Get out and get activist

John Martyn is dead at age 60. I heard the news from my friend mjp6 living in NYC. On a recent trip to Rasputin, in part to support the music store industry as well as feed my own habit, I picked up a used David Gray EPwith which was a mystery CD including a cover of Martyn’s, “Go Down Easy”. Cool.

At the moment, there is a flurry of activity on YouTube with people combing through decades of sometimes bizarre and sometimes stellar (always sweaty) performances. There is a lot of reminiscent posting pared with a justified expression that Martyn was underrated and, in any event, under acknowledged: “I’m sad to know I’m hearing him now for the first time.” That is paraphrased.



In listening to “Sweet Little Mystery,” the memory of seeing Martin Sexton in concert for the first time replayed in my head. It was a show at Off Broadway in St. Louis. Sexton was supported by a great percussionist with an excellent sort of beaded shaker thing that exactly recreated the sound of a drum machine effect… weird inversion. I had been turned on to Sexton by a friend of a friend, both of whom were there with me. Great show and a great place: we ordered a pizza from the place next door and had it delivered to us at the venue. The guy walked in midway through the show and brought it to where we were sitting. Ha! My thought was that in music as with so many things, it takes the active word of mouth and in this case, the lending of an ear (and a CD) to learn something new. That venue itself was another instance word-of-mouth: the theatre manager I worked for at the time told me over and over again to see something... anything... there.



The newest issue of Outside features an interesting interview with Lance Armstrong. In the piece, he talks of his motivations and goals for coming out of retirement to participate in the next Tour de France. Given reflection on his current physical condition as well as his hiatus, his primary goal is to spread the word (i.e., effect new political and economic paradigms regarding cancer eradication). Maybe this has always been his intent, but I am happy to be hearing this now for the first time. It is also exciting (and palpably reported) that he intends to win. That sneakish intent is something I love about both John Martyn and Martin Sexton: while they are in it to play, they are serious players.



Thanks to Thalerguy and shiveringgoat for their YouTube videos.

Skip this and go listen to something by Ana Egge.

The sequence goes like this: watch YouTube video of Ana Egge performing > recall an absurd comment made by John Mayer about how great it is that, “girls get out up there and bang out a few chords” (paraphrased) > try to find the source article in Acoustic Guitar by way of Google > fail > end up on the Wikipedia entry for John Mayer and find… of all things… a subcategory describing Mayer’s apparent consideration of abandoning music entirely to pursue a career in… design. Where to begin? Clearly, at the end.

Design: who knows how credible the claim is that design was even a consideration? The overall point though is that the disposition is supported by examples of signature model guitars issued by Martin and Fender. Wow. It is delightful that Mayer had the opportunity to select the wood varieties and offer up some styling cues so winningly, but the fact is that he does not design guitars: at best he specified some features when prompted by legendary makers. Oh wait! Wiki says that Mayer also has designed t-shirts and shoes. I bet that he has even designed a method for sandwich construction whereby the mayonnaise is applied to one piece of bread while mustard is craftily placed on… the other piece of bread. It is like flavor in stereo. Design? How to even begin to describe what design thinking means to a room full of designers when the word design is even casually used in the context of some dolt who stencils a shirt? Clearly at the beginning. [The entirety of the shoe issue has been abandoned for even the slightest attempt at brevity.]

There is always a hip-pocket example to counter the quick dismissal of talent: Mayer’s trivialization of women getting started in the singer-songwriter racket implicitly suggests that women cannot play the guitar like he does… which, I guess, is well. [Though, secretly I am thrilled that there are no heroines-apparent taking up his slack.] The number of brilliant women guitarists is overwhelming, to the point that consideration in light of the comment is moot. Let the mystery be, yes? Not just yet. The fact that there is even discussion of Mayer as a designer to be taken seriously brings me right back to the point of this whole thing: Ana Egge. Her talents are immense vocally, lyrically, and dexterously. The cap though is the fact that she IS a designer. The guitar that she plays is an Egge/Musser original: she made it. Her efforts did not begin and end with style choices. She built it. Further, she plays the hell out of it on a daily basis.

In the world of retail sales of vintage instruments, belt buckle “rash” is an interesting phenomenon: it is the collective distress due to wear from belt buckles, keys, buttons, snaps, and the like that accumulates from the physical contact between instrument and player. Only in particular cases (e.g. celebrity instruments or VERY old instruments) does this kind of wear exist without impact on value. Admittedly, there is a certain bravado in beating up a guitar in more than one way. Patina is cool: designers and musicians agree.



The “honest” wear that I see on Mayer’s instruments I suppose is a trophy of his skill, craft, and lifestyle: hard-charging designer on the road belting out the Grammy winning Wonderbread. Sucks to your asthma,I say! I am compelled to cry foul and pull from my hip pocket video proof of something I have seen in person, as well: the skewed buckle. Aha! Now THAT is a legitimate metric of a designer. That’s right John: she BUILT her guitar; she is designerly enough to understand what that means. Now I know that there are lots of guys getting up on stage with pristine Martins buckling their belts on the hip, but it seems like the world deserves at least one good example of a woman doing the same. That is all: long, boring, and needlessly bitter based on a vaguely remembered quote from an article that cannot be located—interspersed with too many colons.