"If you're coming to the show you're going to dance till you drop!" says vocalist Renee Scroggins, who cofounded ESG in 1977 with sisters Valerie (drums), Deborah (bass), and Marie (congas). The trio has performed off and on along with various lineups since then. "I'm so glad I was able to do this show for Hard French," the singer adds, "because they've been getting at us for years, and this will probably be the last time you will ever see ESG perform."
Scroggins has knee problems and is due for major surgery in December. The recovery includes a year of physical therapy, which leads her to believe Hard French's five-year anniversary on June 28 at the Mezzanine in San Francisco will be the group's final performance. "I don't anticipate coming back, like 90 percentage," she says. "The thought of me getting up on that stage and bouncing around after all that isn't that appealing."
ESG (which stands for Emerald, Silver, and Gold) started under the family Christmas tree decades ago. Scroggins and her sisters had watched the weekly variety show SOUL! religiously as children growing up in the South Bronx and pleaded with their mother, a clerk at the New York City Health Department, for instruments that would help them re-create the music they heard on the family TV. In an effort to keep her girls out of trouble, Mom Scroggins surprised the children with instruments one Christmas morning.
"If she didn't buy us the instruments we wouldn't be here. It was the '70s, things were rough in the Bronx. There was gangs, drugs, things like that — a lot of teenage pregnancies — and my mom didn't want us hanging out and doing things like that, so she bought us instruments. After that we just stayed in the house and continued to try to write things," Scroggins, who saw her own daughters join the band decades later, says.
ESG rubbed shoulders with fellow musicians on the no wave scene of the late '70s and early '80s, sharing a label (99 Records) with two of the experimental post-punk genre's more notable bands: Liquid Liquid and the Bush Tetras. Although ESG shares with those bands the same sort of confrontational, post-punk edge — notably, in songs like "Erase You," off 1991's ESG — its music is even more funky and danceable.
ESG took equal inspiration from classic soul and the sounds of the pre-hip-hop Bronx streets to create songs that artists like Beastie Boys, Big Daddy Kane, and Wu-Tang Clan would later sample, introducing ESG's art-funk to larger audiences. Unimpressed, ESG responded via a 1992 EP titled, Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills.
"It was disco into punk, and punk into techno and house — all these different music scenes affect you," Scroggins says. "In New York I would hear music in the park; all my Latin brothers and sisters out there playing congas and Coke bottles in the middle of the night. It's very inspiring. And I'm a big fan of James Brown, so all that stuff came together as far as ESG's style of writing."
As for the June 28 Hard French party: It started five years ago after a promoter dropped the ball and left an afternoon slot open at El Rio. Devon Devine and a group of friends jumped at the opportunity to create and grow a party for queer people of all kinds.
"We all threw a birthday party together one time, and just thought, 'This party was so fun, why don't we do it all the time?'" Devine says of the monthly party that now draws an average of 600 people. "ESG was a bucket-list band for Hard French, they're just so influential in music and fit together with the vibe of our party. When we all sat down to talk about who we were going to bring out for our five-year anniversary party, the first band we thought of was ESG."
According to Devine, the first thing Scroggins expressed to the organizers of Hard French was how excited she was to finally get the opportunity to play directly to the LGBT part of the band's audience. "It melted all our hearts," Devine says.
"In New York, the LGBT community has always supported us," Scroggins says. "Clubs like the Paradise Garage, up until the very end, the last days of their closing party, have always been very supportive of ESG. They created the buzz. If they played it there, it was happening. So I find it a great pleasure that I'm able to come and do this and give a little bit back to the community."
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