Just do it. Regardless. No matter what. Without being able to do it. Without having learned it. Without regard to expectations. Expectations of the audience or the market. Years before punk and the Geniale Dilletanten in West Berlin, there was The Godz. A band between experimental rock, avant-noise and psychedelic folk. The trail leads back to New York in 1966.

The boys didn’t really want to be avant, they were just bored. Boredom in New York. Boredom in the most exciting city in the world, the city of John Cage, Miles Davis, and Marcel Duchamp. Boredom and frustration. In New York. Heavy smog lay over the city, in November 1966 there was an environmental disaster, dozens of people died. In Andy Warhol’s factory, creatures of the night amped on up white powders wielded shiny leather whips while the light of the film projectors flickered wildly. At the same time, bearded men plucked banjos in the Village as if the American Civil War were still raging. But another war was raging, far from the Hudson River. While New Yorkers choked in a toxic haze, U.S. soldiers were fighting a senseless battle in the Vietnamese jungle. The hits of the Monkees and the Supremes played on the radio.

Larry Kessler, Jim McCarthy and Paul Thornton were bored, sitting around in an apartment smoking pot. The kind of thing you do when you’re bored. In 1966. In New York. At least it was better than dying in Vietnam. They were hip, had hip jobs, knew their way around. Paul and Jim sold musical instruments at Sam Goody, Larry worked at ESP. That was way ahead, even by New York standards.

ESP, short for ‘Esperanto Records’, was a label founded in 1963 by Bernard Stollman, specializing in free jazz and obscure songwriters. Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and Ornette Coleman were all published on ESP, as were the protest anarcho-freaks The Fugs. With ESP, Stollman provided a forum for the avant-garde of the counterculture. There was no ‘Love and Peace’ here, no hippie-esque bliss, instead collectively improvised atonality and subversive revolutionaries.

Larry sat in the mail room at ESP and wrapped packages. In the evenings, he smoked joints with Jim and Paul. Sometimes Jay Dillon, ESP’s art director, would join them. There were instruments lying around the room. That’s how it all started. Just do it, without second thoughts. They played away and thus The Godz were born. The next step was obvious, record an album. Larry told his boss he now had a band and asked if he would put the album out. Stollman spontaneously agreed without even hearing a note and booked the Folkways studio for three hours on September 28, 1966. It was the best deal he could get.

That day, Stollman went over to Folkways about an hour after the session started to see what he was getting into. What he saw irritated him. The guys were sitting on the studio floor smoking pot. What’s this? he asked himself, there he was paying good money for studio time and this was the result!? Larry remained calm. They had long since finished. The Godz recorded the nine tracks on their album in just under 30 minutes. No rehearsing, no fiddling, no playing around. One song, one take, all in a row. In the end, ‘Contact High With The Godz’, the ESP release with catalogue number 1037, would last exactly 24 minutes and 14 seconds. 24 minutes and 14 seconds for eternity. Nine songs. Nine weird beat numbers, wild folk songs, improvised miniatures, and to finish things off a bizarre cover version of Hank Williams’ ‘May You Never Be Alone’. Music critic John Dougan wrote for AllMusic many years later, ‘The Godz coughed up some of the strangest, most dissonant, purposely incompetent rock noise ever produced. […] Sounding like a prototype for Half Japanese or The Shaggs’. The Godz play as if they discovered their instruments ten minutes before the tape started rolling.’

After their debut, The Godz continued for a few more years, recording three more records until 1973, all released by ESP. Then they disbanded, made a comeback 35 years later, and are still considered an insider tip among record collectors and music geeks. Today, Jay Dillon, Paul Thornton and Larry Kessler are no longer alive. The latter was hit by a truck in March 2022 and died as a result of the accident. The Godz are now history.

The Godz vs. The Curators: Berlin, 2007. I had been running the off-gallery Zero Project at Schlesisches Tor in Kreuzberg, Berlin with my girlfriend Anna Krenz for a while. Together with a friend, the camera operator John-Patrick Classen, we founded the gallery’s own band The Curators which rehearsed in the exhibition space and usually played live in the context of art shows. Just do it, without consideration. Neither Anna or I were able to use any instrument properly, Patrick at least knew how to play the guitar. We followed the concept of instant improvisation. With guitars, e-violin, keyboard, rattles, drums wefound in the trash, bizarre electronic instruments like the theremin and tenori-on and cheap effect devices from the flea market, we created soundtracks over which I sang improvised vocals. No repetitions, no rehearsals, no nothing. But sometimes trouble.

At one concert at the Rock’n’Roll High School (which no longer exists) in Friedrichshain, Berlin, the rockabillies who ran the club turned off the power and yelled ‘That’s not music!’ after us as while we hurriedly packed up. Another gig, in the former wholesale flower market across from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, now home to the Jewish Academy, resulted in the sound engineer cutting our performance short after a little over 22 minutes, stating that what we were doing on stage was ‘Körperverletzung’ or ‘bodily harm’, in English. The surviving recording of the group improvisation with the Berlin band Floating Di Morel was given just that title.

In the spring of 2008, I was in New York for a few weeks where I met Bernard Stollman. After a career as an assistant New York Attorney General, Stollman began to dedicate himself once more to his old label, which had been shut down in the meantime. The old records were re- released on CDs, plus they had some new releases. From our conversation, I produced a radio feature for the Hamburg based NDR about the ESP story. The Godz were also featured, and the story of September 28, 1966, those 30 minutes in the Folkways studio that should have changed the world, but didn’t. For me, however, the recording of ‘Contact High’ remained a historical moment that I wanted to trace, to re-enact. It was an ideal project for The Curators.

I asked my friend, the musician, songwriter and singer Doc Schoko, to join the cause and also invited filmmaker Dietmar Post. Post’s documentary ‘Monks – The Transatlantic Feedback’, which he produced with his wife Lucía Palacios in 2007, tells the story of the nihilistic beat band The Monks. I discovered parallels between The Godz and The Monks, not only in spiritual hierarchy – we’re talking about gods and monks, after all –, but also in terms of sound, musical strategies, and a similarly radical attitude toward the era in which the bands operated. The legendary Monks album ‘Black Monk Time’ also appeared in 1966.

A good 42 years later, in the winter of 2008, the time had come. The Curators faced The Godz. With Doc Schoko as well as Dietmar Post, who was to capture the moment with his camera, we went to the old Festsaal Kreuzberg on Skalitzer Straße, which had been completely destroyed by a fire five years later, and set up our lo-fi instruments. There was no audience. The concept was simple, we wanted to completely replay The Godz’s first record. Without rehearsing beforehand, without repeats, without post-processing. We listened to one song and played it, then the next, then the next. Godz song, Curators version, Godz song, Curators version. After nine tracks and exactly one hour and two minutes (including about 25 minutes of original Godz material and about 30 minutes of Curators cover material), ‘Contact High With The Curators’ was born.

This time it wasn’t an irritated Bernard Stollman who came in the door, but Teka, one of the bosses of Festsaal Kreuzberg. We sat around and drank beer. ‘What was the point of that?’ he wanted to know, after he had made the room available to us. We are done, we answered, one hour, we didn’t need longer. Just do it, without consideration. The recordings then lay around on external hard drives for 15 years until Alexander Meyer from Edition Telemark decided to release the 2008 reanactment of those immortal 30 minutes from September 28, 1966. Contact High!

Jacek Slaski, December 2022