You never heard such sounds in your life
In 1964, Bernard Stollman launched the independent record label ESP-Disk' in New York City to document the free jazz movement there. A bare-bones enterprise, ESP was in the right place at the right time, producing albums by artists like Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra, as well as folk-rock bands like the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. But the label quickly ran into difficulties and, due to the politically subversive nature of some productions and sloppy business practices, it folded in 1974. Always in Trouble tells the story of ESP-Disk' through a multitude of voices—first Stollman's, as he recounts the improbable life of the label, and then the voices of many of the artists involved.
You never heard such sounds in your life
In 1964, Bernard Stollman launched the independent record label ESP-Disk' in New York City to document the free jazz movement there. A bare-bones enterprise, ESP was in the right place at the right time, producing albums by artists like Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra, as well as folk-rock bands like the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. But the label quickly ran into difficulties and, due to the politically subversive nature of some productions and sloppy business practices, it folded in 1974. Always in Trouble tells the story of ESP-Disk' through a multitude of voices—first Stollman's, as he recounts the improbable life of the label, and then the voices of many of the artists involved.
Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk', the Most Outrageous Record Label in America
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Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk', the Most Outrageous Record Label in America
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Overview
You never heard such sounds in your life
In 1964, Bernard Stollman launched the independent record label ESP-Disk' in New York City to document the free jazz movement there. A bare-bones enterprise, ESP was in the right place at the right time, producing albums by artists like Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra, as well as folk-rock bands like the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. But the label quickly ran into difficulties and, due to the politically subversive nature of some productions and sloppy business practices, it folded in 1974. Always in Trouble tells the story of ESP-Disk' through a multitude of voices—first Stollman's, as he recounts the improbable life of the label, and then the voices of many of the artists involved.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819571601 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Music / Interview |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Who, Where, When
Beginnings and Departures
As the founder of a label unlike any other, Bernard Stollman shared the Jewish immigrant background of certain Hollywood moguls and also a few jazz impresarios, yet with many distinct turns. How he ended up in music, running a business that was hardly a business, seemed anything but a likely outcome. He recounts his own circuitous path along the way.
My father, David, was born at the turn of the century, in the small Polish market town of Krynki [Krinik]. He was the third youngest of nine children whose father, a devout Orthodox Jew, labored for long hours as the foreman of a local tannery owned by his brothers. The rafters of their one-story house held stacks of curing hides, which gave off a terrible stench. My father attended yeshiva as a child, until he was apprenticed to a tailor at the age of twelve. One day, his closest friend came running to the shop to tell him excitedly that a traveling cantor had arrived in town and was auditioning boy singers to accompany him on his tour of the great synagogues of Poland and Russia. My father's sweet voice won him employment, and the two boys found themselves celebrities, warmly applauded by congregations whose women showered them with attention and fine food.
When a year had elapsed, his voice began to change with the onset of puberty. The First World War had begun and the cantor abruptly fled to America, abandoning him in a distant city without funds. Desperate, the boy approached a well-dressed stranger on the train platform and told him of his plight. He asked to borrow the train fare, requesting the man's name and address, and insisted that he would repay the loan when he reached his home. The man gave him the fare and refused my father's offer. This generous gesture left an indelible impression on him, and he recounted it with wonderment to me half a century later.
My mother, Julia Friedman, lived in Jurewicz, a small town on the border of Lithuania and Poland. She had four sisters and a brother. Her father had attended university to study accounting, and he was the town scribe as well as a schochet [kosher butcher]. She and her brother, Boris, were raised by their grandmother, a strong woman who owned the town's livery stable, which housed the coaches that the czar would use when visiting the region. My mother attended the local grade school for three years under the new communist regime. Her father had left his family to go to the United States in 1913, in order to earn enough money to bring them over. When the war broke out in 1914, he could not return. His family was stranded without funds, so their living conditions were very harsh. The money that he accumulated was lost to a swindler. He was finally able to return in 1920. When she saw him, my mother angrily accused him of abandoning them.
When she arrived in the United States at the age of thirteen, she attended high school at night and worked in a department store during the day. She learned English and eventually spoke impeccably. My father was twenty-two when he arrived. He learned to speak reasonably well, with almost no accent. Both had come to the United States in 1920, the last year the doors were open to immigration. They met for the first time two years later, in the balcony of a Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side. She was not interested in him, but she had three older unmarried sisters she thought he might consider. He was not to be deterred and, after two years, they married. His three older brothers had come to America earlier in the century and peddled fruits and vegetables from horse-drawn carts in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He acquired his own horse and wagon, and among his customers was the Johnson family, founders of Johnson & Johnson. My mother decided they should open a dry goods store in Rahway, New Jersey, where they initially settled.
In the fall of 1929, four months after my birth in New Brunswick, we moved to Plattsburgh, New York, where my mother's parents and sisters had settled. A city of seventeen thousand, Plattsburgh is, like much of upstate New York, scenically beautiful, with a long history of economic distress. On the shores of Lake Champlain, thirty miles south of the Canadian border, it has one of the finest sand beaches in North America. It housed the barracks of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Division and a paper mill, a teachers college, and little else of note. My parents opened a dress shop there in 1930, just a few months after the great crash on Wall Street, at the beginning of the Depression. Plattsburgh was composed largely of two population groups, both Catholic: the descendants of French Canadians, many of whom spoke French at home, and the Irish. Each group had its own bishop, church, and parochial schools. There was little mixing between the two communities.
Was there an Old World orientation in the family when you were growing up?
My parents thought America was paradise. They never talked about the old country. They had dark, negative feelings about their early years and never expressed an interest in returning.
They were very progressive, and not at all religious, but they were honest and ethical. Mother's father combined the roles of rabbi and schochet. Before making their home in Plattsburgh, they had lived in towns up and down the East Coast. Wherever they went, they lasted about a year. To survive, her father surreptitiously became a conventional butcher. So he'd be butchering hogs, and it didn't take long for the Jewish community to become upset. He would lose his position, and they would move to another town.
My parents developed few social ties in the Plattsburgh community. They worked around the clock, spending much of their time traveling to small towns in northern New York and Vermont, where they opened six additional stores to form a small chain. My mother had good business sense, and my father's training as a tailor proved invaluable. He was an excellent window draper. His window displays were successful in drawing customers, which gave them an edge over the competition. He was a superb salesman who charmed the local farm women, to whom they supplied inexpensive and tasteful garments for their difficult figures. The stores became magnets for Canadian tourists, including prostitutes, for whom the Plattsburgh store stocked gaudy, vividly decorated dresses that resembled the Parisian bordello attire depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec in his paintings.
When they traveled to their stores, my father would drape the windows and teach the managers to display garments. While the name of most of the shops was Stollman's, in Burlington and St. Albans, Vermont, my brother Solomon, who had earned an industrial design degree from Pratt, installed modern stores for them, with my assistance, and those were called Bernsol's. My parents were astute merchandisers. Dad used a unit control system on flip cards that I had designed for him, which showed every item in every store, and he loved to sit at home and observe what sold in which stores. If a store manager or a saleswoman liked a particular item, and it was selling well, they would transfer these garments there from their other stores.
Where were they buying the clothes?
New York had a flourishing garment district in the West 30s. On the avenues were the higher-priced manufacturers, and my parents bought coats and suits from them. They stocked well-made, inexpensive garments. For a number of years, my parents used a resident buyer in the garment district who knew all the manufacturers. They made seasonal buying trips to New York, driving down Route 9, an eight-hour trip, and they would stay at the Hotel New Yorker, adjacent to the garment district. The manufacturers had great respect for them — my mother was a lovely woman; my dad was a gregarious, dapper individual. They were a striking couple. One day I said to them, "You've just become resident buyers. Print up your order book; you're going to become the AAA Buying Service." They did that and began to get the 6 percent commission that the resident buyer had obtained from the manufacturers. The manufacturers didn't mind, as it was factored into their prices.
As a youth I would travel down with them once a year, making the rounds of the showrooms with them. I knew nothing about women's fashions. But I reacted instinctively to colors and designs. Besides, the raincoat showrooms had models wearing black slips to make it easier to don and remove the coats, and they were beautiful girls. I was thirteen or fourteen, and it was mind-boggling for me.
What sort of perspective came with being the oldest of seven kids?
My parents were away a lot. Our French-Irish live-in housekeeper cooked for us and looked after the younger ones, but she had two children of her own. She was divorced, and her children were being raised by her parents. I felt a responsibility to my siblings. I was the surrogate father. The youngest was about fourteen years younger than me. I'm told that the oldest child in a family often does not marry. I had many opportunities, but I just let them go by — until I was in my forties, which is late.
As the firstborn son, did you feel particular expectations from your parents or within yourself?
Both. During the years I was growing up, I had to get a hundred in my exams. My parents never raised this subject, but somehow it was implicit that I would have to excel. I was totally absorbed in school and in every extracurricular activity. Throughout high school I did little socializing.
Were you raised with much of a Jewish orientation in the family? Did you hear Yiddish around the house?
My parents spoke Yiddish occasionally, but only to exchange their thoughts privately. The Reform synagogue had a congregation of upper-class, educated, second- and third-generation German Jews. And there was a second congregation, in the Orthodox synagogue. It was a conventional Orthodox shul, with a bimah [altar] at its eastern end and a mikvah [ritual bath] in its basement. I had my bar mitzvah service in that synagogue. These were two distinct communities: the merchant community that went to the Reform synagogue and the Orthodox Eastern European Jewish immigrants. As a twelve-year-old, I became the organist in the Reform synagogue. I wasn't trained, and I didn't know how to work the pedals, but I could play the keyboard. The rabbi was a gnome-like man of advanced age; he would cue me and I would play the hymn. Once, during a sermon, I mischievously pressed a pedal that emitted a squawking sound.
What kind of musical education did you have in Plattsburgh?
I had weekly piano lessons from the age of seven until I was thirteen. My teacher was one of three daughters and a son of the late Charles Hudson, a sea captain who had married a Chinese woman on one of his voyages. The Hudsons were tall, handsome, distinguished individuals, none of whom married, living during their later years in the shadow of the father whose memory they detested and suffering the racism that characterized popular attitudes during that era. They lived together throughout their lives in a stately, white frame house on Court Street, in which they ran the Hudson School of Music. All were highly accomplished musicians. They taught string instruments and provided cultural life to the town. They created a string ensemble that would rehearse there. The smell of rosin was pungent in the living room when I came for my piano lessons. Their parlor was full of Chinese screens and art objects, which their father had collected in his travels. The environment had a profound influence on my outlook regarding music.
How old were you when the family moved to New York? Did the change affect you much?
When I was sixteen, my parents bought a house in Forest Hills, Queens, but couldn't occupy it yet. I rented an apartment with my next younger brother, and for eight months we attended Forest Hills High School, living on our own. The year was 1945.
While I was a high school student in Plattsburgh, trains would come up from New York City with two daily newspapers: the New York Post, which was a very different New York Post from the Rupert Murdoch one of today, and PM, the radical left newspaper. I observed the Second World War through the lens of these publications. I read Max Lerner and I. F. Stone. They prepared me for the move to New York City.
How did you fare in college? Did you remain a diligent student?
When I attended Columbia, on a scholarship, the teachers were highly rated, but I was bored with sitting in the classroom. I lived in the dorm and then in rooming houses off campus. I would show up regularly to work in my parents' business, now based in a loft on West 36th Street in the garment district, from which they shipped merchandise to their stores. At Columbia, all around me were veterans of World War II, who were very serious about obtaining a professional education. The only courses I enjoyed were French literature of the nineteenth century, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and Chaucer. I tried campus radio, and then found a berth at the campus humor magazine, the Jester. In the spring of my third year, I was suspended from school in midterm for flunking Soviet Economics, poor grades, and cutting classes. I went west and found a job as a laborer in a Wyoming tunnel construction project, surrounded by strong silent men, and lived in a tiny cell with a slatted wooden door. At the end of two weeks, it was clear to me and the foreman that I was not strong enough to maintain the pace. I went on to Los Angeles, where I worked briefly at various jobs, including as a stock clerk in a drug store and as a gas station attendant. In the fall, I returned to Columbia, where I was readmitted. I took the law aptitude exam and scored in the top 2 percentile. My faculty adviser suggested that I enter Columbia Law School on professional option, which meant I would not have to finish college.
Was there anything in particular that made you think of law school?
It was the prospect of being drafted for the Korean War. I don't know if I ever would have chosen medicine as a career. A Jewish youth is expected to choose law or medicine or commerce. I was comfortable with law, assuming that the training would be useful in whatever career I undertook. Cutting classes, I would digest three texts for each course prior to the exam. This required a periodic frenzy of reading, but it freed me to continue my self-indulgent practices. As graduation day approached, the dean called me in. He said, "Bernard, we can't let you loose on an unsuspecting society. Your professors have no idea what you look like." He insisted that I take an extra term and attend class diligently. I graduated in January 1954 and then in March I was drafted. The Korean War was now in an armistice phase.
Were you ever tempted to enter the family business?
No.
So then you allowed yourself to be drafted. ...
I could have avoided it. At my physical, the examining doctor offered me an out and said, in effect, "Do you want this?" Being drafted, I didn't have to take the bar. I didn't mind that at all. Also, I was curious about the world. The war was over, and I hadn't traveled outside the United States, except to Montreal.
I was assigned to Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, to learn teletype operator skills and spent much of the hot summer in the base swimming pools. Visiting a large barbershop on the base for my first haircut, I studied the barbers and noted that one young black barber clearly took pride in his work. When his chair was free, I sat in it. The barber quietly informed me that he could not cut my hair. I asked him to identify the shop owner. The barber pointed to a short, elderly white man who was unloading barber supplies from his van. "Hold the chair," I said. "I'll be back."
I approached the proprietor. "I care about my appearance, and that barber is good. I would like him to cut my hair." He adopted a confidential manner. "Look, son, in our shops, white barbers cut white boys' hair and black barbers cut black boys' hair. You wouldn't want to catch a disease, would you?" I ignored the comment and reiterated my request. The owner, sensing an impasse, changed his tone. "You will have to sign a paper, releasing the barbershop from responsibility for anything that might happen to you." I stated that I would sign the release, returned to the chair, and directed the barber to proceed. I noticed that all of the eight barbers, white and black, were staring. The barber's hand trembled slightly from nervousness. When the haircut was finished, I signed the statement in a notebook that was proffered to me by the proprietor.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Always in Trouble"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Jason Weiss.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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Table of Contents
<P>Acknowledgments<BR>A Note on the Photographers<BR>Introduction<BR>WHAT GOT INTO HIS HEAD: BERNARD STOLLMAN, FOUNDER OF THE LABEL<BR>IN THE GREAT BEFORE<BR>Who, Where, When: Beginnings and Departures<BR>Music and Law: Into the Deep End Fast<BR>THE RISE AND FALL AND PERSISTENT RESURRECTION OF A CURIOUS RECORD COMPANY<BR>The Initial Years<BR>While It Worked<BR>Decline and Fall<BR>On Individual Artists<BR>About Some Records<BR>A Word or Two on Record Engineers<BR>Close Encounters in the Music Business<BR>A Short History of Licensing<BR>In the Wilderness<BR>Revival<BR>ESP-DISK' AS LIVED AND WITNESSED<BR>Ishmael Reed<BR>Gunter Hampel<BR>John Tchicai<BR>Paul Thornton<BR>James Zitro<BR>Sonny Simmons<BR>Gary Peacock<BR>Milford Graves<BR>Alan Sondheim<BR>Tom Rapp<BR>Warren Smith<BR>Roscoe Mitchell<BR>Michael Snow<BR>Marion Brown<BR>Richard Alderson<BR>Roswell Rudd<BR>Montego Joe<BR>Evan Parker<BR>Alan Silva<BR>Giuseppi Logan<BR>Peter Stampfel<BR>Burton Greene <BR>The Coach with the Six Insides: Jean Erdman and Van Dexter<BR>Leo Feigin<BR>Erica Pomerance<BR>Joe Morris<BR>William Parker<BR>Ken Vandermark<BR>Gato Barbieri<BR>Amiri Baraka<BR>Michael D. Anderson<BR>Sal Salgado<BR>Lindha Kallerdahl<BR>Sirone<BR>Sunny Murray<BR>Marc Albert-Levin<BR>Jacques Coursil<BR>Steve Weber<BR>Steve Stollman<BR>Index<BR>Photographs also included</P>What People are Saying About This
"ESP's music was startling, and it was unusual to have one company bring out so many styles of music at once under the same logo. This book takes a biographical approach to the label, and presents one of the best accounts I've seen of a chaotic, bizarre, and thrilling time."
— John Szwed, author of Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World
“Always in Trouble brims with lively, revealing stories and anecdotes. A multi-sided look at the legendary ESP record label, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural explosions of the 1960s.”
"ESP's music was startling, and it was unusual to have one company bring out so many styles of music at once under the same logo. This book takes a biographical approach to the label, and presents one of the best accounts I've seen of a chaotic, bizarre, and thrilling time."—John Szwed, author of Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World
"Always in Trouble brims with lively, revealing stories and anecdotes. A multi-sided look at the legendary ESP record label, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural explosions of the 1960s.""——Nathaniel Mackey, author of Bass Cathedral
"By allowing Bernard Stollman and the artists he embraced to speak, multiple perspectives illuminate human stories that are by turns incisive, tragic, hilarious, petty, visionary, idealistic, paranoid, and never pedestrian.""—Nels Cline, guitarist for Wilco, The Nels Cline Singers, and others
"ESP's music was startling, and it was unusual to have one company bring out so many styles of music at once under the same logo. This book takes a biographical approach to the label, and presents one of the best accounts I've seen of a chaotic, bizarre, and thrilling time."—John Szwed, author of Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World
“By allowing Bernard Stollman and the artists he embraced to speak, multiple perspectives illuminate human stories that are by turns incisive, tragic, hilarious, petty, visionary, idealistic, paranoid, and never pedestrian.”