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WoG Blog #2 Little Fyodor’s mixed bag

4/21/2018

11 Comments

 
PictureLittle Fyodor, October 2017

by Little Fyodor
​
Evan’s essay reminds me of an age-old debate.  Is everything we do done for the sake of pleasuring the ego?  Are even the likes of a Mother Theresa helping the poor just to feel good about themselves and maybe even superior to others?  Evan wraps up by saying it would be disingenuous to deny that such ego satisfying motivations “were not somewhere on our minds” when creating and distributing Walls Of Genius, and of course if “somewhere” on the mind is the standard, that’s hard to dispute.  I’ll fully cop to feeling warm and fuzzies over favorable reviews (and feeling a bit of the sting at the not so good ones!) as well as from recognition in the street and compliments from friends and in letters and nowadays online, etc.  It’s even better when people tell me how my music affects them, how they relate to it, what it means to them.  After all, the first thing that got me into wanting to do music in the first place was -- well wait, actually let’s back up.  Cause I first started writing songs when I was around 12 or 13 or so.  Bad shit.  “Watch Out for That Buoy” about the family houseboat trip and an urgent plea for world peace and pollution solutions called “What Are We Gonna Do?” and a song about growing old called “Songs of the Past.”  YECCCCH!!!!  I wonder why I did all that?  That’s hard to say!  I guess perhaps some of the notoriety seeking of which Evan speaks may have played a role.  I looked up to rock stars and wanted to be one.  Guess it seemed “cool”?  Sometime-WoG participant and artist Leo Goya liked to say there’s just a great appeal to creativity, and I think that’s part of it, too.  The will to power of putting something into the world that’s something you did.  Evolutionary psychologists may say it’s a sexual selection thing.  It’s ultimately pretty mysterious, don’t you think?  I mean, even if we’re trying to gratify our egos, why do it via art or music?  Just cause we’re too short to be a basketball player?  Or is there more to it?  I don’t know if we’ll ever really know for sure….

PictureLittle Fyodor, 1983

​But I do recall feeling a desperate need near the end of my college years and the beginnings of being on my own to express a deep sense of loneliness and alienation and of generally feeling lost.  And the sense I had that I wanted to tell the world what that was like and maybe somehow cosmically connect to people who felt the same way, like what The Who’s “Quadrophenia” was ostensibly about, and maybe parts of Alice Cooper.  I picked my “pen” back up and started writing short stories and a novel (that I never finished) -- and songs; eventually I found the songs were more fun and a lot easier!  This led to the start of the Little Fyodor repertoire that spanned several LP’s and CD’s.  These sentiments only occasionally poked their head up in Walls Of Genius cassettes, but wanting to record these songs with Evan led directly to my joining the burgeoning project that became WoG, as both of us preferred to do WoG than record my songs.  It was just FUN!  The open endedness, the way anything was possible.  We could goof around and make it art!  Community and non-commercial music can be realized by having a regular live local band, but home recording opened up all sorts of possibilities that weren’t available with a regular setlist or while trying to get your sound out to a crowd in a bar.  I remember the excitement I felt when WoG was first starting out, and again, I don’t know if I can explain it rightly, but it was just exciting to me.  I remember telling Evan that I thought  “I could contribute something,” as in to the world of experimental music.  Whether that was a lot or a little, it meant something to me for it to at least be something.


I also remember Evan suggesting around that time that in a few months we could maybe make enough money for him to cut back his job to part-time, and I was naïve enough to consider that possible.  Being able to quit your job always seemed like the Holy Grail.  I’ve often liked to say that my wet dream was to become half as big as Jonathan Richman.  Was that too much to ask?  Haha.  Hah.  I don’t think that formed the entirety of my motivation as it became fairly clear fairly quickly that nothing of the sort was likely to happen.  But it was still fun, and it was still, well, something to do, something to give my life meaning and purpose.  Something to be part of.  Something to make people look at me like I meant something.  I won’t deny that the factors Evan speaks of play a role in this, but I don’t know if they say that much about the cassette movement per se as you can ultimately say that kind of stuff about doing almost anything (as I averred above).  Maybe this was just the activity that worked out for me, the only way I knew to find that satisfaction.  Regardless, it was definitely nice to have an outlet like that for us weirdos who didn’t necessarily fit into the world any other way.  To do something we could call our own and be admired for it.  I’ll say at this point that while I cop to much of what Evan speaks about in the plural, I don’t think I did any of that examining of what “the scene” wanted or would most respect us for, or any of that worrying about just being thought of as so much screaming (not that I want Evan to change his essay, and I hope he won’t!).  I even worried we were selling out by screaming less and being less ridiculous!  I did get into overdub projects once I could get my mitts on Evan’s four-track, but that’s just because it was fun and exciting, just like the drunken jams were!

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Then again, I didn’t mind it when Evan suggested releasing shorter tapes, as I did get the feeling our long ones kind of lost people, and I did want people to like what we did and I liked the idea of our music gaining notoriety and leading to greater acclaim and maybe even possibly the outside, outside, outside, outside possibility of rising above the underground and making it something real and slightly profitable and day job killing, like Eugene Chadbourne when he said he hoped his music could someday put a thousand dollars in his bank account.  Our next project when we broke up was going to be a record, an LP.  Sort of a “step up.”  But, well, we broke up instead.  What would a record have brought?  Most, most, most, most likely just more of the same, the kind of burden that clearly soured Evan on the endeavor, and I always warn people to this day that it takes me a good long while to get to doing the next thing I promised.  I’d just as soon watch Gunsmoke!  We’ll never know if that record might have done anything for us career-wise, and maybe that’s just as well….
​​

11 Comments
William Davison link
4/21/2018 09:43:44

Nice article! I'd like to hear more, from you or others here at EC, on the issue of cassette artists putting out vinyl. You have wondered what might have happened if WoG had put out a record. Would it have propelled you to stardom or just more of the same? I don't have an answer for that but I can tell you what happened to me. For years, I released my music on tapes, and later CD-Rs, and remained about as unknown as you can get. That's partly my own fault for being a terrible self-promoter (not sending things out for review, radio play, etc.). In 2011, a friend with a label put out an LP for my band Six Heads. Only 300 copies but it went everywhere - all over North America, Europe, Asia. Distributors were picking it up and customers were buying it. Not only was the distribution impressive, but everywhere it ended up, it got written about. Many reviews. Far more than I had ever seen for any other project I had been involved in! That happened because it was a vinyl LP. I can almost guarantee that would not have happened with a cassette release. Did it make me a star? Ha ha, of course not. But I was truly shocked at just how much it did raise my profile. It was fun to see that happening, but at the same time I found it kind of disappointing too. Why? Because the music didn't change when we made a record. There wasn't a drastic leap in the quality of our work. Six Heads on vinyl sounded exactly the same as Six Heads on cassette. What changed was that, for a lot of people, the music/art was being presented to them in a form that validated it. I find it immensely disappointing that so many people seem to be unable to judge for themselves whether a work of art has value, that they need some voice of authority (in this case, the aura of validity/importance of vinyl records) to tell them what to like or pay attention to. I don't know. I guess it's understandable. But it bugs me. Anyway, yes, judging from my personal experience, putting out vinyl DOES make a difference. If anyone else here has experienced something similar (or dissimilar), I'd love to hear about it!

Reply
Little Fyodor
4/21/2018 12:02:39

It would be easy to make cynical comments about sheeple needing the correct signals to tell them what to like, and I'm sure that's applicable. OTOH, making an LP is somewhat of filtering device. There's fewer of them and may, at least plausibly, reflect some greater degree of commitment. So it may not be a matter of what people are willing to accept so much as what they have the capacity to pay attention to. Which may not seem fair or intelligent, but it's understandable, too, I think.

Personally, I would say it's been very difficult to discern what has or hasn't affected the level of my profile over the years, be that cassette versus vinyl or what have you. Sorry that's not much of a help!

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William Davison link
4/21/2018 13:21:31

Ha ha, I'm going to stand by my cynicism about sheeple. However, you make a good point about people's capacity to pay attention, or even be aware of, the creative work that's being produced. Especially these days, there is an overwhelming amount of art out there! So, yes, any kind of filtering device (particularly, as I mentioned, the "voice of authority" or the validating quality of certain mediums) are going to be latched onto by many people. I get it. I'm still disappointed, but I get it.

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Evan Cantor
4/21/2018 12:39:52

kudos Fyo for excellent reflections--I don't recall ever thinking that WoG could help free me from a day-job wage-slave existence, but I had already attempted that in Charlottesville with the Folk-Grass-Blues-Band. So it doesn't surprise me that I may have had that on my mind. I tried it years later with an 85% appt at the Univ of Colo as I tried to make up the difference in income with visual art. It never really worked out that way, though. But damn, those day-jobs! Wasn't that something we were reacting against with our music? My guess is that a vinyl LP would have done the same for us as it did for William Davison--it would have been gratifying and would have extended our audience somewhat before disappearing from consciousness. "What have you done for us lately" seems to be the rule in terms of quitting your day-job for anything in the arts.

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William Davison link
4/21/2018 13:28:18

I'm 35 years or so into my "quitting the day job and living off my art" project. Not quite there yet. But, I'm going to live forever so it's okay. No worries. I'll get there, eventually.

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Little Fyodor
4/21/2018 13:37:32

Yeah, I think logically if you live forever you'll have to achieve that eventually? Or maybe that's just if you exist in all manifestations of the multiverse? Damn, this is complicated! All seriousness aside, there's likely some serious downsides to living entirely off your art, as well. But as long as it'll take a multidimensional eternity to realize anyway, may as well just keep dreaming of the good parts....

C. Goff III link
4/22/2018 12:51:42

This whole Fame and Fortune discussion is very interesting, Misters Evan and Fyodor. Reading your personal thoughts about your own musical histories reveals much, and I appreciate you bringing this all into the EC for discussion.

Some observations... I agree that the idea of achieving fame in the underground is indeed a very different thing from what The Who experienced back in the day. I'm guessing that all the WOG performances helped to make for some name recognition around Colorado. Participating in the cassette community added to that WOG recognition world-wide. But for me, back in California during the 1980's, I never heard of WOG. It's easy to see how a bit of kudos, some enthusiastic reactions from audiences, and a lot of self-confidence, can lead to thoughts of fame and fortune. It's happened to many of us, and I daresay that a lot of us also learned from experience that reality can turn out very differently from our hopes and expectations.

Again, back in California in the early 1980's, I actually DID pay the rent as an entertainer for a while. My paying gig was being a singing messenger for Eastern Onion Singing Telegrams. I performed a lot. I drove around a lot. I met a lot of professional entertainers, musicians, etc. During the time I was doing this, I also was performing with Steve Schaer (RIP) in an experimental project called "-Ing." We weren't Punk, but since there were no experimental clubs, we played all the punk clubs, including the Mabuhay Gardens, the On Broadway, the Keystone, even the Elite Club at the Fillmore. I'm guessing that absolutely NO ONE who reads my words here had heard of us back in the day. We didn't participate much in the cassette culture per se back in those days. My first cassette album was produced in 1980, but it mostly got around to college radio stations and promoters in the early days. We did get some on-air interviews and radio play though, which bolstered our self image somewhat.

Anyway, it wasn't until I got involved with Disism in the mid 1980's that my hopes and dreams for fame and fortune evolved into an open arms embrace of the independent art community and art for art itself -- strictly as vehicles for free expression. I'm very glad I made that jump; it gave me the feeling that my (already original) art could become even free-er of constraints. It allowed me to make friends in the art world that methinks are more special to me than anything I could have achieved through conventional avenues of "fame and fortune." Some of those friends, including Fyodor and Evan, are sharing ideas right here on the EC.

Looking at this all with a bit of historical context, achieving fame and fortune as a musician is a very recent thing in human history. For most of our ancestors, musicians served as adjuncts to religious activities or tribal celebrations. I think a lot of avant garde artists are serving those same functions today, and it is no less a necessary part of human existence now than it was then, and I'm glad to be a part of it all.

Reply
Evan Cantor
4/22/2018 13:32:31

howdy Goff! Nice thoughts--thanks for weighing in on the discussion. I hope that my "essay" didn't establish me as the world's biggest egomaniac!

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C. Goff III link
4/22/2018 14:36:54

Evan! No, no, you're not the biggest! We all know what office he's holding these days, ha!

In all seriousness though, this is a good discussion for the EC community. The difficulties of being an artist in a society where money is King are quite numerous. In my experience, most Americans don't respect musicians who don't make a living from their craft, because if you can't sell it, they can't imagine that it's any good. In the greenback USA, it's hard to be a serious artist without being a good peddler as well. Obviously, we know something they don't. It's good to flush this subject out into the open. Thanks very much for bringing this discussion on with your essay!

Little Fyodor
4/22/2018 15:27:08

Hell, why bother to be an egomaniac if you're not the world's biggest? JOKING!!

This makes me think of a couple of things, one being something a woman who described herself as a therapist told me years ago at a party. That people could be divided into those who were result-oriented and those who were process-oriented. Result-orientation was over-represented among bank presidents and the highly successful in general, but it was also over represented among alcoholics and depressives, and that therapists would try to get people who were too results-oriented to be more process-oriented, because that tends to be a lot more satisfying to most people!

Another thing it reminds me of is my brief attempt to be a comedian. Some friends exhorted me to try my hand at comedy since I make funny faces on stage that often make people laugh. Tuesdays were open stage night at this one major comedy club in town and it was known that you could get booked for it just by calling them. And calling and calling and calling. I called several times before I got booked, but I finally did. I didn't have a shtick, I just sang a few songs in my usual wacky way and people seemed to like it. But the reason I'm telling you about this is that backstage I encountered a lot of SADNESS. The first gal who performed felt she had bombed and came backstage when she finished and CRIED. A friend consoled her. Since I'm an introvert who didn't know anyone I was hanging by myself so of course the saddest guy of the lot chatted me up. He used to be professional but something happened, I forget what (sickness or divorce or something) and he lost his cred, so now he was kind of starting over, doing the open stage night again trying to work himself back into being professional again, and the sadness just dripped off of him. A few days later, I tried calling to get back on the next week's open stage and I didn't get on it, and I never called them again. I just thought I'd tell you all that to brighten up your day.....

Little Fyodor
4/22/2018 15:38:06

Replace "results-oriented" above with "goal-oriented", just because I'm pretty sure that's the terminology she used.

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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.

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Electronic Cottage is a webzine covering independently-produced Experimental & Electronic Music, Space Rock, Audio Art, Video Art, Mail Art and more.