Liner Notes by PEK

This is Evil Clown’s first ever rock record and was made with conventional studio techniques: Separate tracking and overdubbing followed by mixing and mastering. We usually record everything Live-to-2-track for efficiency and for the LIVESTREAM.

In the early 80s when I was about 20 years old, I was in a rock band with older more experienced musicians in Santa Cruz, California called Local 12 (short for Thieves, Villains, and Scoundrels Union – Local 12) – a Bullwinkle reference. Boris is on strike with a union sign that says “Unfair to Local Villains – Thieves, Villains, and Scoundrels Union – Local 12…”

I had joined this band after it had been around for several years and had already gone through several guitar players – The original name of the band was The Fabulous Weiners. The band name change occurred before my arrival because the band members disagreed over its racy connotations…

This band had lots of interpersonal chaos and controversy – I was really good pals with Jim Smith and Dave Murray who were really tight with each other. They tended to disagree with Bob and Steve about a lot of different things and the band only lasted about a year and a half after I joined it.

Jim was the designated genius of the band – he wrote many of the songs, is an amazing vocalist and an excellent keyboardist. Dave is a great rock bassist. Bob (a surfer) was the drummer – he wrote some of the songs and did some of the singing and Steve, the guitarist when I joined, was later replaced by George. After the breakup of Local 12, Jim and Dave continued playing together in different bands for years.

I decided that I wanted more control of my instrument and resumed saxophone study with Kurt Heisig with whom I had taken lessons for maybe 5 years during junior high and high school. Difference being this time around I was serious and applied real discipline and focus for the 5 or 6 years from that time until I left for Berklee in Boston in 1989.

Jim is legally blind – he had normal vision until his late teens in high school when he rapidly lost most of his sight. He was a gifted visual artist and was preparing to go to art school when this happened to him. When I met him, maybe 8 years later, he was still doing art – black and white line drawings with pen – he could see pretty good detail through a small window in one eye, and he would get about 8 inches away from the page and he could still execute some amazing drawings.

In 1992, after I left California for Boston (in 1989) to attend Berklee, Jim moved with his wife and young son Christopher back to Detroit (where he had originally come from) to have better family support while raising his young family. I had not seen him in person since, although we talk on the phone periodically.

I have seen Dave a bunch of times since he still lives in Santa Cruz and I go to California every year to see my mother who is now in Los Altos and I spend about half of each trip with my oldest pal Rob in Lompico which is in the Santa Cruz mountains about 10 miles from the town of Santa Cruz. While I was on my last trip a few months back, Dave came up to Rob’s to hang out, and I discovered that he was coming out to Connecticut to see his sister and meet her children for the first time in August.

The idea hatched that we should get Jim out from Detroit and do a Fabulous Weiners album, and, it happened. Dave drove to Boston from California so he could bring his instruments. He is retired, his car is in good shape, he’s originally from the east coast and he visited other people in New York and Maryland after we did the album, so this crazy choice actually made good sense.

We decided that we would call the band The Fabulous Weiners and that we would use one of Jim’s drawings from the early 80s for the album cover. Back in the day, Jim had given me 11×17 inch photocopies of a bunch of his drawings – maybe 20 years ago or so, I came across them and made high resolution scans which have been on my Evil Clown hard drives since. Since Jim now has an explicit Evil Clown connection, I have added a page to the website with all his drawings that I have. For the album cover, I looked through those files and selected the cover image of the husband at the BBQ wondering What the Fuck his wife is up to Vacuuming the Lawn…. I asked my housemate Raffi, who is also the video mixer for Evil Clown LIVESTREAMS, and who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from Mass Art, a prestigious Boston art school, to add color to the drawing. The original is fantastic as a black and white line drawing, but the Evil Clown brand uses the strongly colored fractal art images in the rest of the packaging, and a black and white drawing would have seemed strange and out of place. I could have added color in Photoshop, but Raffi is a real painter, and his colorization adds real depth and intensity to the drawing that I would never have achieved. The final image is amazing and is kind of a metaphor for the rebirth of this instrumental unit.

We decided to call the album WTF!? Works on a bunch of levels… WTF is she doing? WTF – is Evil Clown making a rock record? WTF is the Fabulous Wieners? WTF are they doing recording an album after 42 years? WTF!?

This is an actual rock record. We played Jim and Dave’s songs, two of them date back to the original band and 5 of them from bands they played in later on – one of which was repurposed with new words. We recorded like a rock band studio recording… First rhythm tracks, then other parts and vocals on top with overdubbing, etc. Jim sang and played keyboards and drums. Dave sang, played guitar and bass. I played my shit and Evil Clown Regulars John Fugarino and Michael Caglianone came in to provide a bigger horn section for overdubs on the last day of production. We recorded two improvised tracks in an Evil Clown style to open and close the album. This is truly an Evil Clown first – Some of the projects like Metal Chaos Ensemble and Neurodivergent Orchestra have some rock-leaning elements, but those bands’ performances are still purely improvised the same as every other Evil Clown release. This is very different: Rock songs recorded like a rock studio album.

My goal was to smash the Evil Clown Aesthetic with the Fabulous Weiners Aesthetic together. The opening and closing tracks (titled Evil Weiners and Fabulous Clowns), the way we used the horns on some of the songs and the sequencing of the material produced an album that exceeded my expectations and fufilled this ambition.

The Evil Clown Headquarters studio is really set up for Live-to-2 track, which is how nearly all Evil Clown albums are recorded. However, when Joel and I designed the current studio (when I remodeled the house about 3 years back to improve both the house environment for me and Raffi and the Studio environment for Evil Clown), we planned ahead for flexibility and included some patch bays in the signal chain that allowed us to send up to 14 channels at a time from my 48 channel board to Joel’s recording laptop without having to patch directly to the back of the board. More than enough channels for each pass to handle this recording task!

I cannot overstate how important these two guys are to me in my life. I was on a very different trajectory prior to playing with the Weiners. It was somewhat traumatic at the time because I stopped going to college in order to focus on this music which promptly fell apart – but my time with these guys made me realize that I needed to make music. Fifteen or so years later I did finish my Computer Science degree, which is how I now do the work that generates the income that drives Evil Clown. So, I did get to the professional day gig in my 30s. Now looking back at the age of 61, I have managed to make a huge body of serious music in my life and, while I took music lessons and played music in school from a very young age for about 10 years before this time, I consider the period with Jim and Dave in the early 80s to be the beginning of my serious life in music. My life would have unfolded very differently but for this first serious musical relationship.

Jim, Dave and I are very happy with the result of our week of recording. As of this writing I do not have final mixes, but the energy and connection between us is still strong even after over 3 decades of not playing together or even being all together in the same room. Before we did this, I had thought it might be the only time, but we have already discussed mining the archives for the Local 12 studio recordings made in the early 80s and the Headcutters recordings from later in the 80s which contain good recordings of other Jim and Dave songs for a follow up in the near future. They will be back to Evil Clown Headquarters for a new record in a year or maybe two for another new FW outing.

Stay Tuned.

PEK – 8/29/2026