Always in Trouble. Jason Weiss

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. I decided that my presence might intimidate them, so I waited about forty-five minutes. At a quarter to eight, I entered the studio. It was on West 56th Street, and it had been the original studio of Atlantic Records. Herb Abramson had been a founder of the label with the Ertegun brothers. I found them sitting around. Paul Thornton, realizing that I was a little taken aback, greeted me. “Would you like to hear it? We just finished it. We’re editing it now.” I said, “You finished it in forty-five minutes?” He said, “Yeah, we just ran with it.” So I listened, and I was delighted. I said, “We’ll call it Contact High with the Godz”. I was obviously inspired. It was followed by a second album [Godz 2, 1967]. For the third one [The Third Testament, 1968], they invited a large number of friends, who contributed crowd noises and choral effects. It has kind of a rowdy party quality to it, which works.

      Promoting them was an impossible challenge. They would try to perform, but they would get in fights; it was total chaos. I rented them a concert hall in the Times Square area and sent out flyers—they showed up but no one else did. Larry Kessler and Jim McCarthy were at each other’s throats. “I’m the leader!” “No, I’m the leader!” That kind of thing. Those were the only records they ever made in their lives. We sent review copies of their records to the press, and one famous critic loved them, Lester Bangs—which was a tremendous plus, of course—but nobody else did. I think we re-pressed the first one, because I know the artwork changed. So, we pressed at least a thousand altogether of that one, maybe more.

      I didn’t bother to stop to figure out whether it worked or not. The investment was minimal and I liked their work, so I just kept documenting it. Now that ESP is back, we’re going to do a Godz box set. Their records were pressed in Italy, by Abraxas, in the ’90s. That gave them a new lease on life—and they sold reasonably well, five hundred pieces a year.

       Pearls Before Swine

      One day in 1966, two tiny reels of tape arrived in the mail at the ESP office on the twelfth floor of 156 Fifth Avenue. They were postmarked Eau Gallie, Florida. At the end of the day, I sat alone in my darkened office to audition them, and as I listened, I was moved to tears. I called Tom and asked him to visit a local studio in Florida with his group to make a professional demo. Two weeks later, a seven-inch square box arrived, wrapped in kraft paper. On the cover were handwritten notations: “garbage,” “trash,” “disgusting.” Inside was a reel of tape. The Christian fundamentalists who owned the studio apparently could not refrain from expressing their opinions of his lyrics.