From Robert Gladston’s “People Started Wearing Fedoras: NYC Ephemera.”

The jams in the back of a small store on a remote corner in Brooklyn at the end of the 20th century are hardly a household cultural reference point. The mythical aura around these “parties” comes mainly from a thinly fictionalized scene in Lucy George’s cult novel “I Forgot Attica.” Far more people have bragged about being there than a factual approximation of attendance would reflect. Confirmed eye-witnesses say that there were never more than a handful of bodies in the room in the back of an adult video (and, apparently, lingerie) store.

Also reported is the fact that said attendants were not only under the influence of powerful mind-altering chemicals but had come to the jams as a connoisseur’s destination for people in this condition. These weren’t gigs. People hung out in proximity to a rehearsing band that was referred to by the name of the store: Candy Love.

Nathan Himmelhoch was a regular presence as an unofficial engineer. He provided a simple sound system from equipment he had “borrowed” from his day job with a wedding reception company. He went on to found Crescent Wrench Records known primarily for releasing Mike Charles’ seminal drone recordings. Recently Himmelhoch digitized informal recordings he had made of some Candy Love sessions.

I reached him at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska where he currently works as an audio engineer at KLCV.

ROBERT GLADSTON: Has the flooding affected you? [Lincoln was suffering from severe flooding from heavy rains.]

NATHAN HIMMELHOCH: Aw, I’m cool. Lot of folks suffering out here, but it’s pretty far from me.

RG: So you’ve said about the Candy Love stuff, “No one’s really supposed to listen to this music.”

<laughs>

NH: Well, I can’t speak for the players. But I think ... when you’re playing for people explicitly on drugs … and, I mean, this ain’t like a dance club in The Village with a velvet rope where people are doing X or blow to “enhance” things before getting laid … we’re talking about people sending themselves to outer space … when you play for people in that state, it ain’t MUSIC. It’s sonic wallpaper.

RG: But it IS music nevertheless.

NH: For me, I get a contact high listening to it. All that crazy guitar shit MEANS something if you’re out of your mind on hash. Not that I would know.

<laughs>

RG: But the music … it’s not, you know, psychedelic.

NH: No, no, it isn’t.

RG: Or groovy like the Dead or whatever.

NH: No, no, because … like … the scene began with the guys just trying to do … I don’t know … they were into Ali Farka Toure and all that.

RG: The Mali sound.

NH: Yeah, yeah. Afro … not afrofunk … but African blues That was the thing. They were just rehearsing as a band in the back of that store.

RG: And people just started showing up.

NH: Yeah.

RG: And how did it … you know, it sounds like something that could get out of control pretty fast.

NH: Not when everyone can hardly move they’re so out of it. <laughs> Not when everyone’s lying around staring into space. There were a few old sofas or people just sat on the floor or whatever. But an unspoken etiquette prevailed and pervaded from the start. Like a natural phenomenon. You know how things can be in New York. When people really know they’ve stumbled into something cool, they’re instinctually protective.

RG: Sure. So this stuff was on reel-to-reel?

NH: Yeah! I mean, I know I sound like I don’t think much of this music as music, but I do. You know, I was part of the “happening” and all. But I didn’t think “Oh, wow, I HAVE to record this shit.” I just didn’t think of it that way. But I got curious about using this old reel-to-reel with these ribbon mics I scored. Running it through the board then to the tape. Mainly to see how it did with live stuff. As a procedure. A method. To be honest, I was thinking I could maybe make some cash recording gigs around the city. But I got sidetracked in life.

RG: As will happen.

NH: As will happen. But over the years it would come up in conversation. “Hey, remember hanging out in the back of that shop?” It came up a hundred times before I even remembered recording that stuff. And, man, I’ll spare you the details of dealing with my ex-wife trying to lay my hands on those reels up in her attic. Which used to be MY attic. But I’ll spare you.

RG: And it all came to an end when Tim stepped into the street.

NH: Yeah. Yeah. Sad. People said it was suicide. 3:30 in the morning on Third Avenue in Sunset Park. 1999. No traffic. And he walks in front of one lone truck. But Barbara [Himmelhoch’s ex-wife] was outside with him. He unwrapped a pack of smokes and the cellophane blew away and he chased it. He didn’t want to litter. And he got hit by that truck. That should be on his tombstone: He didn’t want to be a litter bug.

Himmelhoch had to get off the phone abruptly. His kids had come home from school. But this struck me as the best albeit a melancholy way to end the interview. Like so many unique scenes in this city, this one just ended randomly and completely in an instant. The next Saturday, people took long cab rides out to Sunset Park. They rang, knocked, banged, noticed the silence then shivered as they went off in search of a pay phone to call a car service back to Manhattan.