YOU NEVER HEARD SUCH SOUNDS IN YOUR LIFE
The offices of ESP-Disk’ have moved many times over the years. A quick scan of the label’s 1960s album covers reveals the various addresses where founder Bernard Stollman set up shop, from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Krumville, a hamlet close to Woodstock. Last January, the home office was in its final days at its latest location, the ground-floor apartment of a Brooklyn brownstone. It doubled as the home of Steve Holtje, who has managed the company since 2013, two years before Stollman passed away.
Seated in a room off of his kitchen—among shelves of inventory, a coveted box of original ESP vinyl pressings, and two computers—the 59-year-old Holtje, a burly gentleman with a walrus mustache, exhibits some qualities one would expect from a label manager. “As a former critic I’ve always wanted to push my tastes at other people, and you never get to push your tastes at other people more than by being the guy that decides what comes out on a record label,” he says. Yet he comes off neither as a hard-selling, “product”-talking guy nor as an eccentric enthusiast who gets rabid about obscure artists. He’s more like a Zen master, always calm and focused.
This becomes clear about an hour into our conversation, when I ask him what it’s like being the torchbearer for the label that introduced the world to free-jazz legends like Albert Ayler and experimental folk-rock groups like the Fugs—and that continues to unleash adventurous musicians on the world. “It cost me my marriage,” he says.
