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 and ask them to call me in New York. I will pay for the session.” He agreed. About a month later, the phone call came from the studio in Germany. I said, “Record him. Send me the bill.” I paid the bill, and they sent me the tape. Then a few weeks later, I received photographs from him. He’d been in a terrible car accident. I thought, What a perfect metaphor for the state of his country. The Russians had suppressed the freedom movement. I put a photograph of him lying in a hospital bed, all bandaged up, on the front cover—and a nude shot of him standing and playing the flute on the back cover. The album [SHQ] did not sell, as we were on our way out of business then, so it did not receive promotion.
I went to the MIDEM in January 2008 and met a friend who was a Czech publisher. He wants to release the album in his country, where Karel Velebny is revered. We shall license it to him [Velebny, who died in 1989, also founded the Summer Jazz Workshop in Frýdlant, Bohemia, in 1984, which has since been named after him].
Even from the start, did you see the free jazz records at all from a political perspective?
Yes. Art is profoundly subversive. If you’re living under a system whose government is disseminating lies, art is a refuge. It’s difficult for the government to control, if it’s not verbal. Art is inextricable from the free expression of ideas. It subliminally conveys a spirit of freedom. In the late ’60s, we had a system that was drafting American youth for the Vietnam nightmare, and we have a recurrence of preemptive war now, and the official lies that go with it.
What was your relation with the East Village Other, the underground newspaper? They were receptive to the records you were producing, and you even did a record with them.
The Fugs were part of that Lower East Side community of artists, poets, and writers. They trusted me. The newspaper’s editors asked me to do a record that would help finance the paper. They brought the artists to the session.
When did you first become aware of errors or faults in your handling of the label as a business?
I knew from the start that I was woefully incompetent and not suited to deal with both the creative side and the business administration side. I never saw it as a business. It is rare that one can wear two heads. Some artists have phenomenal business acumen, but most have one orientation or the other. And my orientation was to hear what was going on. I never asked, “But will it sell?” That is no way to run a business, if you look at it as a business. If you look at it as something different—as a commitment, a calling, an obsession—no, I didn’t make mistakes. To regard it as a business would have been preposterous. ESP planted seeds that might yield a harvest in a year, ten years, or thirty years. How does one derive a livelihood in this manner? I wasn’t married; I didn’t have the normal concerns about getting married and having children and assuming the responsibility to support a family. I met women from time to time who were extraordinary, who would have made superb wives. I wasn’t about to settle down.
Because of the money from your parents, weren’t you able to keep the label going until that ran out?
Yes. And it ran out because I had been put out of business in ’68, when we were doing phenomenally well. The government closed my business because of our opposition to the war.
With respect to business practices, how did you determine your royalty rates and why did some believe it was too low?
I think our original price when we started the label was $4.98. Over the span of a few years, it became $6.98. A $5.00 retail was $2.50 wholesale, and 25¢ would have been 10 percent of $2.50, domestic. And foreign export would have been 12.5¢. The rate was 10 percent of wholesale. That was not wildly off the mark. The records themselves were not ever—for any of the artists—deemed to be a significant source of earnings. The artists would make more from a tour or a series of concerts in a few weeks than they’d make in a year from a record. The records were a vehicle for promotion. And this had been true of the industry throughout its history. The record labels and their producers, recognizing the vulnerability of the artists, would make sure the studio costs were huge. You had to use a Columbia Records studio if you were recording for Columbia, and you would incur astronomical studio costs, promotion costs, and breakage allowances.
Did your royalty rate change in those few years?
Not only did it not change, but we paid royalties to few artists. During those three years, we kept records of what the sales were. We saved those files and are busy issuing statements that go back to the beginnings of the label. When ESP resumed operation six years ago, we changed our royalty rate to 10 percent of wholesale for all recordings, unilaterally—including those that had been recorded during the early stage of the label—to reflect current prices.
But most of the time you were paying advances?
Three hundred dollars to a leader, fifty to a hundred dollars for a side person, and they all shared ownership of the album.
How did you determine these sorts of arrangements?
Artists who got together to record for ESP produced their own albums and often exchanged roles. A sideman on an album might become the leader on another album. They were all improvising. We decided that the leader should have a share of the royalties as the composer (he was generally the composer),