Music Monday: Bernard Stollman’s ESP Disk’

I’ve been visiting family this week and I haven’t had as much of a chance to listen to music as I would have liked. (And, like most music lovers, I can’t wait to listen to Meshell Ndegeocello’s No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin).

Instead of listening to music, I read Jason Weiss’s 2012 oral history of the ESP Disk’ label: Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk’, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America. The first part of Weiss’s book focuses mostly on Bernard Stollman, the founder of ESP Disk’, and the thinking behind his short lived, but also influential label. 

Part of what I admire about Stollman is that his label simply released what he liked. There wasn’t some formula, there wasn’t some identity that he sought to preserve, and there wasn’t some sense of grand strategy. In fact, after two years, the money Stollman had borrowed from his mother ran out and the label, while enjoying some successful records, did not bring in enough to support its continued operations and ambitions.

The other thing that stood out to me is how relatively easy it was to form a label. Of course Stollman had a decade of informal connections in the music industry through his work at a lawyer. At the same time, surplus studio space in New York made it affordable to record musicians. Record plants had the capacity to produce small runs of albums (500 to 1000 copies) and to distribute these albums. In other words, there was infrastructure in place to support a small label and to keep the overhead low enough to allow ESP Disk’ to generate some modest income (if not really be profitable).

In the end even with the existing infrastructure and some modest success, the label wasn’t successful. It made a brief comeback in the early 2000s after Stollman retired from his job as a state attorney. He found ways to generate some income from licensing the catalogue as CDs and added to the ESP Disk’ catalogue. 

Stollman’s story is also laced with a very contemporary sense of conspiracy. He suggests that both the major record labels and (or with?) the US government worked to suppress his label. He argued that bands like the protopunk, political, folk bands like the Fugs who wrote songs not only protesting the Vietnam War but also attacking President Johnson. The critical historian in me thinks its unlikely that the FBI, CIA, or “government” felt it necessary to shut down a label which sold a few thousands albums a month, but for Stollman, this was evidence of the art that he supported having an impact.

Check out the second and fourth album from ESP Disk’: