When the tour was over, David returned with the tapes, and I turned the tapes over to the artists, asking them to listen to their own work and to select enough material for an album. It worked. David told me that it had been an ordeal for him, coping with the personal needs of all the musicians, and vowed he would never do it again. When ESP artists went into the studio to record, they never did second or third takes of their pieces. The sessions were brief, typically forty-five minutes, and that was it.
Did the label engage in sponsoring other concerts or tours?
Infrequently. The Fugs had an underground hit on Folkways before they joined ESP. We paid for musical instruments, posters, and a publicist, and paid the rent for the Astor Place Playhouse, where they performed for a few months. In 1968 we staged a free concert on Pier 17, which would later become the South Street Seaport, at the foot of Manhattan. Sun Ra and his Arkestra performed without charge. Jim McCarthy of the Godz gave a solo performance, and so did John Hall, who is now a member of Congress. A huge white yacht was moored along the pier on one side, and on the other side was a Portuguese full-masted training ship, with two hundred cadets in white uniforms. A macrobiotic restaurant, the Paradox, was closing on that day, and I paid them for all their remaining food. They delivered it to the pier, and ESP was able to feed Sun Ra and all of the other performers. A huge crowd formed, and the Sun Ra Arkestra played a long set. The captain of the ship allowed the cadets to join the crowd on the pier, and they danced with the local girls. The captain saw our concert as a salute to Portugal, an observation shared by Portuguese journalists who were present, and ESP has since enjoyed a highly favorable reputation in that country. A recording engineer acquaintance warned me not to try to record the event in a conventional manner, explaining that the long electric lines needed to reach the end of the pier would act as antennae, picking up radio signals and ruining the undertaking. The engineers who had been hired for the job were neophytes and unaware of the problem. I foolishly disregarded his warning, and the tapes were useless. He had bicycled down to the scene with his portable tape deck on the handlebars and recorded thirty minutes of the concert. The sound was flawless.
How did you see what you were doing at ESP with regard to the usual industry practices?
I saw the industry as an enemy to the creative process, and I drafted a new standard for the treatment of artists. Each production would be a collaborative undertaking, in which the artists would have full control over the repertoire and the recording process. Our slogan became “The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk’.”
The typical recording industry contract has thirty-six to forty-five pages. We use a two-page agreement, and it is for a single album. The industry agreement grants ownership of the album to the record label. ESP co-owns the album with the artists in perpetuity. By jointly owning the master and administering their publishing rights through our Global Copyright Administration, LLC affiliate, we are partners.
As the label grew, you soon branched out into other types of recordings. How did you make the transition from the free jazz that was the core of the label to other projects like the Fugs, Pearls Before Swine, even the nonmusical albums?
I didn’t want ESP to be a niche label. Art is anarchistic, and when it becomes categorized, it loses impact. I wanted people who were innovative and inspirational. The Coach with the Six Insides, the Jean Erdman theater piece based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and other productions were selected using this criterion.
Were you concerned with avoiding a particular public perception of the label?
The label was not to become identified as representing only one particular sector of music. Art is ephemeral, and change is always under way. Any art form can become clichéd and derivative. I thought the label should be a documentary device to capture audio art. The format didn’t matter; it could be Tim Leary talking about LSD [Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out]. It was important to confound people.
Did that help enlarge the audience for the free jazz people?
I was hoping that this approach would reach a larger audience than the very small community who were interested in free improvisation. I was always surprised to find people who embraced all of our repertoire.
The label had a certain success with the Fugs. How did that affect your ongoing approach?
It meant that we were doing more business, and I could pay my staff. Our U.S. distributors stocked our free improvisation titles on consignment to obtain the rapidly selling Fugs and Pearls Before Swine, folk-rock artists. In 1968 we were forced out of business.
The success of the Fugs didn’t change what you wanted to do with the label?
No, I didn’t go out to the pop music community and recruit artists. That wasn’t our focus, and I was not interested in commercial music designed to be entertainment. A few folk-rock singer-songwriters—including Randy Burns, Jerry and Don Moore, Mij, Les Visible, Cromagnon, Octopus, and Louis Killen—came to ESP and were recorded. The Fugs were Beat poets and anarchists. They were against the war in Vietnam. I had numerous reasons for wanting to work with them. But pop music groups as such? Any commercial group would have had lawyers, managers, and demands for promotion budgets. They would have needed a small army of people to support their enterprise.
How did you see the label’s role in the culture of that time?
Our role was to document the work of the community of newly emerging composer-performers of the generation who were identified as free improvisational, who had followed bebop and its immediate successors, such as Coltrane. ESP filled that need.
As you moved from the free jazz to a wider perspective with the label, you also started recording European musicians.
ESP put out one record by Gunter Hampel [Music from Europe, 1967]. By the time it came out, he had his own label, Birth Records. Other European musicians who joined ESP were the Free Music Quintet of Pierre Courbois, the group of Nedley Elstak, and Czech artist Karel Velebny. If I had been able to continue, ESP would have recorded more European artists. They too were in desperate need of wider recognition and stigmatized because they were Europeans.
How did you find out about Karel Velebny?
I’d gone to the MIDEM [the annual international music industry convention in Cannes, France] in January 1968. The Czechs were enjoying their “false spring,” a brief period of freedom from the Russians. They were intoxicated by it, and they staged the gala that year. Marta Kubisová, the most popular singer in Czechoslovakia, sang to celebrate freedom! It was thrilling. At their reception following the concert, a young member of their delegation approached me and said quietly, “You will come to Prague.” On a hunch, I flew to Prague! It was late January, and Prague was dark, cold, and damp, and they burned soft coal, so a soft rain of soot fell. I visited their official record label, Supraphon, where they played me Karel Gott and other artists. Their sounds were all commercial, so nothing came of it. The sun came out, and I hired a cab driver as a guide. We spent hours visiting exhibitions of historical art, the great old churches and monuments in Prague. When evening came, I visited the jazz club and asked for the name of their most celebrated jazz artist. I was told it was Karel Velebny. At my request, they found him for me, and he appeared within twenty minutes. He suggested that we step outside, to avoid prying eyes and ears. We walked out in the darkness, and I said, “I hear you’re the most prominent jazz artist in Czechoslovakia. I have an American label, and I’d like to record you.” “What do you want?” “I want you to take it as far out as you can go.” He looked at me, stupefied. Then he paused and said, “We are going on tour; we will be in Germany in a few weeks.” I said, “When you get to Germany, find a studio
