BILLY SYNDROME, 1963-2017

photos by andre grossman

I write this piece with a very heavy heart for many reasons. Already this year sucks worse than last year for me, and the ongoing onslaught of rock and roll passages has really hit too close to home this time.

William Ogilvie passed away on January 11th, 2017, aged 53. To many of you reading these words, he was known as Billy Syndrome. To say this man was the consummate rock and roll renegade is an extreme understatement. If the story of his life were written in book form, it would be one of the juiciest reads in rock history, believe me. Over the course of his life, Billy would both create and witness rock history. His first band, a hardcore punk group called the Pricks, featured a man by the name of Rick Rubin on guitar. The same year they formed, 1981, Billy witnessed the infamous Public Image Ltd. "riot show" at the Ritz -- just one of literally thousands of concerts he attended over the years. By the mid '80s he'd caught the home recording bug, forming Porcelain God with his best friend James Sherry, a/k/a Evil Jim Friendly, and by 1987 the two of them were tearing up the lower east side of NYC together.

It was in mid-1988 that Billy first appeared on my radar. At that time, the antifolk scene was forming, comprised of a group of young, like-minded folks forging a new sound fusing '60s folk with modern punk. Banned from famous westside folk clubs like Cafe Wha and Folk City for being too raw, they found the less sophisticated east side far more welcoming and set up shop there. Many of them were, in my honest opinion, not much better than the more polished modern folk acts uptown, though I did eventually come to appreciate the likes of Roger Manning and Paleface and a few others. But Billy Syndrome completely transcended the very definition of antifolk the very second he first walked through its door. No one brought more punky swagger to it than him, and when I first stumbled across him at an antifolk fest in July '88, his performance stood out like a sore thumb accordingly. I took immediate note of him and vowed to investigate him further.

A few months later I dropped by the studios of WFMU radio and my dear pal William Berger was waiting for me excitedly. He had a new song cued up that he just couldn't wait to play for me. It was "Have You Seen The Cows," from a compilation of antifolk acts called "White Trash." And the artist was none other than Billy Syndrome. What a watershed moment it was! Totally unlike anything we'd ever heard before, it sounded like some slice of alien hardcore beamed down from Mars, led by those raving lunatic vocals of Billy's I'd soon grow quite fond of. Even as one who was used to strange music by then, this was heavy stuff to me.

Needless to say, I started attending Syndrome gigs whenever I could after that. In the process I found an even newer scene forming in a seedy little Brooklyn neighborhood called Williamsburg. Its hub was a loft turned performance space in a shady part of the 'hood called the Lizard's Tail, run by a European immigrant husband-and-wife artistic duo named Terry Dineen and Jean Francois. Berger and I caught a solo performance of Billy's there one weekend and quickly found he was even more out there onstage than he was on vinyl. Well, the next thing I knew, my own musical duo, Living Guitars, were booked to open for Billy the next time he played there! I was quite humbled to say the least. That night, Billy watched our entire set with rapt attention, then approached us as we walked offstage and said, "You guys were really great, man. You want some acid?" I politely declined his offer, but my partner Jet accepted, which caused me a bit of worry a couple of hours later when he and I found ourselves at a rooftop party after the show. I still remember keeping a very close eye on Jet the rest of the night, in case he suddenly thought he was Superman!

Billy and I were now officially a mutual admiration society, and over time it would turn into a full-fledged friendship. It really wasn't until about late '91 or so that I started to really get to know him personally. By then I was doing quite a bit of hanging out in Williamsburg, first at the Lizard's Tail, then at a bar on the East River waterfront called the Right Bank, which would quicky take over as Billy's home away from home when the Tail closed in '90. Billy's motto at that time was "You either know or you don't." This motto perfectly applied to early '90s Williamsburg, at that time still a seedy neighborhood in the best of gritty NYC traditions, untouched by the hand of gentrification. Artists and bands held illegal punk concerts and "acid house" techno raves in the abandoned warehouses on the waterfront and sometimes right on the waterfront itself, and Billy and his friends were a big part of that scene. And only those truly in the know at the time knew what was happening in Williamsburg, unlike every Tom, Dick and Harry today.

I moved in with Evil Jim for awhile in late '91 and Billy lived right across Fort Greene Park from us, visiting regularly. It was then that our friendship really took hold, over many evenings of beers, bowls, and listening to and raving about music. Billy absorbed popular culture llke a sponge, holding the Grateful Dead, Public Enemy, and the Ramones in equally high regard, and was always buying the cool new albums the day they came out and giving me verbal reviews of each one. One day I went to visit him and he played me something I'd never heard before, a live version of "Listen to the Band" by the Monkees that ended in an extended noise jam, and I almost died. Billy knew lots of things I didn't and delighted in sharing them. In '93, we went on a tour of the midwest together as bandmates in the Thundering Lizards, and when we heard the phrase "finders keepers" from somewhere or other one day, we both immediately started singing the obscure Beach Boys song of the same name. We were both eccentric to the core, and he was a true kindred spirit.

Shortly after he and Evil Jim finally settled in Williamsburg, Billy launched his own record label, Slutfish. This label's primary purpose was to release records by, you guessed it, Billy Syndrome. I don't know where the hell he found the money to do it (he sometimes claimed it was because he'd put himself on a diet consisting almost entirely of Kraft Dinner and cheap beer), but for awhile in the mid-90s it seemed like he had a new single out every time you turned around. Often on colored vinyl, always pressed in the smallest of quantities, and distributed almost exclusively around Williamsburg by Billy himself, those Slutfish sides are all rarer than your average Misfits singles today. He also released several vinyl albums and full-length CDs under his own name and with projects like the JFK Jr. Royal Airforce and Mummies of the Insane. They reveal a wealth of indescribable insanities of every stripe, rolling punk, psych, folk, r&b, hiphop, and noise into one big fat blunt and topping it off with his unhinged persona and otherworldly world vision.

At his best, in songs like "Fish in the Rain" and "No Power," he was so catchy he had you singing along. Sometimes, admittedly, he could be indulgent and downright unlistenable. But he was always interesting no matter what he was doing. This hit-or-miss quality applied to Billy's live shows as well, but even at his worst, you couldn't take your eyes off him onstage. To me he was the single most unsung outsider music legend there ever was. (Irwin Chusid, please take note.) Billy was also a very talented artist as well as musician, doing all the artwork for his releases himself, and I still have fond memories of laughing till I cried binge-reading the entire series of issues of his ultra-rare mid-80s underground comic book Puss The Cat, perhaps the funniest comic book series I've ever read in my life. (Seriously, someone needs to get them online in PDF form. Now.)

When the internet became part of our lives, Billy and I took to communicating via AOL Instant Messenger, and in the later years of our friendship we had dozens of long, insane online chats, some of which I still have the printed transcripts of. He was always hilarious and down to earth and happy to share his thoughts about current cultural and world events. We still saw each other sporadically at shows until I first moved to Florida in the summer of 2004. The following summer I went back home for a month, visiting as many friends as I could. I saw Billy three times that month, in the audience at a partial reunion of the MC5 in Central Park, and onstage as a member of Brian Wilson Shock Treatment and JFK Jr. Royal Airforce, those last two in the final week of my stay. We enjoyed some quality time together which I would ultimately be very thankful for. It would also be the last time I would see him in full health.

Not long after my return to Florida from that month back in NYC in late August '05, I received word that Billy had suffered a stroke just five days after I'd last seen him. He was in a coma for two weeks, eventually being transferred from Mount Sinai to the Park Terrace Care Center in Queens after regaining consciousness. The general lack of online info about Billy was frustrating as fuck, and ultimately led me back to NYC a couple months later to check up on him. I wound up moving back home for awhile the following year, in part to monitor Billy's progress and take it upon myself to create the online coverage on him no one else seemed willing to bother with. I began a series of news updates on the original version of this blog I'd spun off from my now-defunct Myspace profile, which attracted the attention of the publisher of the short lived antifolk fanzine Urban Folk, for whom I ultimately wrote a piece on Billy's plight, fleshed out with quotes from emails he had sent me about his condition.

Things were never the same for Billy after his stroke. He was paralyzed on one side, wheelchair-bound, and living on a meager disability pittance. The first time I visited him in the hospital I understood about every third word he said. He eventually regained his speech, though, and before long it became clear there was another big thing his stroke hadn't robbed him of -- his incredible personality and outlook on life. Once out of rehab, he had many caring friends willing to make sure he was back in the loop, wheeling him to Hawkwind and Brian Wilson concerts within weeks of his discharge. He still managed the occasional live appearance, and did a good job for awhile of continuing to keep in touch with me, though in the last couple of years of his life I began to hear less and less from him and began to worry more and more about him. Billy was not one to make others suffer through his pain and I truly believe only he himself knew the full extent of the pain he was in, because his persona never failed him. It could reasonably be argued that his misfortune only made him more determined to be who he was. Sadly, that determination could only carry him so far, but the fact that he survived another 11 years and 4 months is testament to his not wanting to give up the fight.

The story I have just told only scratches the surface of Billy Syndrome's life and what it was like to know him. He was truly one of the nicest guys I've ever known in my life, and perhaps even number one in that respect. Billy was humble, modest, wickedly funny, deeply spiritual, philosophical, positive, and just plain cool. Music was his religion from cradle to grave. He lived his life fearlessly and unapologetically, truly believing in his vision every step of the way, even post-stroke. On top of all that, he was the truest of New Yorkers, never leaving his city and even remaining in Williamsburg as it changed all around him. When I wrote about him for Urban Folk, I was quick to note that antifolk music was already firmly in the hands of the next generation, and made damn sure those newbies got the point in the course of one simple sentence which summed it all up in a nutshell: "Billy Syndrome was antifolk long before you were, and has taken its very definition to extremes you never will." Indeed I think that says it all.

Bill Ogilvie was a friend of mine. I consider myself truly fortunate that he was a part of my world. I know he is in a much more cosmic place now, and I take comfort in that and all of the amazing and incredible music he gave us. Thank you, Billy, for everything and more. See you on the other side, brother.

(Please feel free to share your memories of Billy Syndrome in the comments!)

CASSETTE CULTURE, 1977-2016 AND BEYOND!

Recording tape has always been a part of my life, right from when I was still in the cradle and my dad's reel-to-reel deck was capturing my baby voice. But when cassettes entered my world, I knew right away I'd found a friend for life. It began sometime around '73 or so, when my parents gifted me with my very first cassette player. It was one of those old Panasonic portables with the handle on the bottom and just one speaker on top. My first recordings were pretty much just me acting goofy, as I had yet to develop any real talent, but I quickly caught the tape bug just the same. Even before I could sing or play an instrument, though, I was trying to be musical. All of these initial attempts are now lost forever, but honestly, you wouldn't want to have heard them anyway.

It was through the big brother of an elementary school friend that I got my very first taste of the cassette culture we know and still embrace today. His name was Laszlo Papp and he was the very first punk rocker I ever met; name virtually any early punk band and chances are he saw them at CBGB or Max's Kansas City. Laszlo didn't have a record player, but he did have a tape deck, and would let me hang out with him on occasion, playing tapes for me the whole time. His collection of tapes was filled with original store-bought cassette releases by the likes of Sparks, Suzi Quatro, and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band -- a collection I would just die to have now -- plus homemade punk comps his friends had made him from which I would hear the Sex Pistols and the Clash for the first time.

But what really aroused my curiosity was the one part of his collection devoted to a series of homemade tape albums by his own band, Chickenshit, who sang dirty songs with names like "Shovel That Shit," "Fags Are Fun," and "Fuckin' Jesus." They were really just a private joke band, true, but they were literally the very first lo-fi home tape project I ever heard of, and their aesthetic alone set off notions in my head that I could do one too. And so I formed my own little private joke band I dubbed the Occupants (a name inspired by that of the Residents) and started making my own little tape albums. The fact that I could neither play guitar yet nor knew any real musicians didn't stop me -- I just got my school pal Zoltan or sometimes even my two-year-old cousin Jamey (!!!) to bang on the family piano while I banged on a cheap guitar I'd picked up at a garage sale for two bits. Needless to say, we made Chickenshit sound like the Beatles. Still, it was through the Occupants that I ultimately picked up the home-recording habit for good.

All this time I was fully immersed in all things punk, and had started reading British-imported music zines like New Musical Express and Sounds to keep up with the latest sensations in my favorite genre. I vividly remember one particular issue of NME around 1980 or so which introduced a new classified column where musicians who recorded at home could advertise their homemade tape albums. Most of them could be obtained for little more than a blank tape and postage, and the majority of them seemed experimental in nature. I never went through the trouble of sending away to England for any of them, but I kinda wish I had now. It was clear to me, though, that something new was happening. People weren't just using tapes to tape albums they'd borrowed from their friends anymore -- they were now using them to make their own albums. Tapes in the '80s were a true precursor to both file sharing AND music streaming -- and I even stored a few computer programs on 'em!

All this was unfolding just as Sony introduced the Walkman and the ROIR cassette-only label emerged, the very first one of its kind. In 1982, at the height of hardcore punk, ROIR released the legendary Bad Brains tape, the one that would etch the very concept of the tape album in stone. I bought it the very week it came out and it blew my socks off. I absolutely wore out that sucker playing it to death right through my senior year of high school. From that point on, I began taking the musical end of the homemade tape albums I was creating for myself a bit more seriously. By then I'd learned enough chords to get started on that premise.

Hardcore also led to the emergence of college radio shows like Tim Sommer's "Noise The Show" on WNYU, and soon it became standard practice for underground radio to air lo-fi tape demos of all stripes. And when word started spreading that you didn't have to have your music professionally recorded to get it on the air anymore, the whole damn thing exploded. The format was available and affordable to anyone, and with the emergence of the dual dubbing deck around this time, tapes were easily duplicated and distributed -- a godsend to those who couldn't afford to put out vinyl. So I did just that. And so did thousands of others.

By 1984 my tapes were being played by Pat Duncan and Irwin Chusid on WFMU, and my music was finding an actual audience for the very first time. Me and my friends formed various punk projects and recorded improvised tape albums straight to cassette at a rehearsal studio in my hometown. Meanwhile, punk and metal had merged into thrash, and a worldwide, underground thrash tape trading community emerged in its wake, the absolute biggest one yet, fueled by the hundreds of thrash bands popping up in Slayer's wake. WMSC in Montclair, NJ, devoted entire shows to these demo tapes and I recorded and absorbed them just as I had followed anything to do with home taping since '77.

But the very best was still yet to come for me. For at the same time, yet another tape cult inspired by everything from psych to punk to modern indie rock was simmering. And yet another technological step forward had been taken -- namely, the 4-track portastudio, which took the quality of home recorded tapes up a notch. All of it was in place as 1986 arrived and William Berger launched Lo-Fi on WFMU. This weekly half-hour program was devoted entirely to tape culture and I was regularly featured on it throughout its existence. Mr. Berger's on-air invitations to listeners to send him tapes led to our discovery of several different artists whom we ultimately brought together and united into a live music scene in New York in the late '80s that literally took lo-fi out of the bedroom and into the street. (In my next post I will describe this particular scene in much greater detail.)

I was now making tape albums with names like "Trace the Psychosis" and "It's the Brann Man... and Don't You Forget It!" using a dual deck boombox with a mixing mic input, overdubbing and bouncing tracks back and forth between tapes. I was also working in the offices of an apparel company at this time, and by sneaking my hand-drawn j-card designs onto the copy machine when no one was looking, I was able to print them for free! Later on I acquired a Tascam 4-track portastudio and that's when I did my very best work, now available on my Bandcamp page for all to hear.

By the early '90s bands of all styles were selling and giving away tapes. They were still the format of choice for low-budget musicians until around 1998. And then... the recordable CD arrived. And suddenly millions instantly traded cassettes for convenience. In a way I could understand it. I admit even I was guilty of it when I chose to release The Racing Brain of Ray Brazen on CD instead of tape. But I still used cassettes to record radio shows, conversations I was lucky to have with music legends like Los Dug Dugs, the Godz, and TV Toy, and ideas for new songs I was writing. I bought a portable player just like the first few I'd owned in my youth at a thrift store and took it on the road with me, capturing the vibes on tape in every state I passed through. For me, tapes were still the best and most convenient way to record. I hate doing multitrack recording on computers with a passion, but ultimately the complete breakdown of my 4-track portastudio made it necessary for awhile. (I really should try to get a new one on Ebay soon. I've got enough new material for a whole new tape album.)

There may have been a drop in tape releases for awhile when CD-Rs took over, but in the late part of the '00s I started to see tapes slowly start to make a comeback. Only a few artists released tapes at first, but over time and into the present decade, the numbers shot up again and with the establishment of Burger Tapes and its global influence, we are now more or less back to where we were thirty years ago. Whoda thunk?

When I was invited by my very dear friend Joshua Rogers of Illuminated Paths to compile some of my home recordings from the 1980s for my first cassette release in 20 years on his label, I just couldn't say no. The response it got, along with Josh's boundless enthusiasm for my music and for tape culture in general, now has me fully immersed in it all over again for the first time in just as long. I'm proud to report that today's tape generation is producing music that stands proudly with the tape music I heard 30 years ago. Here in central Florida, in addition to Illuminated Paths, there's also Godless America and Popnihil, three distinct tape labels releasing everything from garage punk to electronic to vaporwave and beyond. They're still as cheap to make as ever, and bands still charge an average of six bucks for 'em.

The tape revival has also got me bootlegging vintage tape albums I've had since the late '80s and early '90s to share with today's younger tapeheads, and paying more attention to tape stockpiles in thrift stores. I've found quite a few old sealed blank tapes in thrift shops and these should always be bought on sight (especially since you don't wanna know how much Walgreen's charges for 'em now). Some of the used ones I've found have revealed everything from old radio airchecks to wedding ceremonies to family holiday greetings. And now tapes are officially fun again, for me and for so many others, veterans and novices alike. As one who has pretty much bled recording tape for over 4 decades now and is positively and justifiably thrilled about the whole resurgence, all I can say is... tape on!

THIS IS THE GODZ' TRUTH: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (Part 1)

(This is a newly revised and expanded version of an article I originally wrote for my website THE FIRST CHURCH OF THE GODZ in 2003. It underwent an unpublished revision two years later that was to be featured in a booklet in a boxed set of the band's music which never saw full completion. The piece has undergone further changes since then and I am now proud and honored to present this greatly revised edition of my Godz bio to you here on the Brazenblog, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the recording session for the band's debut album, CONTACT HIGH WITH THE GODZ. Enjoy.)

On September 28, 1966, four young freaks from New York City entered A-1 Sound Studios with only a few very trashy acoustic instruments. They had just landed a recording contract with a New York-based record label on the sole basis of a audition in which they just banged on these cheap instruments and howled like feral cats in a streetfight. But this was no ordinary band, and they had signed with no ordinary label. And in just one single session's time, they would give birth to a whole new sound and style which has taken on many forms since then, but has come to be identified (by my old WFMU colleague Irwin Chusid) as "outsider music."

The Godz were at A-1 to record their debut album, Contact High, for Bernard Stollman's ESP Disk (ESP being an abbreviation of the "universal" Esperanto language, as opposed to "extra-sensory perception"). ESP was a pioneering independent label primarily devoted to documenting the avant-garde jazz explosion of that time (releasing several Albert Ayler and Sun Ra albums and introducing Pharoah Sanders, to name a few), and in a sense, the Godz' music was as close to free jazz as psychedelic. These days, weird bands and indie labels are a dime a dozen, and how many of them have that same underlying sincerity to them? But in 1966 the Godz, and ESP, were quite literally in a class by themselves.

The Godz existed at a time when rock music was just starting to become freaky, but they stood out among all the others as the absolute freakiest of them all. Many bands were beginning to experiment with strange sounds within song structures in the mid-1960s, but the Godz were experimenting with strange sounds as the songs themselves. The Godz deliberately stressed minimal instrumental ability in an effort to bring the raw expression of art to the forefront of their sound. Whether you could dig it or not depended upon how open your mind happened to be, either naturally or through the use of certain illicit drugs, but most often a combination of both. And you can't help but wonder how many folks bought into the serious, pensive looks of four lads looking just like any other group on the cover of Godz 2 in 1967, and took the record home, only to be shocked out of their unsuspecting minds when the strains of "Squeek" or "Crusade" hit their ears!

Now the Godz' truth can be told: it was all sort of an accident. These guys never thought they would become a band when they first met. They were just good friends who happened to meet on the job in New York City. In a recent telephone conversation with this writer, Larry Kessler recalled to me how he met Jim McCarthy and Paul Thornton when they all took jobs in the 49th Street location of Sam Goody's, which may be the McDonald's of record stores today, but in the '60s and '70s was a serious music lover's emporium. It was while working at Goody's that Larry caught word of a more unique career opportunity: "Bernard Stollman needed a salesman for ESP and he told one of the guys who was doing stock work in the basement -- I guess this was in '65. And he told Jimmy about it, but he didn't want it because he wasn't really the salesman type. So he asked me if I wanted it and I said 'yeah, I'll go talk to the guy.' I talked to Bernard and we seemed to hit it off pretty good, so I started working for him." Larry would eventually work himself all the way up to ESP's general sales manager position.

All three had previous recording experience under their belts. Larry had released a single in 1961 called "Wonderful Days" under the alias of Obie Cricket, and Paul had two 45s of his own in 1964, "I'm No Rebel" (an answer record to "Hes a Rebel") and "Baby Be My Girl" (which was issued with two different B-sides, "Where's My Baby" and "Walk In Outer Space"). He and Jim were also members of the Dick Watson Five, who released one album, Baker Street, a rock interpretation of a Sherlock Holmes-themed Broadway musical. The two at first seemed content with their place in the NYC rock scene, until the fateful evening they ventured out to see an outrageous new local outfit calling themselves the Fugs. In a mid-90s interview with the fanzine 200 Lb. Underground, Jim recalled the lasting impression the Godz' future labelmates left on him: "The reality of their music caught me, and I thought, why am I fucking around singing other people's songs when I should be expressing my own feelings?"

Jim quit the Dick Watson Five right then and there, and so began the chain of events leading to the formation of his next band. Soon thereafter, his girlfriend dumped him and threw him out of the pad they'd been sharing, so he moved into Larry's apartment on East 11th Street for a short while. One day Paul came over to visit them, and the three gathered in Larry's living room to smoke a joint. What happened next was purely accidental, according to Jim: "There were all these percussive instruments lying around and out of total frustration, I got up and started shaking a tambourine or something like that, and that's how it all started. We all started to get up and make noise like a bunch of maniacs, expressing our frustration." It was an exhilarating moment for all three of them. But immediately afterward, Larry made a suggestion that had both Jim and Paul questioning his sanity: that the three audition this impromptu "band" for ESP. According to Jim, "He said 'Oh, Bernard Stollman would love this,' and I thought he was crazy!" But Larry was indeed serious, and went on to persuade ESP's art director, Jay Dillon, to round out the quartet, thus ensuring that John Sebastian could not claim the title of rock's only autoharp (psaltery) stylist.

Stollman remembered his first Godz encounter thusly: "They were all in my office, and Larry said 'Well, we're recording tomorrow.' I said, 'WE are recording?' 'Yeah,' he said, 'my group. The Godz.' I said, 'A group called the Godz?' 'Yeah. We're going into Herb Abramson's studio to record.' 'Who are the Godz?' 'Well, there's Jimmy over there, and there's Jay and me and Paul.' I said 'wow. Would you like me to hear it before you go record it in the studio?' 'Yeah,' he said, 'we're rehearsing at Natasha's tonight.' Natasha, my personal assistant! They were rehearsing at her apartment on the south side of Tompkins Square Park. So I went there, it was sweltering warm, it was hot, so we turned off the lights so it was cooler. And they did their song for me ("White Cat Heat"). I heard that, and that's all I had to hear. It was a ridiculous basis on which to give them a record session, but I couldn't say no. I figured, somehow they're into something. And I think it was because they were such rank individualists, that there was no danger of them doing anything conventional."

Larry claims his involvement in the Godz actually caused some friction with his new boss: "When Stollman found out I was in a band, he was really pissed at me personally, because I never told him I had anything to do with music, I had just told him I was a salesman. I was doing great as a salesman -- I got the Fugs' records into Korvettes and Alexander's (two now-defunct NY-metro-area department store giants of the time). I had long hair, I was freaky, and I was talking to people all over the country on the phone -- and I was doing a great job for him, he really liked me. But he wanted me to stay with ESP and not go off on the tangent of being a musician, 'cuz he knew how that was gonna end up."

THIS IS THE GODZ' TRUTH: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (Part 2)

The Godz recorded Contact High just after Jim's recovery from a bout with hepatitis (during which time he shared a hospital room with none other than Lou Reed) at A-1 Sound, owned and operated by the aforementioned Herb Abramson, the very same guy who founded Atco Records. (Abramson in fact was very open minded to the Godz' strange ideas, and even appeared on their third album as a sideman of sorts.) Stollman wanted to release a 45, but the Godz wanted more, so they took it upon themselves: "He told us we could go in and do a single with two songs," says Larry, "but we really had eight or nine songs. Most of these songs were, like, skeleton songs, and we were one of the first bands to ever do a Hank Williams song ("May You Never Be Alone"). We went in and instead of doing the single, we just did one song after another. The engineer, Andrew (Burliner) even played on it, he got all excited and he loved us." By the time they were finished, the two-hour session ESP had set up for them had stretched to six hours, and they had recorded seven songs more than was expected of them. But when Stollman heard the results, he liked it all so much he finally gave in and agreed to release a full album, and Contact High was born.

ESP put Jay Dillon to work designing the album cover. He portrayed the Godz as serious, mysterious, and a bit spooky, with its photographic depiction of Jay being "lynched" by the other band members, using liner notes and photos taken of the group in front of a fireplace by Marc Crawford, a local photographer and black activist who "didn't like white people, but liked us for some reason," according to Paul. But Jim McCarthy wanted to design his own cover and portray the band as just a bunch of fun-loving freaks, putting studio shots on the front cover in which he appears to be holding a joint. In the best diplomatic interests of the band, they had a cover contest, with Stollman as the judge. When he couldn't decide which cover he liked best, he decided to release both simultaneously, giving the listener the unique option of choosing whether to view the Godz as serious or humorous.

To be fair, the Godz were a little of both, but they were never above making fun of themselves. Jim's self-penned liner notes proclaimed them "four New York freaks who can't play their instruments," and their only non-LP track, "I Want A Word With You" (the B-side of their first 45, "Lay In The Sun"), ends with the voice of one member suggesting they "should practice more." But even the Godz were subject to an earful of artistic advice from a label like ESP, particularly in regards to the wall of wailing cat sounds which would become Contact High's most notorious track, and which Stollman originally wanted to release as their single. Says Larry, "We had called that song 'Meow' and he said, 'Oh, you've gotta call that song 'White Cat Heat,' cuz you're white cats and you sound like you're in heat!'" Stollman also took it upon himself to name the album, and wanted the Godz to assist him in his championing of the so-called "universal language" which had given the label its name, according to Jim: "Bernard wanted us to sing in Esperanto! One time he brought us into his office and he had this old geezer in there, and he spoke with this Eastern European accent, and he tried to teach us Esperanto and we couldn't have cared less!"

Having an album in the stores meant an easier time getting gigs for the Godz -- never mind the fact that theirs was no ordinary album. Says Larry, "Nobody ever listened to it first, they just figured that since we had an album, we were just like everyone else!" This would probably best explain the band's participation in a benefit for Pete Townshend's favorite guru, Meher Baba, or an even more bizarre booking Larry remembers: "We played the Miss Greenwich Village Pageant! They were trying to get us off the stage and we wouldn't leave!" Adds Paul, "That was at the New York Coliseum. It was sponsored by a ski shop and they wouldn't let us onstage unless we wore ski sweaters, so we had to get in a taxi and go to their shop on the east side to get ski sweaters. And then, after our first song, one of the go-go girls went over to the manager and said, 'We can't dance to this!'" Jim recalls the Meher Baba gig: "We played the Civic Center in Durham, North Carolina, and it was a great show. There was a pretty good local blues band that opened up for us and they were baffled out of their minds that we had top billing over them!"

As you would expect, the Godz live were as free and freaky as they were on vinyl. "We were so outrageous for our time," Larry says. "We were pre-punk. Even the Fugs had some type of show, but we were just total anarchy onstage. We used to argue with the audience. They thought we were kidding when we came out with a psaltery and plastic flute and acoustic guitar and big drum sticks, and we would just tune up for half an hour! And these people would be yelling! The freaky people liked us, but the regular people who were going down to Greenwich Village from Brooklyn or wherever were looking for some kind of folk singer, and we would come out!"

"We certainly let mistakes work in our favor," says Jim. "Art is about taking things that occur and letting them go and seeing what happens, and that goes for any art form. All we did was try to express our feelings honestly. We wanted to show that you didn't have to be a music student to express yourself."

They played at the Scene, Café Wha, Gerde's Folk City (their live debut, which ended with a more-than-fairly inebriated Larry falling off the tiny stage), and Café-A-Go-Go (a gig Jim remembers primarily "because we were thrown out of there for smoking grass in the dressing room"), in addition to various "open mikes." They wreaked havoc on the WBAI airwaves and recruited the hosts of the show as their soundmen. When they played in New Jersey, someone called the police. They opened for the Fugs at the Bridge Theatre on St. Mark's Place (until just recently home to the pricey "punk boutique" Trash & Vaudeville), and were halfway to the stage when Larry realized he had forgotten his violin -- one which he had managed to persuade his reluctant grandmother to lend him. The instrument wound up in splinters when Jim accidentally kicked it down a flight of stairs in the midst of the resulting mad rush to retrieve it.

Somewhere in the midst of all this activity, the then-up-and-coming experimental filmmaker and visual artist, Jud Yalkut, who at the time was working at Sam Goody with the rest of them, made the Godz subjects of a nine-and-a-half-minute, eight-millimeter film short. Yalkut shot a couple of live performances and gathered them at Larry's apartment one evening to film them just hanging out and acting silly. You see Jay playing his autoharp and Jim strumming the very same acoustic he used on Contact High, perhaps the cheapest one ever built in guitar history, and the boys getting stoned and watching a football game on Larry's TV. Accompanying this silent footage is a long medley of "Lay in the Sun" and "Come On Girl Turn On," interspersed with plenty of improvisation, actually owing more to the overall feel of the second album than of the first. Today, this film can be viewed in its entirety on Youtube, complete with its soundtrack which to this day remains unreleased on vinyl or CD.

For their second album, the Godz sought to advance their sound a bit, and took their time doing so. While Contact High had been recorded in one day, the band took four months to create Godz 2, which appeared in the fall of 1967. "After the first album," recalls Jim, "our egos were really pumped up. Larry kept on insisting we could be the American Beatles! For the second record we got decent instruments -- Jay got an electric keyboard, Paul got a set of drums, Larry had my bass and I got a nice electric guitar. We played around with those instruments and got a different feel for the second record."

Paul Thornton claims nobody told him about the Ampeg endorsement deal which provided them with the equipment used on Godz 2, and was stuck with the same old kit he'd used on Contact High. He had, however, started taking lessons from famed 1960s east coast session drummer Gary Chester, whose beats propelled such hit tunes as "My Boyfriend's Back" and "I'm a Believer," amongst a million other oldies, and who helped Paul create the primitive and infectious rhythms heard (and played while standing) on "Radar Eyes" and "Soon the Moon." For the second of two very rare white-label promo 45s, they recorded "Wiffenpoof Song," an insanely catchy, anthemic garage-chant that's one of their finest moments, and backed it with a mono remix of "Travelin' Salesman," which added overdubbed crowd hysteria swiped from the Stones' Got Live if You Want It and run backwards.

The Godz were also taken under the wing of Michael Soldan and Judy Parker, who published the legendary Eye magazine (original copies of which now fetch fairly large sums on Ebay), designed and photographed the cover of Godz 2 (and went criminally uncredited for it), and added a light show to the band's live act. Says Larry, "He was a photographer from England and she was from Rhode Island, and Jay was very close to them -- he started working at Eye magazine. We used to rehearse at their loft, and they loved us. We were really getting good by then. They had 50 or 60 of our practice tapes." "She was a very aesthetic, lovely woman, slender, tall," says Bernard Stollman, "and Michael was short and boyish and charming, and they were such an exquisite, sweet pair. I just liked them both a lot." Larry recalls that The Godz' music also had an unusual influence of sorts on Soldan's photographs of British rock stars: aiming to get the wildest facial expressions imaginable out of his subjects, "they used to play our tapes for the English bands and the guys would freak out while they took the pictures! They never heard this sort of music before, and they would act nuts!"

But tragedy struck on Memorial Day in 1968, when Soldan and Parker set out on a fateful, LSD-fueled boat ride off Long Island Sound, went missing in a flash flood and were presumed drowned, their bodies never recovered. "Their deaths were devastating to us, because they were our mentors," says Larry. Jay Dillon was especially spooked by this loss as he was originally scheduled to accompany his friends on the voyage, and his grief was a major factor in his decision to leave the Godz shortly afterward. Additionally, says Larry, "he'd grown disgusted with our lifestyle. He was much more of an intellectual than the three of us." Jim agrees: "Jay was the one who wanted us to get intellectual with the Godz. He wanted us to go to schools and teach kids how to play music!"

Without Jay, the remaining Godz released The Third Testament in late '68, inviting several friends to invade the studio and freak out on a few numbers (a concept mirroring the Red Crayola's Parable of Arable Land), then filling in the rest with solo numbers by each member. Despite the band being in its final stages by this point, Larry proclaims it his favorite Godz album: "I really liked where that one went." He broke his neck in a diving accident the following year, and that was the end of the Godz... almost.