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  • Always in Trouble: An Oral History of Esp-Disk′, The Most Outrageous Record Label in America by Jason Weiss
  • Roger Davis Gatchet
Always in Trouble: An Oral History of Esp-Disk′, The Most Outrageous Record Label in America. By Jason Weiss. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. 290 pp. Hardbound, $75.00; Softbound, $24.95.

It is rumored that Elvis Costello once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” The kernel of truth embedded in this astute commentary— that musical experience transcends our ability to codify it in language—seems especially relevant in light of Jason Weiss’s oral history of ESP-Disk′, a scrappy independent label committed to documenting the avant-garde and free jazz movement of the 1960s. Part of ESP’s mission (in the words of label founder Bernard Stollman) was “to confound people” (31). What better way, then, to chronicle its history than by letting those who were most closely involved with ESP tell its story, even if those narratives are unable to capture fully the esoteric experimentalism of its musical legacy?

This is precisely the approach that Weiss takes in his new book, Always in Trouble. The project is divided into two parts. In the first, Stollman is featured in a series of excerpts culled from interviews with Weiss that took place in 2008 and 2009, in which he discusses topics as varied as the founding of his label, its early years, and its downfall in the mid-1970s (and eventual rebirth, decades later, in 2005); some of the landmark albums released under the imprint, along with the struggles ESP faced with bootlegging and getting proper distribution; and the innovative studio engineers who were tasked with capturing the sound of some of the most wildly diverse (and in many cases, eccentric) jazz artists of the last century. Another brief chapter is dedicated to Stollman’s recollections of several better-known artists he encountered during his years in the music business, including Barbara Streisand, Jimi Hendrix, and Yoko Ono, whose husband at the time (Tony Cox) once approached ESP to see if they might publish Ono’s book Grapefruit (Stollman declined; it was later picked up by Simon & Schuster [New York, 1970]).

The book’s second half features a series of interview excerpts with no less than forty individuals, nearly all of them musicians, who have been involved with the label in some form or fashion over the decades. Most of the names will be recognizable only to readers already familiar with ESP’s catalog or the free jazz movement itself, but the vast array of talent given a voice here is no less impressive. ESP’s focus was not restricted to jazz, however; most notably, it recorded successful albums by experimental and psychedelic rock groups such as the Fugs, Pearls Before Swine, and the Godz, and each receives ample treatment as well. ESP is also somewhat infamous for acquiring an album by Charles Manson, Sings, released in 1974 (several years after the horrific 1969 Manson “family” murders). As Stollman observes, “Manson was, of course, a total maverick—in the sense that he was an enemy of society, and he’d been in and out of prison since childhood. He was a victim and also a perpetrator…. I saw him, [End Page 400] in a sense, as a political victim as well as a psychopath” (59–60). The album is still available for purchase through the label’s website, with royalties going to the family of murder victim Wojciech Frykowski.

As the book’s subtitle aptly suggests (hyperbole notwithstanding), ESP, similar to other like-minded independent labels that have integrated an activist stance into their business model, was founded “as a commitment, a calling, an obsession” (34). Although Stollman was apparently unconcerned with the commercial viability of his operation (early on in the book, he quips, “I never asked, ‘But will it sell?’”), the issue of royalty payments for album sales was certainly on the minds of artists on the ESP roster and is a recurring theme in many of their narratives (34). At times, conflicts over album payments almost erupted into violence. Sonny Simmons, a saxophonist who recorded two albums for the...

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