoe horn! That was one powerful sound! At times you can hear the sound of the microphone stand shaking or being hit. On Side B I think we hear it get smacked intentionally a couple of times. It was the only form of electric music on the recording, if you think of it that way!
We would usually listen to the day’s recordings in Leo and Jeanne’s trailer afterwards. One night, the battery was running down in my ghetto blaster causing the sound of the playback to get stretched out in long wobbly undulations, and that made the music sound especially FAR OUT! But alas, I put in new batteries and no one ever heard it like that again…. (Of course we were listening stoned, which is a good way to listen to this music even when it sounds the way it’s supposed to!)
The bell that rings out singularly a third of the way into Side B sounds to me like the one that Joe brought back from India. There’s a very nice wash of clatter about 2/3 into Side B. I think that’s the side of the Miracle I liked the most, when things were just going wild and it just seemed like a random, primal force of nature without recognizable shape or form! (Chris Culhane, a later member of The Miracle, said it was best when it was like birds chirping in the woods, and I agreed with that, too!)
Of course, another key feature of the Miracle is that there was always an aspect of musicality to it amidst the “noise”, and that was a good thing. It was a mixture of sentiments, a mutt, neither fish nor clichéd fowl. The types of musicality employed weren’t always the ones I would have chosen, but then, that’s the paradox of such things. It’s like how art appreciation engages a much more critical part of the brain than, say, nature appreciation. Do you ever hear someone say, “Well, I like the flowers and the waterfall in the foreground, but those mountains back there, no, they just don’t work like that at all, they’d be much better set at a different angle”? I think I liked the Miracle best when it was more like wild nature, working on a plane beyond the rational critical mind. Not that I can’t claim my rational critical mind isn’t what’s deciding that or what might choose to seek or make the type of music I’m trying to describe, but, ah, such is the paradox of it. My goal in the Miracle was often to try to find a sense of controlled randomness….
Tape 3 was sort of in between the first two, with the biggest cast of characters and plenty of craziness but also with more quiet parts and definitely showing more signs of intentionality than the first tape.
One participant on this one was Del Hoeft, who had his own DIY band called Iceplants and who is still a good friend of mine to this day and who I first met in the flesh at the schoolhouse where he was already in 7th heaven jamming away after first learning about the Miracle jams when I played some of the schoolhouse music on my radio show and he called me up at the station to find out what the hell it was about and was very excited to find out he could actually participate himself!
Sparka Houts was Del’s girlfriend at the time (and also in Iceplants). “Aaron Eldora” was a fellow named Aaron who lived in Eldora (see above). We later learned his real last name (Cook, I think?) but Evan evidently didn’t know it when it was time for the calligraphy! Mingus I think was George’s dog! (You can hear him “performing” near the end of Side A!) I don’t know who Angela was (nor Scott Van Der from the first tape).
Del liked comparing the music being made to a gamelan. Iceplants was more mutant pop, but he later joined an industrial band based in Boulder called Naram Sin whose fourth and final release (a cassette) was a long improvisation somewhat reminiscent of Miracle music (though Naram Sin member John Martinez, while a roommate of mine, expressed some envy at how much more “swing” the Miracle had: “That’s what we need, to swing like that!” he said.)
This tape was informally called “Chalkboard Jungle” in honor of all the scraping sounds that came from George scraping on trashcans, I think with a shoe horn! That was one powerful sound! At times you can hear the sound of the microphone stand shaking or being hit. On Side B I think we hear it get smacked intentionally a couple of times. It was the only form of electric music on the recording, if you think of it that way!
We would usually listen to the day’s recordings in Leo and Jeanne’s trailer afterwards. One night, the battery was running down in my ghetto blaster causing the sound of the playback to get stretched out in long wobbly undulations, and that made the music sound especially FAR OUT! But alas, I put in new batteries and no one ever heard it like that again…. (Of course we were listening stoned, which is a good way to listen to this music even when it sounds the way it’s supposed to!)
The bell that rings out singularly a third of the way into Side B sounds to me like the one that Joe brought back from India. There’s a very nice wash of clatter about 2/3 into Side B. I think that’s the side of the Miracle I liked the most, when things were just going wild and it just seemed like a random, primal force of nature without recognizable shape or form! (Chris Culhane, a later member of The Miracle, said it was best when it was like birds chirping in the woods, and I agreed with that, too!)
Of course, another key feature of the Miracle is that there was always an aspect of musicality to it amidst the “noise”, and that was a good thing. It was a mixture of sentiments, a mutt, neither fish nor clichéd fowl. The types of musicality employed weren’t always the ones I would have chosen, but then, that’s the paradox of such things. It’s like how art appreciation engages a much more critical part of the brain than, say, nature appreciation. Do you ever hear someone say, “Well, I like the flowers and the waterfall in the foreground, but those mountains back there, no, they just don’t work like that at all, they’d be much better set at a different angle”? I think I liked the Miracle best when it was more like wild nature, working on a plane beyond the rational critical mind. Not that I can’t claim my rational critical mind isn’t what’s deciding that or what might choose to seek or make the type of music I’m trying to describe, but, ah, such is the paradox of it. My goal in the Miracle was often to try to find a sense of controlled randomness….
WoG 0029 - Walls Of Genius AND MIRACLE 4
EC:
Volume 4: Likely all of these people as Volume 4 was “culled from 12 hours of performance…during the summer of 1985. It is a collage of bright moments and hot spots.” It was mixed by David Lichtenverg (sic-a/k/a David Lichtenberg or Little Fyodor). The cover was a photo of the old schoolhouse taken by Evan Cantor, part of a fold-out j-card featuring photos of the schoolhouse, all of which appear in the WoG scrapbook. We thanked Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, Zoot Berry (a/k/a George Stone) and Joe (Joe Ketola).
LF:
As mentioned above, the fourth “Walls of Genius and Miracle” cassette release, while based on the same raw material as the first three, that being the cassette recordings I made of the spontaneous activities at the schoolhouse, differed in a couple of ways. Visually, the outer package is made up of photos Evan took of the schoolhouse (probably after Leo and Jeanne and George had already moved away), and the labels were cutups of photos actually taken at the first live Miracle performance at the Pirate Art Gallery in Denver. The first three all had labels with calligraphy of Evan’s describing what tape it was and which side it was on Side A and random cutups of some psychedelic artwork I believe was Evan’s on the Side B’s. The first three were also all whole sides of jamming taken directly from whole sides of the original recordings. The fourth tape was what you might call a collage, except that there was no “bigger whole” made by the stitched together parts, it was just a series of edits of previously unused portions of the jams all edited or segued together with overlapping fades. This was a means of reflecting a lot of the cool stuff that happened that did not fit onto the first three releases, including material that came from sides of recordings that were not consistently interesting throughout the entire side. Something great would happen, and then it would stop or die off. People would go do other things. After all, there was a lot of time and material recorded! And Leo and Jeanne and George lived there and often had day to day life things to do, like hauling water cause they had no water unless they went and got it and hauled it back. They’d wander into the schoolhouse to jam when they felt like it. It was somewhat a different experience for those of us who traveled there for the jamming (or to hang out and party). Of course the presence of others and the arrival of the microphone undoubtedly contributed to the hosts’ urge to jam, though they were doing this before the mike showed up and I presume some percentage of it would have taken place regardless, who knows whether it would have been closer to 10 or 90 percent of what it ended up being. The second and third releases do reflect the most awareness of the microphone and the recording process going on, which probably helped make for side long listenable jams. Along with the first release, the fourth probably captures the more candid moments, when there was less concern for doing something presentable to the outside world. Though, befitting such a collage, it was definitely a mixture and cross section of it all….
The first two bits on Walls of Genius AND MIRACLE 4 surprisingly both feature George Stone, though I doubt that was on my mind in starting with those two. That’s him at the start, whacking on a trashcan with only a few others around, but he’s having a fab time, yelling “Wipe Out!” and maybe whacking out some semblance of the classic song’s rhythm but surely going full throttle with bonkers energy. Then the second bit features George playing “My Favorite Things” on the piano. I think it was a young (then!) feller named Ben on the drums. I remember such a fellow, but I don’t see his name in any of the liner notes. This bit reflected some of the jazz influence on the people making this music and George’s talents at the piano. As well as Ben’s talents. Like many of the participants, he had talents and/or interests in “straighter” music, particularly jazz, and the Miracle often flowed between inside and outside sentiments. All sorts of moments are captured on this compendium. At one point, you hear Jeanne saying, “Why’d you do it?” multiple times, which reminds me that Ed actually smashed his acoustic guitar during the proceedings that one day he showed up, and Jeanne was referring to that. Then we hear George apologizing to the microphone for accidentally bumping into it! (Um, quite tongue-in-cheek, that!) That might be me on the very “no technique” piano. I broke a key on Andrew Brennan’s (downstairs neighbor) piano doing that kind of stuff!
You often hear talking during the music, reflecting the casual, impromptu nature of the proceedings – not to mention the yelling and screaming, reflecting the fun we were having! Twice on Side B there are references to a flyer about a Martin Luther King memorial event that was hanging around somewhere that quoted his famous line, “Free at last!” We actually hear George’s cynical response, “Who says we’re free?” first and later Leo yelling “Free at last” to much free-form abandonment and commotion.
After the George bit, we get a good dose of what made Del liken the Miracle to a gamelan, albeit with a more modern sounding “groove”. I remember one friend complaining about the “camel walk” he felt too many industrial jam bands fell into in the 80’s, and the Miracle was certainly guilty at times, but I think there’s always something warped and different going on regardless. The quality of the Miracle could only be a function of the people involved, there was no formula or blueprint that we were following!
Next we hear George soloing on the piano and chatting, including about the influence of Art Tatum on him. Soon after, Leo’s talking drum is briefly spotlighted. Times like these weren’t likely to be included in 45 minute long jams as there may have only been one or two people in the schoolhouse at the time, thus the opportunity for genuine solos, but not as much for a seamless 45 minute jam.
My friend Brian Kraft complained there was too much “I bang, therefore I am” on these recordings, and you do have to enjoy, or at least tolerate, the thrill of banging we manifested.
Plus, next thing you know, someone’s playing a harmonica! (Though not blues harp this time!) Several types of flutes made appearances, too. It was a veritable anything and everything affair! As long as it didn’t need to be plugged in…. Like a cricket, or Evan’s car horn, which he honked outside one night right after leaving to head home, and those still inside jammed along!
Volume 4: Likely all of these people as Volume 4 was “culled from 12 hours of performance…during the summer of 1985. It is a collage of bright moments and hot spots.” It was mixed by David Lichtenverg (sic-a/k/a David Lichtenberg or Little Fyodor). The cover was a photo of the old schoolhouse taken by Evan Cantor, part of a fold-out j-card featuring photos of the schoolhouse, all of which appear in the WoG scrapbook. We thanked Leo Goya, Jeanne Strzelewicz, Zoot Berry (a/k/a George Stone) and Joe (Joe Ketola).
LF:
As mentioned above, the fourth “Walls of Genius and Miracle” cassette release, while based on the same raw material as the first three, that being the cassette recordings I made of the spontaneous activities at the schoolhouse, differed in a couple of ways. Visually, the outer package is made up of photos Evan took of the schoolhouse (probably after Leo and Jeanne and George had already moved away), and the labels were cutups of photos actually taken at the first live Miracle performance at the Pirate Art Gallery in Denver. The first three all had labels with calligraphy of Evan’s describing what tape it was and which side it was on Side A and random cutups of some psychedelic artwork I believe was Evan’s on the Side B’s. The first three were also all whole sides of jamming taken directly from whole sides of the original recordings. The fourth tape was what you might call a collage, except that there was no “bigger whole” made by the stitched together parts, it was just a series of edits of previously unused portions of the jams all edited or segued together with overlapping fades. This was a means of reflecting a lot of the cool stuff that happened that did not fit onto the first three releases, including material that came from sides of recordings that were not consistently interesting throughout the entire side. Something great would happen, and then it would stop or die off. People would go do other things. After all, there was a lot of time and material recorded! And Leo and Jeanne and George lived there and often had day to day life things to do, like hauling water cause they had no water unless they went and got it and hauled it back. They’d wander into the schoolhouse to jam when they felt like it. It was somewhat a different experience for those of us who traveled there for the jamming (or to hang out and party). Of course the presence of others and the arrival of the microphone undoubtedly contributed to the hosts’ urge to jam, though they were doing this before the mike showed up and I presume some percentage of it would have taken place regardless, who knows whether it would have been closer to 10 or 90 percent of what it ended up being. The second and third releases do reflect the most awareness of the microphone and the recording process going on, which probably helped make for side long listenable jams. Along with the first release, the fourth probably captures the more candid moments, when there was less concern for doing something presentable to the outside world. Though, befitting such a collage, it was definitely a mixture and cross section of it all….
The first two bits on Walls of Genius AND MIRACLE 4 surprisingly both feature George Stone, though I doubt that was on my mind in starting with those two. That’s him at the start, whacking on a trashcan with only a few others around, but he’s having a fab time, yelling “Wipe Out!” and maybe whacking out some semblance of the classic song’s rhythm but surely going full throttle with bonkers energy. Then the second bit features George playing “My Favorite Things” on the piano. I think it was a young (then!) feller named Ben on the drums. I remember such a fellow, but I don’t see his name in any of the liner notes. This bit reflected some of the jazz influence on the people making this music and George’s talents at the piano. As well as Ben’s talents. Like many of the participants, he had talents and/or interests in “straighter” music, particularly jazz, and the Miracle often flowed between inside and outside sentiments. All sorts of moments are captured on this compendium. At one point, you hear Jeanne saying, “Why’d you do it?” multiple times, which reminds me that Ed actually smashed his acoustic guitar during the proceedings that one day he showed up, and Jeanne was referring to that. Then we hear George apologizing to the microphone for accidentally bumping into it! (Um, quite tongue-in-cheek, that!) That might be me on the very “no technique” piano. I broke a key on Andrew Brennan’s (downstairs neighbor) piano doing that kind of stuff!
You often hear talking during the music, reflecting the casual, impromptu nature of the proceedings – not to mention the yelling and screaming, reflecting the fun we were having! Twice on Side B there are references to a flyer about a Martin Luther King memorial event that was hanging around somewhere that quoted his famous line, “Free at last!” We actually hear George’s cynical response, “Who says we’re free?” first and later Leo yelling “Free at last” to much free-form abandonment and commotion.
After the George bit, we get a good dose of what made Del liken the Miracle to a gamelan, albeit with a more modern sounding “groove”. I remember one friend complaining about the “camel walk” he felt too many industrial jam bands fell into in the 80’s, and the Miracle was certainly guilty at times, but I think there’s always something warped and different going on regardless. The quality of the Miracle could only be a function of the people involved, there was no formula or blueprint that we were following!
Next we hear George soloing on the piano and chatting, including about the influence of Art Tatum on him. Soon after, Leo’s talking drum is briefly spotlighted. Times like these weren’t likely to be included in 45 minute long jams as there may have only been one or two people in the schoolhouse at the time, thus the opportunity for genuine solos, but not as much for a seamless 45 minute jam.
My friend Brian Kraft complained there was too much “I bang, therefore I am” on these recordings, and you do have to enjoy, or at least tolerate, the thrill of banging we manifested.
Plus, next thing you know, someone’s playing a harmonica! (Though not blues harp this time!) Several types of flutes made appearances, too. It was a veritable anything and everything affair! As long as it didn’t need to be plugged in…. Like a cricket, or Evan’s car horn, which he honked outside one night right after leaving to head home, and those still inside jammed along!
LF:
Well, the caretaker gig eventually dissolved and Leo and Jeanne moved their trailer elsewhere and the schoolhouse even got torn down eventually, its owner’s efforts to sell it to someone actually willing to move the wonderful but huge damn thing having failed. The Miracle continued, however, though it could never be quite the same. The biggest difference is that there was usually electricity available which was a mixed blessing. After WoG broke up, I talked the Miraclites into recording in a professional recording studio, as I had begun doing as Little Fyodor, only I realized that the Miracle could do it very economically as several musicians only had to contribute a small amount of money each to jam for a few hours which created direct fodder for final product that needed no mix down.
The first resulting tape of such an endeavor, Dingsters at the Break of Dong/Jammus Interruptus, was really probably the Miracle’s finest (recorded) moment, at least in part because I had gotten everyone to agree to not play anything electric or any horns for the first 20 minutes, which allowed the subtler sounds we could make to resonate.
It was difficult to impossible to impose restrictions on a concept whose foundation and chief strength was its complete and unabashed freedom. Ironically and appropriately enough, WoG AND MIRACLE 4 ends with Leo asking the rest of us to “take a break” because our enthusiastic crazy-ass noise making may have scared away one of his cats, and it wouldn’t be the last time the difficult side of too much freedom would rear its head. Sometimes at live shows, people from the audience would want to join in and no one would want to tell them no, and sometimes they ended up breaking some favorite little instruments. Del Hoeft, mentioned above, asked if he could bring along another of his Naram Sin band mates to a live gig, who we’ll just call Mark, and we’d never met much less played with Mark, but we couldn’t say no, so we said yes. Mark came to the gig armed with a hammer and industrial gloves, and he proceeded to pound the hell out of a trashcan in the same very simple caveman rhythm over and over and over and over. He pounded so loudly that he actually drowned out the rest of us! The trashcan lay crumpled and destroyed by the end of the show. One might not think smashing cans was a problem for us hearing all the banging on the schoolhouse tapes, but thing is the Miracle was never just about loud banging even if it was a part of it, plus the veteran Miraclites were really just pikers in the world of genuine Industrial Music and we lacked both the ability and interest to compete with Mark’s single-minded industrial strength volume. Unfortunately he was oblivious to the effect he was having and reportedly ignored requests to dial it back. Jeanne, who, among other things, liked making music by shaking vitamin pill bottles cause she could stop and open up the bottle and down a vitamin pill and then close it back up and start shaking it again, claimed she spent much of the boom-boom-pound-pound night in tears. George pointed out to me that for all his metallic whacking, he usually played the trashcans with his hands.
Unlimited participation could be a problem in other ways and we once had a good 15 people jamming at a friend’s photographic lab (where he often held jam sessions of his own) and of course that was a bit of a mess (albeit still fun!). We did continue to have our shining moments. One was at a party in the mountains where we once again had no electricity and we had a quiet and mystical jam mostly on hand drums and flutes. One of the attendees said we could have made an album right then and there if we’d had recorded it (the host for that party was Evan’s supplier). Another was at an art gallery in Boulder where we had agreed to only play wood, which was in abundance in various playable forms at the gallery.
Anyway, the aforementioned Dingsters tape was surely the “band’s” recorded highlight, a downright beautiful recording if you ask me, full of shaking and rattling and all manner of crazy little musical doo-dad sounds (including Evan on duck call!) plus the playing of an accomplished trumpeter named Miles White who started soloing just a bit before the 20 minute time limit was up, and the pristine studio recording with plenty of delay to imitate the schoolhouse’s natural reverb didn’t hurt either. The Dingsters tape got played once on WFMU and was semi-praised in a private letter by Fred Frith, woo-hoo!
Leo eventually cited to me our inability to match the high point of that tape as a reason he had begun to lose interest. And there couldn’t be a Miracle without Leo. Even though he made little to no attempt to “lead” or organize the project in any particular way, he seemed to be the central figure and the one consistent focal point that in essence defined what the Miracle was, to the degree it could be defined at all, anyway. Ironically and appropriately enough, the Dingsters follow up tape was called “Infinition”, after something cubist painter Georges Braque had said….
The very last thing the Miracle did was a live performance at legendary Boulder coffeehouse Penny Lane, opening for local progressive Klezmer band Hamster Theatre. By that time I had sort of semi-inadvertently kicked Evan out of the band by not inviting him to consecutive recordings and shows because I had tired of his bluesy electric bass playing and loud saxophone (newer member Chris Culhane concurred that Evan didn’t seem to “understand what we [were] doing”). I had considered proposing the concept of inviting a varying small group of potential players (maybe around 6) from a pool of interested parties to different Miracle jams, which could sometimes include Evan and sometimes not me. But I never quite found the words and will to articulate the idea to Leo, much less to the rest of what more or less constituted the band (though it was inspired by something new sometimes member Jack Wright had said). It’s also occurred to me that my eagerness to push the Miracle into doing various things may have turned off Leo in much the same way Evan’s bossiness had often irked me, though if so Leo never told me so. Well anyway, that was a nice last night at Penny Lane, as we listened to each other well and played some fun and joyful and weirdly prancing sounds, weaving in and out of little grooves in prime Miracle fashion, and I like to think we went out on a high note…. (Chris Culhane still likes to call any free music he plays “miracle music”, but then, that’s Chris for ya, which is also a whole ‘nother story….)
Well, the caretaker gig eventually dissolved and Leo and Jeanne moved their trailer elsewhere and the schoolhouse even got torn down eventually, its owner’s efforts to sell it to someone actually willing to move the wonderful but huge damn thing having failed. The Miracle continued, however, though it could never be quite the same. The biggest difference is that there was usually electricity available which was a mixed blessing. After WoG broke up, I talked the Miraclites into recording in a professional recording studio, as I had begun doing as Little Fyodor, only I realized that the Miracle could do it very economically as several musicians only had to contribute a small amount of money each to jam for a few hours which created direct fodder for final product that needed no mix down.
The first resulting tape of such an endeavor, Dingsters at the Break of Dong/Jammus Interruptus, was really probably the Miracle’s finest (recorded) moment, at least in part because I had gotten everyone to agree to not play anything electric or any horns for the first 20 minutes, which allowed the subtler sounds we could make to resonate.
It was difficult to impossible to impose restrictions on a concept whose foundation and chief strength was its complete and unabashed freedom. Ironically and appropriately enough, WoG AND MIRACLE 4 ends with Leo asking the rest of us to “take a break” because our enthusiastic crazy-ass noise making may have scared away one of his cats, and it wouldn’t be the last time the difficult side of too much freedom would rear its head. Sometimes at live shows, people from the audience would want to join in and no one would want to tell them no, and sometimes they ended up breaking some favorite little instruments. Del Hoeft, mentioned above, asked if he could bring along another of his Naram Sin band mates to a live gig, who we’ll just call Mark, and we’d never met much less played with Mark, but we couldn’t say no, so we said yes. Mark came to the gig armed with a hammer and industrial gloves, and he proceeded to pound the hell out of a trashcan in the same very simple caveman rhythm over and over and over and over. He pounded so loudly that he actually drowned out the rest of us! The trashcan lay crumpled and destroyed by the end of the show. One might not think smashing cans was a problem for us hearing all the banging on the schoolhouse tapes, but thing is the Miracle was never just about loud banging even if it was a part of it, plus the veteran Miraclites were really just pikers in the world of genuine Industrial Music and we lacked both the ability and interest to compete with Mark’s single-minded industrial strength volume. Unfortunately he was oblivious to the effect he was having and reportedly ignored requests to dial it back. Jeanne, who, among other things, liked making music by shaking vitamin pill bottles cause she could stop and open up the bottle and down a vitamin pill and then close it back up and start shaking it again, claimed she spent much of the boom-boom-pound-pound night in tears. George pointed out to me that for all his metallic whacking, he usually played the trashcans with his hands.
Unlimited participation could be a problem in other ways and we once had a good 15 people jamming at a friend’s photographic lab (where he often held jam sessions of his own) and of course that was a bit of a mess (albeit still fun!). We did continue to have our shining moments. One was at a party in the mountains where we once again had no electricity and we had a quiet and mystical jam mostly on hand drums and flutes. One of the attendees said we could have made an album right then and there if we’d had recorded it (the host for that party was Evan’s supplier). Another was at an art gallery in Boulder where we had agreed to only play wood, which was in abundance in various playable forms at the gallery.
Anyway, the aforementioned Dingsters tape was surely the “band’s” recorded highlight, a downright beautiful recording if you ask me, full of shaking and rattling and all manner of crazy little musical doo-dad sounds (including Evan on duck call!) plus the playing of an accomplished trumpeter named Miles White who started soloing just a bit before the 20 minute time limit was up, and the pristine studio recording with plenty of delay to imitate the schoolhouse’s natural reverb didn’t hurt either. The Dingsters tape got played once on WFMU and was semi-praised in a private letter by Fred Frith, woo-hoo!
Leo eventually cited to me our inability to match the high point of that tape as a reason he had begun to lose interest. And there couldn’t be a Miracle without Leo. Even though he made little to no attempt to “lead” or organize the project in any particular way, he seemed to be the central figure and the one consistent focal point that in essence defined what the Miracle was, to the degree it could be defined at all, anyway. Ironically and appropriately enough, the Dingsters follow up tape was called “Infinition”, after something cubist painter Georges Braque had said….
The very last thing the Miracle did was a live performance at legendary Boulder coffeehouse Penny Lane, opening for local progressive Klezmer band Hamster Theatre. By that time I had sort of semi-inadvertently kicked Evan out of the band by not inviting him to consecutive recordings and shows because I had tired of his bluesy electric bass playing and loud saxophone (newer member Chris Culhane concurred that Evan didn’t seem to “understand what we [were] doing”). I had considered proposing the concept of inviting a varying small group of potential players (maybe around 6) from a pool of interested parties to different Miracle jams, which could sometimes include Evan and sometimes not me. But I never quite found the words and will to articulate the idea to Leo, much less to the rest of what more or less constituted the band (though it was inspired by something new sometimes member Jack Wright had said). It’s also occurred to me that my eagerness to push the Miracle into doing various things may have turned off Leo in much the same way Evan’s bossiness had often irked me, though if so Leo never told me so. Well anyway, that was a nice last night at Penny Lane, as we listened to each other well and played some fun and joyful and weirdly prancing sounds, weaving in and out of little grooves in prime Miracle fashion, and I like to think we went out on a high note…. (Chris Culhane still likes to call any free music he plays “miracle music”, but then, that’s Chris for ya, which is also a whole ‘nother story….)
