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Zerfas :
Zerfas
"A Soul Tormented by Contemporary Music Finds a Humanizing Alchemy"
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(1994 re-issue)
Record collecting, in one form or another, has probably
been going on since the first fellow lost sleep over a
missing Edison cylinder in his collection. If you wanted
to trace a history of rare record collecting (the
quest for the "holy grail" -- the intoxicating
aura of authenticity surrounding the "impossible
object") it would likely lead you from the earliest
Blues 78s, past seriously rare Rockabilly and C&W
sides, down a hallway lined with ethereal and beautiful
doo-wop 45s, into a library of gloriously snotty
psychedelic garage-punk singles, and into a room full of
psychedelic oddities so large you can't tell where it
ends.
Sometime in the late-70s, maybe just into the early
1980s, a collector's scene began to take shape around the
loosely-defined category of "private-label"
LPs. From the mid-60s on, the impact of records like
"Surrealistic Pillow", "Disraeli
Gears", "Axis: Bold As Love",
"Revolver", "Freak Out", "Blonde
On Blonde", and others upon art and culture is
immeasurable. One pretty direct effect of the trend was
that tens of thousands of us (maybe more) took to our
basements and garages with drums and guitars, cheap mics
run through tiny PA systems and made our own music. Of
the five hundred people who will eventually hold a copy
of this record, I'd wager half or better once made way
too much noise in somebody's basement.
We played rough cover versions of "I'm So
Glad", "Good Lovin'", "Hey Joe",
and countless others. Most of us got over it after a
while; but many of us didn't. Thousands of bands wrote
original songs, influenced by the incredible records that
filled the bins at the local stores. Many of these
bands scraped together money from their day jobs and the
gigs they'd play at local clubs and auditoriums, borrowed
some money from families and friends and went into local
semi-pro recording studios (or set up borrowed
reel-to-reel recorders in makeshift basement studios) and
recorded some combination of covers and original
material. Just like a very stoned John Lennon playing
the tape of "Rain" backwards, they made
mistakes and incorporated their accidents into music in
their own giddy stoned reverie. Some would go so far as
to ship these tapes off to the nearest pressing plant
with payment for the minimum number of copies you could
have pressed, as few as 100, as many as 1,000. Some paid
for generic covers of sunsets or clouds over the ocean,
covers they would unknowingly share with local gospel
quartet and high school marching band records - and some
would paste up their own covers over blank covers they
bought. The records were sold at gigs and local head
shops, given away to friends and local radio stations,
the last box or two stashed away in an attic (still
waiting for somebody like me to find).
Now decades later, in a dollar bin, flea market, yard
sale or a local junk shop, somebody pulls out an
abandoned copy, dusty and scratched, the cover worn and
ripped from old glue and water damage, and takes it home,
cleans it up a bit, and drops the tone arm on the first
track. Most of the time it's badly recorded, badly
played cocktail lounge music at best. But every once in
a while, honest-to-God magic comes rushing out of
the speakers. What the earliest private-press collectors
realized was that hidden in some of these records was
inspired song writing, arrangements, and playing as good
as anything the major labels had to offer. These
collectors also took extra pleasure in the knowledge that
they were the first to hear these songs in this new
context. And in this manner (or one very much like it)
the collector/dealer as psychedelic archaeologist was
born.
In truth, the bulk of what has emerged as the U.S.
private-press collector scene is comprised of records
that never has the polish and production values necessary
for the wider commercial appeal of the major label LPs.
A good portion of the education process - and a good
chunk of the pleasure therein - is in the acquisition of
new ears and new eyes; the expanded senses
necessary to find the treasures amid the trash in the
thrift store racks, and to find the magic in the dusty
grooves.
A record collector for the most of my life, I have spent
some time in recent years undergoing this process of
education/transformation - a gradual process of seduction
I have found a source of great personal enjoyment. The
title I've put at the front of this short essay is the
title of scene 4 in avant-garde composer, Harry Partch's
1957 composition, "The Bewitched". I am taken with
the way the phrase "a humanizing alchemy" describes
with strinking accuracy those records we are all now
frantically searching for. For me, this notion of a
"humanizing alchemy" has something to say about
the emotional sincerity, a kind of emotional
authenticity, the best of these records contain. The
best of these records were made by people who beleived
that music was capable of saying BIG things - capabale of
expressing BIG answers to BIG questions. Caught up in
this then, is a struggle for articulation as these
musicians, often very young and semi-professional
struggled to connect the notes in ways that would shed
light on, well, the meaning of life, the universe...
everything.
In many ways, Zerfas is the epitome of the U.S.
private-press psychedelic record. A group of 18 and 19
year-olds, heads alive and bursting with all the
mythologies of the 1960s filtered through the vast flat
strangeness of the American midwest and their own unique
and rich creativity, finally raise the money to enter
Moe Whittemore's small recording studio in January of 1973.
In the six months that followed, led by David's fertile
imagination, they would use every device, every
recording trick and technique, every late-night accident
and mistake, to finally realize their vision and deliver
the closest thing Indiana would ever have to the
archetype of studio psychedelic LPs, "Sergeant
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
This record presents the first two chapters of what might
still yet be a work-in-progress (Dave had the first four
or five chapters worked out, and if he finishes these
sometime in the first decade of the new century he can
still claim to have out-paced George Lucas). Starting
sometime in the early 1980s, Zerfas made its
earliest appearances on psych collector want lists -
usually in the form of "Zerfus ?" or "Zerphus
?", more rumor than record. For a local record from
central Indiana, the original 500 copies seem to have
been spread by the four winds: copies have been found in
a New York radio station record library, a Colorado
thrift store, Marin County flea market - my own favorite
is a copy, now in a Minnesota collection, marked with the
stamp of the library of a state mental institution!
I first heard Zerfas some years back when a friend found
a copy at a local thrift store. As the prelude to the
first track slowly faded up - a wondrously thick mix of
layered backwards and forward voices and sounds - I
remember thinking that this might just be the best thing
I'd ever heard. the greatest strength of Zerfas is in
its rich mix of different techniques and approaches; and
ability to work across a wide range of styles - from the
opening garage sneer of "You Never Win" through
the dreamy psychedelia of "The Piper" - without
ever sacrificing an overall thematic and harmonic
continuity. Across the two sides you can get some sense
of these musicians/artists laboring for hours in the
small studio to get just the right blend of harmony,
guitar, drums and organ to reach for that fleeting
glimpse of something larger than we are. This is a great
LP that rewards repeated listening with new insights.
Enjoy.
Stan Denski
Indianapolis
November 1994