after the "Jazzactuel" box came out, Byron Coley said Charly wanted him and Thurston Moore to do liner notes for reissues of the whole series, but they refused unless the artists got paid for the reissues. Ah, the sour smell of the record business.
That's exactly what ESP Disk'/ Calibre promised: (they would surely have this clean deal), when they asked me to do some liner notes. And after thirty discs, The Dutch Deal was down, never heard any coherent story about its demise. ESP is currently put out in Italy. Yes, that's right, bootleg heaven. As a writer, I thought just about the same things a jazz musician might come across, when offered this ESP-Disk deal: Wow, now I can do the stuff I REALLY like. In my case, I didn't 'sign' anything, but I had an interesting time visiting Burton Greene, speaking to Sonny Simmons on the phone etc. That was a wild experience for me. And, yes, I was paid, but compare it to the one time 'session fee' all ESP musicians got after their recording session. Byron Colley might know the exact amount of dollars involved, it must have been something between 50 and 250 dollars. I actually lost money on at least one booklet. That was because I went out of my way to make Free Music Quintet as beautiful as possible. And now I am Pierre Courbois's (Free Music's drummer) official biographer. Let's see if that's going to make me rich;-) Remco