John Martyn
Solid Air
Island, 1973
By Simon Reynolds
(for Marooned, ed. Phil Freeman, 2007)
Picking my favorite record of all time, identifying the album that means the most to me, singling out the one I could least bear to never, ever hear again – such a task would surely make my head explode. But the desert island scenario (and I’m curious: who came up with this conceit first, historically?) actually makes narrowing things down much easier. Something with a very particular bundle of attributes would be required, a tricky-to-find combination of consoling familiarity and resilient strangeness. You’d need a record that could retain the capacity to surprise and stimulate, to keep on revealing new details and depths despite endless repetition. But it couldn’t be too out-there, too much of an avant-challenge, because solace would after all be its primary purpose. Which in turn would mean that the selection would have to feature the human voice, as a source of comfort and surrogate company – a criterion that sifts out many all-time favorites that happen to be all-instrumental (Aphex Twin’s two Selected Ambient Works albums, Eno records like On Land and his collaboration with Harold Budd The Plateaux of Mirror). But, equally, songs alone couldn’t sustain me on the island – I’d need some element of the soundscape, the synesthetically textured...food for the mind’s eye...something to take me out and away.
Four albums sprang to mind based around a framework of songs-plus-space (or songs-in-space, or maybe even songs versus space). (Actually, there’s a fifth album in this vicinity, but Lester Bangs bagged it last time around: Astral Weeks). All are from roughly the same period in rock history – the early Seventies – and all can be characterized as post-psychedelic music in some sense. Tim Buckley’s Starsailor is just too wild, too derangingly strange; its restlessness would stir me to rage against the limits of confinement, rather than adopt a sensible stoicism, and its eroticism would be no help at all. Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom is rich and lovely, but the album’s emotionally harrowing arc (it was made shortly after the fall that left him paralyzed from the waist down) might be too wearing for someone in such dire straits; even its ecstasy is on the shattering side. Stormcock is brilliant and beautiful, but Roy Harper’s diatribes wouldn’t warm my lonely soul, and besides, it only consists of four long tracks, all pretty much chipped from the same block of sound.
So my choice is John Martyn’s Solid Air. There’s something about this album that suggests “island music.” And I don’t just mean that it came out on Island – probably the most highly-regarded record label on Earth at that point, a haven for the visionary, the esoteric, the not-obviously-commercial. The other day I was searching through my stuff for a review I wrote a long time ago of the reissue of another John Martyn record (1977’s One World, which is hard on the heels of Solid Air as much-loved album/potential D.I.D.), only to be pleasantly ambushed by the opening lines:
John Martyn was a castaway on the same hazy archipelago of jazzy-folky-funky-blues as other burnt-out hippy visionaries of the Seventies (V. Morrison, J. Mitchell, etc.)
Ha! That list should have included T. Buckley, R. Wyatt, N. Drake (a close friend of Martyn’s and the inspiration/addressee of Solid Air’s title track), and probably quite a few others too. “Archipelago” still seems like the right metaphor. These artists didn’t belong to a genre, each of them had their own distinct sound, but there’s enough proximity in terms of their sources, approaches, and vibe, to warrant thinking of them as separate-but-adjacent, a necklace of maverick visionaries sharing a common climate.
The cover of Solid Air invites aqueous reverie. A hand passing through sea-green water leaving an after-trail of iridescent purple ripples, the effect is idyllic on first glance. But then you notice that the image is a circle of color on a black background, introducing the possibility that we’re inside a submarine looking through a porthole, and the hand’s owner is outside, drowning. Solid Air’s title track, we’ll see, is about someone who’s figuratively drowning, unable to resist the downward currents of terminal depression. One of the best songs is called “Dreams By The Sea,” which might resonate for a homesick castaway, except these are “bad dreams by the sea.”
Water flows through the entire John Martyn songbook, from “The Ocean” to his delightful cover of “Singin’ in the Rain,” while two of his post-Solid Air album covers feature images of the sea. 1975’s Sunday’s Child shows the bearded bard standing in front of crashing surf, while One World’s cover is a painting of a mermaid diving up out of the waves and curving back into the ocean, her arched body trailing a glittering arc of sea-spray and flying fish. In that review, I dubbed the album “a Let’s Get it On for the Great Barrier Reef,” a comparison inspired mainly by the reverb-rippling aquafunk of “Big Muff” and “Dealer,” two songs that mingle the language of sex and drugs such that you’re not sure what brand of addiction they’re really about. One World’s final track, the nearly nine minutes of almost-ambient entitled “Small Hours,” was recorded outdoors beside a lake.
Solid Air, though, has just one song that actively sounds aquatic, “I’d Rather Be The Devil,” a cover of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman.” After almost 15 years of loving Martyn’s version, I finally heard the original “Devil” in the movie Ghost World, where this out-of-time specter of a song harrows the teenage soul of heroine Enid. Most songwriters would have flinched from attempting such an unheimlich tune, but Martyn’s cover is so drastic it fleshes this skeletal blues into virtually a brand-new composition: imagine the clavinet-driven funk of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” if it actually sounded superstitious, witless and twitchy with dread. “I’d Rather Be The Devil” starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the glutinously thick groove rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or Parliament-Funkadelic. Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come in and out of focus: “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west,” “stole her from my best friend...know he’ll get lucky, steal her back.” But mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like a black gas of amorphous malevolence. The song part of “Devil” gives way to a descent-into-the-maelstrom churn, a deadly undertow of bitches-brew turbulence. Then that too abruptly dissipates, as though we’ve made it through the ocean’s killing floor and reached a coral-cocooned haven. Danny Thompson’s alternately bowed and plucked double bass injects pure intravenous calm; John Bundrick’s keys flicker and undulate like anemones and starfish; Martyn’s needlepoint fingerpicking, refracted through a delay device, spirals around your head in repeat-echoed loops of rising rapture. This oceanic arcadia is something music had touched previously only on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland with the proto-ambient sound-painting of “1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be)/Moon, Turn The Tides...Gently Gently Away.”
Listening to this split-personality song – glowering storm-sky of dark-blue(s) funk/shimmering aquamarine utopia – it’s hard to believe that only a few years earlier John Martyn had been a beardless naïf with an acoustic guitar, plucking out Donovan-esque ditties like “Fairytale Lullaby” and “Sing a Song of Summer.” What the hell – more precisely, what kind of hell – happened in between?
Arriving in London from his native Scotland in the mid-Sixties, John Martyn hung out at the city’s folk cellars, learning guitar technique by sitting near the front and closely watching the fingers of Davy Graham and Bert Jansch. Soon he was performing at spaces like Les Cousins and Bunjie’s himself. He signed to Island (one of the first non-Jamaicans on the label) and in October 1967, aged nineteen, released his debut album London Conversation – fetching but jejune Brit-folk. Like many of his contemporaries, he gradually fell under the spell of jazz, especially John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. He later described Impulse as the only truly pure label in the world. The Tumbler, from 1968, featured the flautist and saxophonist Harold McNair, while The Road To Ruin, his second collaboration with wife Beverley, involved jazz players Ray Warleigh, Lyn Dobson and Dudu Pukwana. But neither of these records really transcended an additive, this-plus-that approach; they fell short of a true amalgam of folk and jazz.
It’s not known if Martyn learned and drew encouragement from, or even heard at all, the voyages of Tim Buckley, who was on a very similar trajectory from pure-toned folk troubadour to zero-gravity vocal acrobat deploying the voice-as-instrument. But Martyn did talk in interviews about digging Weather Report (particularly the colorized electronic keyboards of band leader Joe Zawinul) and Alice Coltrane (he called her “my desert island disc” but didn’t specify which particular disc of hers he had in mind!). A less-likely influence was The Band’s Music From Big Pink, especially the Hammond organ sound, which he mistook for electric guitar, and described as “the first time I heard electric music using very soft textures, panels of sound, pastel sounds”. He and Beverley Martyn made one album, Stormbringer, in Woodstock and New York City, with some members of The Band playing. But that was something of an aberration in the general drift of his music towards a jazzed fluidity. The ideal of a “one world” music possessed the imagination of many at this time – Can and Traffic, Miles Davis and Don Cherry – and throughout this period, at the cusp between the Sixties and the Seventies, Martyn was also listening to Indian classical, high-life, and Celtic music. (He would later record an electric version of the Gaelic air “Eibhli Ghail Chiun Chearbhail.”) This all-gates-open receptivity was part of Martyn’s refusal, or more likely inability to tolerate divisions, his compulsive attraction to thresholds and in-between states. And it would culminate in the untaggable and indivisible alloy of folk and jazz, acoustic and electric, live and studio, songform and space, achieved on Solid Air. "I think that what's going to happen is that there are going to be basically songs with a lot of looseness behind them," he told Melody Maker at the end of 1971, less than a year before recording the album.
As jazz entered Martyn’s musical bloodstream, it affected not just his songwriting and approach to instrumentation, but his singing too. The clear diction of folk gave way to slurring that turned his voice into a fog bank of sensuality tinged with menace. Folk privileged words because of the importance it placed on messages and story-telling, but Martyn had come to believe that “there’s a place between words and music, and my voice lives right there.” One characteristic Martyn mannerism – intense sibilance – can be heard emerging in his cover of “Singin’ In the Rain” (on 1971’s Bless the Weather, the immediate precursor to Solid Air), where “clouds” comes out as “cloudzzzzzzz,” a drunken bumble bee bumping against your earhole.
If Martyn’s music grew woozy “under the influence” of jazz, during this period he was equally intoxicated by...well, intoxicants. The ever more smeared haziness of his voice and sound owed as much to the drugs and drink entering his biological bloodstream; dissolution and the dissolving of song-form went hand in hand. Martyn had always felt the bohemian impulse (he’d gone to art school in Glasgow looking for that lifestyle, only to leave after a few months, disappointed) and on his debut album he sang the traditional folk tune “Cocain.” But with its jaunty lyrics about “Cocaine Lill and Morphine Sue,” the song sounds like it was recorded under the effect of nothing more potent than cups of tea. Bless the Weather, again, is the moment at which the music first really seems to come from inside the drug experience. “Go Easy” depicts Martyn’s lifestyle – “raving all night, sleeping away the day...spending my time, making it shine...look at the ways to vent and amaze my mind” – but it’s “Glistening Glyndebourne” that hurls you into the psychedelic tumult of sense impressions. The title sounds like it’s about a river, and the music scintillates with dashes and dots of dancing light just like a moving body of water, but it’s actually inspired, bizarrely, by an opera festival in a stately home near where Martyn then lived; the suited formality of the upper class crowds provoked him to reimagine the scene.
“Glistening Glyndebourne” was also the track that first captured what had become the signature of Martyn’s live performances, his guitar playing through an Echoplex. It seems likely that he was, unconsciously or not, looking for a method of recreating sonically the sense of the dilated “now” granted by drugs. Martyn initially turned to the machine thinking it could provide sustain (a quest that had previously and briefly led him to attempt to learn to play a jazz horn). He quickly realized that the Echoplex wasn’t particularly suited to that task, but that he could apply it to even more impressive and fertile ends. Set to variable degrees of repeat-echo, the machine fed the guitar signal onto a tape loop that recorded sound-on-sound; the resulting wake of sonic after-images enabled Martyn to play with and against a cascading recession of ghosts-of-himself, chopping cross-rhythms in and out of the rippling flow. The Echoplex appeared in discreet, barely-discernible form on Stormbringer’s ““Would You Believe Me,” but “Glistening Glyndbourne” was something else altogether. Its juddering rush of tumbling drums and Echoplexed rhythm guitar was the dry run for “I’d Rather Be The Devil.”
Solid Air starts with “Solid Air,” twinkles of electric piano and vibes winding around Martyn’s close-miked acoustic guitar and bleary fug of voice. For most of my years of loving this album I never knew the song was about, and for, Nick Drake, and I almost wish I could un-know that fact (especially as I’ve always secretly felt that Martyn deserved the mega-cult following that his friend and Island label-mate has, as opposed to his own loyal but medium-sized cult). But the phrase “solid air” still retains its mystery. Listening to it just now it suddenly flashed on me that “solid air” sounds like “solitaire,” raising the possibility that it’s a punning image of the lonely planet inhabited by the melancholy Drake, cut-off from human fellowship as surely as any desert island castaway. More likely, though, is that lines like “moving through solid air” attempt to evoke what depression feels like, suggesting both the character in Talking Heads’ “Air” who’s so sensitive he can’t even handle contact with the atmosphere, and someone trying to make their way through a world that seems to have turned viscous. The song, written over a year before Drake committed suicide, is at once an offer of help, an entreaty, and a benediction: “I know you, I love you...I could follow you – anywhere/Even through solid air.” Sung with a sublime mixture of maudlin heaviness and honeyed grace, it’s a huge bear-hug to someone in terrible pain. But, with the advantage of hindsight, it also feels like a lullaby – rest in peace, friend.
There’s a symmetry to the way Solid Air is constructed. Side Two starts like the first side, with a soft, slow whisper of a tune gently propelled by Danny Thompson's languid but huge-sounding double-bass pulse. In texture, tone and tempo, “Go Down Easy” is very much a sister-song to “Solid Air,” but this time the air is thick not with melancholy but with a humid sexuality that’s oddly narcotic and ever so slightly oppressive. It’s a kind of erotic lullaby: the title/chorus seems logical enough, the kind of thing lovers might say, until you actually contemplate it, and then it sounds more appropriate to an agitated animal being quelled or a child being calmed down at bed time. “You curl around me like a fern in the spring/Lie down here and let me sing the things that you bring,” croons Martyn, drawing out the chorus “go down easy” into a kind of yawn of yearning, as he draws his lover into a space where breath becomes tactile and intimacy almost asphyxiating.
On Solid Air, John Martyn is a hippie with a heart of dark, equally prone to brawling and balladeering, his voice constantly hovering between sweet croon and belligerent growl. In an interview, he talked about wanting to be “a scholar-gentleman...I'm interested in spiritual grace,” and this side of Martyn – the idealist, albeit one whose ideals his all-too-human self tended to fail – comes through in songs like “May You Never” and “Don’t Want to Know.” The former (his most well-known song, widely covered, mostly famously by Eric Clapton) is a good will message or blessing to a friend; that empty social formality (“best wishes”) fleshed out with specifics, bad things to be warded off (“may you never lay your head down without a hand to hold,” “may you never lose your woman overnight”). An anti-hex, if you will. Lines like “you’re just like a great big sister to me” and “you’re just like a great big brother to me” show that this song’s domain is agape as opposed to the eros of “Go Down Easy.” Eros, in Martyn’s world, is the danger emotion, the destabiliser, source of addiction and division (stealing your best friend’s woman in “I’d Rather Be The Devil”).
If Martyn had only ever recorded delicately pretty, heartfelt songs like “May You Never” and “Don’t Want To Know”, he might have been as big as, oh, Cat Stevens or James Taylor (although his thumpingly physical and rhythmic acoustic guitar playing always put him several cuts above the singer-songwriter norm). “Don’t Want to Know” is an even more desperate attempt to ward off malevolent forces with a willed withdrawal into blissful ignorance: Martyn says he doesn’t “want to know one thing about evil/I only want to know about love.” It’s a kind of shout-down-Babylon song (even though his voice is at its softest), with a strange apocalyptic verse about how he’s waiting for planes to fall out of the sky and cities to crumble, and lines about how the glimmer of gold has got us all “hypnotized”. Martyn often talked about wanting to leave “the paper chase” behind, move out to the country, live a purer lifestyle. But if this song envisages corruption as an external contaminant that you can escape by putting distance between yourself and it, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” and its own sister-song “Dreams By The Sea” treat evil as an intimate. In “Devil,” it’s inside his lover, his best friend, and most of all himself (“so much evil,” moans Martyn midway through the song), while in “Dreams”, a song fetid with sexual paranoia, he goes from imagining there’s “a killer in your eyes” to a “killer in my eyes.” The track is tight, strutting funk, Martyn’s "Shaft"-like wah-wah coiling like a rattlesnake. At the end, it’s like the fever of jealousy and doubt (“Nah no nah no/It can’t be true...Nah no nah no/It’s not the way you are”) breaks, and the track unwinds into a lovely, forgiving coda of calm and reconciliation, laced with trickling raindrops of electric piano.
There’s one more pair of songs on Solid Air, and in these Martyn figures as incorrigible rogue rather than demon-lover. Side One’s “Over The Hill” is deceptively spring-heeled and joyous, its fluttery prettiness (mandolin solo courtesy Richard Thompson) disguising the fact that Martyn here appears as a prodigal rolling-stone returning in disgrace. “Got nothing in my favor,” he blithely admits, while flashing back to Cocain Lil with a line that confesses “can’t get enough of sweet cocaine.” Babylon’s own powder, coke is a drug that stimulates desire for all the other vices, from sex to booze. “The Man In The Station,” on the opposite side of the album, catches the roving minstrel once again wending his way back to the family hearth, but this time he seems less cocksure and more foot-sore, ready to catch “the next train home.” These two coming-home songs would sound especially right on the island, where I’d need music that both acknowledged the fact of isolation while offering consolation for it. The album ends with “The Easy Blues,” really two songs in one: “Jellyroll Baker,” a cover of a tune by acoustic blues great Lonnie Johnson and a Martyn concert favorite whose blackface bawling is the only bit of Solid Air I could happily dispense with, and then the light cantering “My Gentle Blues” which almost instantly flips into a sweetly aching slow fade, draped with a poignant (if dated) synth solo played by Martyn himself.
I’ve sometimes argued in the past that rock’s true essence is juvenile, a teenage rampage or energy flash of the spirit that burns brightest in seemingly artless sounds like ‘60s garage punk or ‘90s rave. Solid Air, though, is definitely adult music. Crucially, it’s made by an adult who hasn’t settled down, who’s still figuring stuff out; his music shows that growing pains never stop.
This aspect of Solid Air also owes a lot to its historical moment: Martyn as open-hearted hippie emerging from the Sixties adventure to confront the costs of freedom (the problem of being in a couple but remaining fancy-free; drugs as life-quickening versus drugs as “false energy” or numbing tranquiliser).
Solid Air is post-psychedelic also in the sense I mentioned earlier. These are songs, like the self that sings them, blurring at the edges and melting into something larger. This expanse was designated “space” by the cosmic rock bands of the era, but Martyn’s utopian image of healing boundlessness was “the ocean.” In “Don’t Want To Know,” the vengeful verse about cities a-crumbling ends with the wistful yet mysterious line “waiting till the sea a-grow”: a mystical image of world destruction as world salvation, perhaps, as though unity will only come when the continents (gigantic islands, if you think about it) drown in the sea of love.
The oceanic, “only connect” impulses of Sixties rock were political and musical at the same time. In the Seventies, these twin dreams collided with political reality and with a music industry that was becoming more market-segmented, and less of an anything-goes possibility space. By the end of the Seventies, Island’s Chris Blackwell would inform Martyn that his meandering muse had driven him into a niche marked “jazz,” a pigeonhole that every fiber in the singer’s artistic being revolted against.
Only a few years earlier, in happier times, Blackwell produced Martyn’s #2 masterpiece, One World, its title track a disillusioned hippie’s plea as plaintively poignant and ardently apolitical (because seeking to abolish politics?) as Lennon’s “Imagine” or “One Love” by Martyn’s labelmate Bob Marley. But the track’s sentiment is also a musical ideal, the call for a “one world” music being made by many at the time (see Miles Davis’ Pangaea, named after the original supercontinent that existed some 300 million year ago).
Martyn had already reached it on Solid Air: a body music that feeds the head, a sound woven from the becoming-jazz of folk, the becoming-electric of jazz, the becoming-acoustic of funk (not that Martyn, an earthy fellow, would ever use such Deleuzian jargon). The schizo-song of “I’d Rather Be The Devil” is where it all comes together, while coming apart. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young Skip James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, “Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”: the color of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of “Devil”, like the play of shadow and light across the whole of Solid Air, correspond to a battle in John Martyn’s soul – between sea monster and water baby,
danger and grace.
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"I'd Rather Be The Devil" for The Wire's cover story on cover versions, November 2005
“Devil Got My Woman” (Skip James, rec. 1931)
Blues might be the most worn-out (through over-use and abuse), hard-to-hear-fresh music on the planet, but James’ original “Devil” --just his piteous keening voice and acoustic guitar--still cuts right through to chill your marrow. The lyric surpasses “Love Like Anthrax” with its anti-romantic imagery of love as toxic affliction, a dis-ease of the spirit (James tries to rest, to switch off his lovesick thoughts for a while, but “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west”). Most singers would flinch from taking on this unheimlich tune. But John Martyn, reworking (and renaming) it as “I’d Rather Be The Devil” on Solid Air (Island, 1973) not only equals the original’s intensity but enriches and expands the song, stretching its form to the limit. It starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the band’s surging aquafunk rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or P-Funk; Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come into focus now and then--“so much evil”, “stole her from my best friend… know he’ll get lucky, steal her back”--but mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like this black gas of amorphous malevolence. Then suddenly the bitches-brew turbulence dissipates; ocean-as-killing-floor transforms into a barrier reef-cocooned idyll. Danny Thompson’s bass injects pure intravenous calm, keyboards flicker and undulate like anemones, Martyn’s needlepoint fingerpicking spirals in Echoplexed loops of rising rapture. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”: the colour of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of Martyn’s drastic remake also correspond to a battle in the singer’s soul--between monster and water baby, danger and grace.
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