Contact High liner notes.
 
The Godz first album, Contact High, rearranged the furniture in my head when I first heard it back in 1966. I was 15 years old and had never heard anything so fucking weird in my life. The Godz’ hypnotic, electronic, cowboy ragas and high lonesome mantric wails sounded like Hank Williams, Sun Ra and The Fugs being wok-fried in the Mongolian barbecue of absolute reality. Their subversive drone was immortalized on vinyl a year before The Velvet Underground’s debut, which leads one to wonder if VU picked up on The Godz twisted vibrations.

The liner notes for Contact High are worth reading in their entirety. They capture a very specific place and time in rock and roll’s ascension:

“THIS IS THE GODZ’ TRUTH: two sides of eight original tunes by four New Yorkers who don’t give a good God-damn whether you dig it or not. They are human, alive, and hot in the blood, creating their own song, forging their own sound with a beat like an elephant’s heart. They are that way because they hold honesty dear, and have no need for arrogance.

By name the GODZ are blond Jay Dillon, 24, a psaltery player by choice and a graphic designer by trade; Larry Kessler, 25, a sometimes craps dealer, dishwasher and itinerant record salesman. Record salesmen also are Jim McCarthy, 22, guitarist, harmonica and plastic flute player, and drummer Paul Thornton, 26, who never played that instrument before this date. To all of them, musical instruments are but so many vehicles by which they express all they cannot consciously define in any other way. Now if all this stops you, don’t read further and for GODZ’ sake don’t buy this record album.

But if you want to hear about love and the lack of it by victims unashamed, about hate and too much of it in the world, or the passion of these realistic young men who know dream can be another name for nightmare, then you can say these are your kind of people and make it stick. For it is a new, honest, emotion laddened telling-it-like-I-feel-it kind of music, which is, really, the only kind of music this country has produced, and is, therefore, very American, Lyndon Johnson and the critics notwithstanding.

The GODZ in short are hip and wise to the ways of the world, its put-ons and all of that. They don’t dig Mom’s apple pie and I’ve never seen them in church on Sunday. They stand in the margin of life and that is where their music is, and this is what they offer you in this, their first recorded album.”  Marc Crawford.

Contact High was followed by Godz 2 in 1967 and The Third Testament in 1968. All three albums blend a proto-punk rawness with alt-jazz and deranged country weirdness into something that still sounds as adventurous and irreverent as it did back in the sixties.

The Godz opened up the field of possibilities for rock and rollers, expanding our notion of what rock is. But I’m sure they’d never claim that. It doesn’t sound fun enough.

In this rarely seen (until now) video, legendary experimental film maker Jud Yulket shoots The Godz in their Manhattan apartment in 1966. The silent 8mm footage was overdubbed with the band playing an extended medley of two of their songs, “Lay In The Sun” and “Come On Girl Turn On,” and some improvised jamming. The music track has never been released on vinyl or CD. Sloppy but evocative, this is not The Godz at their musical best but it does take you back to a time when space was the place and rock and roll was vital mojo in a shaman’s trick bag.
 

 
“Radar Eyes” from Godz 2 is edgy psychedelia with some seriously sinister overtones. Cooler than punk and twice as deadly.