Henry Flynt
Nova'Billy
locust101
CD / 180 gram LP
2007-10-23

"i want to be a rocker. everybody else has walked away from rock. i want
to walk towards it." - Henry Flynt

Taste the magic! Nova’Billy is another edible audible from Henry Flynt's
dusty lower Manhattan bunker and it stands as one of the fullest, most
beauteous document of Flynt's tenure with a full working rock band to
date. For less than one calendar year between 1974 and 1975, Henry
Flynt's hard driving, heavy jamming agit country rock band, Nova'Billy
embraced bareknuckled deep fried groove attacks, bearded hippie jam band
workouts & a monstrous melange of blues, boogie and free jazz squeal
into a musical soufflé that could only have come together with Flynt
cooking up what was proven to be, time and again, an impossible vision
within the confines of the SOHO art orbit of the 70s. After a couple
performances at Anthology Film Archives and studio sessions in Richmond,
Virginia and Manhattan, the band postered SOHO in a last ditch effort to
get some traction with the hipsters that read, "Party on down to the
Kitchen. Stoned country music for rock country". The gig, like all the
others before it, was poorly attended. Nova'Billy played what would be
their last live gig at the Kitchen on June 27, 1975.

Nova’Billy covers a damned fine and important moment in Henry Flynt's
musical career. If the Insurrections laid the foundation for his anti
war primitive garage rock sound, the emergence, nearly a decade later of
Nova'billy is the realization of Henry's own vision of obtuse personal
politics ( "I was a creep"), provocative leftwing posturing (check their
version of the world communist anthem "the international!") and a
gleefully recombinant spin on southern music. 13 cuts and 60 minutes of
old glory!

Available on cd and gatefold 180 gram double vinyl.

Praise

In the mid-Seventies, as America was reliving a sanitized version of the Fifties with /American Graffiti/ and /Happy Days/, Henry Flynt (perhaps the only bona fide philosopher/hillbilly fiddler in the history of the world) assembled a crack band of downtown New York pals to remind everyone of rock’n’roll’s righteously unruly roots. No one listened at the time, but upon hearing it now, /Nova’Billy/ is a revelation. Flynt rethreads the sounds of early rock ’n’ roll — the rude bleat of Big Jay McNeeley’s sax; Chuck Berry’s briar patch guitar riffs; the slapback shuffle of Carl Perkins and the propulsive piano of Jerry Lewis — and swings it overhead for his own unruly lariat. That an avant-garde thinker created music this glaringly unpretentious and wholly alive in the conceited environs of pre-punk New York is accomplishment enough. As gnarly as /Nova’Billy/ can get, one intuits that this is how rock’n’roll felt at the beginning: a sputtering, barely-controllable cyclone of dancefloor energy and joyful noise. - Sam Sweet, Stop Smiling

fried country blues, interspersed with moments of sax squeal and odd almost Velvets rants, if that band was founded in rural Arkansas rather than Warhol’s factory. How ever you want to take it, its highly listenable, playful music that fits nicely with today’s oddballs. The fact that there are actual funk passages on this album is just bizarre. So tune it for some old school freak weirdness if yr so inclined. - Steve Lowenthal, The Fader

Welcome back my friends to the hoedown that never ends. This is a barn dance called by an inspired madman, where the fiddles switch at bog bottom boogie and the drummer rolls like a good crank buzz, mean and hard and focused. Throw this into the ring with Canned Heat's Hooker 'n' Heat and Albert Ayler's New Grass tag teaming and Flynt might bitch slap 'em both. It might be the Chuck Berry piano on "Lonesome Train Dreams" that trips 'em up or maybe the howlingly hypnotic string buzz throughout that puts them off kilter but there's a ropeadope move in here somewhere. While largely known to experimental/outsider music enthusiasts, Flynt is surprisingly groovy here. This highly left leaning (there's a delightfully bent version of Communist anthem "The International") conflagration of bold ideas existed for slightly less than a year in 1974-75, and while woefully short-lived, they make most so-called "newgrass" acts today look like mere fluffers to these true porn stars. This is bold, fearless stuff that still hits you square in the gutbucket. A thousand thanks to Locust for helping this one resurface. If Nova'Billy doesn't make you scream out loud at least a few times I'd wonder if there's antifreeze in your veins instead of human blood. - Dennis Cook, Jambase