WALLS OF GENIUS INTERVIEW
WITH EVAN CANTOR AND LITTLE FYODOR
Hal McGee:
When I traded cassettes with you in the mid-1980s I thought Walls Of Genius was the name of your band. The cassette cover information of “Crazed To The Core” (1984), “Before …and After” (1984), and “the mysterious case of Pussy Lust” (1985) all indicate that Walls Of Genius was the name of the band. On the front cover of “Ludovico Treatment”, which came out in 1984 before those other tapes, it says “Walls Of Genius Presents”, but on the inside it says “Ludovico Treatment Walls Of Genius”, which again indicated to me that Walls Of Genius was the group name.
The first cassette in the Walls Of Genius catalog (WoG 0001), which was originally released in 1983, is listed as “Walls Of Genius”. In the information insert that accompanied the cassette there were five different artist or band names listed (Spazz Attack, Excitable Dogs, Vegetables Behind The Wheel, The Crooning Goons, Ed'n Evan, & Sergeant Joe Colorado). Those five acts consisted of one, two, or three members of the group I later knew as Walls Of Genius: Evan Cantor, Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg), and Ed Fowler.
What was “Walls Of Genius”?
- A group? An organization or umbrella project? An album title?
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Evan recently sent to me a copy of a 90-minute cassette consisting of material that was recorded in 1982. The cassette is untitled and it lists four bands: The Dirt Clods, Chariots Of Beer, Jerry’s Kids, and Ed’n Evan. Evan Cantor and Ed Fowler are on all of the recordings, as the duos Ed’n Evan and Jerry’s Kids, and with other performers in The Dirt Clods and Chariots Of Beer. David Lichtenberg is not credited in any of these recordings. Why not? Had Evan and Ed recorded or performed together before these recordings from late 1982?
Why wasn’t that cassette listed in the Walls Of Genius catalog? It does not say anything about Walls Of Genius on the cover, but is clearly related to the tapes in the WoG catalog. Some of the additional musicians, such as Dirt Clods member Dena Zocher, and Glenn Swanson (who was a member of Chariots of Beer on this tape), appear on later WoG tapes.
Evan Cantor:
What was "Walls of Genius" --a group? an organization or umbrella project? An album title? The short answer is "yes" to all three. The name Walls of Genius (WoG) first appeared as the title of a cassette. It was a loving tribute to the band Wall of Voodoo. David Lichtenberg reports that I was fond of the expression "he's a genius!", which I apparently used in referring to various football players who appeared to defy the laws of physics. I don't remember this, but it's certainly possible. The tape "Walls of Genius" included a number of "faux" bands.
Around the same time, Walls of Genius became a faux-umbrella organization releasing music from "different" bands we were involved in. It started innocently enough with the naming of different sessions with crazy names, each one a different kind of fantasy of a band name. The different sessions were named individually, each and every single different jam session that we recorded, regardless of the personnel, which rotated, but always included a core of Evan Cantor, David Lichtenberg (Little Fyodor) and Ed Fowler. These so-called bands included Spazz Attack, Vegetables Behind The Wheel, Excitable Dogs, The Fabulous Pus-Tones, etc. Whenever I (Evan Cantor) would do a solo recording, utilizing over-dub magic, it might be Joe Colorado, Sergeant Joe Colorado, Wally-Bob Colorado or Johnny Pureheart. Do you get the mocking of John Denver here? John Denver was, at the time, everything that we were rebelling against. He was so damn wholesome! We sought to undermine that wholesomeness as we saw it as a huge fake, almost a put-on, like 'opiate for the masses'. I had nicknamed David "Little Fyodor" previously because he had both turned me on to Dostoevsky when we were college and I later determined that in some ways he was like the characters in Dostoevsky's books, lurking in dark corners in greasy overcoats, tortured psychologically by the world around him. He did solo tracs originally as John Leningrad, but then transitioned into using the nom-de-plume Little Fyodor. Groups like The Crooning Goons or the Fabulous Pus-Tones usually consisted of David and I taking apart classic top-40 material and reassembling it in maniacal fashion, featuring a lot of autistic singing as if we were mentally disabled, plus a variety of whooping, hooting and screaming. All of this was presented to the world as "Walls of Genius Presents (name of band here)".
Our first public performance was promoted as "Wall of Genius Presents: Strange Rituals". Later we performed as Runaway Trucks and The Flaming Jerks, amongst others, and it was all under the aegis of "WoG Presents". It was not possible to maintain indefinitely the pretense of so many different bands and eventually we became simply the band "Walls of Genius". Our final performance, at the Littleton Town Hall where I opened as Wally Bob Colorado and then burned a smurf on stage, was billed as "Walls Of Genius". We did some performances with Miracle, which were billed as "Walls of Genius and MIRACLE". But all along, I had the idea to create a "label" in the underground scene. The "joke" of many different bands doing odd music in Boulder became a self-fulfilling prophecy. There were other groups doing experimental music: Doll Parts, Naram Sin (John Martinez, currently a DJ for the CU student radio station) amongst others I don't recall. Our involvement with Architects' Office was along these lines. David and I participated in the early Architects' Office sessions and then, via Walls of Genius (the cassette label), we garnered reviews for Architects' Office in the underground press and released their first two titles under the "WoG" label. Later on, we did a similar thing with Leo Goya's free-jazz group, Miracle. We also released some Little Fyodor solo material and did two compilations of groups currently active in the underground, "Madness Lives" and "Son Of Madness". So these materials were released on the Walls Of Genius "label".
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What's the story with the 1982 cassette alternately known as "From The Living Room All The Way To The Closet, Vol. 1", "Authentic" or "The Dirt Clods, etc." (that's my name for it)? This is the tape labeled on the spine: "The Dirt Clods/Chariots Of Beer/Jerry's Kids/Ed'n Evan". This tape represents a transitional stage. Rumours of Marriage (1982) was a straight-ahead punky New Wave band in Lafayette, Colorado, in which Evan Cantor played bass and Ed Fowler played lead guitar. I had become involved with this band almost by accident. I wasn't interested in playing in a band at that time because I was sick of the trials and travails of the music business and the insanity of most of the musicians I had ever known. I wanted to be the recording engineer. But one thing led to another and I became the group's bassist. Thus, I ended up putting David Lichtenberg at the controls of the Dokorder 4-track reel-to-reel machine and we used a bunch of old used-reels that the lead singer Mikal Bellan had laying around. I got ticked off at David because he let the VU meters go into the red, meaning that a lot of the recordings were hopelessly distorted and he was playing the spoons really loud, which wasn't anything we wanted to hear. Perhaps there was too much partying happening. Which would not have been surprising and I am in no position to judge as I am as guilty as anybody in that regard.
As Rumours of Marriage was preparing to implode, we made some recordings as "Couch Dots", consisting of extended jams with poetic recitations by the two lead singers, Riann Thonesson and Mikal Bellan. This approach was co-opted later on by Walls of Genius, albeit a good deal more frenzied and maniacal.
After the band completely blasted apart, I (Evan Cantor) needed a new place to live as the Rumours of Marriage band-house was no longer viable. I moved into Rich Schaffer's place in south Boulder, but that was not a place where I could make music. It was not an environment amenable to all the music that I thought was interesting at the time, like The Clash and Talking Heads, much less music I might have wanted to make, so it quickly became a place I needed to escape from.
That escape was down to Denver, to Ed Fowler's place on Dahlia Street. Ed's place was a part of a four-plex kind of thing. We could make as much music there as we wanted. I would go down to Ed's place on a Saturday, we would party and jam and watch "bad" movies (so bad they're good). I'd sleep on the couch and we would recover at Annie's Cafe the next morning and subsequently watch the Denver Broncos on Sunday afternoon. We recorded our sessions on Ed's boom-box, which we called a ghetto-blaster in those days.
By this time, I was completely sick of the music business, sick of the parade of insane musicians that I had tolerated over the course of many years, sick of trying to find gigs and all I wanted to do was make music, whatever and however I felt like it. I no longer cared what anybody thought about my music or my chops or my approach. Ed and I would drink ourselves silly and in this environment of complete freedom, unleashed our demons. We let loose a barrage of zaniness and craziness, utilizing toys and bonafide musical instruments alike, playing whatever songs we happened to know and murdering them in a stoned drunken frenzy.
On occasion, some of Ed's friends would show up and that's how Dena Zocher started playing with us, as well as the other folks listed on the "Dirt Clods" cassette, none of whom really embraced the approach besides Dena. I did some cowboy song duets with Marsha Wooley later on, but she declined to ever perform with us subsequently.
David Lichtenberg (aka Little Fyodor) does not appear on this collection because the tape represents sessions at Ed's place in Denver and I was still ticked off at David's lack of attention to the 4-track recorder at Rumours of Marriage sessions. Soon enough I was no longer ticked off. I must have played the tape for David or given him a copy. Perhaps he had his late-night experimental-music radio show at KGNU Public Radio Boulder by this time. I would have been interested in airplay although there was no "band" at the moment. David was interested in what Ed and I were doing, had plenty of his own zaniness and craziness to offer and our recordings after this date include him.
Later, WoG "released" some of the tracs from the Dirt Clods cassette on "official" Walls Of Genius releases. At the time these tracks were first recorded, we were unaware of the international underground of Do-It-Yourself artists and we had no inkling of what was to come. By the time there was an actual "Walls Of Genius" label "presenting" stuff, I felt that the material on the Dirt Clods cassette was not consistently strong enough to merit full release. But there were outstanding tracks and those made it onto later collections.
Little Fyodor:
The seeds of Walls Of Genius go back to a band called Rumours Of Marriage. Evan played bass and Ed played lead guitar and I hung out with them sometimes and made an ill-fated stab at being their soundman. The band, based in Louisville, Colorado, was a rock band with a setlist and tried to get gigs where they would play songs from their setlist, like most rock bands. But they broke up in unusual fashion in that the two lead singers (who were rumored to be getting married) announced that they would be leaving town. Thus, the band had no future (heh), but they still liked playing together (well, at least enough to do so), so play together they did, but their repertoire of songs was now kinda pointless and they decided to jam and get experimental and record it all on the Dokorder four-track reel to reel machine that Evan owned and had brought to practices. This made it possible to get decent recordings of their experimental jams and thus preserve them as they happened. The band adopted a new name, Couch Dots, for this endeavor.
After the couple finally left, Evan eventually got together with Ed at Ed's place in Denver to continue the jamming, albeit without having any band leader as such around to tell them to do this or that. Perhaps Evan can describe the mindset better, but I think because of the off-the-cuff nature of this endeavor, because of the lack of any setlist or any desire to have one, because of not having anyone to tell them what to do, because Evan has a sharp and intrepid wit, and because there were different people involved each time, and maybe most importantly because they didn't know where this was all going and didn't necessarily care, they simply called themselves something different each time they got together. It was fun as a kinda joke and as a different way of doing things, but it made sense in its own way too, cause they hadn't come to any decision about what it was all about (Alfie?) and they weren't interested at that point in doing so. So considering that, why not? Why not call yourself something different every time? Everyone always has a zillion band name ideas, but it's always tough to come up with "the" name you should use, as a permanent thing. So if you're not concerned with having some concrete ongoing project, why not be a different "band" each time? You don't have to worry who the band members are either, when you're just recording whoever's there and it's different each time. (Couch Dots would also encourage the participation of people who were hanging around but not part of the band, too -- like me!)
The name Walls Of Genius was eventually adopted later, when it became apparent that we DID have a consistent project going and that we should represent that somehow. The "in-between" step was to continue being a different "band" each time but to place all our activities under the Walls Of Genius Presents umbrella. “Walls Of Genius Presents: Strange Rituals”, it said on the poster for our first live performance! “Walls Of Genius Presents: Runaway Trucks”, the poster said for a later performance! At this point (and actually in general), it would be tough to say exactly what WoG was. It was a project, an organization, a cassette label and eventually a band with flexible membership. It was definitely not "just" a band or a band in the normal sense of the word. All of this happened very spontaneously and we never actually discussed what WoG actually was. But yes, eventually we gave up coming up with different band names and just became WoG and WoG became us, our band name, even if it never ceased to be more than that and it was never a band in the usual sense of the word as we continued to not care who else would be involved. As well as the fact that we we didn't have any constant or mapped out roles within the "band" as most bands do, at least to some degree. It was never, "You play the drums and I play the guitar." Sure Ed and Evan played a lot of guitar and bass (and rhythm guitar) respectively, but any of us might play anything for any given recording, and I'm talking about anything from any and all "real" instruments to toys or found objects, etc. I think the preponderance of toy instruments strewn about Ed's place may have played a major role in initiating that approach during the original Ed and Evan jams.
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Anyway, the part where this continued after the lead couple of Rumours Of Marriage/Couch Dots had left town didn't include me because Evan mainly just wanted to play with Ed, who Evan considered to be a musician of great and unique talent and whose sense of humor he appreciated, and I guess he was mad at me for some of the behaviors I exhibited which he interpreted as drunken negligence as the band's "soundman" and maybe other stuff. I don't mind mentioning that, these things happen. It's pretty much water under the bridge for both of us. But I didn't get involved till later, when I guess Evan got over his anger at me plus he wanted me to bring along this woman I'd met through my radio show who had a house she wanted to rent to an artistic type and Evan wanted to move somewhere where he could set up his Dokorder and make music whenever he wanted, perhaps including this new project of jamming with Ed and whoever else....
Hal McGee:
[Evan], in the handwritten information on the cassette j-card of “The Dirt Clods, Etc.” tape you wrote:
ALL OF THE MUSIC ON THIS TAPE WAS CREATED SPONTANEOUSLY OUT OF THIN AIR!
Much of the music on this tape, especially by The Dirt Clods, seems to have been recorded in a very loose party atmosphere. As you have suggested above, this music sounds like it was done for the pure love of it, almost in a purposely thoughtless/carefree way and yet you chose to record these sessions. For what reason or purpose? You recorded the music on Ed’s cheap cassette boombox instead of a Dokorder reel-to-reel tape recorder like Rumours Of Marriage and most of your later recordings, so high fidelity was not a concern.
When were these recordings made? On the cassette j-card you wrote 1983, but I am guessing that some or much of this might have been recorded in the Fall and early Winter of 1982. Rumours Of Marriage broke up during the Summer of 82 and you usually do a lot of hiking and camping in the Summer, don't you? I know that it was 31+ years ago, but can you remember if the four different groups on this tape were recorded at four different sessions, on different dates, and are they in chronological order?
EC:
Yes, The Dirt Clods cassette was recorded on Ed's boombox--the 4-trac Dokorder was too heavy to move around much (which is why I used my old 2-trac reel for the Festival of Pain later on). We probably recorded the sessions out of habit--having been in bands for years, I was particularly annoyed that I had so few recordings of all the bands I had ever played in. Recording equipment in those days was not ubiquitous like it is now. We all had had to put up with total space-cases at the dials of 4-trac tape recorders simply because they were the only people who actually owned them. Why these recording "engineers" were always fuck-ups, I can't really say, but that was my experience. Four-trac reel-to-reel machines were not cheap either, but they gave you much better recording quality than anything else at the time (besides maybe 8-tracs and 16-tracs in professional studios). That said, it was supremely easy to pop a cassette into a boombox and hit the record button. We knew we were making something worth listening to and the Dirt Clods cassette was, in its own way, a 'demo' of what we were up to. It was definitely a "best of"--you can hear the fade-outs and fade-ins, so it was indeed "mixed". While we weren't yet organized in any way as a bonafide band, we must have thought highly enough of what we were doing to think it merited being recorded, if only for our own benefit.
That Summer of 1982 I had a job, working 40-hours a week at the Trust Company of America. I very likely went camping and hiking as much as I could, but it wouldn't have been to the exclusion of making music and I was looking for ways to escape the mundane reality of my room-mates. Not that I didn't like the guys--in fact, I was in business with the primary room-mate, Rich Schaffer. Rich was in the process at that time of giving up on legitimate employment altogether and becoming a full-time dealer. Dealers typically sold marijuana, hashish, psilocybin mushrooms and cocaine. As a musician, I knew people who wanted that stuff, not to mention myself. Rich declared that he was the "Jesse James of the 20th Century". He stopped reporting and paying taxes and didn't have any health insurance. How he managed to keep a drivers' license was beyond my understanding. He had ruined his knees years before, from skiing, and eventually claimed he couldn't walk uphill. He was one of these guys who eventually did nothing outdoors but play golf. In later years, he had a series of heart attacks which cleaned out whatever savings he had amassed and the last one came about three years ago and finished him off. We hadn't spoken in over 20 years. I heard the news from a mutual acquaintance two years after the fact. Once I gave up the marijuana business, I became persona non-grata to him and I knew when I was being blown off. That summer (1982) was probably the last times he ever went camping and hiking, because I took him with me. But once the Fall starts in Colorado, the high country goes to winter pretty quick and hiking/camping peters out as people wait for the ski season to start in earnest. I didn't yet know how to ski. So there was the whole Fall 1982 and Winter 82-83 wherein these recordings were made. By March 1983, David was participating, we were recording in Eldorado Springs and the reel-to-reel boxes give definitive dates.
The four "groups" on the Dirt Clods tape would have been at separate sessions. This was the time when Ed and I started to give crazy names to every session. Each session got a different band name. I cannot for the life of me remember "why" we decided to do that, but it became our modus operandi very quickly. Probably just another inside joke that amused us. Remember, we were sick of the traditional forms. Bands were crazy-making endeavors, featuring charismatic lead singers having shit-fits, bassists issuing ultimatums, asshole drummers playing way too loud, and a legion of dazed wannabes. We were rejecting all that. So one day we played as the Dirt Clods. Another weekend we played as Jerry's Kids. And so on. Whether or not the four groups on the Dirt Clods cassette were presented in chronological order is probably impossible to determine at this time. The reel-to-reel boxes place these recordings some time between June 1982 (final Rumours of Marriage sessions) and March 1983 (sessions later released as "Johnny Rocco", the so-called Greatest Hits Volume 2 of Living Room to the Closet). That's about a 4-month period (October-February). There's not a lot of documentation for this Dirt Clods tape since it pre-dates the realization that we were an actual band of some kind.
Hal McGee:
Evan, you said that the Dirt Clods cassette was a kind of "best of" tape from those sessions from the Winter of 82/83. You hung out at Ed's on weekends and partied and cut loose and jammed. Did you leave the recorder on the cassette ghetto-blaster running constantly as you jammed, and then later listened back to the sessions and selected your favorite parts of the long jams? Yes, there is a definite fade-up at the beginning of the first song on the tape, "Arriba!", which makes it sound like it was an extract from a longer recording. Explain how you made these edits. I assume from one cassette deck to another. Did you make the selections by yourself or did you and Ed do it together?
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The listed primary Dirt Clods group personnel consisted of you, Ed, and Dena Zocher (on cello and vocals), but it sounds like there were other people in the room when you made these recordings, notably in the background on "Arriba!", and in the sing-along chorus of "Dead Puppies". Dena participated in numerous Walls Of Genius recording sessions and releases, and even appeared on a couple of the cassette covers. Tell me about her, and how she got involved in WoG. I notice that he surname is spelled "Zoccer" on this tape and and "Zakar" on a later WoG tape.
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Let's talk about the Dirt Clods tracks on the tape and share with me any recollections about how and why you recorded the songs/jams, the ideas behind them, what you were thinking about, etc. A lot of the music on these Dirt Clods recordings has a kind of impressionistic Eastern European or vaguely Asiatic feeling to it.
When I listen to "Arriba!" I get an impression of a caravan, or journey across a desert or maybe a jungle, or a traveling band of gypsies (mostly), or something like that.
"Whoopee Cushion Agent Man" is a funny, loose, rollicking take-off on the Johnny Rivers 1966 hit, "Secret Agent Man".
Of course "Dead Puppies" is a cover of the Ogden Edsl novelty song which gained notoriety/infamy on the Dr. Demento show.
In another section of the WoG profile Little Fyodor mentioned that "All Along The Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix blew Ed's mind when he first heard it and really turned him onto the possibilities of weird, wild and out-there guitar-playing. The cover version on this tape doesn't sound anything like Hendrix or Bob Dylan - hahahaha! That's some crazy percussion sounds you did on that, and is that a triangle that I hear?
Was "Never Come On Sunday" a reference to the film "Never On Sunday"? If so, I cannot detect much of the original song in this intricate instrumental consisting of electric guitar, oddball percussion and Dena's cool cello-playing.
And what's the deal with "Brother Paul's Soliloquy"? Sounds like one of you guys reading some kind of arbitrary religious text along with electronic and percussion jammage, harmonica distortifications and maniacal laughter.
EC:
In recording these tracs, we mostly left the recorder turned on and then later pulled out the best parts for the "Dirt Clods, Etc." cassette. For some of the tunes, we probably practiced for a moment or two, then exclaimed, “okay, we know it, let’s do it”. For the jams, I faded in and faded out at “propitious moments”. I wish I had the original recordings so I could give dates, but I don’t seem to have anything left of the sessions other than this “best of” collection. I made these edits from one cassette deck to another, using my 6-trac TEAC mixer for equalization and fade-ins/fade-outs. That was the machine that I used to interface with the 4-track Dokorder reel-to-reel. At Ed’s place, we were just recording onto a cassette-player boombox. Ed was never particularly interested in the mixing process afterwards. I did the mixing, all the choosing and deciding what material went on this tape.
Regarding Dena Zocher: Her name appears with different spellings in different places, but “Zocher” is correct. Dena was a hippie in those days and "official" things like name spelling likely didn't concern her, nor did I care much about it, so we just did our best to give credit where credit was due. Nobody had facebook pages or personal websites or email addresses in 1983, so there was very little way to check up on these things other than asking face-to-face and we apparently never did until much later. In 1983, Dena lived at "The People's House" in Denver with a bunch of room-mates, a sort of "commune" type of set-up. Dena was a friend of Ed's, perhaps a short-term ‘old girlfriend’ and that's how she originally got involved with The Dirt Clods (and other WoG incarnations). Dena performed with WoG at the Left Hand Bookstore (Strange Rituals, on the Mr. Morocco cassette). How Dena met Ed is a story for Ed to tell, since I don’t know it.
On to the Dirt Clods Etc cassette: The name "Jerry's Kids" was an obvious reference to the Jerry Lewis Telethon. The people involved with the Dirt Clods (Marsha Wooley, Roger Boraas, Nina & Russ Stevens, Dena Zocher) were all members of Ed’s Telethon Party “club”. Ed and a bunch of his friends got into mocking the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethons. They would have drunken stoned parties watching Jerry on the tube and go wild and crazy making fun of him, since Jerry Lewis’ “act” was essentially to behave like a stereotypically mentally-disabled idiot. Ed and his friends (including Glenn Swanson who appears on Chariots of Beer) even went to Los Angeles one time to attend the telethon in person. They made so much noise and were so distracting that Jerry Lewis kicked them out of the auditorium. He was apparently pissed off at their antics, their snickering and raising cain in the audience. I'm surprised to hear myself playing so much blues harp on the “Jerry’s Kids” tracs.
Whether or not I thought up these names or Ed did is lost to posterity, as are most of the so-called band names we used. "Chariots of Beer" was a play on "Chariots of Fire", a popular movie about competitive runners at the time that had a popular theme song, which Ed’s friend Glenn Swanson knew how to play. Since Glenn knew how to play it, we proceeded to murder it in what would become our typical fashion. Glenn never really embraced our approach and this is the only trac which he appears on. I think he thought we were nuts. Maybe still does! "Ed'n Evan" is self-explanatory, just the two of us jamming with whatever devices were handy, like toys and kalimbas.
Very likely these names were assigned to the different sessions after the fact.
“Arriba!” features a lot of Marsha Wooley’s voice, a friend and perhaps short-term ‘old girlfriend’ of Ed’s. She was part of Ed’s Telethon Party group. How they met is yet another story for Ed. On this trac, you hear Marsha exclaiming “Whack-ah!” and, later in the trac, egging-on somebody who is playing a party horn with “Blow hard! Blow harder!”. Evan is playing the acoustic guitar, Ed the lead lines that have an Arabian sound due to the scales he is using. There are lots of toys in the background. “Arriba!” is Evan’s voice, who also says “Say What Now?”.
“Whoopee Cushion Agent Man” is, as you say, a loose rollicking take-off of the Johnny Rivers hit song “Secret Agent Man”. “Secret Agent Man” was a part of my “straight” repertoire at that time and for this trac, I broke up the head riff into pieces, playing them in a kind of halting rhythmic fashion. This was a typical approach that I took on many occasions in the making of improv jam music. This is an early recorded example of that approach. I am playing the acoustic guitar and Marsha Wooley is grunting over the whoopee cushion.
Ed sang "Dead Puppies", a song he had heard on Dr. Demento's radio show (by the band Ogden Edsl). I don’t think any of us knew who actually sang this song on the Demento show. Ed may have had a Demento “best of” collection since he actually knew the words and the chords. But I never heard the name Ogden Edsl until this question came up (2014). Ed also sometimes sang a song called "Fish Heads". I thought it was by Barnes And Barnes, but Ed says it was by Wild Man Fischer. Ed’s version of "Fish Heads" never made it onto tape. Wild Man Fischer was a clear influence, though, in our approach to raving maniacal vocal stylings.
“All Along The Watchtower”—this is a real stand-out trac. The flute-sounds in the background are a real mystery to me since this pre-dates David Lichtenberg having a synthesizer in the room and we did not have a flute player. It might have been a record that Ed had, but it fits like a glove. There is a lot of toy percussion on this one. The bell sound was part of a percussion toy, the one that had the ratchet sound and the spinning wheel sound. I am singing the lead on this, experimenting with different voices including a Louis Armstrong impression and a faux West-Indian accent. Ed was likely playing the acoustic guitar on this since he knew the song from Jimi Hendrix, one of his idols. We often went in directions that reflected something we already knew.
"Never Come On Sunday" was a riff borrowed from Rumours of Marriage and I somehow slipped it into this jam at the very end. Ed plays an intro (not the "Never Come On Sunday" riff) and Dena picks it up on the cello. You can hear me in the way-back playing a chromatic harmonica. Dena runs with the theme and takes some cool cello solos. Ed changes his tone with the Echoplex (an echo machine that ran a tape loop to create echo and effects). The bass line from RoM “Never” song roars in at the end and finishes it. As far as I know, it has no connection to the film of a similar name, but I have no idea if the lyrics associated with the music have a connection. The lyrics that appeared on Rumours of Marriage’s version of the song were written by either Riann Thonesson or Mikal Bellan, I don’t know which. Although I played in that band, I never listened very closely to the lyrics of this particular song—I was too much focused on the wild bass line that followed the music Ed had written.
'Brother Paul's Soliloquoy" sounds like a bizarre religious text, almost science fiction. Ed must have had it laying around and I ran with it, but I remember nothing about it. Nonetheless, it is a good example of what would become a typical WoG approach to text, going from sedate all the way to maniacal desperation as a climax. Ed plays spacey effects with the Echoplex, Dena and Marsha provide the mocking laughter as Brother Paul discusses God. It sounds like a toy organ in the mix—might have been Ed’s toy piano miked through a guitar amp. The end of this piece devolves into Ed’s explorations with the Echoplex and Evan’s “evil” laughter at the end.
“Bats On The Wing” is three parts of a single long jam that I cherry-picked the best parts. Part I starts with my bass line, Ed chimes in with electric guitar and establishes a new rhythm within which I play lead bass. It fades out. Then Part II fades in with Ed playing leads and it fades out again as Evan starts up a new bass line. Part III fades in with Evan playing chords on the bass and a weird clip-clop rhythm part coming out of the Echoplex, then fades out. This is Ed and Evan only. Regarding the song title, Ed loved the double entendre of the word “bat”—think baseball bats versus vampire bats. “Bat Kontrol” was one of Ed’s proposed names for the band that became Rumours Of Marriage.
“Laundry” starts with Evan’s bass through a flanger. Ed picks up the line while Evan improvises a rap about going to the laundry. This was likely an inside joke on Bill Snow, one of the musicians that was replaced by Evan in the band that became Rumours Of Marriage. Bill’s “big” song was a chant of “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”. My improvised rap becomes more abstract as I talk about taking a motorcycle up “Golden Canyon”. That would have been more properly Golden Gate Canyon, in which a highway follows from Golden, Colorado, up towards Central City. This is totally on the fly. I start whistling, then howling and laughing and ramp up into some screaming, a la the Beatles. Then it fades out…
“Evil Santa’s Theme”—Ed started this with a rhythm guitar and I fell in with a minor-key doom-and-gloom bass line borrowed from the “God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen” melody. I’m guessing this session took place in December 1982 because of the Christmas music worming its way into the mix.
I discussed the trac “Chariots Of Beer” previously.
Jerry’s Kids is just Ed and Evan again. “Ed’s Blues” is a standard blues progression that really shows off Ed’s prowess as a lead guitarist.
“Paranoid” is obviously a fade-in from the blues jam, which morphs into the Black Sabbath riff of the same name before fading out again.
"Evan's Blues" is a kind of satiric take on the form. It sounds like I'm making up lyrics as we go along and having a hard time not cracking up. Ed plays the rhythm guitar in delta-blues style.
“The Massacre” is probably the best instrumental piece on the whole collection. On one hand, it’s just “another minor key jam”, but the combination of Ed’s effects with the Echoplex and my threatening bass lines made it work. It ends with me playing “Red River Valley” on the harmonica, which was one of about seven songs I knew how to play on the harmonica in those days. That explains why the song got called, after the fact, “The Massacre”. It was such a mournful version of “Red River Valley”, that it conjured up the tragic experience of Native Americans. I was really interested in Native American history at the time, too. I loved the western landscape so much, was so obsessed by mountains and canyons and desert, that I wanted to figure out how the original inhabitants viewed it. Of course it was a sacred landscape to them.
“Hot Tub In Tokyo” starts another session, again just Ed and I. Ed opens the piece with a gong and I fall in with baritone baroque recorder. This is perhaps the most ambitious music I ever made with the recorder. It’s an organically developing jam, named after the fact. The gong gave it a Japanese flavor to start, so that name was assigned to it. I have no idea if the name was Ed’s idea or my own.
“A Kiss Is Not A Contract” has Ed on the Echoplex again. I am playing a walking blues-rock bass line. Ed’s voice is run through a guitar amp with effects and mostly incomprehensible, but “a kiss is not a contract” comes through and that’s how I labeled the song, a way to identify it. Ed may recall the source of the text, I do not.
"The Dog Bite" is one of my rants, but again, I have no memory of it other than knowing it appears on this cassette. My voice is run through a guitar amp with effects. The theme of a “drooling dog” reappears in later WoG material (“Dogshit Drool”). There is a lot of toy percussion on this. Also voice clicking percussion through the guitar amp. At the end, this morphs into “Malcolm’s Chant” (om-pane-mane-mo) which also reappears in later WoG material. Malcolm Barr was a room-mate of mine at the TKE house in Charlottesville, Virginia and we used to do that yoga-like chant on occasion. People in the house called it “that damn chant”.
“Leading the Worms To Slaughter” fades in, obviously after some extended jamming got it going. Ed’s lead guitar, Evan’s bass line. Evan’s voice comes through a guitar amp with effects, a lot of incoherent chanting in rhythm with the bass line. You hear some of Ed’s signature hot lead licks, borrowed from the lead guitar solo in Sugarloaf’s hit song “Green Eyed Lady”. Evan’s chanting moves into incoherent rumbling, paranoid howling and mewling as if something awful is about to happen. This, then, was a worm being led to the slaughter. This is a theme that would reappear in later WoG material, “March of the Lost Wormsouls”. It fades out as the jam apparently kept going. The worm-thing was mine own.
“Lost In The congo” starts with Ed on kalimba. Evan’s electric guitar falls in, played through a digital delay. You can always tell my lead playing because I don’t have the hot licks that Ed did. It fades out… only to fade back in as “The Sequel”. This time I’m on acoustic guitar, mimicking the kalimba sound and Ed is wailing away on the Echoplex. It fades out. The “Congo” reference would have been in honor of the kalimba, an African instrument.
“Angel Rot” fades in, more edited jamming. Ed’s lead guitar, Evan’s bass line. Evan’s voice is heard through a guitar amp with effects, incoherent rhythmic chanting and scat singing. This is another piece that shows off Ed’s lead guitar prowess. It fades out… the jam continued…. as usual…
“I And I We Be High All Day”—this is a real shortie. Ed put an instrumental reggae LP on the record player and we played along with it. Ed on the guitar, me singing in a faux-Jamaican-accent through a guitar amp with effects.
“Dance Of A Trillion Teats” is Ed on acoustic guitar and me playing the recorder. I have no memory of why it was called this.
“Blue Jays” was metamorphosed from Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies” and overlaid with a sports announcer from an LP of sports history-stuff that Ed possessed. We used a section about Dave McNally of the Baltimore Orioles, a kind of 'bird' related theme. You know, Blue Jays, Orioles… I am playing the rhythm guitar, Ed chimes in with a few electric licks about halfway through. This is also a parody, in a sense, of Willie Nelson, who had recorded a selection of jazz standards that was getting a lot of airplay at the time. You can hear a little of my nasal Willie impression being discovered on this trac. At the end, Ed turns his guitar to “Girl From Ipanema” and we fade out.
“Chariots of Beer (Reprise)” is covered previously—just another bit edited from the original jam to “round out” the collection.
The best material on this tape re-appeared in later "releases" like "The WoG Sampler". I cannot for the life of me recall what I intended to do with these recordings, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I was so sick of never having recordings of the bands I played in, I wanted tape recorders going on all the time. Thank goodness for that, because I really enjoyed hearing all this music again!
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HM:
Four of these songs were later issued officially on WoG 0011 The WoG Sampler!: "Dead Puppies" and "Whoopee Cushion Agent Man" by The Dirt Clods, "The Massacre" and "Evan's Blues" by Jerry's Kids, and "Hot Tub In Tokyo" by Ed'n Evan. "All Along The Watchtower" and "Blue Jays" by The Dirt Clods were included on the WoG 0009 Cultural Sabotage cassette.
Fyodor, you did not appear on this tape, but many of the tracks appeared on later official Walls Of Genius releases, alongside tracks including you. How do you view this tape in terms of WoG's later developments? And please feel free to comment in detail on this tape in general.
LF:
Well hey, the goings on reflected on this tape were what started it all, so I have nothing but reverence for it! WoG went through a few phases, but it really started with the idea that you turn on the tape machine and record any and all shenanigans that transpire within its presence and that's your art! It's nice to always be recording cause then there's no, Uh-oh, we're recording now, it better be good, NOW! There's less of a sense of a wall between life and art, it's all life, it's all art. Some may not like that idea, but whatever, there's pros and cons to everything, and that's what we did, and what went on during the making of that tape was what started it all. Like I said, the seeds of the idea I think started with the dissolution jams of Rumours of Marriage/Couch Dots, but it was during the sessions in question that "it" really started. If RoM represented the seeds, this tape represents the stalk sticking its head above the ground! I was actually mildly surprised when Evan first started making catalogs of our "available" material and didn't include this tape, but that's not to say I disagreed. I was fine either way. Being polished was never what WoG was about, even though you try to make improvements that don't interfere with your core mission, and I could see that even we "straight from the gut" self-proclaimed Morons might have origins too humble and primitive to share with the world as official "product"! Y'know, I remember playing something off that tape on my radio show and some woman called up and complained about not getting it! I told her the name of the band was the Dirt Clods and she said, "Oh, it's funny.... Okay!" Anyway, I'm definitely glad that some of these tracks did in fact see release on later WoG tapes, as you've ably documented!
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WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco
HM:
Little Fyodor's WoG Discography states: "Johnny Rocco originally existed before WoG 0001 as 'Greatest Hits Vol 2: From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet'. Its inclusion in the WoG catalogue was almost a reissue, except that it was never actually issued in its first incarnation."
"What does the phrase "From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet" mean? Was there a "Greatest Hits Vol 1"? WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco is first listed in the second WoG catalog. In the liner notes of the album it says that it was long out-of-print.
LF:
Evan didn't originally include it in the catalog he made to announce to the world that our material was available for sale or whatnot, so neither did he originally give it a catalog #. But then we decided, hell, why not? There's good shit on there! So we changed the name to something manageable, gave it a # and put it in the catalog. Thrills and chills, I know! I guess the most interesting thing about this process is that we hadn't come up with the name Walls Of Genius yet at the time that tape was originally created, so maybe that was part of why it wasn't originally included. Walls Of Genius was originally the name of the next tape we did, and that then became WoG 001 once we realized that "we" were also WoG!
We recorded it in the living room and then Evan put the recording apparatus (recording machine and tapes) back in the closet so that's simply where the material went, that's where it traveled, from the one place to the other. Until we took it back out of the closet!
Some things are just up to interpretation and your fevered imagination... Y'know, there's a dj on WFMU who plays lots of very obscure stuff, especially from the 60's and 70's, and he once commented that a lot of bands titled their first record "Volume 1" only to never release a 2nd record! While WoG was no stranger to hubris, I suppose one might say that Evan was cautious enough not to number a tape by volume until he got to the 2nd one and came to realize, hey, there's a pattern going on here!
The title was ironic sure but simultaneously descriptive. I believe that after culling through the available material from the recording sessions and mixing down the best parts, it felt like a "greatest hits." The "greatest hits" of those several recording sessions!
Just out of print cause it wasn't in the first catalog and thus hadn't been getting distributed. I suppose we should let on that that was a joke as we printed them up at will and it was only a long time if you're constantly craving all the WoG you can digest, as you should be, of course. Kinda makes you wonder what "out of print" even means when you think of it since production of anything is generally started and stopped as needed. Only with us, it was one at a time....
EC:
"From the Living Room All the Way To The Closet" is basically a joke, meaning that the music wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't going to leave the living room. It started in the living room and then... made it's way all the way to the closet. As opposed to a radio station or recording studio or anywhere else in the world. I don't recall storing the recording equipment in a closet--at both Eldorado Springs and the Hall of Genius, the living-room had been turned into a recording studio and the equipment stayed put. I hated to move the Dokorder around for reasons previously discussed.
"Volume 1" and "Volume 2" were, once again, basically joke titles, as we had no conception that anybody in the world wanted to hear this music at the time. The tapes were for us and maybe a few friends. "Vol 1" was the Dirt Clods Etc tape. It wasn't as consistently strong as "Vol 2". Eventually the best selections from "Vol 1" were included on future WoG releases and "Vol 2" was re-named "Johnny Rocco" and released in its entirety.
"Greatest Hits" just meant the best material from the sessions.
The business about Rocco being "long out of print" was yet another joke. It never had been "in print" in the first place. Plus, as David indicates, we were dubbing cassettes on demand. Eventually I had a set-up with three cassette decks so we could dub 2 at a time, in real-time. In those days, there were no "double" cassette decks that we were aware of or speed-dubbing devices.
When I traded cassettes with you in the mid-1980s I thought Walls Of Genius was the name of your band. The cassette cover information of “Crazed To The Core” (1984), “Before …and After” (1984), and “the mysterious case of Pussy Lust” (1985) all indicate that Walls Of Genius was the name of the band. On the front cover of “Ludovico Treatment”, which came out in 1984 before those other tapes, it says “Walls Of Genius Presents”, but on the inside it says “Ludovico Treatment Walls Of Genius”, which again indicated to me that Walls Of Genius was the group name.
The first cassette in the Walls Of Genius catalog (WoG 0001), which was originally released in 1983, is listed as “Walls Of Genius”. In the information insert that accompanied the cassette there were five different artist or band names listed (Spazz Attack, Excitable Dogs, Vegetables Behind The Wheel, The Crooning Goons, Ed'n Evan, & Sergeant Joe Colorado). Those five acts consisted of one, two, or three members of the group I later knew as Walls Of Genius: Evan Cantor, Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg), and Ed Fowler.
What was “Walls Of Genius”?
- A group? An organization or umbrella project? An album title?
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Evan recently sent to me a copy of a 90-minute cassette consisting of material that was recorded in 1982. The cassette is untitled and it lists four bands: The Dirt Clods, Chariots Of Beer, Jerry’s Kids, and Ed’n Evan. Evan Cantor and Ed Fowler are on all of the recordings, as the duos Ed’n Evan and Jerry’s Kids, and with other performers in The Dirt Clods and Chariots Of Beer. David Lichtenberg is not credited in any of these recordings. Why not? Had Evan and Ed recorded or performed together before these recordings from late 1982?
Why wasn’t that cassette listed in the Walls Of Genius catalog? It does not say anything about Walls Of Genius on the cover, but is clearly related to the tapes in the WoG catalog. Some of the additional musicians, such as Dirt Clods member Dena Zocher, and Glenn Swanson (who was a member of Chariots of Beer on this tape), appear on later WoG tapes.
Evan Cantor:
What was "Walls of Genius" --a group? an organization or umbrella project? An album title? The short answer is "yes" to all three. The name Walls of Genius (WoG) first appeared as the title of a cassette. It was a loving tribute to the band Wall of Voodoo. David Lichtenberg reports that I was fond of the expression "he's a genius!", which I apparently used in referring to various football players who appeared to defy the laws of physics. I don't remember this, but it's certainly possible. The tape "Walls of Genius" included a number of "faux" bands.
Around the same time, Walls of Genius became a faux-umbrella organization releasing music from "different" bands we were involved in. It started innocently enough with the naming of different sessions with crazy names, each one a different kind of fantasy of a band name. The different sessions were named individually, each and every single different jam session that we recorded, regardless of the personnel, which rotated, but always included a core of Evan Cantor, David Lichtenberg (Little Fyodor) and Ed Fowler. These so-called bands included Spazz Attack, Vegetables Behind The Wheel, Excitable Dogs, The Fabulous Pus-Tones, etc. Whenever I (Evan Cantor) would do a solo recording, utilizing over-dub magic, it might be Joe Colorado, Sergeant Joe Colorado, Wally-Bob Colorado or Johnny Pureheart. Do you get the mocking of John Denver here? John Denver was, at the time, everything that we were rebelling against. He was so damn wholesome! We sought to undermine that wholesomeness as we saw it as a huge fake, almost a put-on, like 'opiate for the masses'. I had nicknamed David "Little Fyodor" previously because he had both turned me on to Dostoevsky when we were college and I later determined that in some ways he was like the characters in Dostoevsky's books, lurking in dark corners in greasy overcoats, tortured psychologically by the world around him. He did solo tracs originally as John Leningrad, but then transitioned into using the nom-de-plume Little Fyodor. Groups like The Crooning Goons or the Fabulous Pus-Tones usually consisted of David and I taking apart classic top-40 material and reassembling it in maniacal fashion, featuring a lot of autistic singing as if we were mentally disabled, plus a variety of whooping, hooting and screaming. All of this was presented to the world as "Walls of Genius Presents (name of band here)".
Our first public performance was promoted as "Wall of Genius Presents: Strange Rituals". Later we performed as Runaway Trucks and The Flaming Jerks, amongst others, and it was all under the aegis of "WoG Presents". It was not possible to maintain indefinitely the pretense of so many different bands and eventually we became simply the band "Walls of Genius". Our final performance, at the Littleton Town Hall where I opened as Wally Bob Colorado and then burned a smurf on stage, was billed as "Walls Of Genius". We did some performances with Miracle, which were billed as "Walls of Genius and MIRACLE". But all along, I had the idea to create a "label" in the underground scene. The "joke" of many different bands doing odd music in Boulder became a self-fulfilling prophecy. There were other groups doing experimental music: Doll Parts, Naram Sin (John Martinez, currently a DJ for the CU student radio station) amongst others I don't recall. Our involvement with Architects' Office was along these lines. David and I participated in the early Architects' Office sessions and then, via Walls of Genius (the cassette label), we garnered reviews for Architects' Office in the underground press and released their first two titles under the "WoG" label. Later on, we did a similar thing with Leo Goya's free-jazz group, Miracle. We also released some Little Fyodor solo material and did two compilations of groups currently active in the underground, "Madness Lives" and "Son Of Madness". So these materials were released on the Walls Of Genius "label".
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What's the story with the 1982 cassette alternately known as "From The Living Room All The Way To The Closet, Vol. 1", "Authentic" or "The Dirt Clods, etc." (that's my name for it)? This is the tape labeled on the spine: "The Dirt Clods/Chariots Of Beer/Jerry's Kids/Ed'n Evan". This tape represents a transitional stage. Rumours of Marriage (1982) was a straight-ahead punky New Wave band in Lafayette, Colorado, in which Evan Cantor played bass and Ed Fowler played lead guitar. I had become involved with this band almost by accident. I wasn't interested in playing in a band at that time because I was sick of the trials and travails of the music business and the insanity of most of the musicians I had ever known. I wanted to be the recording engineer. But one thing led to another and I became the group's bassist. Thus, I ended up putting David Lichtenberg at the controls of the Dokorder 4-track reel-to-reel machine and we used a bunch of old used-reels that the lead singer Mikal Bellan had laying around. I got ticked off at David because he let the VU meters go into the red, meaning that a lot of the recordings were hopelessly distorted and he was playing the spoons really loud, which wasn't anything we wanted to hear. Perhaps there was too much partying happening. Which would not have been surprising and I am in no position to judge as I am as guilty as anybody in that regard.
As Rumours of Marriage was preparing to implode, we made some recordings as "Couch Dots", consisting of extended jams with poetic recitations by the two lead singers, Riann Thonesson and Mikal Bellan. This approach was co-opted later on by Walls of Genius, albeit a good deal more frenzied and maniacal.
After the band completely blasted apart, I (Evan Cantor) needed a new place to live as the Rumours of Marriage band-house was no longer viable. I moved into Rich Schaffer's place in south Boulder, but that was not a place where I could make music. It was not an environment amenable to all the music that I thought was interesting at the time, like The Clash and Talking Heads, much less music I might have wanted to make, so it quickly became a place I needed to escape from.
That escape was down to Denver, to Ed Fowler's place on Dahlia Street. Ed's place was a part of a four-plex kind of thing. We could make as much music there as we wanted. I would go down to Ed's place on a Saturday, we would party and jam and watch "bad" movies (so bad they're good). I'd sleep on the couch and we would recover at Annie's Cafe the next morning and subsequently watch the Denver Broncos on Sunday afternoon. We recorded our sessions on Ed's boom-box, which we called a ghetto-blaster in those days.
By this time, I was completely sick of the music business, sick of the parade of insane musicians that I had tolerated over the course of many years, sick of trying to find gigs and all I wanted to do was make music, whatever and however I felt like it. I no longer cared what anybody thought about my music or my chops or my approach. Ed and I would drink ourselves silly and in this environment of complete freedom, unleashed our demons. We let loose a barrage of zaniness and craziness, utilizing toys and bonafide musical instruments alike, playing whatever songs we happened to know and murdering them in a stoned drunken frenzy.
On occasion, some of Ed's friends would show up and that's how Dena Zocher started playing with us, as well as the other folks listed on the "Dirt Clods" cassette, none of whom really embraced the approach besides Dena. I did some cowboy song duets with Marsha Wooley later on, but she declined to ever perform with us subsequently.
David Lichtenberg (aka Little Fyodor) does not appear on this collection because the tape represents sessions at Ed's place in Denver and I was still ticked off at David's lack of attention to the 4-track recorder at Rumours of Marriage sessions. Soon enough I was no longer ticked off. I must have played the tape for David or given him a copy. Perhaps he had his late-night experimental-music radio show at KGNU Public Radio Boulder by this time. I would have been interested in airplay although there was no "band" at the moment. David was interested in what Ed and I were doing, had plenty of his own zaniness and craziness to offer and our recordings after this date include him.
Later, WoG "released" some of the tracs from the Dirt Clods cassette on "official" Walls Of Genius releases. At the time these tracks were first recorded, we were unaware of the international underground of Do-It-Yourself artists and we had no inkling of what was to come. By the time there was an actual "Walls Of Genius" label "presenting" stuff, I felt that the material on the Dirt Clods cassette was not consistently strong enough to merit full release. But there were outstanding tracks and those made it onto later collections.
Little Fyodor:
The seeds of Walls Of Genius go back to a band called Rumours Of Marriage. Evan played bass and Ed played lead guitar and I hung out with them sometimes and made an ill-fated stab at being their soundman. The band, based in Louisville, Colorado, was a rock band with a setlist and tried to get gigs where they would play songs from their setlist, like most rock bands. But they broke up in unusual fashion in that the two lead singers (who were rumored to be getting married) announced that they would be leaving town. Thus, the band had no future (heh), but they still liked playing together (well, at least enough to do so), so play together they did, but their repertoire of songs was now kinda pointless and they decided to jam and get experimental and record it all on the Dokorder four-track reel to reel machine that Evan owned and had brought to practices. This made it possible to get decent recordings of their experimental jams and thus preserve them as they happened. The band adopted a new name, Couch Dots, for this endeavor.
After the couple finally left, Evan eventually got together with Ed at Ed's place in Denver to continue the jamming, albeit without having any band leader as such around to tell them to do this or that. Perhaps Evan can describe the mindset better, but I think because of the off-the-cuff nature of this endeavor, because of the lack of any setlist or any desire to have one, because of not having anyone to tell them what to do, because Evan has a sharp and intrepid wit, and because there were different people involved each time, and maybe most importantly because they didn't know where this was all going and didn't necessarily care, they simply called themselves something different each time they got together. It was fun as a kinda joke and as a different way of doing things, but it made sense in its own way too, cause they hadn't come to any decision about what it was all about (Alfie?) and they weren't interested at that point in doing so. So considering that, why not? Why not call yourself something different every time? Everyone always has a zillion band name ideas, but it's always tough to come up with "the" name you should use, as a permanent thing. So if you're not concerned with having some concrete ongoing project, why not be a different "band" each time? You don't have to worry who the band members are either, when you're just recording whoever's there and it's different each time. (Couch Dots would also encourage the participation of people who were hanging around but not part of the band, too -- like me!)
The name Walls Of Genius was eventually adopted later, when it became apparent that we DID have a consistent project going and that we should represent that somehow. The "in-between" step was to continue being a different "band" each time but to place all our activities under the Walls Of Genius Presents umbrella. “Walls Of Genius Presents: Strange Rituals”, it said on the poster for our first live performance! “Walls Of Genius Presents: Runaway Trucks”, the poster said for a later performance! At this point (and actually in general), it would be tough to say exactly what WoG was. It was a project, an organization, a cassette label and eventually a band with flexible membership. It was definitely not "just" a band or a band in the normal sense of the word. All of this happened very spontaneously and we never actually discussed what WoG actually was. But yes, eventually we gave up coming up with different band names and just became WoG and WoG became us, our band name, even if it never ceased to be more than that and it was never a band in the usual sense of the word as we continued to not care who else would be involved. As well as the fact that we we didn't have any constant or mapped out roles within the "band" as most bands do, at least to some degree. It was never, "You play the drums and I play the guitar." Sure Ed and Evan played a lot of guitar and bass (and rhythm guitar) respectively, but any of us might play anything for any given recording, and I'm talking about anything from any and all "real" instruments to toys or found objects, etc. I think the preponderance of toy instruments strewn about Ed's place may have played a major role in initiating that approach during the original Ed and Evan jams.
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Anyway, the part where this continued after the lead couple of Rumours Of Marriage/Couch Dots had left town didn't include me because Evan mainly just wanted to play with Ed, who Evan considered to be a musician of great and unique talent and whose sense of humor he appreciated, and I guess he was mad at me for some of the behaviors I exhibited which he interpreted as drunken negligence as the band's "soundman" and maybe other stuff. I don't mind mentioning that, these things happen. It's pretty much water under the bridge for both of us. But I didn't get involved till later, when I guess Evan got over his anger at me plus he wanted me to bring along this woman I'd met through my radio show who had a house she wanted to rent to an artistic type and Evan wanted to move somewhere where he could set up his Dokorder and make music whenever he wanted, perhaps including this new project of jamming with Ed and whoever else....
Hal McGee:
[Evan], in the handwritten information on the cassette j-card of “The Dirt Clods, Etc.” tape you wrote:
ALL OF THE MUSIC ON THIS TAPE WAS CREATED SPONTANEOUSLY OUT OF THIN AIR!
Much of the music on this tape, especially by The Dirt Clods, seems to have been recorded in a very loose party atmosphere. As you have suggested above, this music sounds like it was done for the pure love of it, almost in a purposely thoughtless/carefree way and yet you chose to record these sessions. For what reason or purpose? You recorded the music on Ed’s cheap cassette boombox instead of a Dokorder reel-to-reel tape recorder like Rumours Of Marriage and most of your later recordings, so high fidelity was not a concern.
When were these recordings made? On the cassette j-card you wrote 1983, but I am guessing that some or much of this might have been recorded in the Fall and early Winter of 1982. Rumours Of Marriage broke up during the Summer of 82 and you usually do a lot of hiking and camping in the Summer, don't you? I know that it was 31+ years ago, but can you remember if the four different groups on this tape were recorded at four different sessions, on different dates, and are they in chronological order?
EC:
Yes, The Dirt Clods cassette was recorded on Ed's boombox--the 4-trac Dokorder was too heavy to move around much (which is why I used my old 2-trac reel for the Festival of Pain later on). We probably recorded the sessions out of habit--having been in bands for years, I was particularly annoyed that I had so few recordings of all the bands I had ever played in. Recording equipment in those days was not ubiquitous like it is now. We all had had to put up with total space-cases at the dials of 4-trac tape recorders simply because they were the only people who actually owned them. Why these recording "engineers" were always fuck-ups, I can't really say, but that was my experience. Four-trac reel-to-reel machines were not cheap either, but they gave you much better recording quality than anything else at the time (besides maybe 8-tracs and 16-tracs in professional studios). That said, it was supremely easy to pop a cassette into a boombox and hit the record button. We knew we were making something worth listening to and the Dirt Clods cassette was, in its own way, a 'demo' of what we were up to. It was definitely a "best of"--you can hear the fade-outs and fade-ins, so it was indeed "mixed". While we weren't yet organized in any way as a bonafide band, we must have thought highly enough of what we were doing to think it merited being recorded, if only for our own benefit.
That Summer of 1982 I had a job, working 40-hours a week at the Trust Company of America. I very likely went camping and hiking as much as I could, but it wouldn't have been to the exclusion of making music and I was looking for ways to escape the mundane reality of my room-mates. Not that I didn't like the guys--in fact, I was in business with the primary room-mate, Rich Schaffer. Rich was in the process at that time of giving up on legitimate employment altogether and becoming a full-time dealer. Dealers typically sold marijuana, hashish, psilocybin mushrooms and cocaine. As a musician, I knew people who wanted that stuff, not to mention myself. Rich declared that he was the "Jesse James of the 20th Century". He stopped reporting and paying taxes and didn't have any health insurance. How he managed to keep a drivers' license was beyond my understanding. He had ruined his knees years before, from skiing, and eventually claimed he couldn't walk uphill. He was one of these guys who eventually did nothing outdoors but play golf. In later years, he had a series of heart attacks which cleaned out whatever savings he had amassed and the last one came about three years ago and finished him off. We hadn't spoken in over 20 years. I heard the news from a mutual acquaintance two years after the fact. Once I gave up the marijuana business, I became persona non-grata to him and I knew when I was being blown off. That summer (1982) was probably the last times he ever went camping and hiking, because I took him with me. But once the Fall starts in Colorado, the high country goes to winter pretty quick and hiking/camping peters out as people wait for the ski season to start in earnest. I didn't yet know how to ski. So there was the whole Fall 1982 and Winter 82-83 wherein these recordings were made. By March 1983, David was participating, we were recording in Eldorado Springs and the reel-to-reel boxes give definitive dates.
The four "groups" on the Dirt Clods tape would have been at separate sessions. This was the time when Ed and I started to give crazy names to every session. Each session got a different band name. I cannot for the life of me remember "why" we decided to do that, but it became our modus operandi very quickly. Probably just another inside joke that amused us. Remember, we were sick of the traditional forms. Bands were crazy-making endeavors, featuring charismatic lead singers having shit-fits, bassists issuing ultimatums, asshole drummers playing way too loud, and a legion of dazed wannabes. We were rejecting all that. So one day we played as the Dirt Clods. Another weekend we played as Jerry's Kids. And so on. Whether or not the four groups on the Dirt Clods cassette were presented in chronological order is probably impossible to determine at this time. The reel-to-reel boxes place these recordings some time between June 1982 (final Rumours of Marriage sessions) and March 1983 (sessions later released as "Johnny Rocco", the so-called Greatest Hits Volume 2 of Living Room to the Closet). That's about a 4-month period (October-February). There's not a lot of documentation for this Dirt Clods tape since it pre-dates the realization that we were an actual band of some kind.
Hal McGee:
Evan, you said that the Dirt Clods cassette was a kind of "best of" tape from those sessions from the Winter of 82/83. You hung out at Ed's on weekends and partied and cut loose and jammed. Did you leave the recorder on the cassette ghetto-blaster running constantly as you jammed, and then later listened back to the sessions and selected your favorite parts of the long jams? Yes, there is a definite fade-up at the beginning of the first song on the tape, "Arriba!", which makes it sound like it was an extract from a longer recording. Explain how you made these edits. I assume from one cassette deck to another. Did you make the selections by yourself or did you and Ed do it together?
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The listed primary Dirt Clods group personnel consisted of you, Ed, and Dena Zocher (on cello and vocals), but it sounds like there were other people in the room when you made these recordings, notably in the background on "Arriba!", and in the sing-along chorus of "Dead Puppies". Dena participated in numerous Walls Of Genius recording sessions and releases, and even appeared on a couple of the cassette covers. Tell me about her, and how she got involved in WoG. I notice that he surname is spelled "Zoccer" on this tape and and "Zakar" on a later WoG tape.
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Let's talk about the Dirt Clods tracks on the tape and share with me any recollections about how and why you recorded the songs/jams, the ideas behind them, what you were thinking about, etc. A lot of the music on these Dirt Clods recordings has a kind of impressionistic Eastern European or vaguely Asiatic feeling to it.
When I listen to "Arriba!" I get an impression of a caravan, or journey across a desert or maybe a jungle, or a traveling band of gypsies (mostly), or something like that.
"Whoopee Cushion Agent Man" is a funny, loose, rollicking take-off on the Johnny Rivers 1966 hit, "Secret Agent Man".
Of course "Dead Puppies" is a cover of the Ogden Edsl novelty song which gained notoriety/infamy on the Dr. Demento show.
In another section of the WoG profile Little Fyodor mentioned that "All Along The Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix blew Ed's mind when he first heard it and really turned him onto the possibilities of weird, wild and out-there guitar-playing. The cover version on this tape doesn't sound anything like Hendrix or Bob Dylan - hahahaha! That's some crazy percussion sounds you did on that, and is that a triangle that I hear?
Was "Never Come On Sunday" a reference to the film "Never On Sunday"? If so, I cannot detect much of the original song in this intricate instrumental consisting of electric guitar, oddball percussion and Dena's cool cello-playing.
And what's the deal with "Brother Paul's Soliloquy"? Sounds like one of you guys reading some kind of arbitrary religious text along with electronic and percussion jammage, harmonica distortifications and maniacal laughter.
EC:
In recording these tracs, we mostly left the recorder turned on and then later pulled out the best parts for the "Dirt Clods, Etc." cassette. For some of the tunes, we probably practiced for a moment or two, then exclaimed, “okay, we know it, let’s do it”. For the jams, I faded in and faded out at “propitious moments”. I wish I had the original recordings so I could give dates, but I don’t seem to have anything left of the sessions other than this “best of” collection. I made these edits from one cassette deck to another, using my 6-trac TEAC mixer for equalization and fade-ins/fade-outs. That was the machine that I used to interface with the 4-track Dokorder reel-to-reel. At Ed’s place, we were just recording onto a cassette-player boombox. Ed was never particularly interested in the mixing process afterwards. I did the mixing, all the choosing and deciding what material went on this tape.
Regarding Dena Zocher: Her name appears with different spellings in different places, but “Zocher” is correct. Dena was a hippie in those days and "official" things like name spelling likely didn't concern her, nor did I care much about it, so we just did our best to give credit where credit was due. Nobody had facebook pages or personal websites or email addresses in 1983, so there was very little way to check up on these things other than asking face-to-face and we apparently never did until much later. In 1983, Dena lived at "The People's House" in Denver with a bunch of room-mates, a sort of "commune" type of set-up. Dena was a friend of Ed's, perhaps a short-term ‘old girlfriend’ and that's how she originally got involved with The Dirt Clods (and other WoG incarnations). Dena performed with WoG at the Left Hand Bookstore (Strange Rituals, on the Mr. Morocco cassette). How Dena met Ed is a story for Ed to tell, since I don’t know it.
On to the Dirt Clods Etc cassette: The name "Jerry's Kids" was an obvious reference to the Jerry Lewis Telethon. The people involved with the Dirt Clods (Marsha Wooley, Roger Boraas, Nina & Russ Stevens, Dena Zocher) were all members of Ed’s Telethon Party “club”. Ed and a bunch of his friends got into mocking the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethons. They would have drunken stoned parties watching Jerry on the tube and go wild and crazy making fun of him, since Jerry Lewis’ “act” was essentially to behave like a stereotypically mentally-disabled idiot. Ed and his friends (including Glenn Swanson who appears on Chariots of Beer) even went to Los Angeles one time to attend the telethon in person. They made so much noise and were so distracting that Jerry Lewis kicked them out of the auditorium. He was apparently pissed off at their antics, their snickering and raising cain in the audience. I'm surprised to hear myself playing so much blues harp on the “Jerry’s Kids” tracs.
Whether or not I thought up these names or Ed did is lost to posterity, as are most of the so-called band names we used. "Chariots of Beer" was a play on "Chariots of Fire", a popular movie about competitive runners at the time that had a popular theme song, which Ed’s friend Glenn Swanson knew how to play. Since Glenn knew how to play it, we proceeded to murder it in what would become our typical fashion. Glenn never really embraced our approach and this is the only trac which he appears on. I think he thought we were nuts. Maybe still does! "Ed'n Evan" is self-explanatory, just the two of us jamming with whatever devices were handy, like toys and kalimbas.
Very likely these names were assigned to the different sessions after the fact.
“Arriba!” features a lot of Marsha Wooley’s voice, a friend and perhaps short-term ‘old girlfriend’ of Ed’s. She was part of Ed’s Telethon Party group. How they met is yet another story for Ed. On this trac, you hear Marsha exclaiming “Whack-ah!” and, later in the trac, egging-on somebody who is playing a party horn with “Blow hard! Blow harder!”. Evan is playing the acoustic guitar, Ed the lead lines that have an Arabian sound due to the scales he is using. There are lots of toys in the background. “Arriba!” is Evan’s voice, who also says “Say What Now?”.
“Whoopee Cushion Agent Man” is, as you say, a loose rollicking take-off of the Johnny Rivers hit song “Secret Agent Man”. “Secret Agent Man” was a part of my “straight” repertoire at that time and for this trac, I broke up the head riff into pieces, playing them in a kind of halting rhythmic fashion. This was a typical approach that I took on many occasions in the making of improv jam music. This is an early recorded example of that approach. I am playing the acoustic guitar and Marsha Wooley is grunting over the whoopee cushion.
Ed sang "Dead Puppies", a song he had heard on Dr. Demento's radio show (by the band Ogden Edsl). I don’t think any of us knew who actually sang this song on the Demento show. Ed may have had a Demento “best of” collection since he actually knew the words and the chords. But I never heard the name Ogden Edsl until this question came up (2014). Ed also sometimes sang a song called "Fish Heads". I thought it was by Barnes And Barnes, but Ed says it was by Wild Man Fischer. Ed’s version of "Fish Heads" never made it onto tape. Wild Man Fischer was a clear influence, though, in our approach to raving maniacal vocal stylings.
“All Along The Watchtower”—this is a real stand-out trac. The flute-sounds in the background are a real mystery to me since this pre-dates David Lichtenberg having a synthesizer in the room and we did not have a flute player. It might have been a record that Ed had, but it fits like a glove. There is a lot of toy percussion on this one. The bell sound was part of a percussion toy, the one that had the ratchet sound and the spinning wheel sound. I am singing the lead on this, experimenting with different voices including a Louis Armstrong impression and a faux West-Indian accent. Ed was likely playing the acoustic guitar on this since he knew the song from Jimi Hendrix, one of his idols. We often went in directions that reflected something we already knew.
"Never Come On Sunday" was a riff borrowed from Rumours of Marriage and I somehow slipped it into this jam at the very end. Ed plays an intro (not the "Never Come On Sunday" riff) and Dena picks it up on the cello. You can hear me in the way-back playing a chromatic harmonica. Dena runs with the theme and takes some cool cello solos. Ed changes his tone with the Echoplex (an echo machine that ran a tape loop to create echo and effects). The bass line from RoM “Never” song roars in at the end and finishes it. As far as I know, it has no connection to the film of a similar name, but I have no idea if the lyrics associated with the music have a connection. The lyrics that appeared on Rumours of Marriage’s version of the song were written by either Riann Thonesson or Mikal Bellan, I don’t know which. Although I played in that band, I never listened very closely to the lyrics of this particular song—I was too much focused on the wild bass line that followed the music Ed had written.
'Brother Paul's Soliloquoy" sounds like a bizarre religious text, almost science fiction. Ed must have had it laying around and I ran with it, but I remember nothing about it. Nonetheless, it is a good example of what would become a typical WoG approach to text, going from sedate all the way to maniacal desperation as a climax. Ed plays spacey effects with the Echoplex, Dena and Marsha provide the mocking laughter as Brother Paul discusses God. It sounds like a toy organ in the mix—might have been Ed’s toy piano miked through a guitar amp. The end of this piece devolves into Ed’s explorations with the Echoplex and Evan’s “evil” laughter at the end.
“Bats On The Wing” is three parts of a single long jam that I cherry-picked the best parts. Part I starts with my bass line, Ed chimes in with electric guitar and establishes a new rhythm within which I play lead bass. It fades out. Then Part II fades in with Ed playing leads and it fades out again as Evan starts up a new bass line. Part III fades in with Evan playing chords on the bass and a weird clip-clop rhythm part coming out of the Echoplex, then fades out. This is Ed and Evan only. Regarding the song title, Ed loved the double entendre of the word “bat”—think baseball bats versus vampire bats. “Bat Kontrol” was one of Ed’s proposed names for the band that became Rumours Of Marriage.
“Laundry” starts with Evan’s bass through a flanger. Ed picks up the line while Evan improvises a rap about going to the laundry. This was likely an inside joke on Bill Snow, one of the musicians that was replaced by Evan in the band that became Rumours Of Marriage. Bill’s “big” song was a chant of “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”. My improvised rap becomes more abstract as I talk about taking a motorcycle up “Golden Canyon”. That would have been more properly Golden Gate Canyon, in which a highway follows from Golden, Colorado, up towards Central City. This is totally on the fly. I start whistling, then howling and laughing and ramp up into some screaming, a la the Beatles. Then it fades out…
“Evil Santa’s Theme”—Ed started this with a rhythm guitar and I fell in with a minor-key doom-and-gloom bass line borrowed from the “God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen” melody. I’m guessing this session took place in December 1982 because of the Christmas music worming its way into the mix.
I discussed the trac “Chariots Of Beer” previously.
Jerry’s Kids is just Ed and Evan again. “Ed’s Blues” is a standard blues progression that really shows off Ed’s prowess as a lead guitarist.
“Paranoid” is obviously a fade-in from the blues jam, which morphs into the Black Sabbath riff of the same name before fading out again.
"Evan's Blues" is a kind of satiric take on the form. It sounds like I'm making up lyrics as we go along and having a hard time not cracking up. Ed plays the rhythm guitar in delta-blues style.
“The Massacre” is probably the best instrumental piece on the whole collection. On one hand, it’s just “another minor key jam”, but the combination of Ed’s effects with the Echoplex and my threatening bass lines made it work. It ends with me playing “Red River Valley” on the harmonica, which was one of about seven songs I knew how to play on the harmonica in those days. That explains why the song got called, after the fact, “The Massacre”. It was such a mournful version of “Red River Valley”, that it conjured up the tragic experience of Native Americans. I was really interested in Native American history at the time, too. I loved the western landscape so much, was so obsessed by mountains and canyons and desert, that I wanted to figure out how the original inhabitants viewed it. Of course it was a sacred landscape to them.
“Hot Tub In Tokyo” starts another session, again just Ed and I. Ed opens the piece with a gong and I fall in with baritone baroque recorder. This is perhaps the most ambitious music I ever made with the recorder. It’s an organically developing jam, named after the fact. The gong gave it a Japanese flavor to start, so that name was assigned to it. I have no idea if the name was Ed’s idea or my own.
“A Kiss Is Not A Contract” has Ed on the Echoplex again. I am playing a walking blues-rock bass line. Ed’s voice is run through a guitar amp with effects and mostly incomprehensible, but “a kiss is not a contract” comes through and that’s how I labeled the song, a way to identify it. Ed may recall the source of the text, I do not.
"The Dog Bite" is one of my rants, but again, I have no memory of it other than knowing it appears on this cassette. My voice is run through a guitar amp with effects. The theme of a “drooling dog” reappears in later WoG material (“Dogshit Drool”). There is a lot of toy percussion on this. Also voice clicking percussion through the guitar amp. At the end, this morphs into “Malcolm’s Chant” (om-pane-mane-mo) which also reappears in later WoG material. Malcolm Barr was a room-mate of mine at the TKE house in Charlottesville, Virginia and we used to do that yoga-like chant on occasion. People in the house called it “that damn chant”.
“Leading the Worms To Slaughter” fades in, obviously after some extended jamming got it going. Ed’s lead guitar, Evan’s bass line. Evan’s voice comes through a guitar amp with effects, a lot of incoherent chanting in rhythm with the bass line. You hear some of Ed’s signature hot lead licks, borrowed from the lead guitar solo in Sugarloaf’s hit song “Green Eyed Lady”. Evan’s chanting moves into incoherent rumbling, paranoid howling and mewling as if something awful is about to happen. This, then, was a worm being led to the slaughter. This is a theme that would reappear in later WoG material, “March of the Lost Wormsouls”. It fades out as the jam apparently kept going. The worm-thing was mine own.
“Lost In The congo” starts with Ed on kalimba. Evan’s electric guitar falls in, played through a digital delay. You can always tell my lead playing because I don’t have the hot licks that Ed did. It fades out… only to fade back in as “The Sequel”. This time I’m on acoustic guitar, mimicking the kalimba sound and Ed is wailing away on the Echoplex. It fades out. The “Congo” reference would have been in honor of the kalimba, an African instrument.
“Angel Rot” fades in, more edited jamming. Ed’s lead guitar, Evan’s bass line. Evan’s voice is heard through a guitar amp with effects, incoherent rhythmic chanting and scat singing. This is another piece that shows off Ed’s lead guitar prowess. It fades out… the jam continued…. as usual…
“I And I We Be High All Day”—this is a real shortie. Ed put an instrumental reggae LP on the record player and we played along with it. Ed on the guitar, me singing in a faux-Jamaican-accent through a guitar amp with effects.
“Dance Of A Trillion Teats” is Ed on acoustic guitar and me playing the recorder. I have no memory of why it was called this.
“Blue Jays” was metamorphosed from Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies” and overlaid with a sports announcer from an LP of sports history-stuff that Ed possessed. We used a section about Dave McNally of the Baltimore Orioles, a kind of 'bird' related theme. You know, Blue Jays, Orioles… I am playing the rhythm guitar, Ed chimes in with a few electric licks about halfway through. This is also a parody, in a sense, of Willie Nelson, who had recorded a selection of jazz standards that was getting a lot of airplay at the time. You can hear a little of my nasal Willie impression being discovered on this trac. At the end, Ed turns his guitar to “Girl From Ipanema” and we fade out.
“Chariots of Beer (Reprise)” is covered previously—just another bit edited from the original jam to “round out” the collection.
The best material on this tape re-appeared in later "releases" like "The WoG Sampler". I cannot for the life of me recall what I intended to do with these recordings, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I was so sick of never having recordings of the bands I played in, I wanted tape recorders going on all the time. Thank goodness for that, because I really enjoyed hearing all this music again!
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HM:
Four of these songs were later issued officially on WoG 0011 The WoG Sampler!: "Dead Puppies" and "Whoopee Cushion Agent Man" by The Dirt Clods, "The Massacre" and "Evan's Blues" by Jerry's Kids, and "Hot Tub In Tokyo" by Ed'n Evan. "All Along The Watchtower" and "Blue Jays" by The Dirt Clods were included on the WoG 0009 Cultural Sabotage cassette.
Fyodor, you did not appear on this tape, but many of the tracks appeared on later official Walls Of Genius releases, alongside tracks including you. How do you view this tape in terms of WoG's later developments? And please feel free to comment in detail on this tape in general.
LF:
Well hey, the goings on reflected on this tape were what started it all, so I have nothing but reverence for it! WoG went through a few phases, but it really started with the idea that you turn on the tape machine and record any and all shenanigans that transpire within its presence and that's your art! It's nice to always be recording cause then there's no, Uh-oh, we're recording now, it better be good, NOW! There's less of a sense of a wall between life and art, it's all life, it's all art. Some may not like that idea, but whatever, there's pros and cons to everything, and that's what we did, and what went on during the making of that tape was what started it all. Like I said, the seeds of the idea I think started with the dissolution jams of Rumours of Marriage/Couch Dots, but it was during the sessions in question that "it" really started. If RoM represented the seeds, this tape represents the stalk sticking its head above the ground! I was actually mildly surprised when Evan first started making catalogs of our "available" material and didn't include this tape, but that's not to say I disagreed. I was fine either way. Being polished was never what WoG was about, even though you try to make improvements that don't interfere with your core mission, and I could see that even we "straight from the gut" self-proclaimed Morons might have origins too humble and primitive to share with the world as official "product"! Y'know, I remember playing something off that tape on my radio show and some woman called up and complained about not getting it! I told her the name of the band was the Dirt Clods and she said, "Oh, it's funny.... Okay!" Anyway, I'm definitely glad that some of these tracks did in fact see release on later WoG tapes, as you've ably documented!
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WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco
HM:
Little Fyodor's WoG Discography states: "Johnny Rocco originally existed before WoG 0001 as 'Greatest Hits Vol 2: From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet'. Its inclusion in the WoG catalogue was almost a reissue, except that it was never actually issued in its first incarnation."
"What does the phrase "From The Living Room All The Way to the Closet" mean? Was there a "Greatest Hits Vol 1"? WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco is first listed in the second WoG catalog. In the liner notes of the album it says that it was long out-of-print.
LF:
Evan didn't originally include it in the catalog he made to announce to the world that our material was available for sale or whatnot, so neither did he originally give it a catalog #. But then we decided, hell, why not? There's good shit on there! So we changed the name to something manageable, gave it a # and put it in the catalog. Thrills and chills, I know! I guess the most interesting thing about this process is that we hadn't come up with the name Walls Of Genius yet at the time that tape was originally created, so maybe that was part of why it wasn't originally included. Walls Of Genius was originally the name of the next tape we did, and that then became WoG 001 once we realized that "we" were also WoG!
We recorded it in the living room and then Evan put the recording apparatus (recording machine and tapes) back in the closet so that's simply where the material went, that's where it traveled, from the one place to the other. Until we took it back out of the closet!
Some things are just up to interpretation and your fevered imagination... Y'know, there's a dj on WFMU who plays lots of very obscure stuff, especially from the 60's and 70's, and he once commented that a lot of bands titled their first record "Volume 1" only to never release a 2nd record! While WoG was no stranger to hubris, I suppose one might say that Evan was cautious enough not to number a tape by volume until he got to the 2nd one and came to realize, hey, there's a pattern going on here!
The title was ironic sure but simultaneously descriptive. I believe that after culling through the available material from the recording sessions and mixing down the best parts, it felt like a "greatest hits." The "greatest hits" of those several recording sessions!
Just out of print cause it wasn't in the first catalog and thus hadn't been getting distributed. I suppose we should let on that that was a joke as we printed them up at will and it was only a long time if you're constantly craving all the WoG you can digest, as you should be, of course. Kinda makes you wonder what "out of print" even means when you think of it since production of anything is generally started and stopped as needed. Only with us, it was one at a time....
EC:
"From the Living Room All the Way To The Closet" is basically a joke, meaning that the music wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't going to leave the living room. It started in the living room and then... made it's way all the way to the closet. As opposed to a radio station or recording studio or anywhere else in the world. I don't recall storing the recording equipment in a closet--at both Eldorado Springs and the Hall of Genius, the living-room had been turned into a recording studio and the equipment stayed put. I hated to move the Dokorder around for reasons previously discussed.
"Volume 1" and "Volume 2" were, once again, basically joke titles, as we had no conception that anybody in the world wanted to hear this music at the time. The tapes were for us and maybe a few friends. "Vol 1" was the Dirt Clods Etc tape. It wasn't as consistently strong as "Vol 2". Eventually the best selections from "Vol 1" were included on future WoG releases and "Vol 2" was re-named "Johnny Rocco" and released in its entirety.
"Greatest Hits" just meant the best material from the sessions.
The business about Rocco being "long out of print" was yet another joke. It never had been "in print" in the first place. Plus, as David indicates, we were dubbing cassettes on demand. Eventually I had a set-up with three cassette decks so we could dub 2 at a time, in real-time. In those days, there were no "double" cassette decks that we were aware of or speed-dubbing devices.
HM:
Evan, "On The Rough Side", Side A of the cassette originally titled From The Living Room All The Way To The Closet: Vol. 2, was recorded at Ed's House in Denver; and "On The Smooth Side", Side B, was recorded at Natasha Brown's house in Eldorado Springs. What precipitated the move from Ed's to Tasha's house, and what were the differences in style, approach and methods that arose as a result?
EC:
Ed and I were having jam sessions at his place because I couldn’t have them at mine. I was living with 3 other roommates in Boulder, 785 36th Street, across Baseline Road from the Williams Village dorms. I described this living situation in previous notes (Dirt Clods Etc). At some point during this time, I gave Dave Lichtenberg a copy of the Dirt Clods recordings because he had a late-night radio show on KGNU-Boulder, and he was playing all kinds of bizarre, off-the-wall, avant-garde materials. Very likely I had hoped that he would play something of it on his radio show and he did. David had made the acquaintance of Natasha Brown, quite likely via the radio program. Natasha was a rich lady with her own house in the village of Eldorado Springs, 8 miles south-west of Boulder, tucked behind the first ridge of hogbacks at the very farthest southwest corner of Boulder Valley, backing up to Eldorado Canyon, a Colorado state park. She wanted to move to New York City and was hoping to rent her place to some arty type(s). Since I wanted a place where I could set up my recording equipment and have jam sessions without worrying about roommates, David and I negotiated a way for me to rent Natasha’s house. I couldn’t afford the rent entirely by myself, so David helped out a little bit each month. Natasha’s house became our recording studio.
This allowed us to dedicate an entire living-room to music. You can see the pictures of the place in the WoG scrapbook—I set up a row of hooks on one wall so that I could hang microphone and guitar cords, plus headphones, guitar straps, my baroque recorder, an acoustic guitar pick-up, RCA cords for the recorder and mixer, and one of the earliest incarnations of a Korg electric guitar tuner. Below these hooks were the amps and guitars and mic stands and music stand. All of this faced out to a wall with lots of big windows opening up on south Boulder Creek. Very picturesque. There is one photo where you can see that side of the house with a couple of guitars getting some sunshine on them. With this set-up and space, we were able to multi-track the project for the first time. We also had the freedom to jam anytime we liked and had a larger space to do it in.
One of the primary results of this process was that I was able to do more recording more often and wasn’t dependent on Ed’s living-room, so that’s when Ed stopped contributing as much material and ideas. When it was just Ed and I, he had to contribute, but when David was introduced to the mix as well as the revolving cast of others, Ed became, in a way, just one member of that revolving cast. Nonetheless, Ed was a primary member of the group, his electric guitar playing was always legitimately transcendent, and we would brow-beat him to bring ideas to the table.
HM:
When the cassette was officially listed in the Walls Of Genius Catalogue #2 as WoG 0006 it was re-titled as Johnny Rocco. "Johnny Rocco" was the opening track on The Rough Side, an epic 32-minute jam extract of you and Ed (under the name Ed'n Evan) playing guitars alongside a section of the movie Key Largo (1948, starring Humphrey Bogart). In WoG Catalogue #2 it is described this way: "On the title track, gangsters snarl as the guitars float through the atmosphere, the world's first example of Silly Ambience! (Who says you can't giggle as you meditate?)." Tell me how you and Ed developed that improvisation and what the ideas behind it were.
EC:
I remember absolutely nothing about this session. However, I can tell you this… I had always loved the old black-n-white gangster movies, mostly featuring Humphrey Bogart, either as a simpering bad-guy or the ultimately cool Sam Spade detective character. I could do impressions of Jimmy Cagney, Bogart and Edward G. Robinson (who played Rocco in “Key Largo”). There were no videos in those days, nothing like that. You could only see these movies when they played on tv. Ed says that we “played along” with the tv. There is no way we could have done that. What about the commercials? We couldn’t have made the recording “Johnny Rocco” by stopping and starting for commercials. However, in those days, the television wasn’t littered with commercials the way it is now. A movie might run for fifteen minutes without a commercial. Nonetheless, I don’t think we just “played along” with the tv. Most likely I put a microphone in front of the tv with a cassette recorder and taped the movie off Ed’s tv. The tv at my place in Boulder would not have been available for that. Too many roommates wanting to use the livingroom. We had already demonstrated that we could run vocal microphones through a guitar amp, so we most likely ran the recording through a guitar amplifier and played along with that. I had all kinds of “adapters” so that we could take the RCA output plugs of a cassette deck and run them into quarter-inch plugs on a guitar amp. Whether or not the sound quality was clean didn’t matter.
Why would we do this? I’m not sure how we came up with the idea to do it. We may have been thinking about it in terms of a movie soundtrack. My notes from the Rocco cassette indicate that this was the case. Another piece of it may have been related to the old psychedelic trick of watching television with the sound turned off and music playing. The visual presentation takes on a completely different perspective without the dialogue and often the results were hilarious, or, if you were high enough, existential. In the case of “Johnny Rocco”, we were transferring this approach from the visual to the audio. By playing along with the movie soundtrack, we would not only get some background sounds to fill in, we would get this terrific forties’ tough-guy dialogue, courtesy of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson’s voices. We had already played along with other audio sources on the Dirt Clods Etc sessions, incorporating those into our own work, a kind of audio non-sequitir.
HM:
Also, on The Rough Side there are three tracks by Fabian Policy, on which we hear (perhaps) the first WoG recordings to include Little Fyodor. How did David become involved in your recording activities at this time? Where did the name Fabian Policy come from?
EC:
Fabian Policy was one of Ed’s names for a group. He claims to remember nothing about those sessions whatsoever. None of us were particularly interested in “Fabian”, a fifties’ surfer singer/actor of blond Disneyesque wholesomeness.
I was ticked off at David for a while because I thought he had messed up a bunch of the Rumours of Marriage recordings by drinking too much at the controls of the Dokorder. So my first sessions (Dirt Clods Etc) with Ed were at Ed’s place without David (Little Fyodor). Eventually I wasn’t ticked off anymore, plus I wanted David to play our tape on his radio show. So he became involved in the project at that time and we both went down to Ed’s place to jam and party. This was documented by the Fabian Policy session. “Karen, Lisa & Floyd” on Fabian Policy are unidentified. None of us remember who they were.
HM:
Over on the Smooth Side there are actually some recordings by just you and David, without Ed involved.
EC:
Yes, this is because once we set up the recording equipment in Eldorado Springs, we could have sessions independent of Ed and his schedule. So we did and the first results were on the Johnny Rocco tape. Then, since we had the space in a house not attached to other apartments, we could have drums, too, so we had Brad Carton (from Rumours Of Marriage & The Lepers) come and play. He brought his girlfriend Rachel, who played some synth. Obviously Ed made it up to Eldorado, too, and perhaps he is the one who brought Dena with him.
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HM:
Fyodor, you are listed as a participant in the three Fabian Policy tracks "On The Rough Side" of WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco, all of which were recorded at Ed's House in Denver in January or February of 1983. Were these the first WoG-related recordings you were involved in, other than the Couch Dots sessions (Summer 1982)? And how did you become involved in Evan and Ed's recording sessions at this time? Were there any undocumented sessions that you were involved in?
LF:
I would guess that was the 2nd session I participated in, maybe the first where I really felt at ease about joining in. I know there was an earlier instance (how much earlier I don't know exactly, maybe just a week, almost certainly not more than 2 or 3) in which I was invited to go to a recording/playing/jam session (what the hell to call it?) at Dena Zocher's house, aka "The People's House", at 10th and Marion in Denver, and to bring along one Natasha Brown, a woman I had met as a result of her calling me up during my experimental radio show on KGNU and who, as I had subsequently passed on to Evan, was looking for an artistic type to rent to at her house in the relatively secluded hamlet of Eldorado Springs, located a few miles south of Boulder at the mouth of Eldorado Canyon State Park. Evan had described to me his frustration over his living situation at the time, maybe even saying he felt like a caged animal, because he couldn't setup his recording equipment and just play and record stuff, which is what he most wanted to do (well, other than going camping and hiking and that kinda stuff). I definitely wondered how much Evan's invitation to me was influenced by my being able to bring along Natasha, but regardless, I was excited to join in the goings on that had produced the "Dirt Clods, etc" tape, which I understood to be something of an "all comers" type jam in league with the latter stages of the Rumours of Marriage/Couch Dots jams, when everyone in the room, including myself, was often encouraged to join in. I had been a little perturbed that in light of the nature of these jams that it took this long to allow me to show up, which I took up with Evan at one point and he responded by saying that he didn't want to upset the chemistry he had with Ed and then he asked me pointedly if I thought I got along with Ed. I hadn't had any doubt that I did up to that point, but his question made me doubt it! I was (and still am) fairly socially awkward with a lot of self-esteem issues (less so of that latter now), so I didn't feel up to asserting that I got along with Ed just fine, and besides, Evan had every right to invite whomever he did or didn't. So even though there seemed to be people who had little to no interest in experimental music, maybe some who weren't musicians at all, who were freely allowed and invited to participate, I had to bide my time, just because of some vague misgivings Evan seemed to have about me, despite that we were ostensibly best friends. During the conversations leading up to this interview, I've learned that Evan remembers his antipathy to me at that time as being based on my failures as a soundman for Rumours of Marriage, but I didn't know that then. Looking back, I do have some sympathy for Evan's reluctance to include me in the sense that it's true enough that I very much became the "volatile element". This project was largely Evan's baby, and while I ultimately added a lot to it, a lot more than, say, friends who just laughed or yelled or played toy instruments while Ed and Evan's jamming formed the bulk of the sound, my doing so and my presence may have contributed to the friction that led to its ultimate demise, too. Insecurities and self-esteem issues notwithstanding, I wasn't the type to only join in a peripheral manner, at least not while there was the opportunity to do more. (This kind of reminds me of Lennon's decision to invite McCartney into his band, knowing it would make the band stronger but that he would lose power, too.)
Anyway, I went to Dena's place and brought along Natasha and then Evan turned on the recording apparatus, whatever it was, probably a boom box or some other type of cassette recorder (or at least he thought he turned it on), and I watched from the stairway as Ed and Evan and Dena jammed away in Dena's living room, sometimes with participation from some of the several other people who were there. One of those others was a kid, maybe about 9 years old, and she had these toy bongos she was playing at times. But at one point she hadn't played them in a while and she was just sitting with them on the stairs behind me. I was becoming very, very anxious to join in the jam. I figured since this girl wasn't playing at the time and since it was an open jam, that I should be able to play those bongos myself. But mindful of the recording I thought was being made, I didn't want to say anything, so I smiled at the little girl -- and then swiped the bongos out of her hands and started playing them myself!! That's how I first participated in what was to become Walls Of Genius!! Once I got over that hurdle, I felt like I fit right in!
This session, as I already alluded to, was never recorded. After everyone was done jamming, Evan went over to the recording equipment, scrunched up his face a little in perplexity, and said, "Hmm, that's funny, it didn't record!" It's easy to forget to hit the play button or to think you did but it didn't really "take" or whatever, especially on analog machines that require you to hit both record and play at the same time, maybe as a safety mechanism against accidental erasure, and I assume that's what happened in this case, although certainly one can't rule out mischievous gremlins and such. But I did get my feet dipped into the proto Walls Of Genius water and it was never in doubt again that I could and would participate in it. And Evan did befriend Natasha and got the ball rolling towards moving into her home in Eldorado Springs, where WoG as such was actually born!
HM:
Most of the songs on "The Smooth Side" of the tape were recorded at Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs. You are involved in all of those recordings, and Ed was not involved in the recordings by Charity Cases and Psychotic Bozos. There is a reference to "Fyodor" in one of the song titles. How did those early sessions at Tasha's transpire and what stylistic changes occurred after that move to her house?
LF:
I lived in Boulder, which was a hell of a lot closer to Eldorado Springs than where Ed lived in Denver. You might say that I was also more motivated or driven than Ed. So Evan's move to ES, where he could setup his recording equipment and not have to journey elsewhere to make music, was quite the boon to my participation and something of a major deterrent to Ed's, though it's not like the door wasn't always open to Ed, which it most certainly was. But, well, you can do the "math" yourself, between the geography of the situation and Ed's lesser drive to do this stuff and Evan's not needing to leave his home to do it himself, and Evan was the most motivated and driven of all of us, and he was the one doing all the recording, which he could now do on his Dokorder 4 track reel to reel machine....
I'm not sure what to say about the stylistic changes per se other than that I'm me and not Ed and so the duos between me and Evan (which I believe includes Charity Cases?) would inevitably be different than his jams with Ed. Well, I'll say this, any duos with me would based less on traditional musical sensibilities and also less on psychedelic sounds because that's not what I did. It wasn't as natural, you might say, for Evan to jam with me as compared to with Ed, so there was maybe more of a "stretch" musically. OTOH, I didn't have the amazing "bad" record collection that Ed had, so there was less playing along with weird bad records. I originally offered to help pay Evan's rent at Natasha's in return for a certain number of hours of Evan recording my Little Fyodor songs on his 4 track. We did one or two such recording sessions, using Brad Carton, whom we knew from Rumours Of Marriage, on drums. Eventually, I blew off my requirement of having my own songs recorded as the jamming that became WoG proved much more fun, and this participation made me feel like I was still getting my money's worth. I wonder now if the Psychotic Bozos session, which included Brad but not Ed, grew out of session to record Little Fyodor songs, but I really have no idea. I remember Brad brought a quasi drum set that I think he called "the five drums" that were these skinny drums setup on a rack, and I got to play them while Brad played his own drum set or something else. Brad also brought a synthesizer which I think we all took turns playing. I played rhythm guitar for the Ed 'n' Evan Hullabaloo session. At one point I started playing two diminished chords a half step from each other. Now, I know enough about music and about the guitar to know I was playing two diminished chords half a step from each other, but I'm nowhere need fluid enough to just fall into something like that and then just seamlessly move into something else. So once I started playing these two chords and everyone else seemed to be playing to them, I kinda felt trapped into continuing to keep playing them! Sometimes I varied the rhythm pattern, but it seemed to get real sloppy sounding if I did anything less than basic, so I'd usually return to a basic pattern real quick so as not to fuck things up too bad! So that's how March of the Lost Wormsouls came about, which was excerpted DOWN to an 18 minute jam with these two damn chords going over and over! When I first played it on my radio show, some old codger called up and said he wondered at first if the record was skipping but then realized there were things in the background that seemed to be slowly changing. He concluded it was pretty fascinating! BTW, I remember noticing the words "You make me feel like I feel" on one of the reel to reel tape boxes, and I believe that was a comment Natasha made in response to the aforementioned jam and may have been its "original name" before Evan changed it to March of the Lost Wormsouls....
To be more specific about how these sessions "transpired", it was probably mostly Evan's doing, inviting people over to jam. Maybe Ed didn't feel like coming over to that Psychotic Bozos session, or maybe, like I say, it may have evolved out of a Little Fyodor song recording session, and thus maybe Ed wouldn't have needed to be there if we thought that's all that was necessarily going to happen. And I believe I went over to Evan's place on my own sometimes during the week after work (well, it would have been after work for Evan but after sleep for me, as I was working a graveyard shift and sleeping during the day), so that may have been how Charity Cases came about. (The other two session were surely on weekends.)
I think Evan may have named one piece "Cookin' With Fyodor" just because my participation may have still seemed like something of a novelty at that point. Plus Evan liked including others' names, thus all the Ed 'n' Evan stuff. I had some riff I wanted to play on the guitar and this idea about "chile in a bowl". I think I had had that for dinner recently, and while it was good enough, it also seemed like a reflection of my poverty, that I would just open up a can of chile beans and make that my dinner. So that was a satirical take on my life at the time, kinda like you gotta learn to dig your poverty, even if at a certain level you understood its decrepitude. I knew this project was based on improvisation, so I made no effort to write an actual song about this concept but rather used it as the basis for some improvised lyricizing. Heh, improvising words really isn't my strong suit, so I ended up doing a lot of grunting and uncategorizable vocalizing! Then Evan started reading a "prep quiz" I had swiped from work! (I worked at a hotel that also had a few restaurants on the premises.) So the anything goes aesthetic most definitely continued, even if the greater participation of me and lesser of Ed would inevitably entail some differences.....
Oh! One more thing! One big difference is that now we recorded on Evan's 4 track, meaning independently mixable tracks, and -- OVERDUBBING! I don't recall what overdubbing there may have been on that particular tape, I don't have the song titles in front of me, and we may have gotten into that slowly as the original idea was spontaneity. I know that sooner or later, a common pattern that developed was that we'd all get together and jam, using maybe 2 or 3 of the tracks, and Evan would overdub stuff onto it later, while the rest of us weren't around! Worked out pretty good that way! No one could care less if this may have been at odds with the original "all of this was made up right on the spot straight out of thin air" conception Evan seemed to associate with the first "Dirt Clods, etc" tape. I've sometimes liked to say that WoG was so free-form that we didn't care if everything was purely free-form or not. We just went with whatever drew us along....
Evan, "On The Rough Side", Side A of the cassette originally titled From The Living Room All The Way To The Closet: Vol. 2, was recorded at Ed's House in Denver; and "On The Smooth Side", Side B, was recorded at Natasha Brown's house in Eldorado Springs. What precipitated the move from Ed's to Tasha's house, and what were the differences in style, approach and methods that arose as a result?
EC:
Ed and I were having jam sessions at his place because I couldn’t have them at mine. I was living with 3 other roommates in Boulder, 785 36th Street, across Baseline Road from the Williams Village dorms. I described this living situation in previous notes (Dirt Clods Etc). At some point during this time, I gave Dave Lichtenberg a copy of the Dirt Clods recordings because he had a late-night radio show on KGNU-Boulder, and he was playing all kinds of bizarre, off-the-wall, avant-garde materials. Very likely I had hoped that he would play something of it on his radio show and he did. David had made the acquaintance of Natasha Brown, quite likely via the radio program. Natasha was a rich lady with her own house in the village of Eldorado Springs, 8 miles south-west of Boulder, tucked behind the first ridge of hogbacks at the very farthest southwest corner of Boulder Valley, backing up to Eldorado Canyon, a Colorado state park. She wanted to move to New York City and was hoping to rent her place to some arty type(s). Since I wanted a place where I could set up my recording equipment and have jam sessions without worrying about roommates, David and I negotiated a way for me to rent Natasha’s house. I couldn’t afford the rent entirely by myself, so David helped out a little bit each month. Natasha’s house became our recording studio.
This allowed us to dedicate an entire living-room to music. You can see the pictures of the place in the WoG scrapbook—I set up a row of hooks on one wall so that I could hang microphone and guitar cords, plus headphones, guitar straps, my baroque recorder, an acoustic guitar pick-up, RCA cords for the recorder and mixer, and one of the earliest incarnations of a Korg electric guitar tuner. Below these hooks were the amps and guitars and mic stands and music stand. All of this faced out to a wall with lots of big windows opening up on south Boulder Creek. Very picturesque. There is one photo where you can see that side of the house with a couple of guitars getting some sunshine on them. With this set-up and space, we were able to multi-track the project for the first time. We also had the freedom to jam anytime we liked and had a larger space to do it in.
One of the primary results of this process was that I was able to do more recording more often and wasn’t dependent on Ed’s living-room, so that’s when Ed stopped contributing as much material and ideas. When it was just Ed and I, he had to contribute, but when David was introduced to the mix as well as the revolving cast of others, Ed became, in a way, just one member of that revolving cast. Nonetheless, Ed was a primary member of the group, his electric guitar playing was always legitimately transcendent, and we would brow-beat him to bring ideas to the table.
HM:
When the cassette was officially listed in the Walls Of Genius Catalogue #2 as WoG 0006 it was re-titled as Johnny Rocco. "Johnny Rocco" was the opening track on The Rough Side, an epic 32-minute jam extract of you and Ed (under the name Ed'n Evan) playing guitars alongside a section of the movie Key Largo (1948, starring Humphrey Bogart). In WoG Catalogue #2 it is described this way: "On the title track, gangsters snarl as the guitars float through the atmosphere, the world's first example of Silly Ambience! (Who says you can't giggle as you meditate?)." Tell me how you and Ed developed that improvisation and what the ideas behind it were.
EC:
I remember absolutely nothing about this session. However, I can tell you this… I had always loved the old black-n-white gangster movies, mostly featuring Humphrey Bogart, either as a simpering bad-guy or the ultimately cool Sam Spade detective character. I could do impressions of Jimmy Cagney, Bogart and Edward G. Robinson (who played Rocco in “Key Largo”). There were no videos in those days, nothing like that. You could only see these movies when they played on tv. Ed says that we “played along” with the tv. There is no way we could have done that. What about the commercials? We couldn’t have made the recording “Johnny Rocco” by stopping and starting for commercials. However, in those days, the television wasn’t littered with commercials the way it is now. A movie might run for fifteen minutes without a commercial. Nonetheless, I don’t think we just “played along” with the tv. Most likely I put a microphone in front of the tv with a cassette recorder and taped the movie off Ed’s tv. The tv at my place in Boulder would not have been available for that. Too many roommates wanting to use the livingroom. We had already demonstrated that we could run vocal microphones through a guitar amp, so we most likely ran the recording through a guitar amplifier and played along with that. I had all kinds of “adapters” so that we could take the RCA output plugs of a cassette deck and run them into quarter-inch plugs on a guitar amp. Whether or not the sound quality was clean didn’t matter.
Why would we do this? I’m not sure how we came up with the idea to do it. We may have been thinking about it in terms of a movie soundtrack. My notes from the Rocco cassette indicate that this was the case. Another piece of it may have been related to the old psychedelic trick of watching television with the sound turned off and music playing. The visual presentation takes on a completely different perspective without the dialogue and often the results were hilarious, or, if you were high enough, existential. In the case of “Johnny Rocco”, we were transferring this approach from the visual to the audio. By playing along with the movie soundtrack, we would not only get some background sounds to fill in, we would get this terrific forties’ tough-guy dialogue, courtesy of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson’s voices. We had already played along with other audio sources on the Dirt Clods Etc sessions, incorporating those into our own work, a kind of audio non-sequitir.
HM:
Also, on The Rough Side there are three tracks by Fabian Policy, on which we hear (perhaps) the first WoG recordings to include Little Fyodor. How did David become involved in your recording activities at this time? Where did the name Fabian Policy come from?
EC:
Fabian Policy was one of Ed’s names for a group. He claims to remember nothing about those sessions whatsoever. None of us were particularly interested in “Fabian”, a fifties’ surfer singer/actor of blond Disneyesque wholesomeness.
I was ticked off at David for a while because I thought he had messed up a bunch of the Rumours of Marriage recordings by drinking too much at the controls of the Dokorder. So my first sessions (Dirt Clods Etc) with Ed were at Ed’s place without David (Little Fyodor). Eventually I wasn’t ticked off anymore, plus I wanted David to play our tape on his radio show. So he became involved in the project at that time and we both went down to Ed’s place to jam and party. This was documented by the Fabian Policy session. “Karen, Lisa & Floyd” on Fabian Policy are unidentified. None of us remember who they were.
HM:
Over on the Smooth Side there are actually some recordings by just you and David, without Ed involved.
EC:
Yes, this is because once we set up the recording equipment in Eldorado Springs, we could have sessions independent of Ed and his schedule. So we did and the first results were on the Johnny Rocco tape. Then, since we had the space in a house not attached to other apartments, we could have drums, too, so we had Brad Carton (from Rumours Of Marriage & The Lepers) come and play. He brought his girlfriend Rachel, who played some synth. Obviously Ed made it up to Eldorado, too, and perhaps he is the one who brought Dena with him.
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HM:
Fyodor, you are listed as a participant in the three Fabian Policy tracks "On The Rough Side" of WoG 0006 Johnny Rocco, all of which were recorded at Ed's House in Denver in January or February of 1983. Were these the first WoG-related recordings you were involved in, other than the Couch Dots sessions (Summer 1982)? And how did you become involved in Evan and Ed's recording sessions at this time? Were there any undocumented sessions that you were involved in?
LF:
I would guess that was the 2nd session I participated in, maybe the first where I really felt at ease about joining in. I know there was an earlier instance (how much earlier I don't know exactly, maybe just a week, almost certainly not more than 2 or 3) in which I was invited to go to a recording/playing/jam session (what the hell to call it?) at Dena Zocher's house, aka "The People's House", at 10th and Marion in Denver, and to bring along one Natasha Brown, a woman I had met as a result of her calling me up during my experimental radio show on KGNU and who, as I had subsequently passed on to Evan, was looking for an artistic type to rent to at her house in the relatively secluded hamlet of Eldorado Springs, located a few miles south of Boulder at the mouth of Eldorado Canyon State Park. Evan had described to me his frustration over his living situation at the time, maybe even saying he felt like a caged animal, because he couldn't setup his recording equipment and just play and record stuff, which is what he most wanted to do (well, other than going camping and hiking and that kinda stuff). I definitely wondered how much Evan's invitation to me was influenced by my being able to bring along Natasha, but regardless, I was excited to join in the goings on that had produced the "Dirt Clods, etc" tape, which I understood to be something of an "all comers" type jam in league with the latter stages of the Rumours of Marriage/Couch Dots jams, when everyone in the room, including myself, was often encouraged to join in. I had been a little perturbed that in light of the nature of these jams that it took this long to allow me to show up, which I took up with Evan at one point and he responded by saying that he didn't want to upset the chemistry he had with Ed and then he asked me pointedly if I thought I got along with Ed. I hadn't had any doubt that I did up to that point, but his question made me doubt it! I was (and still am) fairly socially awkward with a lot of self-esteem issues (less so of that latter now), so I didn't feel up to asserting that I got along with Ed just fine, and besides, Evan had every right to invite whomever he did or didn't. So even though there seemed to be people who had little to no interest in experimental music, maybe some who weren't musicians at all, who were freely allowed and invited to participate, I had to bide my time, just because of some vague misgivings Evan seemed to have about me, despite that we were ostensibly best friends. During the conversations leading up to this interview, I've learned that Evan remembers his antipathy to me at that time as being based on my failures as a soundman for Rumours of Marriage, but I didn't know that then. Looking back, I do have some sympathy for Evan's reluctance to include me in the sense that it's true enough that I very much became the "volatile element". This project was largely Evan's baby, and while I ultimately added a lot to it, a lot more than, say, friends who just laughed or yelled or played toy instruments while Ed and Evan's jamming formed the bulk of the sound, my doing so and my presence may have contributed to the friction that led to its ultimate demise, too. Insecurities and self-esteem issues notwithstanding, I wasn't the type to only join in a peripheral manner, at least not while there was the opportunity to do more. (This kind of reminds me of Lennon's decision to invite McCartney into his band, knowing it would make the band stronger but that he would lose power, too.)
Anyway, I went to Dena's place and brought along Natasha and then Evan turned on the recording apparatus, whatever it was, probably a boom box or some other type of cassette recorder (or at least he thought he turned it on), and I watched from the stairway as Ed and Evan and Dena jammed away in Dena's living room, sometimes with participation from some of the several other people who were there. One of those others was a kid, maybe about 9 years old, and she had these toy bongos she was playing at times. But at one point she hadn't played them in a while and she was just sitting with them on the stairs behind me. I was becoming very, very anxious to join in the jam. I figured since this girl wasn't playing at the time and since it was an open jam, that I should be able to play those bongos myself. But mindful of the recording I thought was being made, I didn't want to say anything, so I smiled at the little girl -- and then swiped the bongos out of her hands and started playing them myself!! That's how I first participated in what was to become Walls Of Genius!! Once I got over that hurdle, I felt like I fit right in!
This session, as I already alluded to, was never recorded. After everyone was done jamming, Evan went over to the recording equipment, scrunched up his face a little in perplexity, and said, "Hmm, that's funny, it didn't record!" It's easy to forget to hit the play button or to think you did but it didn't really "take" or whatever, especially on analog machines that require you to hit both record and play at the same time, maybe as a safety mechanism against accidental erasure, and I assume that's what happened in this case, although certainly one can't rule out mischievous gremlins and such. But I did get my feet dipped into the proto Walls Of Genius water and it was never in doubt again that I could and would participate in it. And Evan did befriend Natasha and got the ball rolling towards moving into her home in Eldorado Springs, where WoG as such was actually born!
HM:
Most of the songs on "The Smooth Side" of the tape were recorded at Natasha's house in Eldorado Springs. You are involved in all of those recordings, and Ed was not involved in the recordings by Charity Cases and Psychotic Bozos. There is a reference to "Fyodor" in one of the song titles. How did those early sessions at Tasha's transpire and what stylistic changes occurred after that move to her house?
LF:
I lived in Boulder, which was a hell of a lot closer to Eldorado Springs than where Ed lived in Denver. You might say that I was also more motivated or driven than Ed. So Evan's move to ES, where he could setup his recording equipment and not have to journey elsewhere to make music, was quite the boon to my participation and something of a major deterrent to Ed's, though it's not like the door wasn't always open to Ed, which it most certainly was. But, well, you can do the "math" yourself, between the geography of the situation and Ed's lesser drive to do this stuff and Evan's not needing to leave his home to do it himself, and Evan was the most motivated and driven of all of us, and he was the one doing all the recording, which he could now do on his Dokorder 4 track reel to reel machine....
I'm not sure what to say about the stylistic changes per se other than that I'm me and not Ed and so the duos between me and Evan (which I believe includes Charity Cases?) would inevitably be different than his jams with Ed. Well, I'll say this, any duos with me would based less on traditional musical sensibilities and also less on psychedelic sounds because that's not what I did. It wasn't as natural, you might say, for Evan to jam with me as compared to with Ed, so there was maybe more of a "stretch" musically. OTOH, I didn't have the amazing "bad" record collection that Ed had, so there was less playing along with weird bad records. I originally offered to help pay Evan's rent at Natasha's in return for a certain number of hours of Evan recording my Little Fyodor songs on his 4 track. We did one or two such recording sessions, using Brad Carton, whom we knew from Rumours Of Marriage, on drums. Eventually, I blew off my requirement of having my own songs recorded as the jamming that became WoG proved much more fun, and this participation made me feel like I was still getting my money's worth. I wonder now if the Psychotic Bozos session, which included Brad but not Ed, grew out of session to record Little Fyodor songs, but I really have no idea. I remember Brad brought a quasi drum set that I think he called "the five drums" that were these skinny drums setup on a rack, and I got to play them while Brad played his own drum set or something else. Brad also brought a synthesizer which I think we all took turns playing. I played rhythm guitar for the Ed 'n' Evan Hullabaloo session. At one point I started playing two diminished chords a half step from each other. Now, I know enough about music and about the guitar to know I was playing two diminished chords half a step from each other, but I'm nowhere need fluid enough to just fall into something like that and then just seamlessly move into something else. So once I started playing these two chords and everyone else seemed to be playing to them, I kinda felt trapped into continuing to keep playing them! Sometimes I varied the rhythm pattern, but it seemed to get real sloppy sounding if I did anything less than basic, so I'd usually return to a basic pattern real quick so as not to fuck things up too bad! So that's how March of the Lost Wormsouls came about, which was excerpted DOWN to an 18 minute jam with these two damn chords going over and over! When I first played it on my radio show, some old codger called up and said he wondered at first if the record was skipping but then realized there were things in the background that seemed to be slowly changing. He concluded it was pretty fascinating! BTW, I remember noticing the words "You make me feel like I feel" on one of the reel to reel tape boxes, and I believe that was a comment Natasha made in response to the aforementioned jam and may have been its "original name" before Evan changed it to March of the Lost Wormsouls....
To be more specific about how these sessions "transpired", it was probably mostly Evan's doing, inviting people over to jam. Maybe Ed didn't feel like coming over to that Psychotic Bozos session, or maybe, like I say, it may have evolved out of a Little Fyodor song recording session, and thus maybe Ed wouldn't have needed to be there if we thought that's all that was necessarily going to happen. And I believe I went over to Evan's place on my own sometimes during the week after work (well, it would have been after work for Evan but after sleep for me, as I was working a graveyard shift and sleeping during the day), so that may have been how Charity Cases came about. (The other two session were surely on weekends.)
I think Evan may have named one piece "Cookin' With Fyodor" just because my participation may have still seemed like something of a novelty at that point. Plus Evan liked including others' names, thus all the Ed 'n' Evan stuff. I had some riff I wanted to play on the guitar and this idea about "chile in a bowl". I think I had had that for dinner recently, and while it was good enough, it also seemed like a reflection of my poverty, that I would just open up a can of chile beans and make that my dinner. So that was a satirical take on my life at the time, kinda like you gotta learn to dig your poverty, even if at a certain level you understood its decrepitude. I knew this project was based on improvisation, so I made no effort to write an actual song about this concept but rather used it as the basis for some improvised lyricizing. Heh, improvising words really isn't my strong suit, so I ended up doing a lot of grunting and uncategorizable vocalizing! Then Evan started reading a "prep quiz" I had swiped from work! (I worked at a hotel that also had a few restaurants on the premises.) So the anything goes aesthetic most definitely continued, even if the greater participation of me and lesser of Ed would inevitably entail some differences.....
Oh! One more thing! One big difference is that now we recorded on Evan's 4 track, meaning independently mixable tracks, and -- OVERDUBBING! I don't recall what overdubbing there may have been on that particular tape, I don't have the song titles in front of me, and we may have gotten into that slowly as the original idea was spontaneity. I know that sooner or later, a common pattern that developed was that we'd all get together and jam, using maybe 2 or 3 of the tracks, and Evan would overdub stuff onto it later, while the rest of us weren't around! Worked out pretty good that way! No one could care less if this may have been at odds with the original "all of this was made up right on the spot straight out of thin air" conception Evan seemed to associate with the first "Dirt Clods, etc" tape. I've sometimes liked to say that WoG was so free-form that we didn't care if everything was purely free-form or not. We just went with whatever drew us along....