John Martyn becomes solid air

I didn’t expect to hear about the death of John Martyn on NPR, but that’s how I got the news. I thought about him, and how much his music has meant to me for almost 40 years. I immediately called Richard Pittman, my friend of so many decades. It seemed to be the right thing to do; Richard introduced me to John Martyn. And he discovered Martyn quite by accident.

It was the fall of 1971 and I had moved to Chicago to go to school. After a short stay in an apartment in a bad neighborhood near Uptown, I moved in with Richard and Paul Gregory in a much better place farther north. A budding guitar player at the time, Richard knew a unique sound when he heard it. And the fact that Martyn sang like a demented angel just added to the mystery. We lived just blocks from Loyola University, and frequented bookstores and record stores (as we quaintly called them oh those many years ago) near the campus. Martyn’s Bless the Weather was released that fall. Richard told me he saw the cover and he knew something magic was going on inside. He was right. I still get a strange feeling when I hear “Head and Heart” – it is a great love song with a tingly mystery to it.

Over the next few years we both bought everything Martyn recorded, going back to fill in his first few LPs, including Stormbringer, recorded with his wife Beverly. Richard lived alone a few years later and it was on a trip to see him in Chicago (after I retreated back to Indianapolis) that he played me Solid Air. Honestly, it was like nothing I had ever heard. The title cut, of course is soulful and lighter than air itself. “May You Never” is the kind of anthem, a prayer really, that at that young age I associated with true love – which I assumed would always elude me. And then there is “The Man in the Station”. Like we would do in those analog days, we picked up the tone arm on the turntable and played that song over and over.

Over the next decades I would buy Martyn albums (and then re-issues on CD, then RE-MASTERED, re-issues on CD, and now digital downloads). Some of it is syrupy crap, but some of it still excites. I guess that John Martyn represents why music is important to me. I didn’t hear him on the radio – you still don’t except on the occasional bizarre packaged radio show from the U.K. I heard about him from a friend, and I explored his music on my own. Over the years I copied his songs on to cassettes and CDs which I gave to friends and strangers alike. Now, many, many of his songs can be found among my playlists in iTunes.

I am sure that with so many recording sessions and live dates to pull from, we can expect countless post-mortem releases of his music. I hope some of it will include previously unheard tracks from the late 1960s and early 1970s. A lot of it will not excite me, some of it, I am sure, will. I have already purchased (OK, downloaded) a re-made Live at Leeds. I don’t like a lot of Martyn’s live recordings, and you can debate whether they are worth the money. But this one features some of the fun stage banter and bit of clever improvisation. Sample it when you have time.

Sometime down the road, perhaps, we can talk about the Nick Drake connection. But not today. I need to put on “The Man in the Station”.