14^th Jan 2011

In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven there were men and women.

Composed by Robert Ashley in 1972, released on Cramps Records in 1974. The text is by John Barton Wolgamot, written in 1944 and published privately in two different versions. The book was reputedly found by chance in a second hand bookshop in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. ‘Wolgamot said he had sold twelve copies of the first edition and two copies of the second. Wolgamot said that the “book” was essentially the title page, that one should consider the title page to be the “body” of the book, and that the 128 pages of names should be considered as “the blood flowing through the body”. Wolgamot was being modest, facetious, self-deprecating, whatever, when he said, “It’s harder than you think to write a sentence that doesn’t say anything”‘.