(An amended version of this article appeared in Signal To Noise, Summer 2004) - USA
© John Kruth

BERNARD STOLLMAN - THE MAN FROM 5D

BY JOHN KRUTH

     Strange things happen whenever I visit Bernard Stollman. He lives in an enormous sprawling apartment complex near the East River. I always get lost and inevitably wind up calling him from a pay phone (if I can find one that works), as I might be the last person in Manhattan not to own a cell. Even the panhandler on the corner who looks like the inspiration for the cover of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung has one. The last time I went to interview him I was writing an article for Signal to Noise on Albert Ayler (who Stollman is credited with “discovering”). And of course I got lost. The only thing I can seem to remember about his place is his apartment number – 5D. Bernard without a doubt is the man from the Fifth Dimension. And I’m not talking about that perky 60’s group who wanted to whisk you away in their “beautiful balloon,” although Stollman, as Sun Ra enlightened us sad earthlings, knows very well that “Space Is the Place.”

     There is something at once pragmatic and alien about Bernard. He always wears the same clothes - white shirts, gray pants and black suspenders. He lives minimally with just the essentials - a desk, phone, fax, computer, couch, a couple of African fetishes hanging on the wall and a pile of CD’s - mostly ESP stock and a handful of books (his favorite being Alice In Wonderland). Stollman is tall and bald with intense blue eyes.

     This time I’ve come to interview Bernard about his recently resurrected label, ESP Records. His catalog of free jazz and sixties radical folk rock is now back from oblivion. As I said, weird things happen whenever I visit him. The last time I interviewed Stollman I got home and discovered there was nothing on the tape but undecipherable gobbledygook – Pakistani pig Latin from cab-drivers lost on Avenue D. It was then I recalled an old episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine has a psychiatrist boyfriend who wields a strange control over her. She tells Jerry she thinks he is a “Sven-jolly.” Jerry corrects her, saying it’s pronounced “Svengali.” But it turns out that Elaine was right. There is indeed such a thing as a “Sven-jolly!” And Stollman is living proof. Since I was a teenager, buying his weird records, this mystical prankster has had a hand in shaping (or should I say warping) my consciousness. As Bernard is a lawyer I’ve considered suing him. First of all, I risked life and limb sneaking the Fugs’ records into our house. If my dad ever caught an earful of Sanders’ twisted anarchist lyrics he would’ve opened up Sam’s Club size can of whup-ass on me that I’d never forget. In fact, if I hadn’t become obsessed with ESP I perhaps might have grown up to become the accountant my dad had hoped for and gone into the family business and would’ve had my taxes done by now (April 12^th) instead wasting my life playing mandolin and banjo with Peter Stampfel (of Holy Modal Rounder fame and an ESP alumnus) and writing articles for esoteric magazines like Signal To Noise.

     The story of ESP began in 1964 in the basement of an Israeli coffeehouse called the Cellar Cafe at 90^th Street and West End Avenue during a three night music festival called ‘The October Revolution.’ Although it was rumored that Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor had a hand in producing the event, neither were to be found.

     “It was a who’s who of improvisational music, that included Sun Ra and Marion Brown and Burton Greene,” Stollman recalled. At the time Bernard lived in the neighborhood and stopped down each night to the jam-packed café to hang out and dig the music.

     “I think they held it at the Cellar because the word was out that Stollman was interested and they wanted to lure me in,” Bernard chuckled, recalling Paul Bley playing an out of tune upright piano while Giuseppe Logan blew clarinet, standing in the doorway while Archie Shepp, (who was under contract to Impulse Records at the time) floated about, checking it all out. “There was no amplification of any kind. No heat or lights,” Bernard recollected. “I had gathered they burned candles because the electricity had been turned off.”

     After his transcendent performance, the intergalactic bandleader Sun Ra invited Stollman over to his loft in Newark. Entranced by his otherworldly sounds Bernard obliged and asked Sun Ra to record for ESP. Stollman was so taken with bassist Ronnie Boykins’ playing that he spoke to him in private and offered to record him for ESP as well. “He said ‘I’ll let you know,’” Bernard recalled. “Eight years later he called, and said ‘Bernard, I’m ready to record!” Stollman said with a chuckle. “Then Ronnie assembled his group of superb musicians and did a fairly laid back album at Marzette Watts’ studio.”

     “They say fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” Bernard said rolling his eyes. “I was just a naïve individual who saw that something must be done. These people needed to be recorded or their work would be lost. They were in their prime. While Impulse Records recorded John Coltrane they were totally loath to go near the new generation. There was a big gap. Nobody would touch them and yet they were ripe, mature and ready to go,” Stollman explained. “I walked in on it and did forty five albums in eighteen months.”

     Stollman recorded Pharaoh Sanders’ Pharaoh’s First for ESP in September 1964, describing the tenor saxophonist as “hostile, suspicious and surly. He chatted with the engineer about how he wanted to the mikes set up. They did the session. I paid them and they left and I didn’t see them again for thirty five years!”

     Bernard was not a hands-on producer. His role was simply to provide the tools, the studio or whatever the musician needed to create and then get out of the way.

     “I didn’t want to be ‘the man,’” Stollman said with a laugh. “While I did attend some sessions, I often did not deliberately, because my presence could very well alter it somehow. I might intimidate someone. I wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible. So I didn’t attended sessions and I missed some extraordinary moments. It was just my sense that being there might not have been helpful.”

     Without any kind of creative supervision the musicians were ultimately on the spot to deliver. And whatever they played was then released by ESP. “I wasn’t going to second-guess the artist’s work. He’s the expert on his own music!” Bernard emphasized. “They could never say later on that they had some great ideas but that son-of-a-bitch producer got in my way. So the opportunity was there for them to wail. And that is just what they did!”

     “I didn’t realize it for many years but the label, ESP, was my art,” Stollman said. “The word ‘producer’ has always given me trouble. The artist produced everything! I am a coordinator.”

     “Eventually ESP drew the interest of the Fugs, who were iconoclasts, the darlings of a new literary age,” Bernard said, recalling the first time he went to the Bridge Theater on Saint Mark’s Place to see Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and company. “You couldn’t hear them. It was just a roar of noise. The equipment was so dreadful. You couldn’t hear a word! They weren’t really making music really. It was poetry.”

     A few days later Bernard had lunch with Ed at the Paradox, a macro-biotic restaurant and suggested they create a pop music subsidiary of ESP but Sanders, Stollman was surprised to discover, deliberately wanted to be associated with Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.

     “No one connected the free jazz players with the radical movement,” Stollman said. “It needed language before anyone woke up to what was going on. The sound of that music was absolutely the most radical sound of its time. But it went right over most people’s heads. Tuli Kupferberg’s ‘Kill for Peace,’ and Tom Rapp’s ‘Uncle John,’ had incredible lyrics.”

     The Fugs had vehemently opposed the Viet Nam war as did Pearls Before Swine while the anarchist antics of the Holy Modal Rounders were the auditory equivalent of the Marx Brothers with a head full of acid. Ayler’s spiritual wail, Pharaoh’s apocalyptic skronk and Sun Ra’s universal sound of love created the perfect soundtrack for reading radical sixties manifestos such as Eldridge Clever’s Soul On Ice, Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare and Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book.

     ESP’s philosophy was the antithesis of the record industry at the time - “The Artist Alone Decides What You Will Hear,” was their motto. Trusting their instincts and sense of aesthetics, Stollman handed over total control to his musicians. They chose the graphics for the album cover as well as the music within. And it all worked quite well for a while. With three records on the pop charts in 1968, two by the Fugs and One Nation Underground by Pearls Before Swine, ESP artists were not only outspoken and outrageous, they actually sold thousands of records!

     Bernard’s little cultural revolution not only raised the ire of the record industry, it would soon catch the attention of United States government. “My phones were tapped. One day I got a call from a lawyer. It was an innocuous conversation until he suddenly quoted a phrase from something I had said the day before. There was no way it could’ve been a coincidence,” Bernard imparted. “So he must’ve been among the crowd monitoring my conversation.”

     Warner Brothers soon called looking to buy out the entire ESP catalog. Stollman suspected their true motive was not to further the music but to suppress the Fugs and the Pearls. “I didn’t have either band under contract except for those specific albums. If I record an artist I will not sign them to a long-term agreement. It’s antithetical to tie up an artist and suppress their creativity. They were totally free to go to Warner Brothers if they wanted. And they did! But they soon fell into a trap. From that day forward neither one expounded against the war. In terms of personal actions they continued to protest (Sanders and a slew of Yippies actually tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1968?) but as far as Warner Brothers were concerned, they kept a tight reign on them as artists. Country Joe McDonald and Phil Ochs were among the few musicians who were blatantly anti war at the time that enjoyed major label support.”

     “Once I said no to Warner Brothers our record sales stopped cold overnight. The pressing plant began bootlegging the records. They pressed them and sold them to our distributors! There were no laws against it at the time! I was very dense and didn’t grasp what was going on,” Stollman explained. “I went down to the plant and looked for my album jackets. I had given them several thousand as a back up but there were none there! That was the end of that relationship. I got a trucker and went through this vast warehouse and collected all the stuff that wasn’t selling, mostly jazz records and albums by the Godz. Effectively I was out of business. The core of my business had been the pop records and that was gone.”

     By the end of 1968 Bernard let his staff go, gave up his office and began to operate out of his apartment. “I was profoundly dumb,” he confessed. “It was so obvious it was over but I just didn’t want to know.” For six years Stollman continued to tread water, accomplishing little while exhausting whatever money he got from his family. In 1974 with no hope left he closed ESP, and paid off his creditors (“who,” Bernard claimed “were the very same people who’d been stealing from me.”)

     “I was so mortified by the history of my label, I had seen it as such a failure that I hid from everyone. Nobody saw me. I didn’t go to record stores or concerts. The word was I had died. Actually I’d gone straight,” Stollman said, referring to a dreadful bureaucratic job he’d taken as an assistant attorney general representing psychiatric centers. “I just went to work every day for ten years at Number 2 World Trade Center on the 46^th floor. Then in July 1991 two things happened. I turned 62 and was forced into retirement. I had a tiny pension and moved to a farm in the Catskills. In December of that year, I was in the depths of depression, going nowhere, when a German label called ZYX contacted me. They knew from nothing. They were a dance company who listened to a consultant friend of mine who knew our catalog back and forth. The records had never been out on CD before, so they put out every record I ever issued – 115 titles, with a 42 page color catalog which must have cost them a pretty penny. Suddenly we were back in business.”

     ZYX bought rights to Bernard’s catalog for six years, selling old ESP records on CD all over the world. The only trouble was they stopped paying royalties. “We’d get statements for five copies of this or that,” Stollman admitted. “Then we put out fifteen titles with a Dutch company called Caliber who went broke. They sub-licensed the records to an Italian company called Abraxas for three years. But for the last two years we haven’t received any statements or royalties from them. Artists say to me, ‘Everywhere I go I see my records. Where’s my money?’ But they don’t understand that people haven’t paid us the royalties. And there’s also bootlegging going on but it’s a compliment of sorts. Last spring our contract with Abraxas expired but they kept right on pressing the discs. How do we stop them? Now we have to go to federal court with their American distributors who have been part and parcel to it. They released records by Albert Ayler and Tom Rapp but haven’t paid us a dime. The only thing we can do now is to re-issue our catalog as fast as we can.”

     Stollman and his small staff of three currently operate out of his one bedroom East Side apartment. The digitally re-mastered discs they are in the midst of compiling are far superior, sonically speaking, then what’s out there. Combining old albums by Albert Ayler (Bells and Prophecy) Pearls Before Swine (One Nation Underground and Balaklava) and Sun Ra (Heliocentric Worlds Vol. 1 & 2) as twofers, the new releases also feature additional material including extra tracks and interviews. There are also new unreleased tapes from the vaults by Albert Ayler – Live on the Riviera as well as Sun Ra’s Heliocentric Worlds Volume 3.

     The new ESP catalog will also include unreleased live sets by Chet Baker, Art Blakey, Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday as well as a box set of live performances by Miles “We’re working with Greg Davis, Miles’ oldest son, as well Evelyn Blakey on these projects,” Stollman pointed out.

     In an age stifled by Neo-cons controlling Congress as well as the jazz series at Lincoln Center, the return of ESP is a welcome antidote to a painfully sober era. With luck (and more than a little money) perhaps Mr. Stollman can help ignite America’s consciousness once more and pave the way for another generation of great explorers of the outer fringe.

JOHN KRUTH

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