American musician Little Fyodor – named in tribute to Russian existentialist writer Fyodor Dostoevsky; real name not disclosed – has spent his life creating outré punk and weirdo rock n roll. Gaining him devoted fans all over the world, who are drawn to his comically depraved lyrics, and zany punk sound – Best described as a mixture of new wave meets experimental rock, with a touch of psych; or Devo meets The Residents, with a touch of Frank Zappa. With Little Fyodor having admirers in luminaries such as Boyd Rice, Brian M Clark and the Elephant 6 collective.
Born in 1957, Fyodor first began performing music in the early 1980s as part of lauded avant garde rock group Walls of Genius, key players in the DIY cassette / tape underground; before venturing solo in the mid 1980s. Initially performing as a one man band, and then later, as a duo with his creative partner Babushka. With Fyodor having started performing with a full, traditional band line-up in the last decade or so.
Indeed, there is no one quite like Little Fyodor – a self-described maladjusted, disaffected, misanthropic, weirdo – who crafts some of the most enjoyable and unique punk-esque music we have ever heard! In addition to his music, Fyodor is also a member of that well known cult for outsiders everywhere, the Church of the SubGenius. As well as being a radio dj for many years!
Wanting to learn all about him, we sent Fyodor some questions to answer over email.
Take a dive into his world, below…
Getting Acquainted
Name + D.O.B?
Little Fyodor
Dec 8, 1957
City, State and Country you currently call home?
Denver, Colorado, USA
City, State and Country you’re from?
Wayne, New Jersey, USA
Please describe some memories – such as art, music, comics, friendships, adventures, study, romance, politics, work, crime, religion… anything really – from the stages of your life noted below:
* Your childhood:
My best friend Ed Granat, who was two years older and three grades ahead of me, lived across the street and my earliest memories of him were of playing one-on-one football in his front yard. He’d kick off to me and come steaming at me and just as he got close I’d sidestep him and run back across the yard for a touchdown! (Then he’d probably do the same to me but I don’t remember that part as much!)
Then we both got into cats and I took his lead to bring a kitten home and ask if I could keep it.
Next thing he was into psychedelic posters, like R. Crumb’s “Stoned Again,” and that was cool by me! We’d listen to Beatles singles for Paul Is Dead clues.
One day he came to me and said, You know what day it is today? It’s 69 69!! (June 9, 1969.)
Another day he came to me and said, Do you realize what they say in that song? Someone left the cake out in the rain (etc)? Yeah, I had to agree, that was pretty weird!
Ed introduced me to Pink Floyd and Hawkwind. Oh, and marijuana! (Of course!)
Somewhere in there we played music together, mostly covers from sheet music, Ed on cheap organ and me on my cheap Kalamazoo. Ed’s father called “Bad Moon Rising” the Farmer Song and would bounce up and down in place with a big shit-eating grin on his face!
Then Ed got a synthesizer and one day he came over and you could still hear his synthesizer going on its own across the street. I was supposed to be weeding the garden but I figured I was probably finished and went back across to Ed’s house to hang out and OOOOOH was my father PISSED OFF that I didn’t finish the weeding AND I pulled out his dahlias instead of the weeds!!!
Well, let’s see, where are we now…. Ed and I actually made a comic book together, which I hadn’t thought about in quite a while since it wasn’t a very big deal, but since I see you asked about comics, yep, we made one! It was called Tuff and it was basically our childhood or teenage, whatever we were at the time, attempt at doing Mad Magazine.
Not sure if we made it to a second issue or not, I don’t think so….
I campaigned for George McGovern as a 14 year old. My idealism in that direction has since faded.
I don’t think I ever got closer to girls than wet dreams in those days.
I felt real cocky in my early adolescence but the challenges of females and career made me more and more alienated as I approached the end of my school daze….
* Your teenage years:
CCR was my first favorite band, starting when I was 12. Then it was Black Sabbath, probably when I was 14? Then I became an ELP freak! I ran on the high school cross country team and on the bus to away meets I’d bring my portable 8-track player and play ELP’s Trilogy and play all the instruments in the air, including a single note on the triangle, as we heard them on the tape!
One younger runner complained that I was thinking more about the music than the upcoming meet! That kinda hurt cause by then I was a captain or something.
It was real weird going away to college, like I was entering some unknown reality. I jumped on the chance to join the radio station whose studio was in the basement of my dorm (WUVA)! Oddly while it was a college station it was also commercial, a very unusual combination, I’m pretty sure.
After a year or two there, I quit and joined the school’s non-commercial station (WTJU)! That was a lot more fun!
I joined a hippie fraternity in my second year at school.
Wanting to be social but being an introvert made joining a frat a kind of shortcut to friends and this frat was kind of at the lefthand fringe of the entire fraternity system at the University of Virginia.
* Your 20s:
I met Evan Cantor at fraternity TKE and others who introduced me (in the first serious way) to punk rock and (at all) to experimental jazz-rock bands like Henry Cow, Gong and Art Bears, etc. Heard my first Pere Ubu and Ramones during my first year in the frat house!
Evan told me that joining TKE was like “beating the system” cause you’d get the advantages of a fraternity without all the stupid bullshit!
I graduated with a bachelors degree in Economics, which was sort of a compromise between doing something practical like my father wanted me to do or something interesting like the LSD told me to do! But it was really kind of neither.
I graduated with no idea of what I was going to do with my life (and still never having had a girlfriend) but I did start to get the idea of making something artistic out of my alienation and lostness and wrote a page long short story called Family Life which light heartedly painted a dire, pessimistic view of the whole ball of wax that was life from the point of view of where I was at the time, and the wind blew down a tree right next door just as I finished it and it felt like an omen!
After graduation I moved with some friends into a house on the other side of Charlottesville and that’s where I wrote my first songs. One evening in my car coming home from work at a fast food restaurant I thought a song called “I Want An Ugly Girl” would make a cool punk rock song. There was a piano in that house where I lived and I wrote the chords to it on that.
A roommate’s brother dealt drugs and crashed at our house and had an electric guitar. I borrowed it and wrote “Useless Shit” on that!
Meantime, Evan (mentioned above) had graduated a year or so earlier and had traveled around the country a bit before finding himself back in his parents’ house in Northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. It was at that house that I first showed him my song lyrics and at first he said they were evil enough but they were missing a sense of JOY in being evil, like the song some friends of his who had a band (oh yeah, Evan played bass guitar and guitar and was previously in a prog band called Dreamer Easy and a folky band called the Folk Grass Blues Band and had just started a punk band called Blitz Bunnies, and he knew a lot of other musicians in the DC area) that played a song called “I’m a Berserker!”
I told him well, I don’t think the people in my songs are really getting any joy out of it and Evan’s eyes widened and he exclaimed, “I get it, the people in these songs are Dostoevskian characters [I had turned Evan onto Fyodor Dostoevsky in the prior few months from having read Dosty in an existentialism class at college] who can’t even get any joy out of their own evil!”
He then called me Little Fyodor, and Little Fyodor I am still!
A few months later he said he wanted to move out west maybe to Colorado but he didn’t want to go alone and I said I’d go! And so we moved together to Boulder, Colorado, with all our possessions in our two cars, including guitars and amps, and crashed at the apartment of my cousin Ellen who had gone to the University of Colorado.
We then moved into a house with a couple, got pissed off at each other and moved to separate places and soon moved back together as the wheels had started spinning towards forming a cassette networking band called Walls Of Genius, that in three years distributed almost a thousand copies of thirty cassette titles around the World Cassette Underground, including to zines where we got some interesting, often favorable, occasionally raving, also occasionally scathing, but never boring reviews!
Evan and I have since written an entire piecemeal history to accompany an audio archive curated by cassette scene stalwart Hal McGee, and you can read and hear all about it in the link here: Walls of Genius History via HalTapes.
I’m blabbing about it here enough as it is, but suffice to say that we broke up in 1986 (along with our guitarist and third wheel Ed Fowler), the same year I met Babushka who was pushing a shopping cart with a Casio digital keyboard down a gritty Denver alley! She and I have been making music together ever since, spewing our alienated, loser but tougher than dirt; or than thou perspective via our quirky brand of nerdy pop and sometimes psychedelic or even experimental punk or whatever else we can manage to do whether we can manage to label it or not, hey, that’s your job, meantime we’ve been astounding dive bar audiences in Denver and beyond throughout these decades….
* Your 30s:
My career, such as it is and has been, is summarized on my website: littlefyodor.com. You can hear much of my music there and at my bandcamp site: littlefyodor.bandcamp.com
I’ll add that during this decade of my life, Little Fyodor and Babushka attended Burning Man twice, toured with Negativland throughout California, driving their equipment van and opening up seven shows, and I joined radio station KGNU in Boulder and hosted a show called Under The Floorboards – Dedicated to the Insects Of Society and featuring the most out-there sounds and sentiments of whatever sort that I could find and could possibly justify airing, at least once (actually I started that in my 20’s; cut me some slack, dickweed!)
Eventually, this endeavour got somewhat enmeshed with Walls Of Genius’s cassette networking activities and much of what I played on the air was actually material we had gotten in trade for our own work. (I think WoG ended up selling about a little more than half the amount we gave away as promos, in trade or just cause we felt like it, comps perhaps.)
I added a second show in the afternoon for a while just called the Cassette Underground, in which I played all tapes, though not usually as weird in the content area as what I played at night (Under the Floorboards started at midnight or one AM and went on for three hours for the first decade or two before moving to an 11pm to midnight slot later on).
I continued receiving tapes for my radio show (and I played pretty much everything at least once!) after WoG’s breakup, sometimes trading my own material, though mine was in shorter supply as I had decided to put out Little Fyodor on vinyl! A dubious choice in some respects, but I had stars in my eyes and whether or not I ever made a dime from my music I wanted to be on the same format as the idols of my misspent youth!
I had songs of alienation bubbling out of me in my thirties resulting in self-producing a seven inch EP called Slither (1985) and LP’s called Beneath the Uber-Putz (1988) and Idiots Are Closer to God (1990) and a CD called Dance of the Salted Slug! (1994.)
Slither was made with the WoG crew while the others saw the assistance of Babushka and various other musicians willing to play their hearts out for no pay, though it was always fun getting into a small-time professional studio!
(Walls Of Genius, by the way and by contrast, was recorded all at home on Evan’s four-track reel-to-reel and six-track mixer, and a few other gadgets we had on hand.)
Babushka and other friends would also help me with the artwork as I’m no visual artist myself.
During this decade we also made the acquaintance of the people who would go on to become The Apples In Stereo, first meeting Jim Mcintyre and Hilarie Sidney who came to see us play in a warehouse because Jim had read about us in an underground music zine called Sound Choice back when he lived in Florida and was excited to actually see someone he’d read about in one of those!
Robert showed up on the scene eventually and they have their own history, but we actually joined them on their first tour, to California, where they were received like the second coming of the Beatles and we were received as the stupid, weird opening band!
I’ve talked to a filmmaker and his camera for a documentary on them, in which I said I was kind of the crazy uncle of Elephant 6 Music, they looked up to me, having already made my own music without any recourse to the music industry, but I was ultimately not of their world….
* Your 40s:
We made it to XX-Day, XXX-Day and, if memory serves (it does so less and less!!), 7X-Day, the Church of the Subgenius’ annual gatherings to prepare for meeting the X-ists who are prophesied by J.R. “Bob” Dobbs to whisk all dues-paying Subgeniusses off this Slackless planet by welcoming us into the Pleasure Saucers and giving us all unlimited powers!
The first one we attended, in ’98 I think, elicited the best, and really only proper, reaction to a Little Fyodor & Babushka performance, with the Subgenius faithful screaming, ululating, and doing somersaults in the air! We were declared pilots of the Escape Saucers!
I used recordings of that first show for my first homemade CDR release, Little Fyodor & Babushka Live at XX-Day!
I was beginning to cool off with the new songs, which I could only write when something lit a spark in me, when some issue slapped me in the face in such a way that I had to work it out in a song, so it was a good time for a live release as well as a Greatest Hits package (2005) – Assembled by Brian Clark for his fledgling Discriminate Audio label, with the help of jolly provocateur Boyd Rice, who had once interviewed me for a local culture zine, might have been Colorado Music Magazine.
We were still playing live, probably close to about once a month, mostly as a duo at this point, though a couple of times we were joined on bass for a short while, first by a fellow we called Bruno because his persona reminded us of a character in a Werner Herzog movie who had been raised in complete isolation (actually he was Sam Fuqua, News Editor and later Program Manager at KGNU) and then by a character called Wilhelm Dorff, who was actually Dave Willey, an amazing musician and producer known around the world, mostly in more proggy and arty cirlces, just cause they’re actually such fucking good musicians.
Though speaking of fucking good musicians, by this decade of life’s end I had agreed to play with Amadeus Tonguefingers and once again we had a fucking great bass player only this time before long we had a drummer too, and well actually we cycled through a few but have been playing with the inimitable Tricky Dick Wikkit since I think 2010….
* Your 50s:
Released Peace Is Boring as a full-length CD in 2009, my first release of new material in 15 years.
Followed almost on its heels by comparison by a seven inch EP, Truly Rejected, in 2015, which was the first release to clearly feature a band that I was playing with live at the time. Had big fun playing with that full band at Denver dives averaging once a month or more for most of this decade.
And hey, a lot of people in the Denver area really love us, if I do say so myself.
And why not, we’re a bunch of great musicians (besides me) and folks love the way Babushka and I theatrically present and emote our wacky songs of despair. They especially like it when I do my spazz dance called the Dance of the Salted Slug at the end of each performance! (Various renditions can be found with a google search!)
Released in 2015 by Ken Rock.
Now, sure a lot of people liked it when Babushka and me played just as a duo (witness the Subgenius reaction!), but we confused a lot of people that way too. Playing as a full rock band is the way we were meant to be and the way my records were made and it has certainly expanded our acceptance. As a result, we even performed at the famous South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas in 2014 and 2016.
And in between those new original releases, a tribute CD was compiled with the help of Lassie Jensen of Denmark called The Unscratchable Itch (2013) that featured talented fans near and far. At the CD release for the tribute, local weirdo rockers The Inactivists played an entire set of my songs (their bass player had been another to play with us for a couple of shows back when, which helped!) and I could have died and disappeared into the void happy right then and there.
Released in 2013 by Public Eyesore.
* Your 60s so far:
Released a new EP called Pithy Romantic Ballads (2019), which included my first overtly political song ever, cause how can you be a true misanthrope if you pick sides, and I’ve always wanted to express things straight from my bowels without regard for being right or wrong or whatever, but Orange Mussolini struck me in such a deep way that I wrote “Trump Loves You” in a purely gut wrenching, albeit satirically light-hearted, manner, and we made a video out of it with our radical friend Jason Bosch.
Google it and check it out!
Since then?
Well y’know, a wise if wacked fellow once said, “Everyone gets a little older and a little slower,” and I’ve finally slowed up. I gave up my semi-weekly radio show in 2016, and although we played at the formerly annual Franksgiving to honor local hero Frank Bell just this past October (2021), the future of the one time juggernaut known as Little Fyodor & Babushka is in question, for various reasons I don’t wanna bother you with.
Might still play if the circumstance moves me (and us), ya never know. But that’s where it stands (or lies down) right now.
Luckily Babushka is full of life and is always pushing me to keep my fingers and toes dipped in music and I entertain ideas of an experimental instrumental nature and you never know what is round the corner!
Personal motto(s)?
“Sacrifice the present for the future and you’ll find yourself wishing to relive the past!”
(My senior yearbook quote, haha!)
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“Kvetching for nothing will getcha whatcha kvetching for!”
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“As bad as things are, they could always be worse!”
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“Peace is boring.”
Being born Jewish, why did you decide to forsake your religion and become a member of notorious cult the Church of the SubGenius?
Haha. Well y’know the Church isn’t very exclusive about its membership (other than requiring a membership fee, for eternal salvation or triple your money back!) So you can easily be both, not that I’ve had any particular inclination to hold onto my Judaism anyway. I take it as far as feeling a minor twinge of pride when people like Joey Ramone and the top two officers on the Starship Enterprise turn out to be Jewish.
I would say the theology of the Church of the Subgenius falls somewhere between Satanism, Buddhism and Alfred E. Neumann. And who in their heart of hearts doesn’t really want Slack? You know you want it!
It’s cool that it’s a group that really shouldn’t exist because its members are the type who you wouldn’t expect to ever join a group, and the paradox of that is beautiful.
…and what impact has the Church had on your life?
As mentioned above, we played our best received show ever at a Church gathering, and I’ll sure never forget that. I’ve made some friends through the Church, but beyond that I’ve mostly moved on. I do hope its perspective is helpful some way.
Y’know, when I left Burning Man, which is an awesome event and you’ve heard plenty about it elsewhere so no need for me to make a stink about it now, but it has its own ethos and perspective, one that attempts to tell you how life really should be lived, and they’re right, it should be lived that way, but when you return into the rest of the world, the real world, or at least I felt this way, I felt like the rest of the world was putrid, it was defiled and slimy, unlike the purity of Burning Man.
It was jarring and discombobulating and disheartening.
But when I left the Church of the Subgenius X-Day gatherings, I felt like I was taking a healthier attitude into the rest of the world, I felt the Church satirized the rest of the world such that I could use this satirical perspective as armor against the bullshit and normality of everything else.
Has that message stuck with me? Well, it’s always hard to hold onto the lessons, but every once in a while, I remind myself.
Who are some of your favourite artists, writers and musicians?
I’m a Beatles nerd and I like a lot of the old sixties shit but I spend most of my time listening to whatever radio-station WFMU wants to foist on me, as it’s almost always good and often downright mind blowing and is usually stuff I’d never heard of before and in all manner of various genres.
I’ve been accused of having eclectic taste!
The people who most influenced me to become Little Fyodor were the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, Jonathan Richman, the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Syd Barrett, Tom Waits, Hawkwind, J.J. Cale, Neil Young, John Lennon, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Nathanael West and of course Fyodor Dostoevsky.
…and what is it about their works that so inspire and move you?
I was inspired mostly by their inner journeys.
Music + Creativity Questions
When and why did you first become interested in music, performance and everything creative?
… and any pivotal creative moments / influences?
I forgot to mention above, or couldn’t find a place to fit it in, that after playing with Ed Granat (and a couple of drummers) in Junior High or so, I pretty much gave up making my own music till I resumed after moving to Colorado with Evan Cantor, originally recording Little Fyodor songs on his home equipment until giving *that* up for a few years while I frolicked with Walls Of Genius…
I first got interested in music listening to Top 40 station WABC, New York in 1969 and then to “progressive” FM station WNEW (also New York).
It might have been getting into prog rock in general and ELP in particular that led me to losing interest in playing myself as, y’know, I was never any actual “good.” I don’t know that I ever thought about it consciously, but I was probably pretty discouraged by the lightning fast virtuosity of the rock gods I worshiped in that time period, say later high school.
I didn’t even bring my guitar with me to college…
It was the Sex Pistols and the like that got me thinking once again I could make music myself (and my crushing alienation that inspired me to!) And then when making experimental music, you didn’t necessarily have to actually know how to play any instrument at all! It could just be pure playfulness and creativity!
I was probably influenced by the Residents and Negativland and people influenced by Throbbing Gristle and by the myriad of weirdos engaged in the cassette underground network toward that end. Zillions of them. Many looked up to Walls Of Genius for actually having some musical ability! (Mostly because of Ed and Evan, not me!)
Listening real stoned to the first side of the Ramones’ second album, Leave Home, was the moment I realized punk could be something brilliant and got me to look at music totally differently.
If you had to explain your creative endeavors to some recently crash-landed aliens…
What would you tell them?
I’d tell them it means that I’m the only one on Earth they can trust, haha!!
For those at home who may be unaware – Please outline the what, who and why of the group Walls of Genius? With whom you played the important position of Assistant Head Moron.
Haha, well, Evan Cantor was the Head Moron and Ed Fowler and I were the assistant Head Morons! Many others were involved in Walls Of Genius but our status as Head or Assistant Head Morons reflected that we were at the core of the project!
It was a free-form open ended musical cassette networking project, and I prefer to call it a project than a band or group largely because the term “band” usually connotes a set lineup playing mostly set instruments (e.g Jimi on guitar, Noel on bass, Mitch on drums) and even if the band strays from that and/or gets Hal Blaine to help out in the studio, you still expect at least *something* that’s set in relative stone as the starting point of what makes them a band, and while WoG had that to some degree especially when we played live, it was often all over the place when we recorded.
It was a real anything goes situation with various people involved and even the three of us often playing whatever we could get our hands on at the moment. We also never practiced and never really had an ongoing setlist.
We turned the microphones on as soon as we got together and then chose the “best” moments to edit down for release. Much of it was improvised with little to no forethought. Some of it overlapped with the movement known as “free improvisation,” but often there was too much structure or patterns involved for that genre and sometimes we did plan a little bit, sometimes we’d write a song on the spot and record it and forget it the next day.
I like to say we were so free-form that we didn’t just stick to free-form!
We often liked to play wacky renditions of cover songs, mostly from the sixties but ultimately from anytime. I also think of it as a project because Walls Of Genius was a label as much as a “band” and we released material from other experimental bands in town such as Architects Office and the Miracle, with whom Evan and I participated. And we released two compilations of other artist’s material.
Stylistically we did whatever the moment called for but our main focus was madness, which could be humorous (albeit not the “punch line” type of comedy) or just adventurous explorations into the unknown.
We released thirty cassettes ranging from 45 to 90 minutes long in three years on our label (and one on Hal McGee’s), sometimes selling them but more often distributing them for attention or trade or just cause we felt like it (for friendship?) throughout the World Cassette Network – Which was quite the singular movement in music, made possible both by the newish technology of cheap portable recording equipment and cheap blank cassettes, but before the internet and computers brought such universality to a whole ‘nother level of ease and immediacy.
Jerry Kranitz has written an exhaustive book on the subject called Cassette Culture, and the accompanying CD includes our rendition of a World War II pop song called “Sunday, Monday or Always”, which we had never even heard of before we recorded our own version!
WoG received a fair amount of attention within this tiny fishbowl of activity, hopefully at least partly cause folks liked what we did but likely also at least partly because we were so prolific and were always sending our shit out to various zines including the Castenets column in the all important OP Magazine, which we bombarded constantly!
Again, you can hear and read all about WoG over at Hal McGee’s musical and textual archive of the band at http://www.haltapes.com/walls-of-genius.html, and surely there’s a lot of other stuff to find online about this project.
As mentioned or hinted at above, Evan and I had our differences, as unserious and anything-goes as it was all supposed to be, and we broke up in 1986, about three years after it had started in earnest….
How did you and your partner and oft-collaborator Babushka come to connect?
… and what impact has she had on your musical and personal development?
I found Babushka as a bag lady from the Olde Country pushing her shopping cart across a puddle in a grimy Denver alley (the moment is captured on our “I Want An Ugly Girl” video) and she took pity on me as a fellow lost soul and has assisted me ever since!
She plays keyboards and sometimes sings, including a song of her own composition, “The God Gripe Song”!
I’m very insecure and limited in my abilities, so it’s always been valuable to me to have a soul-mate of a collaborator!
Fellow musician Boyd Rice and yourself are friends and mutual fans of each other’s work – With Boyd having curated your greatest hits collection and covered your track The Blackness. And yourself having conducted Boyd’s marriage ceremony; to name but a few specific connections.
… and we were wondering…
* How did you and Boyd first get acquainted?
Once Boyd moved to Denver after he burned out on San Francisco, I think it was back in the 90’s, or maybe even the late 80’s, we just began to cross paths occasionally, and then Joel Haertling (of Architects Office) brought Boyd to one of our shows at Penny Lane Coffeehouse in Boulder.
I figured Boyd would like us cause he was a famed misanthrope who liked cheesy, campy stuff, and here we were misanthropic and cheesy and campy all rolled into one, and I was right, he became a fan!
Photo by Brian M Clark.
* What are your thoughts on Boyd’s art and music?
… do you have any favourite works of his?
I like a lot of Boyd’s work and I was playing it on my radio show before we ever even met. I can think offhand of one piece of his called “Out! Out! Out!” so I’ll call that my favorite! He was definitely an innovator in his exploration of pure electronic noise, before there was a “noise music” genre as such.
Oh and there’s also a spoken word piece called “People” in which he expresses his misanthropy by praising mass murderers throughout history, that one’s entertaining….
– Please share with us some of your favourite memoirs of Boyd…
Boyd mostly keeps to himself, and we’ve mostly gotten to know each other in middle age, so it’s not like I have a list of wacky exploits with him. It’s true that I married him and his lovely wife Karin in the basement of the novelty theme restaurant Casa Bonita.
Since Boyd covered my song The Blackness, he made a guest appearance performing vocals on it during our Greatest Hits release show at the Bluebird Theater.
I’ve gone to his birthday party on occasions over the years, and he’s always good fun with lots of stories to tell.
– Has Boyd ever tried to tempt you away from the Church of the SubGenius, and into the loving arms of the Partridge Family Temple?
Haha, no. Boyd couldn’t care less about indoctrinating anyone.
I find the Partridge Family Temple fascinating but you have to change your name to Partridge to genuinely join and that’s a bit of a high bar for me.
(As a result, I don’t know that Boyd is really a member either, though maybe they made an exception for him? See, I don’t know!)
If people wanted to listen to your music, work with you or buy some of your wares – Where should they visit and how should they get in touch?
My personal website is littlefyodor.com and there are Bandcamp sites you can find easily enough for both Little Fyodor and for Walls Of Genius.
You can always email me at littlefyodor@yahoo.com!
You can find fan videos online too, often with music not posted anywhere else, with just a wee bit more googling.
Odds and Ends
If you could live in any place, during any historical era – Where and when would that be?
…and why would you choose that time and place?
I wouldn’t mind transporting into the midst of the Summer Of Love at Haight-Ashbury in 1967, but I’d want the option of transporting out, too!
Being able to visit the CBGB’s scene in its mid 70’s heyday would be pretty cool, too.
What role did toys play in your childhood?
I liked plastic dinosaurs!
I gave up on cowboys and Indians when no one wanted to shoot me.
Does sex change everything?
Pretty much.
Fertile ground for sociobiologists….
What are the top 3 items you own?
… and what is it about each of them that you so love?
My house, my guitar and my cell phone.
Please describe your last dream in detail…
It drives me crazy but I keep forgetting my dreams within moments of waking up!
I’ll go, “Hmm, that was an interesting dream,” and then I’ll start to try to recreate it in my mind just to realize I’ve already forgotten it! What does THAT mean? (since dreams are always supposed to mean something.)
It’s very frustrating….
Of everything you have done, what would you most like to be remembered for?
I take most pride in my songs and hope that I can reach people in a deep place and that they can relate to them and find them personally meaningful and thought provoking.
While it won’t actually affect me once I’m dead, I can die happy if I think maybe my songs will continue having that effect on people….
Links
- Little Fyodor – Website
- Little Fyodor – Bandcamp
- Little Fyodor – YouTube
- Little Fyodor – twitter
- Little Fyodor – Discogs Entry
- Little Fyodor & Babushka – Facebook
- Walls of Genius – Bandcamp
- Walls of Genius – Discogs Entry
- Walls of Genius – History (via HalTapes)
- Evan Cantor – Website
- Ed Fowler – Discogs Entry
All images supplied by Little Fyodor and Brian M Clark, or sourced online.
