The emergence of Henry Flynt's proletariat backwater trance music has been one of the more remarkable uncoverings of unheard music in years. A dozen discs, on Locust, Recorded and Ampersand, have been released, records he had completed (down to the artwork) as far back as the mid 1960s. Quitting La Monte Young's band because it was too bourgeoisie, the North Carolina-born violinist took a guitar lesson or two from Lou Reed and set about forging his own working-class art music, mixing country blues, rock and raga in different permutations and into something utterly unique.
Because his recordings were all conceived and packaged as albums, we now get to watch his career unfold in hindsight and at hyperspeed. So on the heels of his charming enigmatic song work (generally the albums with "Hillbilly" in the title) and his long-form trance music (C Tune, Purified by the Fire and others), we get his later-day stab at stardom. Nova'Billy was Flynt's mid '70s rock band, a project seemingly designed to dumb down the leader's ideas for an audience he once championed. The band is a little too solid and a fair bit too unimaginative, and their album far and away the least interesting of the releases.
That said, there's some fun listening here. Flynt and the band (a septet including drummer Don Christensen, who would go on to play with the Contortions, and saxophonist Peter Gordon, who would record with the Love of Life Orchestra and Laurie Anderson) groove through commie anthem "The Internationale" and do some fun one-chord jams featuring Flynt's fiddle. But for the most part, they do little more than Canned Heat did for John Lee Hooker: They don't quite kill it but they don't do much to earn their keep either.
The album is being hyped as Flynt's rock band recording, and while that's true enough the remarkable I Don't Wanna, recorded in 1966 and released by Locust in 2004, is far superior. Unlike that and most of the other releases, Nova'Billy stretches well beyond LP length, suggesting that it may not be the completed work the previous releases have been, and perhaps the bottom of the barrel is nearing. But few even knew the barrel was there; we're lucky to have found it.
this email was sent to Kurt Gottschalk in response to his review:
I thought I'd point out that Henry only ever conceived two records from beginning to end - Graduation & You Are My Everlovin'. All of the others have been put together in the present day. I can't speak for Berndt's working process with the Recorded discs but with his locust releases, album 'concept' is usually put in place the moment i've had an opportunity to hear the flat transfers of material from a particular period and talk it over with Henry. From that point I typically compile & sequence the albums and propose them to Henry. A lot of dialoguing ensues and we arrive at a finished 'album' that stays true to what Henry may envisioned were it to have existed at the time of its recording. The idea has always been to arrive at as cohesive an album as possible handled in much the same way as one would handle any new collection of songs rather than the tendency with some archival collections to include everything to the detriment of the fluidity of a great listening experience. It's for this reason that his positioning in reissue columns always seemed to be more than an issue of semantics. something can't be a reissue if it was never issued and put on the public record in the first place.
Henry has an extraordinary amount of material dating back - he and i have just discovered - to as early as 1959.
Best,
Dawson Prater
locust
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Kurt Gottschalk 2007-12-19
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