The “Sonny and Cher” of Folk?

It’s not the best marketing ploy for a record company to compare an up-and-coming artist to a superstar; the musical field is filled with singer-songwriters who were predicted to be the “next Dylan” (i.e. Steve Forbert, Loudon Wainwright III, Conor Oberst etc.) only to be just… themselves.  No doubt John and Beverly Martyn felt that when they were termed the next Sonny and Cher.

The identity crisis began when Beverly was sixteen and a label tried to convince her to be the next Cher. Unfortunately, record buyers rebuffed her attempt after “Happy New Year,” a single penned by Randy Newman that featured half of Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones).

The next year, she appeared in a spoken role (“Good morning, Mr. Leitch, have you had a busy day?”) on Simon and Garfunkel’s 1967 hit “Fakin’ It.”  At the time, Beverley was sporadically dating Paul Simon and not-so-fondly recalled: “We had an on-off relationship. You could say he had a Napoleon complex. Moody, but witty.”

In June 1967, Paul then got her on the Monterey Pop Festival’s bill where she performed three songs and was mistaken for a “high-class hooker” by Otis Redding.

She admitted, “I shouldn’t even have been there. I didn’t have a green card. Paul did say ‘If you marry me you can get a green card’ and I thought, well, that’s not very romantic.”

Instead, she married ace guitarist and superb folk-jazz singer John Martyn who, at 19, had released his debut album, London Conversation. The label also signed Beverley to record her first album in Woodstock, NY only for her to realize that John wanted to bask in his own glory.  In a 2004 BBC-4 documentary, Beverley commented, “It was going to be my album and he was just coming along for the ride. He wasn’t content to just be a guitar player and playing with me. I let him take over. He was quite a force to be reckoned with.”  The best part of the pair living in Woodstock was meeting Dylan (who Beverley gushed: “My hero! My Jewish cowboy!”) and playing with esteemed sidemen on their Stormbringer! album.

John stated: “[The Band’s] Levon Helm and Harvey Brooks [Dylan’s bassist on Highway 61] we met in Woodstock and used them just because they were friends. Dylan lived up the road and Hendrix lived virtually next door. He used to arrive every Thursday in a purple helicopter, stay the weekend and leave on the Monday. He was amazing…a good lad.”

Unfortunately, unlike their two album covers that gave the appearance that John was Beverley’s dreamboat, living with him was a never-ending nightmare. Their marriage’s last days evoked Tina Turner escaping the wrath of Ike. Beverley remembered, “He said: ‘You’ll never get away from me. I will hunt you down and kill you and whoever you are with.’”

After years of dealing with his drunkenness and dark moods, she put an end to their relationship by “slipping my feet into my son’s boots and ran to the police station. I could never go back, but it left me having to rely on state benefits. It was hard.”

But before they parted ways, Beverley realized that the reason for his rage may have been the divorce of his opera-singing parents.  She noted that John was a child, he’d write to his mother and she’d never reply.  Beverley said, “Many letters were found that his mother had kept. ‘Dear Mummy, I miss you so much, why don’t you write back?’ ‘I love you, when can I see you?’ He was wounded from the beginning. Maybe if he wasn’t like that we wouldn’t have the music, with such depth of feeling.”

One such song with a great deal of feeling and soul was “May You Never” from his classic 1973 LP, Solid Air. The song was covered by Clapton on his Slowhand album with lyrics showing a flip side of John:

“And may you never lay your head down,
Without a hand to hold,
May you never make your bed out in the cold.”

The album’s title track was written to ease the depressed mind of his friend (and children’s babysitter Nick Drake, who overdosed a year later at the age of 26.

John’s steady use of the Echoplex guitar pedal which caused a “delay effect” and allowed him to overlap guitar runs made big fans out of Beth Orton, who recorded his “Go Down Easy” song, Clapton (“John is so far ahead of everything, it’s almost inconceivable”) and a housemate named Phil Collins.  John and Phil were both going through divorces and, as John confessed, “going through vast amounts of cheap wine.”

Phil played drums and sang on John’s 1980 Grace and Danger then pounded the skins and produced Martyn’s next album, Glorious Fool in 1981.  Phil rationalized his wasted days and nights with John: “That whole thing became creative for me because Face Value [Phil’s great 1981 album] came out of that.”

John continued recording and drinking even after doctors informed him that his blood was poisoned by germs and that half of his right leg would have to be amputated because of the septicemia.  He notes in his documentary, “I’ve had a wonderful time. I can’t argue at all about what life’s dealt me. So off it goes!  Peg Leg Martyn!”  Six years later, he died at the age of 60.  Collins paid tribute by noting: “He was uncompromising, which made him infuriating to some people and we’ll never see the likes of him again.”

But leave it to Beverley to succinctly sum up the life of John and any musician’s life: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a great artist, play the blues and make everyone cry. It’s what you do as a human being that counts at the end of the day.”

-Mark Daponte

Fair use image from John and Beverly Martyn’s Stormbringer