Someday, someone should write a definitive story about the history of ESP records, because they are surely one of the strangest companies (and much of their product among the most elusive) in history. Their records (some of them, anyway) are packaged with all the sturdy solemnity of Folkways library collections, and the cover art has generally been either bizarrely imaginative or unbelievably shoddy. Since 1964, they’ve introduced such contemporary titans as Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and Gato Barbieri, as well as providing important releases by sometimes elusive musicians of stature like Steve Lacy, Bud Powell, Paul Bley, releasing Ornette Coleman’s classic 1962 Town Hall concert, bringing Sun Ra back to us after far too long, and coming up with some of the most off-the-wall items in recording history. Like William Burroughs’ stunning readings from Naked Lunch and Nova Express, a musical adaptation of Finnegan’s Wake, Patty Waters’ pre-Yoko album of 16 minute shrieks based on “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”, and the East Village Other Electric Newspaper — a sloppy, rather cynical “collage” of the radio broadcast of LBJ’s daughter’s wedding, Ishmael Reed reading from The Free Lance Pallbearers, songs by Tuli Kupferberg and Steve Weber of Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders (“If I Had Half A Mind”, which is one of the great all-time obscure rock croak masterpieces), some good jazz by Marion Brown and fascinating “Noise” by the early Velvet Underground (both of them cut criminally short), a witless smattering of camp gossip by Warhol acolytes Ingrid Superstar and Gerard Malanga (“I could turn Steve Reeves on — just like that,” bragged Ingrid, snapping her fingers), an interminable and equally witless “Interview with Hairy” by Ed Sanders and Ken Weaver pushing their Play boy/locker room humor much too far, and Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky chanting mantras even more interminably though equally as boring. Also, a liner listing of “SILENCE by Andy Warhol, copyright 1932”, which must refer to the empty bands leading you in and out of each side. The strong temptation is to call Warhol’s spot the highlight of* the record, but it does have Brown and the Velvets, which was why I bought it. Unfortunately, however, they only got to play for about a minute apiece, and the blaring radio broadcast of Luci’s wedding which runs through the whole record all but drowns them out. Not only that, but it’s set stereo center, so you can’t turn out one speaker to fully absorb that brief moment of primal Velvet. Still, you’ve got to admit that it’s a one-of-a-kind item, and I’ll probably keep it forever. My kids might get a kick out of Luci’s wedding.

Another interesting ESP album is Nu Kantu En Esperanto (Sing Along in Esperanto). I don’t know how many people know this, or if anybody even cares anymore, but there was a brand-new language devised a few years ago by some incredible genius or maniac, based on several European tongues and phonics. He called it Esperanto, and a foundation was set up to promote its adoption worldwide as the new International Language, wiping out French, English, Swahili, all the others — and part of the rationale behind that proposal was somebody’s notion that this would be a way of promoting world peace by sort of manufacturing a Tower of Babel in reverse. If we all spoke the same language, perhaps then we could all get along, no more wars or exploitation, because then we would all understand each other! (I may be simplifying this a bit.) What all this has to do with ESP records is that for a long time, perhaps even today, they had some vague connection with the Esperanto foundation. Until a year or two ago, all ESP releases had a short message about prices and how to order by mail on the back, translated into Esperanto. But what’s the connection? Do Esperanto speakers dig Ayler and Gato, or even the Fugs and the Godz? Does their knowledge of the new International and so far all but useless Language attune them to the lofty realms where high-energy music soars and William Burroughs croaks out old Doc Benway’s lines with perfect snake-oil sonority? Or does Esperanto have some implicit connection with the emergent counter-culture, the Life Culture, whatever you want to call it? Will we all speak Esperanto after the Revolution and become true brothers and sisters at last and lay down the gun for good? It’s food for thought.

So I have never quite understood the record company called ESP. Warner/Reprise they’re not. Cloaked in mystery, inevitably issuing from New York City, they’ve recorded some of the greatest jazz and most unclassifiable idiosyncrasies of our time. And, periodically, they’ve made hesitant steps at signing rock talent. But what sort of rock group signs with ESP? The Rascals? The Lovin’ Spoonful? No, not even the Mothers or the Velvet Underground. Unchallenged as the most prototypically Underground record company in America, it stands to reason that they would have to sing the most ultra-Underground of Underground groups. So they started with the Fugs in 1966, and the product of the association is a testament both to the genius of the band and the vision of the company. The first two Fugs albums are enshrined forever in the pantheon of heroic rock‘n’roll manias. The inspiration blazing behind songs like “Swinburne Stomp”, “Nothing” and “Frenzy” will never again be equalled. I remember buying the Virgin Forest album in 1966, staggering back to the record store and asking the girl what their first album could be like? “Oh, pretty much like that,” she smiled, “except more primitive.” More primitive?! Much more primitive than that and they’d have loincloths and bones in their noses. But, of course, infinite extension in either 'direction is possible to artists of true vision, so it was, and the first real Fugs could likely have made an album that would have tal^en that slab of backalley primitivism and reduced it to the square root of its nth division, into the yowlings of missing links around the purple fire, and it still woulda been a great, wailing, infinitely entertaining record.

Unfortunately, however, the Fugs were seduced by the big money and technicolor jackets of Frank Sinatra and Reprise, and after that their albums just got worse and worse, until we’d lost yet another great musical Yeti forever. Which left us crying up the sleeves of our Bobby Dylan worker shirts and listening to Count Five and Question Mark, but left ESP with a haunted hole where their larger-than-life boogie poets once slouched, and they had to scout around and find somebody fast. Oh, they always had Pearls Before Swine, but who gave a spoonful of swill for them? They were soon to follow the Fugs to the warm fold of the emergent Burbank Adult-Rock cartel, anyway, and if Sanders and the boys never quite fit there the fuckin’ place was made for P.B. Swine, just find ’em a berth in the stable for snotnose minstrels, right between Arlo and the one reserved for James Taylor.

The only thing was that for awhile there it really looked like ESP was gonna start a whole line of rock albums, promising to sign the most outrageous and/or untouchable scalawags from Maine to El Cajon, California. (I even nurtured my own fantasies, blatting my harp and singing “Clark Kent” and “Keep Off the Grass”.) Fired by the holy frenzy of the Fugs, I ran right out and tried to steal a copy of Pearls Before Swine. I took a copy of that and the Remains album, which I have never seen and wondered about ever since, and shoved them in my pants and pulled my coat over and walked out and got busted. But I believed in ESP! I went right back soon as my social security check arrived and bought the damn thing, the very same copy I’d tried to lift! Imagine the dent in my artistic sensitivity when I got it home and its pallid putrefaction hit my nostrils! What next — Albert Ayler Swings Stephen Foster??

Luckily, however, the Godz came along at about that time, put me back on the right track and restored my faith in ESP. And it’s the Godz I’ve mainly written this for, because their art has fascinated me for four years — meanwhile absolutely ignored, as so many great artists are, by the rock press and the world at large. The Godz, in a word, are phenomenal. They don’t take up where the^ Fugs left off — nobody could do that — but they do sometimes approximate the nth devolution of the Fugs’ yawp to the point of squatting dogmen around the cannibal fire. Other times they would remind me of you and me and New York City and the vast vacuous beauty of this crap culture we’re fryin’ in.

One thing to be said about them is that they may well be the most inept band I’ve ever heard. I’d almost grant out of hand that they’re the most inept recording band I’ve ever heard. And that they are the most inept band with three albums to their credit, I cannot deny. Why have they made three albums when so many great, talented, professional, musicianly bands get dumped unceremoniously after one? Because the Godz are brilliant, that’s why, and most talented professional musicianly bands are stupid and visionless and exactly alike. Also, perhaps, because most TPMB’s don’t record for ESP.

\ Say, \ Clyde, have you heard The Godz?

Don't be silly, I'm an athiest.

No, Clyde I mean the groupthey or it or them is spelled with a Z.‘ Listen....

So, the Godz are inept. They are also one of the most interesting bands to have survived from the first petal-kissing hey daze of Lovedelia to (presumably) the schizoid present. When I first saw their first album, Contact High, I jumped for joy. A new monster from ESP! Then I played it, and thought, “Who the fuck do these guys think they’re kidding? This is the worst record I ever heard!” And after that I went around for about a year and a half assuring everbody that no matter what kind of atrocity tales they could relate / knew what the absolute worst record in history was because I’d heard it! But somehow the memory of that idiot caterwauling kept following me around like the shade of a vision, and one day in 1968 when I saw it remaindered I grabbed and bought it. Man, was it awful! It was so awful I dug it! Not like so-bad-it’s-good or any of that camp -kitsch shit — the Godz were onto something. I took it over to liny nephew’s and he looked at it and said, “How’s this?” And I positively beamed, “Oh, man, is that ever lousy, oh, it gets stars for lousiness!”

“Oh yeah?” he said, getting all excited. “Let’s play it!” After all, which would you rather audition first: Super Session and the new Butterfield album, or something that gets stars for lousiness?

Contact High, though nowhere near the Wagnerian grandeur of the Fugs, is nevertheless an album like no other before or since. I know, I can hear you snide simps who’d rather listen to 'what you’d like to call “real music”, all out there snorting: “Yeah, because nobody else would wanta do something like that!” And you’re right. Most people are too stupid! They’d rather go learn Eric Clapton riffs or something. But the fact remains that the Godz did it and nobody else, and the record lives as an entity unto itself.

As such it is simultaneously a perfect artifact of New York in its period, and probably the Godz’ finest album. The only non-snazz aspect of the set is the cornball liner notes by one Marc Crawford: “This is the Godz’ truth ... by four New Yorkers, who don’t give a good God-damn whether you dig it or not . . . But if you want to hear about love and the lack of it by victims unashamed, about hate and too much of it in the world . . . it is a new, honest, emotion-laden telling-it-like-I-feel-it kind of music, which is ... very American, Lyndon Johnson and the critics notwithstanding . . . They don’t dig mon’s apple pie and I’ve never seen them in church on Sunday.”

Boy, they used to drag poor ole LBJ into everything. I bet if he were in now and some cat like David Crosby made a really fucked album and got called on it, he’d probably say that he was so preoccupied by Lyndy’s machinations that he couldn’t think straight. What’s more I don’t think the Godz would ever come on so defensive at that dude. They may not care whether you like it, but they know their music is great, and their whole oevre radiates that kind of positive vitality. Marc Crawford probably secretly thought it was shit, himself, super-pseudo-intellectual radiclib that he reeks of. What’s more, the Godz don’t sing about hate or lack of love, because they know there’s too much negativism in the world already; not only that, I bet they do like mom’s apple pie and mom too because they’re too All-American riot to. How could a real rock‘n’roller not like mom’s apple pie for cryin’ out loud? The only people that don’t are them faggy radiclibs with their latent Oedipus complexes. And the same goes for Church on Sunday — why’n the fuck d’ya think they called themselves the Godz? No, the Godz song is a joyous song of praise for the sun and the moon and all that lives between them.

Their first album, for instance, is a series of elemental celebrations, beginning with “Come On, Little Girl, Turn On”, a relatively lengthy (by Contact High’s standards — I think the whole album’s bnly about 21 minutes long — but then why pad out a perfect production with a bunch of draggy filler?) song exhorting a sweet child of the city to partake of the sacrament for three whole minutes. With Jay Dillon’s great psaltery (ain’t that some kind of an autoharp?), Jim McCarthy’s whinnying harmonica, and the generally rambunctious vocal, the song could hardly miss, even if its form is a bit, anachronistic in terms of the Godz real symphonies.

A word should be said about the instrumentation and all that technical folderol. All of them sing, Dillon just plays psaltery here although he’ll add piano and organ on Godz Two, but Larry Kessler doubles on bass and violin (viola later). A John Cale he’s not —.in fact he probably never had a lesson — in fact, he may never have practiced — but he sure can make that fiddle sing sassy! “Squeak” is his magnum opus, a grinding, grunging violin solo that sounds like he’s jamming a non-resined bow on the strings so hard they’re buckling against the wood, so you get that great organic sawing creak. I once borrowed a violin from friend for a few days; I used to play it by holding the bow still and moving the fiddle lightning-fast across it. I’m left-handed. After awhile I was even better than Larry, but I never learned his sense of economy — he can grind one note til it sounds like Beethoven, but I’m always sawing all over the damn thing. Just the rambunctiousness of a beginner, I guess.

Continued on page 62.

Sounds tribal.

is tribalOrganic Tribal Body Music, Clyde

Snap your fingers, .. Clyde

No,no, to the Clyde

Continued from page 41.

Jim McCarthy is the guitarist, but he also doubles on plastic flute and harmonica, both of which I play. As a matter of fact, I’m better than him too, but I still really dig his work — I only wish I could sit in sometime. On the only non-original on the album, Hank Williams’ “May You Be Alone”, he fills in beautifully behind the straight shit-kicker vocal with a marvelous series of Ayler-like plastic flute flurries that squiggle off in all directions yet always remain absolutely appropriate. In the Godz music, it’s almostf impossible to play a wrong note. So what’s the point, you say, why can’t anybody play music like that, why can’t you or I? What makes them so special?

Well, theoretically, anybody can play like that, but in actual practice it just ain’t so. Most people would be too stultified — after all, what’s the point of doing it if anybody can? - and as for you, you probably ain’t got the balls to do it, and even if you did, you’d never carry it through like a true Godzly musical maniac must to qualify. You’d just pick it up and tootle a few bars to prove something, and that’s entirely different. Me, I could do it because I have been for years, even before I heard of the Godz. All it takes is insane persistence and a total disregard for everything but getting that yawp out if you gotta howl at the moon, and obviously most folks aren’t gonna howl at the moon just to prove a point.

But the Godz would! And not to prove a point, but because they like howling at the moon! Which is what sets them apart. You gotta dig it or it falls flat. Here they are in “White Cat Heat”, for instance, not exactly howling at the moon, but yowling like a pack of alley-cats in a fur-flying brawl. Notice how it starts out kinda subdued — one guy’s even going “Meeoow!”, all falsetto-sweeet just like mama’s very own house tabby! The chickenshit! But then the others -start revving up - “SCREEE ! SCRAWWRRR! RRRAAEEIKKHR!” — and before you know it he’s as homicidal as the rest! And then dig how it rises to that incredible climax and then dies down in perfect symmetry. Fight’s over. And it was a real one, too — you can listen to some of these corny post Freak-Out records, with all these half-ass animal noises and shit, but that’s just child’s play. When the Godz got into character, they got into it good, and those who came to fool around had best just stand aside.

Godz Two is a little bit less rqw than the first one — it has more songs, fewer explosions like “White Cat Heat” — but still a great album. Greil Marcus once came to see me when I was playing this album. As soon as he walked in the room, he said: “What’s that?”

“It’s the Godz!”

“Hhmmmm,” he said, puffing his pipe with that wry look he gets, “so that’s the Godz, huh? Well, have fun!” and walked right back out! Sometimes I just don’t understand people. Especially since Godz Two has at least two all-time Godz classics. “Riffin’ ”, the song Greil walked out on, begins with a Tarzan yell, a wallowing harmonica, “Melons! Get your water-melons!”, a hog call, an LBJ imitation, and on through several more political caricatures interspersed with odd punctuation of animal bleatings.

Even better, though, is “Now Song”. This is a dead drunk lament featuring viola, guitar, and a truly incredible McCarthy vocal that wheezes and groans and gurgles like an old wino bawling his heart out, finally collapsing in grunts and sobs, right after the heartbreaking words, “This is now-ow-ow, this now-olliew, ow.”

This album also found the Godz getting into some relatively conventional material. “Radar Eyes”, “Soon the Moon”, and “Permanent Green Light” were all dark, droning things, extremely simple but effective with their obsessive drumming, reiterated minor chords and chantlike vocals, and showed the Godz to be getting into a rock-bottom groove reminiscent of Tyrannosaurus Rex’ initial experiments in elementary electric guitar. There is a certain quality in the approach of a musician not totally familiar with his instrument, a sound found nowhere else. Sometimes less is more. “Soon the Moon”, for instance, runs almost entirely on the low vocal chant and the insistent throbbing of one bass string and works perfectly that way, stark and spare to a purpose.

Between the second and third albums, the Godz recorded one great single that of course never hit anywhere but should have. Much the best thing they’d ever done, “Wiffenpoof Song” (no relation to its namesake) was a real rock‘n’roll record, full in sound, dynamics and driving as the work of a much larger group. It opened with a guitar flourish, then the sad sad lyric echoing pitifully in space: “We are poor little lambs/Who have gone astray/We are poor little lambs/Who have lost our way.” Then suddenly: “BAAH BAAH BAH BAAAAAHH! BAAH BAAH BAH BAAAAHH! BAAH BAAH BAAH BAH BAAAHH BAAAHH BAAAAHH!!!” A great explosion of martial blasts. And when the song returns to the plaintive, “We are poor little lambs ...” you can hear actual sheep commenting on it (recorded down on the farm? or impersonated once more by the ubiquitous Godz?) Anyway you cut it, that’s a great record. I just don’t understand why it never found its way onto any of their albums.

One of the main keys to the Godz’ interest is that they are a rock-bottom test of one of the supreme musical traditions of rock‘n’roll: the process by which a musical band can evolve from beginnings of almost insulting illiteracy to wind up several albums later romping and stomping deft as champs. Think of the stiffness and super-cool banality of the first Love album, of the Velvet Underground born in already-fascinating welters of sheer arhythmic noise, the Stooges recording their first album when none of them ahd been playing their instruments at all for more than two years or three at the outside. Yet each of these outfits matured into assured professionalism with astounding rapidity (though less surprising in the case of the Velvets, who apparently had enough training and background to put out the slickest sides from the start, but chose to make their early stuff deliberately simple and cross-cut raw.)

The Godz are not in a class with any of those groups, of course — in fact, most of their music could be taken mbst obviously as downright insulting — but they always revealed aspirations to rock‘n’roll respectability and seemed at times on the way to or the very brink of achieving it. The first album’s “1 + 1 = ?” saw McCarthy attempting the standard Dylan-Beatles meaningful ballad with plain embarrassing results, but “Radar Eyes”, “Soon the Moon” and “Permanent Green Light” all had genuine substance however primordial, and “Wiffenpoof Song” and its flip side, “Travelin’ Salesman” firmly set the Godz at a level of a pioneeringly outrageous exercise in Bizarro. Still no great shakes instrumentally, they had ingeniously surmounted their limitations with solid, methodical arrangements and full vocals. They were exciting to think about because they promised to break through and becbme even more outrageous by dynamiting all the stupid Standards by which aesthetic-minded critics and technique-bound musicians sought to raise rock from pigmy squawl to Art-Form.

Sadly, they blew the chance in the worst possible way. The Third Testament is a lame, psychedelically stereotyped, even smug album that sounds like everything their detractors might ever have accused the Godz of being. Where the amusical rampages of earlier albums showed fiendish genius, the ones here are utterly obvious, echoing several of the most gimmicky banalities of acid-rock where the early Godz prophesied them. There is the unedifying mindlessness (genius mindlessness is something far different) of the alphabet-recitals “ABC” and “KLM” and Side One is nearly engulfed by “First Multitude”, a muddy collage of divers taped music, random clatterings and half-coherent gurglings patterned after “Revolution #9” and several other similar atrocities by more commercial groups, ending with the standard high nasal chant: “The mind, the mind, the mind ...”

Bad as it is, though, “First Multitude” comes close to being the best thing here. Its very murkiness makes it work in the event of certain types of delirium, and delirium being commoner and more diversified than ever these days there’s probably a place for it in more than one dark decelerating rush. Maybe.

There ain’t no maybe in the rest o’ these babies at all, though, with one beautiful exception. Because with “First Multitude” out of the way, the balance of the album belongs to an unblinking succession of straight songs in the “1 + 1 = ?” vein, done with apparent sincerity and uniform mediocrity. “Ruby Red” almost makes it on the basis of strong, moody melody and lyrics, but the performance is so awkwardly earnest it’s just sad. The greater Godz yowled and mattered with real authority but they just don’t have the vocal chords for conventional work ballads. “Like A Sparrow” also comes close with its combination of Van Morrison’s Spanish Harlem phase and Beach Boys “Bu-diddit, bu-diddit” chorus, but again, sounds like Thursday night in somebody’s living room, and not much of a Thursday night at that. And “Walking Guitar Blues” delivers with a straight face lines like: “Just my guitar and a song/The policeman said move along/I wpndered what have I done wrong?/Since when did they outlaw a song?”

Such snivelling pieties would have been tromped into cackling refractions by the Godz of old, and that great primal sense of humor is evidenced on one song here. “Woman” ds a Larry Kessler classic, a cracked-rhythm fit macho breastbeatings that hilariously parodies the perennial cliche of super-emotive growl and slur from Eric Burdon to the latest-pasty-faced British bluesband yammering on with dipshit explicitness about how they’re gonna Ball their Little Schoolgirl: “I wuz — (halt, grunt, heavy breathing hesitation) — uh-walkin’ with my woman/An’ I said, uh . . . Woman ... I really . .'. love yuh . . . An’ I said I love yuh becuz — (halt, grunt) — of whutcha have. An you know whutcha have, woman — you got my., you got my soul — yeah . . . you got me — a long time ago . . . Took muh mind — and you tole me it wuz — (agonized second) — all — right. And that I — wuz — outa — sight — That’s what you said — Ohh, woman — you — wommmmmmmmmun — ungh — Woommmununummmmmuhnnnnn . . . ergg » . . unghhh (sniff, choke) . . . yeah . . . you make it, uh, like you make it young, you make it, like you make it all fun — you know — when’s it’s young it’s all fun ... oh wow, what am I talking about? ... wummmmunnn ...”

The more you listen to that piece, the more it sounds not only like Burdon and the Bobby Plants and Bear Hites but seems even to suggest the shade of the Fifties posturings handed down by Brando and James Dean, that whole fumbling, mumbling, brooding, sweaty Virility as Dimwit routine. Maybe the Godz’ approach in their greatest work, from “White Cat Heat’s” fencepost fracas .through “New Song’s” wino to this song, boils down to a kind of Method School of rock'n’roll. Instead of taking on the usuable components of the inchoate howl of the jungle or the gurgle of the stooping slob and integrating them into the standard framework of the rhythm'n’riffs, the Godz macheted their larynxes all the way through to be those alley cats, derelicts and hooligans, just as Method actors once tried to “become” trees by standing with their arms twisted out.

I don’t know if the Godz are still in operation. The Third Testament leads one to doubt it, though they may surprise us tomorrow with an album even more lamely conventional. They might even turn up recording for Warner/Reprise. (Some of that company’s applecheeked minstrels aren’t that far ahead of the Godz in folk-ballad sophistication and guitar technique, and their wilder stylings could conceivably appeal to as large an audience as Wild Man Fischer’s.)

It would be truly mind-bending, though, if they could somehow stay together to come back from their latest descent into near-total obscurity with further elaborations on that sabre-toothed rending of the rational ear which they pioneered, and even more bounteous a blessing if they balanced it with still more anthemic hotrods of the sterling clarity and coherence of “Wiffenpoof Song”. Who knows, they might even enter the mainstream, get bought and plugged and amped-up and Circus magazined and end up touring with the next British five-man poetic-rockabilly-blues Sensation of the Year, then back to New York to record under Glyn Johns with various contractually anonymous You Know Whos sitting in, and end up with bad reviews in CREEM ’cause:

What profiteth a Godz if he gain the world and lose his loon-lunging soul?

. None of that is likely to come to pass, of course - maybe the Godz were for all their primal potency very limited and specific, sent here to do their work and go. At their best, they made the craziest of the touted Crazies look like bluesjam diddlers, and few indeed have made it to their Cheshire outpost on the limb even yet. At least one thing’s absolutely certain — after them, the planet will never whistle, hum, yodel or even sing in the shower quite the same again. They’ve turned us all to Godz yowling freer than we ever dreamed, and every yowl and squawk and whinny is a hymn of praise to their ancient eminence.

DISCOGRAPHY

(All albums available from: ESP-DISK’, LTD. 300 W. 55TH STREET NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10019 for $5.98 or thereabouts.)

CONTACT HIGH WITH THE GODZ - ESP 1037

GODZ TWO - ESP 1047

THE THIRD TESTAMENT - THE GODZ - ESP 1077

THE EAST VILLAGE OTHER ELECTRIC NEWSPAPER ) ESP S-1034

THE FUGS FIRST ALBUM - ESP 1018

THE FUGS (Featuring “Virgin Forest”) — ESP 1028

CALL ME BURROUGHS - WILLIAM BURROUGHS - ESP 1050 N(and don’t miss it, whatever you do)

NU KANTU ESPERANTO - ESP 1001 (Monaural Only)