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Little Fyodore
The Very Best of Little Fyodore's Greatest Hits
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.date Jan-08-2006
.style Psychedelic Rock
.label discriminate audio
.cat.no. n/a
.source CDDA
.type Album
.quality VBRkbps 44.1hz Joint-Stereo
.size 107,3 MB
______________________________________________________________________________.
http://www.littlefyodor.com/
http://www.discriminateaudio.com/
http://www.boydrice.com/
Boyd Rice Presents:
The Very Best of Little Fyodor's Greatest Hits!
Liner Notes:
In my time I've seen Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and
various members of the Rat Pack, but by far the most charismatic
performer I've ever laid eyes on, has got to be a man who goes by the
stage-name of Little Fyodor (pronounced Fee-A-Door, like Dostoevsky). On
the surface, he would appear to be the antithesis of what you'd expect
of a Pop Star; and he is - deliberately so. He has consciously inverted
the rock n' roll paradigm, and in so doing created a kind of bizarro-
world version of the rock idiom.
That said, Fyodor's music is perhaps truer to the spirit of rock
n' roll than anything produced by the sort of ersatz bad boys who feign
defiance in Mtv music videos. Little Fyodor is a genuine outsider, a pop
anti-hero who both laments and celebrates his alienation. His songs are
well-crafted pop psychodramas that usher the listener into a funzone in
which giddy glee and paranoia blur effortlessly into one another.
By way of introduction, we here reprint an interview I conducted
with Fyodor roughly a decade ago. Welcome to the world of Little
Fyodor...
-- Boyd Rice, 2005
Boyd: So how long have you been doing the Little Fyodor stuff?
Fyodor: Solo since about 1985. Before that I was in sort of a band
called Walls Of Genus, though Little Fyodor was born in late '81. That's
when I first started writing all these songs out of the desperate
depression I was in.
Boyd: But you didn't have the name Little Fyodor at that point?
Fyodor: Not quite; that came later. That was originally a friend's
idea as a joke. But I thought it was cool, because he knew I was reading
[Fyodor] Dostoevsky at the time.
Boyd: So having this Little Fyodor character helped you exorcise
all these things?
Fyodor: Yeah, it gave me a purpose in life, to express all the
shit that was going on inside me. All I wanted to talk to people about
was how depressed I was, but I thought, "I don't want to bum everyone
out by talking about that." So I wrote these funny songs about it
instead. Now I can entertain people with how depressed I am, instead of
bumming them out.
Boyd: Yeah, it seems a real kind of psychodrama. It seems like a
channel for focusing and expressing these feelings that probably go
through most people's minds, but they don't really have any outlet for
it. It just bubbles back there and festers.
Fyodor: Then they become mass murders and things like that. I
think 'most everyone's got this stuff going on in them to one degree or
anotherà I just wanted to examine all this shit rather than kind of try
to brush it aside or repress it, orà I 'm not sure how people deal with
it. It kind of slowly goes away as you become middle-aged, but I didn't
want to wait that long, at the time, I guess. You know, you're young and
impatientà Before I started doing songs, I was trying to be a writer,
but being a writer's so much more difficult. I'd walk around in my room
trying to think of something to write - that didn't help much. I'd come
up with all these great ideas for novels and stuff, but I'd never get
around to writing them. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Nathaniel
West - whose real name was Nathan Weinstein - and write short novels of
nasty satire, on how fucked up everything really was. His style of
writing is what I'd call minimalism. It's almost like his style of
writing and The Ramones' style of writing songs - those are combined
influences. All these short snappy satires that are just so black in
their nature, so negative - at looking at the underside of human life
that most people want to brush aside - and yet they're so hilarious in
the way they deal with it. So in that sense West's work was very
therapeutic for me when I was depressed, because I could just laugh at
all this stuff. So I feel I'm kind of on a mission to give that back to
all the other insects out there.
Boyd: There aren't many people who succeed at doing stuff that is
really funny - it entertains you and you can laugh at it - and yet it
has that weird, dark undertone, or sometimes sort of mean-spiritedness.
Fyodor: Hardly anyone wants to be both funny and sincere nowadays.
You're either sincere and deep - and you take a serous tone - or you're
comical, but not sincereà most people who try to do both are really just
making fun of poor schleps who're anti-social and stuff. What I'm doing
is satire, but I'm not really making fun of poor schleps - I'm
empathizing with poor schleps because I'm kind of a poor schlep myself.
But on the other hand, I wanted to raise it above the dreariness of
schlep-existence and bring it to another level. So if I'm making fun of
anything, it's just human existence; we're a race full of schleps. It's
kind of funny when you think about it, but when your experience is
schlepness, it's more painful. What I do is kind of the opposite of the
ancient Greeks. I heard that Nietzsche admired the Greeks for expressing
life as tragic, but the plight of the individual as comic. I'm sort of
the other way around. I guess it's mainly because I can't take seriously
crooners expressing how sad they are. To me it's just kind of hilarious
- but on the other hand, pain is real, too. I'm just trying to express
both at the same time. I think there's no contradiction there, and I've
always found myself disgusted with the notion that you have to take a
serious tone to express serious feelings. I disagree with that totally.
Boyd: People seem to pick-up on either the funny side of what you
do, or the sad side. A lot of people don't see both sides of your
expression.
Fyodor: I think that's just because they're not used to it.
They're trained to think it's one or the other. I think the people who
see more of the serious side, are people who have heard the recordings,
but haven't seen me live. Sometimes I get reactions like; someone once
saw me live and thought I was so silly I'd make Joe 'King' Carrasco look
like a depressive intellectual - but then, in Options, this reviewer
wrote, "This guy bums me out. This guy just hates the world. He thinks
everything sucks, and his band obviously agrees."
Boyd: It all seems stuff that's your real feelings, but an
exaggeration of them at times.
Fyodor: I like to use the word 'caricature.'
Boyd: I was going to say 'caricature,' but I didn't know if that
would be goodà
Fyodor: In a way it's like stick figures. People say to me, "Boy,
are you really like this?" And it's kind of like, you only have to feel
something for five seconds and you can write a song out of it.
Boyd: It's like an exaggeration, and at the same time, it's all
very real. I'm sure that stuff has gone through a lot of peoples' minds,
but they might prefer to turn on the TV and make it go away.
Fyodor: By exaggerating it and by making it humorous, you can deal
with things a lot more intensely than you can when you're being
realistic or somber, because you can get more at the root of it all. The
humor kind of sugar-coats it in a way, and the exaggeration kind of
blows it up, so you see it like a big picture. Like, "Nobody Wants to
Play With Me" - I wrote that actually as a result of working the
graveyard shift at the Hotel Boulderado, and seeing all these peopleà I
was new to town so I didn't know anyone, and here I was the front desk
clerk with a goddamn tie and stuff, and feeling very neurotic, and all
these people were like drinking and partying all around me. So I wrote a
song about someone whose whole life was like that, from point A to point
Z.
Boyd: I think most people think your stuff is either funny, or
stimulating... I focus on stuff like that because I hear it and think,
"God, that's exactly right!"
Fyodor: People are so into falling into molds; they like to mold
themselves just so they know what they are. I was never able to do that
for myself, and that's why I had these mixed feelings and paradoxes and
dilemmas going on within myself. I've never been able to mold myself as
easily as some people do. I don't know; that might sound smug or
somethingà and actually, here's why it's not smug: because a lot of the
time I would have wanted to. I've had a lot of people - when I told them
I wanted to be a hippie or things like that - go, "I thought you were an
individualist." And I'd say, "Yeah, but that was by accident!" Doing
Little Fyodor is what really helped me become comfortable with being an
individualist. Until then, I was always trying to fit in somehow, but
always failing.
Boyd: And it's even worse - you're even more of an outcast - when
you try to fit in someplace where you're obviously not meant to fit in.
Fyodor: It seems like that was everywhere. Especially after
progressive rock started becoming commercial - that was the last time I
fit into anything; when I was in high school, and an ELP freak. And then
all those bands like The Strawbs and ELP started singing all these
really sappy love songs, and I thought it sucked, but all my friends
were like, "Oh, this is great! This is great!", and I was like, "What's
wrong with you?" That's when I really started going into the ozone,
because I lost the one thing that had anchored me: my progressive rock,
and all my friends that were into progressive rock. I started seeing
through it. Then I started getting into '60s rock, but then I started
seeing through that, when I was tripping at a Grateful Dead concert and
everyone else was getting into the cosmic experience of the Grateful
Dead, and I got into the cosmic experience of realizing that everyone's
excited just because they want to be excited. That's what I'm seeing:
here's a crowd, here's a band. It's just a coincidence that they're both
here.
Boyd: A lot of the stuff you do has an abstract edge to it, but in
a lot of ways it's classic rock, the way the guitar and keyboards
interact; so it's hard to pin-down your influences.
Fyodor: That confuses people, because they don't know whether to
call it avant-garde or rock, because it's sort of neither. My main
influences were really late '70s punk, The Ramones, The Buzzcocks, The
Sex Pistols, and all the stuff where you just strum the hell out of the
guitar and bleed out all your feelings. On the other hand it's not just
normal - when I tell people I was influenced by The Ramones, a lot of
times they don't see any relation at all. Plus I have a more open-minded
attitude as to what music could or should be. It doesn't have to be all
one thing - a lot of times it takes on other influences - it can be more
abstract. It's not like I think if you don't have a bass and drums,
you're not allowed on a stage. I just do whatever works. I picked up a
guitar as a kid and put it down when I was listening to progressive
rock, because I thought I could never play all those leads and stuff
like that. Then after The Ramones, I thought, "Well, maybe all I need to
do is play chords? I love to play like that." There is a little bit of
that pure musician in me that loves strumming a guitar; it's kind of
like throwing a Frisbee or something. But it's not the point of what I'm
doing; I wouldn't be doing this except that I've got these ideas I want
to express, and strumming on the guitar is one way to do it. When I
heard The Ramones, that put a big smile on my face; but I'd given up on
being a hippie, so I wasn't really going to try being a punk, because
they were all taking fashion real seriously and all I wanted was to put
on was a t-shirt and jeans, and not comb my hair. So I didn't really fit
in with the punks either, even though I liked a lot of their music.
That's when I realized I was on my own. But that's when I started
writing some songs, kind of influenced by The Ramones. The first one was
"Useless Shit." It was right after college; I was a flop with girls, I
had a shitty job, and I was hanging out with these friends, who I kind
of liked, but I couldn't really communicate with. Then I got into avant
-garde music, and then into Walls of Genius. We were kind of an
experimental band, but we bucked a lot of rules for experimental bands,
because we did cheesy '60s songs, too. We did anything and everything,
and that was a lot of fun; I was the Assistant Head Moron. At our live
shows, Ed Fowler, one of the guitarists, decked us out in these
outlandish clothes he found in thrift stores. They told me to go out
first because they thought I was really funny, the way I sang and stuff.
And suddenly, once again, I realized I'd found my place in life:
onstage. I just got into wearing those clothes. It was the first style
in my life that I ever enjoyed. Eventually that broke up. Little Fyodor
is a much more focused thing. Occasionally my depravity showed through
in Walls of Genius; the other guys were a little scared of that. I think
they wanted to be a little more of a light-hearted, cheesy kind of
thing. One of them only got serious when it came to left-wing politics.
He did songs like, "Fuck You Ronald Regan," which I always felt a little
uncomfortable with. Not that I liked Ronald Regan, but it just seemed so
clichΘ to say, "Fuck You Ronald Regan."
Boyd: So many of my friends in San Francisco were into that, and
I'd always think, "These people are kind of smart, and so talented, and
it seems like a waste of their talent to do something that you could
have on a bumper-sticker. Why bother to tell someone something they
already know?" It's like, "What, everybody loves Ronald Regan? You're
like wising-them-up to the fact that he may be a goof or something?"
Fyodor: Well it was basically sloganeering. I went along with it,
but it wasn't how I'd really have expressed myself. I want everything to
be connected to what's going on inside me, so if I sing, "The world's
doomed," it's because I'm doomed. I try to make the connection. I think
one of the biggest problems in politics is everybody thinking, "I'm
right and you're fucked up." I try to show that in some of my songs, but
I never want to preach to people, because people will listen to whatever
they're going to listen to. They're going to hear what they want to hear
and they'll tune out every thing don't, so there's really no point. I'm
not interested in it anyway. Though if I could encourage people to think
for themselvesà
Boyd: That's something people will either do, or they won't do.
Fyodor: That's probably true - it's kind of an impossible dream
for me, anyway. I like to write songs that invite people in by giving
them something to relate to, and then put it in a context in which what
they're relating to is something they would have seen in other people;
like this is them, not me. So I try to create that cognitive dissonance,
so that people have to see in themselves what they don't want to see; or
see in other people things that they don't like, that are in them. So on
the other hand, if people just think it's all a big goof, well
aesthetically I prefer that to being taken overly seriously. Although I
know on the other handà I know that only when people start writing about
what a genius I am, that's the only time I'll ever get popular - like
The Talking Heads and all that kind of crap. That always pissed me off,
when people would come up in my face and go, "Don't you realize what a
genius David Byrne is?" That always used to piss me off so much, just
because his lyrics never made any sense.
Boyd: Maybe if you started writing lyrics people didn't quite
understand, they'd think, "This guy must be really smart, because he
knows what this means, and I can't quite catch on."
Fyodor: I just can't bring myself to do that. Not for moral
reasons - I just don't know how. This is the only thing I know how to
do, really, is writing these songs that are results of dilemmas that I'm
going through, and yet at the same time, seeing the absurdity of it all.
I'm just now finishing songs that I wrote years ago, when I was really
depressed. It's like, "I'm going into the studio next week, I guess I'd
better finish up that song." I started "The Blackness" ten years ago; I
started finishing it a couple years ago, when I was driving into the
mountains and thinking about how I was polluting the mountains in order
to appreciate them. That's when I started writing the lines of, "I know
the arguments are good and long, about how all that I do is wrong." On
the other hand, I know that you just have to not give a shit, or the
best thing you can do environmentally is to kill yourself. When I
pointed that out to someone, they said that if that's true, then what
you want to do is take as many people with you firstà
Boyd: That's really deep ecology - six feet under!
Fyodor: The richer, the better, of course. The rich use more
resourcesà So you could go to some disco and try and kill as many rich
people as you can at one timeà
Boyd: Yeah, that's what David Berkowitz wanted to do. He was going
to do it the very night they caught him. Darn the luck, huh?
Fyodor: Well, the world is filled with would-have-beensà
2005 DISCRIMINATE AUDIO / Boyd Rice
______________________________________________________________________________.
01 you give me hard-on 01:24
02 i want an ugly girl 01:40
03 everybody's fucking 00:30
04 too many people 01:42
05 happy people 02:39
06 the blackness 04:55
07 watching the squirrels 03:36
08 small talk 01:29
09 i go to parties 02:08
10 i thought people liked fools 02:31
11 no relief in sight 02:37
12 doomed 03:21
13 this diamond ring 02:55
14 i don't know what to do 04:44
15 everybody's fucking (reprise) 01:15
16 nobody wants to play with me 03:19
17 i wanna be the buddha 02:21
18 like an earthquake 02:20
19 tried 01:42
20 fuck it 02:20
21 blank track 01:12
22 blank track 00:36
23 blank track 00:52
24 blank track 00:11
25 blank track 00:24
26 blank track 00:17
27 the blackness (reprise) 05:35
. .
58:35 min
______________________________________________________________________________.
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