Bingo Gazingo

Who was Bingo Gazingo?

Murray Wachs, better known as Bingo Gazingo, was an elderly poet and former postal worker from New York City. Two versions, each also titled Bingo Gazingo, have been released of the only single-artist album ever released by WFMU -- the first on cassette, the second on CD.

The album consists of Bingo's reading his poems to an improvised musical accompaniment by WFMU DJs R. Stevie Moore, Bob Brainen, Dennis Diken, Dave Amels, Chris Bolger and Chris Butler, and engineered by Amels. Often, while performing live, the background music to his frantic, poetic incantations is nothing more than a cassette tape inserted into a cheap cigar-box tape recorder and miked.

Bingo's poetry often contain hilarious rhyme schemes, extended stream-of-consciousness rambling, and crude language, with titles like "Up Your Jurassic Park" and "I Love You So Fucking Much I Can't Shit". In the past he has penned hyper-caffeinated odes to Madonna, Tupac Shakur, and Beavis and Butthead, and had his "Everything's O.K. at the O.K. Corral" featured on a 1996 CD produced by the famed Greenwich Village coffeehouse Fast Folk Cafe.