The Musical Box

john martyn

John Martyn was many things.

As a songwriter, he was one of the most distinctive stylists to emerge from a highly fertile late ’60s British folk-rock movement. His songs were fanciful, poetic, often wildly romantic and sometimes as dark the rains that must have soaked the shores of England and Scotland where he spent his youth.

As a guitarist, Martyn was unlike any of his contemporaries. His ‘60s albums for the Island label (London Conversation and The Tumbler, among them) were sparse, but richly and harmonically complete records. But with the ‘70s came electricity and pioneering use of the Echoplex, the device that gave Martyn’s songs a textured, staccato sound. Through those albums (1973’s Inside Out and 1977’s One World being the most daring), Martyn designed an ambience that also worked in the leanest of performance settings - including his long-running duo association with acoustic bassist Danny Thompson.

Of course, he was also a seemingly reckless eccentric and a sometimes very public alcoholic. While artists like Eric Clapton covered his songs, critics has often speculated that Martyn might well have discovered his own commercial fortunes - or at least something larger than his devout but modest folk-pop fanbase  - were it not for his fondness of self-destruction.

In an interview recently referenced in the London newspaper The Telegraph, Martyn recalled being so inebriated at a concert in Spain that he fell off the stage. “I still got three encores,” he added.

Yesterday morning the whole grand saga that was John Martyn concluded. He died at age 60. No specific cause of death was announced, although Martyn has been in ill health for years. Confined to a wheelchair since a burst cyst caused the amputation of a leg below the knee, Martyn continued to perform through the end of 2008.

One of his final recordings, in fact, was a concert set called Solid Air: Live at the Roundhouse. The album included a stage performance of Martyn’s seminal 1973 album Solid Air. An exceptional boxed set retrospective, appropriately titled Ain’t No Saint, surfaced last fall. Neither album has yet been issued in the United States.

Any of Martyn’s Island albums released between 1967 and 1977 should be considered essential listening. But the masterpiece remains Grace and Danger, a devastating 1980 work cut with help from Phil Collins that documented the dissolve of a marriage to former performance and recording partner Beverley Martyn. Aside from Richard and Linda Thompson’s 1982 epic Shoot Out the Lights, no British folk-rock album placed more exposed nerve romanticism on display than Grace and Danger.

I saw Martyn play only once. He headlined the opening night of a 1987 folk festival in Oxfordshire, England. It was one of his famed duet sessions with Thompson. That night, when the Echoplex cranked up in the great outdoors during songs like Big Muff you would have thought a flying saucer was landing.

Martyn walked onstage that night looking, as a friend of mine was fond of saying, “drunk as a monkey.” With a smile on his face as bright as glowing neon, it was tough to tell if Martyn received a hero’s welcome from the festival crowd. It didn’t matter. As was the case for much of his career, he made enough of a hero’s entrance to compensate.