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Whatever happened to my bonkers?

1/15/2019

20 Comments

 
by Evan Cantor
Walls Of Genius did many things, but the single most unique and defining element of the band was the three of us going bat-shit bonkers. This resulted not only in a lot of freewheeling improvisation, but a good deal of screaming, hollering and weirdness, all discipline abandoned. Self-consciousness was thrown out the window, self-indulgence embraced. Noise, cacophony, sounds of all kinds and dissonance gleefully explored, even over-done. When we solicited contributions to a compilation of the leading cassette artists of the mid-1980s, we specifically requested that participants not “be afraid to go psychologically naked, (to) let it hang down to your knees and, above all, take effective measures to unleash your inhibitions.” I went further and admonished participants to give us the “most intense sort of insanity, be it dark or delightful.” We called it Madness Lives. We wanted the participants to embrace, as Leslie Singer (Girls On Fire) has called it, their personal “bonkers”. Whatever happened to mine?

Let’s acknowledge that the 1980s were a different time, a long time ago, as far away from 2018 as a Star Wars galaxy. We were almost forty years younger, meaning that the parts of our brains governing rational thought had only just matured very recently, if at all. So we were, like so many young people, highly charged over the things we felt strongly about. For me, there were two over-riding elements in my life that prodded me into going bonkers. One was my frustrated experience with the business of music itself and two was frustrated sexual or romantic ambitions.
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Little Fyodor, Ed Fowler, and Evan Cantor
No doubt another motivating factor was watching the liberal developments of the 1960s and 70s get washed down the drain by resurgent regressive conservatism (i.e. Reagan). This is not to claim that there isn’t reason enough today to respond energetically to resurgent regressive conservatism. There’s just as much crap as ever. But my response as a 20-something to Reagan/Bush was different from my response as a 60-something to Trump and his America. It’s not that age necessarily mellows one about these things. The things are equally, or more, objectionable than ever.
​Walls Of Genius has taken on Trump specifically with a number of pieces, including Little Fyodor’s unhinged and angry “Man Of Instinct” and my own satiric faux-mariachi song “Make America Mexican Again” (both on the WoG title All Trumped Up, 2017). But in the bigger picture of letting one’s marbles slide, roll and rebound, the same crazed perspective on our overall society is not the same as it once was. I’m still a smartass, just not an unhinged one.
To be honest, the seeds of my own willingness to shed inhibition via craziness were already there, just waiting to be watered. The proof is in a recording made in the Spring of 1981 with Kevin Landes (formerly of Washington D.C.’s Young Turds and a future member of The French Are From Hell) playing one of his pieces on an upright piano. It’s interesting to note that L’Enfant Suckling was an imagined band that only had one session, not unlike the many one offs that eventually turned into Walls Of Genius a few years later. Towards the end of this short piece, you can hear me raving extemporaneously in the back-ground, “I’ll kill him, I’ll beat him...” accompanied by the pounding sounds of the imagined beating. As the demo ends, Kevin asks “Have you lost your mind?” Perhaps I had, but I wasn’t yet ready to do so on a regular basis.
As for the business of music, as a young man, there was one thing I really wanted to do in this world and that was to be a musician. By the time Walls Of Genius coalesced, I had played in numerous bands pursuing numerous styles. One had dissolved in crazed misplaced recriminations over band politics (Long Lost Friend), another fell apart with accusations of my being ‘childish’ (Blitz Bunnies). I dropped out of college to play in another, a band that worked like the devil for months, played one concert and promptly fell to pieces (Dreamer Easy). I kept going, though. After college, I played in a group that started making money (Folk Grass Blues Band). We all worked construction by day, lived in a band house, and did our gigs at night. But still, it dissolved, again into misunderstandings and acrimony. At least this time, nobody was angry with me. In Colorado, I helped form a new wave band that promptly fell into more misplaced recriminations and accusations (Rumours Of Marriage). By that time, I had had it. I concluded that musicians were the weirdest and most difficult bunch of mercurial idiots I had ever known. I wasn’t particularly happy about the people who booked the venues, either. Liars, frauds, cheats, self-aggrandizing ass-holes arrayed in all directions like airborne Whack-A-Moles. Sick of charismatic leaders losing their shit and destroying all the work done by their fellow musicians, I decided to just chuck it. It was 1982 and I had a day-job and music had never paid the rent anyway.

Chucking it meant heading to Ed Fowler’s place on the weekends, drinking copiously and sucking on the bong, watching the Broncos, win-or-lose and jamming in the living room. We were both avatars of the “so-bad-its-good” aesthetic. Years before the world discovered and celebrated the cheesy wonder of the Great William Shatner, Ed had records (lps) of Telly Savalas, Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and plenty of others who thought to turn their fame into music in
the wild-and-woolly 1960s. He even possessed a recording of Gene Tracy’s version of “The Great Crepitation Contest”, a/k/a “Battle At Thunderblow”, a farting contest between Lord Windesmear and Paul Boomer. This would have us rolling on the floor with delight. “It’s a triple flutter blast!” We thought we were pretty hip because not only had we seen Plan 9 From Outer Space, we had also seen Glen Or Glenda and were conversant in John Waters’ movies from the years before he went Hollywood (Desperate Living, et al). We hadn’t yet heard The Shaggs, but we were very impressed with the naïve foolishness (and overblown self-importance) of Savalas, Shatner and company, not to mention Wild Man Fischer, who was the real thing, sans self-importance. So we were well prepared for silliness and abandon.
On top of this, we were geeks. You’d think that since we were in a band, we must have been getting a lot of action, what with all the groupies, right? The truth is that Walls Of Genius wasn’t particularly sexy. A lot of people thought that Little Fyodor and I were a gay couple, which didn’t help. I myself was in the midst of a multiple-year drought. Yes, there had been some opportunities, but being a nice guy (and a geek), I didn’t want to take advantage of women who were only of interest to me as sex objects. There would have just been more bad feelings and animosity to toss in the pot. ‘Free love’ had been floating around since the 60s, but I never found any that was actually ‘free’. For me, there had always been a price. For some, the price was far higher in the free-wheelin’ coke-fueled 80s. Looking back at the AIDs crises of the 80s, it was, perhaps, a good time to renounce promiscuity. Not that I had renounced it. It was something I just could not locate and the “hook-up” culture was thirty years into the future. It’s not fair for me to speak of others in this regard, but I think it’s safe to say that there wasn’t much happening for any of the three of us, our prospects appeared slim and we were pursuing one of the strangest band projects of all time. So we had plenty of energy and anomie available for railing against society and its norms. Put all of these elements together and, voila!, the boys go bonkers.

And yes, there was Ronald Reagan. Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I was a member of a generation that thought it had fixed the world. There would be no more war, no more discrimination, no more environmental degradation, we were
all so enlightened. Then along came Reagan and the conservative backlash. This energized me to get in a political mode, in ways that Little Fyodor either didn’t understand or simply felt was irrelevant to our music-making. Trump, on the other hand, motivated Little Fyodor at a time when he was questioning his interest in music outside the Little Fyodor model. Ed objected to political content back in the 80s, although today he has morphed into a rabid, mouth-foaming liberal and I’m the one who has mellowed out. Trump? He doesn’t bother me. He’s no good, of course, but I don’t take him personal. Having survived a round with lymphoma, I’m not interested in letting that asshole enter my life in the way of stress.
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We had some pretty good opportunities for letting it all hang down, too. Boulder still had a counter-culture vibe in the early 80s. There were even old, famous beatniks in Boulder courtesy of the then-Naropa Institute. I must admit that the old beatniks did not care for Walls Of Genius. Maybe they were stuck on be-bop jazz. But plenty of us were in revolt against the conservatism of old beatnik culture. So what if you had hung out with Jack Kerouac twenty years ago? This is 1984, Man! The future is now! We’re pushing the boundaries, NOW! This very revolt against the generation that “howled”, despite having actually inspired our own, was yet another reason to go bonkers. Going bonkers was itself a statement of cultural independence and a reasoned response to cultural stasis.

The battle sometimes took place on the air. During a KGNU fund-raising drive, on-air, an old beatnik who had his own talk show insulted the avant-garde classical show. I had the temerity to respond by making a disparaging remark about the old beatnik’s talk-show, emphasizing different strokes for different folks. That old beatnik regards me with the stink-eye to this very day. But on the other hand, consider the Friday night “Go For It” show on KGNU. You could call in and say almost anything you wished, right on the air. Sitting around on a Friday night in Eldorado Springs, Little Fyodor and I would call “Go For It” and as the weeks rolled by, we got crazier and crazier. I invented an insulting faux-redneck character named Roy Watkins who would ramble on about all the perversions of humanity, Boulderites in particular. I would play autistic screaming versions of Hank Williams and Creedence songs. I would channel “The Voice of God” and admonish Little Fyodor for his sins, mostly something to do with lusting in his heart. It was all in good fun and the timing, after a week of miserable toil at crappy jobs, was perfection itself. Of course, with the advent of YouTube, we could do all this today if we so wished. And therein lies the crux of the matter. Do we so wish?
So why my lack of interest in going bonkers as a reasonable and reasoned response to the madness of today’s world? I had asked myself a similar question years before, upon ending Walls Of Genius in 1986 (it was revived in 2014 with Now Not Then). The problem with going bonkers is how far will you, or can you, go? It’s kind of like the workplace exhortation that you should “exceed expectations”. How many times can you exceed expectations before that exception becomes the expectation itself? So, going bonkers. How crazed can you be before it becomes the “new normal”? Walls Of Genius established itself as a group going beyond-the-norms, unleashing our ids, dismantling our inhibitions and destroying them. Using what chops we had in the service of going ape-shit.

It worked and it was fun. And, lo-and-behold, people responded positively to it. Well, not everybody. But enough to keep us going, at least for a while.

Another question concerns the material to be explored, dissected and deconstructed. In the mid-80s, the music with which the three of us had grown up was sufficiently fresh enough in collective memory that the exploration was relevant. Exploring (and exploding) that material in 2018 is a different proposition. I have already expounded via a previous ramble on the various reasons for why I am mostly unaware of “new” music. So it’s a limited audience who would understand bonkerizations of classic rock. Of course, it was a limited audience in 1984 as well, but at least it was relevant to that limited audience and, through live performance and local media, there was a small overlap into the world of the normals. Thusly, our commentary was made known and available to the very society we were spoofing.
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The truth is that I am no longer motivated to go ape-shit. Like the revived Walls Of Genius title of 2014 indicated, that was then and this is now.
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I don’t seem to have much of the ape-shit left in me anymore. Maybe Little Fyodor does, although having perfected his shtick, going ape-shit doesn’t seem to be on the menu. He certainly performs with a lack of inhibition, but you know what you’re going to get at a Little Fyodor performance. He may be “out-of-the-box” by definition, but he’s not busting the envelope anymore simply by being Little Fyodor. Ed is only running wild with his traditional Coors Light in the living room, still refusing to sing and barely touching his instruments due to terrible arthritis. And me, oh sure, I’m still a smartass wisenheimer. But a lot of those things that I did back in the 80s, well, they happened and that was that. I’m glad they happened and I’m proud of the work we produced, but there’s just no way I can hope to channel the same energy that I had then. I can only channel what energy I might have now. I’m no longer an angry young man, mad at the world, sexually frustrated, freshly ticked off and pissed off at society. After 62 revolutions around the sun, I have accepted that society is fucked-up beyond repair and that, at best, human beings are a flawed experiment. At worst, we are the planet’s most dangerously destructive animal. If there’s a God, we are His or Her’s biggest mistake. I have no great expectation that the world is going to be a better place in the future than it is now or was in the past. Anything that I or Walls Of Genius might have to say about it will be heard by only a precious few and while it’s a good thing to do your best to make the world a better place, I have no illusions that my opinion counts for much in that regard. The world keeps turning despite our best efforts and will only be the same fucked-up place it always was, albeit with more technological devices stuffed into our hands. I don’t mean to say that there’s nothing good in the world. There’s plenty of good and I know where to find it. But still, the absurdities that energized me to go bonkers forty years ago no longer do. More power to those of you who still have it.
20 Comments
Leslie Singer
1/15/2019 13:47:41

Evan, thanks so much for writing a true technicolor think piece with great music and pics. Your awesome work and inspiration continues-- thank you!

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Little Fyodor
1/15/2019 16:51:59

Well, you know what they say, we get a little bit older and a little bit slower! Haha!!

To be honest, if perhaps a little out of line, I would observe that ape-shitness left your music, Evan, pretty much as soon as you left Walls Of Genius. I suppose it ties in with your observation that going ape-shit as an aesthetic unto itself can be self-limiting to also observe that it seemed to me that as early as your “Treat Me Nice” treatment on Almost Groovy (WoG #5 out of 30) that you were reflecting a desire to connect with an audience in ways other than via a pure no-bars-held spontaneity, namely by demonstrating your acquired skill set as a musician and your developed sense of craft (very aptly displayed in your writing skills here, I might add!). I’d say this led to a growing frustration in you throughout the duration of the original Walls Of Genius project that it was not necessarily the best outlet for achieving such goals. However much some people may appreciate the humor, exuberance and freedom of expression of a “go apeshit” approach, screaming and playing without regard to (or while outright flouting) the dictates of “good taste” are just not the best ingredients for getting audiences (and critics) to go, “Hey, he’s GOOD!” Again, I may be out of line here, but y’know, I think we all have friends and compatriots who might know a good damn bit of what’s really going on with us -- just as we also know the like who are utterly full of shit! Hah! Well, you can decide which I am, but that’s just my observation, for whatever it is or isn’t worth, that your lack of interest in going apeshit grew from interests evidenced early on and simply reflected the part of you that knew you couldn’t get to where you wanted to go doing that kind of thing. Didn’t you feel a sense of relief to make those (mostly) subdued folk tapes right after WoG broke up?

As for my own interests, I’d say going ape-shit is something you employ when the time calls for it, just like playing a C chord. Little Fyodor setlists are full of practiced songs that we endeavor to deliver in a manner that gets the ideas and feelings of the songs across (and my bass player is probably anxious to display his skills, and that’s fine, he’s really good!) (as they all are, of course!). Heh, audience members even agitate for particular songs sometimes (even sometimes when the next band is playing!)! At the same time, I like to think there’s some unpredictability at the fringes of what we do, at the margins so to speak, but hey, that’s for others to judge….

I’ve never been the hugest fan of mixing politics and music or art in general, particularly when it comes to saying the likes of, see, it’s those people over there, THEY’RE the bad ones, they're the ones who are WRONG (and therefore we’re the ones who are right). I’m less doctrinaire per se nowadays, though my sensibilities are more or less the same, but especially back in WoG days I was of the mind that the artist should eschew placing himself above others and instead reflect an understanding of being a part of the muck that he sees all around him. Only by getting in touch with that muck, I felt, could the artist truly expose and shed a light on what all the problems are really all about. Even in that Trump rant I gave in a more recent WoG session, I was indicating little bits of admiration for Trump amidst my more prominent disdain, and it was all a reflection of just whatever (hopefully uncensored) thoughts I had going through my mind about the phenomenon, to reflect what I was going through as a result, perhaps to give voice to others (though not necessarily to those who might want a more clear-cut or simple-minded denunciation!). (Though even less so support, BLECH!)

Well, there’s some thoughts for ya....

Reply
Lord Litter link
1/16/2019 11:16:24

"..the cheesy wonder of the Great William Shatner..."

... many thanks in general for this writing - made me find myself...

Discovered *Glen or Glenda* much later - but it became one of my favourite movies. Also - discovered "..the cheesy wonder of the Great William Shatner..." later .. I mean *the cheesy* part of it. He is and will be forever No. 1 of overacting (noone does it better!).

.. this is UNBELIVEABLE..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wI4jMxveyI
.. probably you know it...

All this was very much inspiring in my recent work.

Dont wanna say much .. just that it was VERY inspiring reading your side of the *story*..

One thing though. Donald Trump IS inspiring to me .. to vomit 'n' to do all I used to do in the 80s when I saw politicians I thought were VERY wrong in what they did. But compared to Trump Reagan was naive and not really dangerous.

Sorry ... no politics please.

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Little Fyodor
1/16/2019 11:31:30

Yeah, Ed was certainly my "so bad it's good" guru. And it's amazing what a movement that became and yet humble ol' Ed was ahead of everyone, at least as far as we knew! If there was some movement of this type going on somewhere (and I sure don't deny there was... somewhere!), I was certainly totally oblivious to it -- till there was Ed!

Most of the actual info covered above I was already privy to myself, except for that L'Enfant Suckling thing, that was quite the revelation to me! Proto-WoG, for sure! Did Kevin also play sax with you in that duet? (Even the info I knew was fun to read about with Evan's various turns of the phrase!)

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Neda. M
1/17/2019 08:44:28

Great guys !

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Evan Cantor
1/17/2019 17:00:32

I'm back--just spent 2 nights in frozen Grand Lake, Colorado, with a friend's 2 insane dogs... glad you all enjoyed the post! So many topics, so little time...

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Little Fyodor
1/17/2019 18:27:28

Having exchanged a few private emails with Hal and Evan, it occurs to me that there may be a few different musical factors, each with its own vector, that might be getting thrown into the bonkers or not stew.

Off the top of my head, here's a few considerations:

Experimental versus mainstream or traditional
Improvised/spontaneous versus composed or planned
Expressions of insanity or weirdness versus normalcy
Frenetic in mood versus calm or studied
Power/heaviness/intensity versus lightness of tone
Stance versus the dictums or impression of "good taste"
High versus low brow
Harsh versus soothing
Discomfort versus comfort

There's likely better ways to describe these factors and I'm sure there's overlap, but I think they all factor into an ascertainment of how "nutty" something is, yet they may reflect how various works can be nutty in very different ways.

If someone goes apeshit at an appointed time in an appointed manner, is he (or she) really going apeshit?

Well, it may depend on what flavor of apeshit yer talking about!

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Little Fyodor
1/17/2019 19:25:14

Re-reading a portion of Evan's text, another potential spectrum occurs, extremism for its own sake versus as a tool to create a desired effect or message. Or maybe to some, the milieu in which they feel comfortable, or even normal, just seems extreme to others....

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Wolfgang Dorninger link
1/18/2019 11:07:25

sad that I never saw you live. really sad!

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Hal McGee
1/18/2019 11:12:30

http://www.haltapes.com/walls-of-genius-video.html

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Lord Litter link
1/18/2019 12:27:38

... this is some REAL great apeshit!!! ... brilliant combination of everything one can think of ..

I'm really grateful that I lived in those times - one can't do it today - these days were a perfect combination of the 50s and the future ... based on fun and dedication ...

This is definitely NO retro (havta repeat myself probably) today it's often all calculated retro one of the other way..

.. and - I also did a version of "The Letter" .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjyfBSFffc

THANKS for this experience..watched the whole video ...

Now go to Vienna in may 2019 for Wolfgang Dorninger's Cassette Culture Node.Linz in Vienna http://www.base.at/ccnl/

... but before you do that watch a full lenght CARL HOWARD interview video Wolfgang did in 1989...
http://www.base.at/ccnl/videos/howard/

APESHIT!

Little Fyodor
1/18/2019 13:18:02

Thank you for the kind words, Mr. Litter! I am listening to your "Letter" right now! Very innovative and tasteful and fun! Yes, I think WoG was very much about looking backwards and forwards at the same time! Are you saying kids these days don't appreciate their forbears and history anymore?? Haha, well ain't that the way it always is! Vienna in May to engage with Cassette Culture and Wolfgang sounds rather fabulous, best of luck to you in your travels.....

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Lord Litter link
1/18/2019 13:51:57

>> Are you saying kids these days don't appreciate their forbears and history anymore?? <<

Well .. I don't want to blame anyone - I guess today it's often kinda *soft* on the one hand and *meaningless* on the other.

Everyone can do *bizarre and crazy and polished* things with a smart phone these days and it's all solid mainstream - all based on the same algorithm structures.

.. if I look at some Youtube kids with their visual_sound_output that would've been hard core underground in the past .. today it's *polished* mainsteam...really meaningless...today's context made it ALL meaningless - 10.000 Walls Of Genius_es would never have been special...

So to me, what I hear/see is often boring these days caus I grew up with the origins. A dammit I keep repeating...

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Little Fyodor
1/18/2019 14:03:20

On one hand the thought occurs that what all seems the same to one not immersed in a particular culture may seem plentifully varied to those on the inside ("all reggae sounds the same!" etc.), but at the same time I sure do get your point, too!! 10,000 Walls Of Geniuses???? NOOOOOOO!!!!!! Haha! Thank you for the insights as I'm not really familiar with this algorithm phenomenon, it sure does sound toxic upon hearing about it....

Lord Litter link
1/18/2019 14:24:31

.. yeh sure *all Blues* sounds the same too but yes I mean something different ...

..we had our 4track recorders and our brains (well most of it) .. the rest was go, search and create. Today you get all basics/templates with the device .. you *click/click* some of those basics/templates and finished is a basics/templates based creation with often little to no own creation...

Sure this is only half of the truth .. I also mean: it's BORING to listen to 45678965 guitarplayers that are *better/faster* than Jimi Hendrix ...

And sure there is more ...

Little Fyodor
1/18/2019 17:01:49

I hear ya Lord. Cut 'n' paste template for everyone via cheap technology. Game changer for cultural flatlining? I couldn't say for sure, but I can share the fear....

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Evan Cantor
1/25/2019 14:23:53

Fascinating conversation with Lord Litter & Little Fyodor--I've got nothing to add except that I agree with your assessments and I'm proud of you both for your forthrightness, honesty and willingness to examine both the world without and within.

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Lord Litter link
1/26/2019 06:53:55

What I'd like to add here - I do not really blame all these somnambule smart phone zombies living in this cut and paste reality ... most of them grew up with all this as *normality* .. so sometimes they just don't have a chance - makes any example of *being different* even more important...

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Little Fyodor
1/26/2019 16:38:47

I getcha, and I think that's a healthy attitude. It's the system, not the systemees! Haha well sorry, I couldn't resist that, but to be clearer, it's the environment that people were born into, not the people who were born into that environment.

I always get annoyed when people get defensive or abusive about espoused generational differences. Whatever one might rightly say or disagree with about such differences, whatever differences there might be are clearly about circumstances, not about the people who find themselves in different circumstances.

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Lord Litter link
1/27/2019 12:54:07

yep .. agreed 100% .. still I think that "somnambule smart phone zombies living in this cut and paste reality" need more kicks up the arse than 1980s mainstream junkies, which still got delivered some ideas from 60s/70s *revolutionaries*, the ones which a bit later turned out to be the *new establishment*.... hope this makes clear what I mean...

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    Walls Of Genius

    formed in 1982, a musical performance-art comedy experimental noise ensemble, featuring everything from musique concrete, sound collage and extended rock improvisation to demented top-40 parodies, free jazz, industrial and audio experiments of all kinds, mostly fitting in no category whatsoever.

    Over the course of the next four years, Walls Of Genius took the underground by storm and rained on every conceivable parade, all with tongue firmly in cheek and cockeyed smiles.
    ​
    The brain-child of disgruntled musician and self-anointed "Head Moron" Evan Cantor, Walls Of Genius' other founding members ('genial genii') were the famous wild-man Little Fyodor and electric guitar wizard Ed Fowler. 

    Stalwarts of the early 80's cassette culture scene, Walls Of Genius was both loved and reviled in equal measure.

    By 1986 WoG had disbanded and was inactive until reunion sessions in 2014 re-ignited the flame. They happily soldier on, voices crying in the wilderness of madness that is this world in the 21st century.

    Evan Cantor email
    Little Fyodor email
    Walls Of Genius Bandcamp
    WoG Archival site

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