posted 3/7/2008 11:35:01 AM

Peter Grudzien

by Patrick Lundborg

Like several other privately released albums that have become underground classics, Peter Grudzien’s ”The Unicorn” was first discovered by musicologist and record dealer Paul Major in New York. Back in 1988, the then unknown LP was presented in one of Major’s record catalogs:

“…The most twisted LP ever in my possession! Even non-collectors flip their wigs into eternity when I give them a dose of Grudzien. And you thought Cosmic Michael was the top acid casualty, you thought Higney was the apex of a dissembled mind! Ultra bizarre blend of religious guilt, Gandalf The Gay wizard trick music – a psychedelic Johnny Cash, sinister voices muttering about ‘Redemption’ and the ‘monkey-people’. One look into his eyes on the cover will convince you this man has Serious Demons he can never exorcise from his brain. This will be too weird for most, I rate it as one of the big then psychedelic garage masterworks worldwide.”

Paul Major would later track Grudzien down, an encounter which he memorably describes in the “Incredibly Strange Music vol II” book from Re/Search:

“[I met him] in a downtown drag bar. He was like something out of the Addams Family: really tall and skinny, in an obviously slept-in tuxedo, about 55 years old. He wanted me to go out to his car and listen to the song he’d recorded the morning before, and when we walked down the sidewalk in Greenwich Village, every head turned on both sides of the street! I got into the car, it was covered with cigarette stains and grease and smelled strongly of gas—I was afraid that when he turned the key in the ignition to play the tape deck, the car would explode. He turned out to be a walking encyclopedia of early country music, he had met a lot of big country stars.”

Following this unusual first encounter, a CD reissue of the album was arranged, and Grudzien’s connection with a circle of NYC underground music fans and record collectors helped revive his career. In the early 2000s his legend had grown to the point where he was interviewed at some length for British TV, and the album was considered one of the ultimate artifacts from the mid-70s underground. The Parallel World reissue soon went out-of-print, and in light of the $500+ price of the original 1974 pressing, the current reissue is a vital and most welcome effort.

Due to the rural nature of his music and some Kentucky references in the lyrics, Peter Grudzien has been believed by some to come from KY, but he was in fact born and raised a New Yorker, in Astoria, Queens. The music bug bit him at an early stage, and in the 1950s he discovered favorite sounds in the fields of Christian music and hillbilly. Influenced by Hank Williams and Johnny Cash (whom he met in person in 1957), Grudzien formed his first band in the late 1950s, and recorded self-composed material already at this early stage. While studying at art school in the early 1960s, he added the young Bob Dylan to his list of favorite artists, and traces of all three giants can be found on “The Unicorn”. He also experimented with hallucinogenic drugs at an early stage, as evident from the peyote trip references on “I Don’t Complain”, recorded back in 1964.

During the 1960s Grudzien visited San Francisco to witness the rapidly emerging counterculture, and back home in New York City, he became involved in the openly gay scene around the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village. The Stonewall riots of June 1969 is often seen as a watershed event for the gay movement, although Peter Grudzien feels today that the confrontation was a staged event, where student troublemakers deliberately provoked the police. In 1987 he recorded a song where he expressed his view of the the riots.

While working as a graphic designer, Grudzien would continue to compose and record music, and in 1974 he was ready to release an album. Titled “The Unicorn – An Album In Two Sides”, it was a self-released work originally pressed in only 500 copies. No professional distribution was involved, and Grudzien tried to sell copies via local book stores, although the highly original nature of the music failed to gain many fans at the time. He moved on to other projects and for a decade the album remained completely unknown, prior to its rediscovery in the late 1980s.

In recent years, “The Unicorn” has been referred to as an “outsider” work, but many of Grudzien’s fans feel that this is an inaccurate label. The primitive circumstances during which it was recorded, and the fact that Peter Grudzien plays all instruments himself, makes for an individualistic sound that may seem crude and unrefined at first. However, over repeat plays a different feel emerges – the sense of a highly gifted songwriter pursuing a personal vision with no need to compromise. If recorded in a professional studio with any number of takes available, this talent and vision would have been more readily available for the listener, but as it came out, the full magic requires some patience to manifest itself. Which, arguably, is one of the things that makes it such an appealing album, and probably also why it has gained such a high degree of devotion among its admirers.

Roots and folk music had been popular in Village underground scenes since the early 1960s, and in the counterculture explosion of the mid-60s highly personal albums were made by NYC artists like the Holy Modal Rounders, the Fugs, Charlie Brown, and others, which clearly draw on the same traditional wells that Grudzien would visit on “The Unicorn”. Echoes of aforementioned icons like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan can be found in the songwriting and vocal style, but unique moods and themes are ever-present, be it snips of electronic avantgarde, choral music copied from “Tannhäuser”, or the unparalleled surreal imagery of the 9-minute magnum opus “Kentucky Candy”. The lyrics are remarkably elaborate and full of double entendres and surprising turns, yet maintain an internal logic in mood and style. The title “The Unicorn” is a reference to a friend of Grudzien’s in the early 1970s gay community, who was nicknamed such due to his distinct facial profile. With this in mind, a lyric such as “the queen that holds the unicorn will be reborn, his mighty horn” opens up in an unexpected way. Similar cases can undoubtedly be found across the whole album.

Peter Grudzien has been called “the Van Gogh of 70s folk”, and like the troubled painter there is a sense of genuine originality in every move he makes, yet all tunes fit into the overall coherence of “The Unicorn” concept. Trying to analyze this extraordinary music is a tempting challenge, but one that each listener should be undertake for himself.

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