college tour. Burton was one of the most outspokenly critical individuals regarding ESP for many years. He recently acknowledged, when I chided him, that while he had made numerous recordings over the years, none of them had made money. He acknowledged that his impressions were incorrect.
Patty Waters
One afternoon Albert Ayler phoned and asked me to visit him in a handsome group of buildings that predate the Revolutionary War, on Astor Place, across from the Public Theater. It was a beautiful afternoon, and he opened the door of a lovely, sun-filled apartment. He smiled at me and stepped aside. Patty Waters was standing behind him. That’s how I met her.
I had never heard of her, but I knew that Albert would not mislead me. A resourceful woman, she was working as a ticket taker in a movie house, barely surviving. She invited me to her apartment, a tiny room with an upright piano. I said, “Play for me.” She sat at the piano and played some songs. I said, “What would you like to do as a record?” “I want to do the great standards, like Ella.” I replied, “That’s fine. But not on ESP. You have to do your own material.” Patty found Burton Greene, who had just recorded his first album for ESP.
She and Burton worked it out between them. She sings and accompanies herself on piano through the first side of her album, Patty Waters Sings [December 19, 1965]. Then she does “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” and Burton starts to tear apart the piano at that moment, so that half of the album is Burton and his trio backing her. They were all her originals, except one that she’d written with another woman. I think it’s one of the finest albums I’ve ever had anything to do with. But it’s topped by Patty’s College Tour [April 1966], which had different mixes of musicians with her, song by song. Her work has been praised by Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Diamanda Galas, and by critics.
She didn’t stay active as a musician in the years that followed, and we lost contact. She lived in Santa Cruz, and part of the time in Hawaii, raising her son. When she came to the Vision Festival in 2003, Burton and bassist Mark Dresser played with her. ESP may release it.
Perry Robinson
Henry Grimes’s trio record [The Call, December 28, 1965] was as much Perry’s as it was his. He’s a very fine clarinetist. I’ve run into him in the past occasionally. It’s partly my fault; I could have taken some initiative with him. I had no rationale or justification for not giving him the same attention I’ve given to others. He projects modesty, humility, diffidence. He’s highly regarded by his fellow artists.
Marzette Watts
I knew him as an independent engineer with his own recording studio. When I visited his apartment on Cooper Square, he had a few small paintings on the wall. I didn’t know at the time that he had studied at the Sorbonne. He said, “Bernard, I’m going to do an album.” “Yourself? Are you a musician?” “Yes,” he said, “I taught myself.” He had such aplomb, that when he said something it wasn’t halfway. I said, “All right, Marzette, you will do an album.” He brought together Sonny Sharrock, Karl Berger; a lot of people played on that album [Marzette Watts and Company, December 1966].
The Fugs
Jordan Matthews came to me one day, and I was depressed. Our initial releases weren’t selling. “My company’s not happening,” I told him. “The American public is not interested in this music.” He said, “You’ve got no problems. You’ve got the Fugs.” “What do you mean?” “I’ve talked with them. They want to be on the label.”
They went to Richard Alderson’s studio and made their album [The Fugs, 1966]. It was a lot more polished than their first record, and Ed Sanders’s songs were more prominent in it. When they did the suite “Virgin Forest,” which was the culmination of the album (and which I later learned had been composed by Richard Alderson), I performed with them as one of the rude chorus. “Kill for Peace” is on the album, and that song was certainly very antiwar and antiestablishment. I took no part in counseling them. That record was really their unfettered moment.
The material put out by Folkways [The Village Fugs, 1965] was charming. Sexually, it was raw; it wasn’t political. And then, from the unreleased Folkways material, came “CIA Man,” which appeared on Virgin Fugs. That had been part of their original material, but they were angry with me when I released it, a violation of the label’s principles. ESP was sued by the Fugs, but they lost the case.
After The Fugs started selling, I bought their first album from Folkways. Moe Asch couldn’t care less how much they sold, as he didn’t want anything to do with them. I released that album on ESP as well. Virgin Fugs came out later: when I bought the master from Moe, the tapes included additional songs. It meant we had another album of material. By then, relations were strained with Sanders. They were feeling their oats; they had a manager. They had been on the Tonight Show. They had all kinds of major breaks—some of which ESP had engineered, because it hired a publicist for them. Their drum set, their instruments, their microphones, all kinds of stuff, silk-screened T-shirts, posters, advertising—ESP underwrote it all, providing first-rate professional support.
We’d never had a pop group, with underground buzz, and we played it to the hilt. We booked the Astor Place Playhouse for them. I signed the lease and advanced the down payment for the rent. They performed there continuously for a few months [January to May 1966, appearing weekly, according to Sanders in his history of the Fugs on the group’s website; during this period other ESP artists also performed there, including Albert Ayler and Sun Ra]. And the night they opened, the fashion editors and the major media came down as their guests, and ESP put out a spread for them of macrobiotic food, which they ignored. But they went back uptown and wrote very supportively. It was a major breakthrough.
They did a free concert in Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side for a crowd of several hundred fans. As they were performing on the stage, a police captain came by with a detail of four officers and made his way through the crowd. He mounted the stage and said, “I have a report of a bomb threat. You’ll have to clear the area.” Nobody moved. He climbed down off the stage and disappeared. The Fugs resumed their performance.
Peter Edmiston became their manager. He was in partnership with Charlie Rothschild, a well-known manager who represented Judy Collins and Allen Ginsberg. Edmiston took the Fugs and the Pearls to Warner Brothers and stole Tom Rapp’s advance. After that, he vanished and hasn’t been seen since.
Godz
They were all sales clerks at Sam Goody’s, the record store. One of them became ESP’s art director [Jay Dillon], another became our sales manager [Larry Kessler], and two were just helping the shipping clerk [Paul Thornton and Jim McCarthy], because we were shipping a lot of records. At one point, Larry Kessler came up to me and said, “Well, we’re going to record tomorrow night.” “We?” “Yes,” he said, “we call ourselves the Godz.” I had no idea until that moment that they had any such aspirations. I said, “Where are you going to record?” He said, “Herb Abramson’s,” which was a studio we used. I said, “Do you want me to hear you?” “Oh, yes. We’re rehearsing in Natasha’s apartment tonight to prepare for the session.” Natasha was my executive assistant.
On a hot August night, I visited her apartment. It was humid. We turned off the lights, so we wouldn’t have heat from the bulbs. As we sat on the floor in the dark, the guys started to do a song. They imitated the sounds of a passel of cats on the back fence during mating time, doing this like a choir. I decided we would call it “White Cat Heat.” I allowed the session to go forward, and it was clear that I was going to subsidize it, no big deal. At seven o’clock the following evening, the session began.
