Always in Trouble

Weiss (editor, Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader) weaves together 40 interviews to tell the story of ESP-Disk' records, the label that launched the careers of many seminal free jazz artists, such as Albert Ayler, and oddball folk rockers, e.g., the Fugs, as well as the initial spoken-word output of writer William S. Burroughs and LSD guru Timothy Leary. He devotes the first quarter of the book to in-depth interviews of Bernard Stollman, who started and then maintained the label from 1964 to 1974 as a labor of love in the face of financial difficulties. In the remainder of the book, the author chronicles the history of the label by sharing interviews of many of those who recorded on ESP, including such avant-garde jazzmen as Giuseppi Logan, Paul Bley, and Milford Graves and folkies such as Tom Rapp and Peter Stampfel.