Jerry Martini was born in born in Shamrock Mine, Colorado. When he was two, his family moved to San Francisco so his father could join the Navy.
His first counter-cultural experience was visiting North Beach in the 50s. There he saw beatniks and Beat poets reciting poems, playing bongos, or a flute.
Family Stone Saxophonist Jerry Martini
Sly and the Family Stone
Martini met Sly Stone when they were teenagers. Of an age (Stone was 5 months younger), Stone surprised Martini because Sly was so into Bob Dylan. A black guy into Dylan was not the norm, but Martini says that Stone was never the norm.
Organizing a band with blacks and white, men and women, and different ethnic groups was Sly Stone’s conscious goal. It didn’t just happen and later people realized what happened.
That band’s mix was deliberate did not mean that others accepted that mix. Venues were still racially divided as well as politically. Black Panthers told Stone that the band should be all black. Stone counter-argued and won.
Family Stone Saxophonist Jerry Martini
Woodstock
Although the band was good enough to make it on its own, their recorded and filmed performance at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair supercharged their fame.
Jerry Martini’s memory of the event was that, “It was a mess. A total mess. We had to wait six hours to go on. It was three in the morning before we got out there. After every act, they’d have to tear down and set up. Took forever. By the time we got out on-stage, people were in sleeping bags. But we got ‘em up. Something happened between us and that audience. Half a million people or however many it was, they were just totally into what we were doing. That’s a feeling you couldn’t scrape off you. It was Love City.”
Family Stone Saxophonist Jerry Martini
Post Woodstock and Sly
After the band broke up in 1975, Jerry Martini continued playing. He performed on Sly Stone’s solo album, High On You and later performed on the bassist of Family Stone, Larry Graham’s Now Do U Santa Dance album.
He also worked with Prince, who was a big fan of Sly and the Family Stone. After the 2006 tour with Prince, Martini helped reorganize the band with Greg Errico, Alex Davis, and Phunne Stone who’s the daughter of Sly and Cynthia Robinson.
Cynthia Robinson was also part of that reband, though she died in 2015.
Included in his credits, Martini has also played with Mike Bloomfield, Carlos Santana, Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, Robert Cray, Willie Lomax, and Van Morrison.
As a docent at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts I have the opportunity to do “Artist Tours.”
During the outdoor concert season, the Center offers a Woodstock site tour to the visiting musicians, their crew, and accompanying family and friends.
The initial response to the opportunity is that as a docent I’d have the opportunity to “rub elbows” with these well-known acts. Rarely is that so and it took me a few times to realize why.
I once observed to a crew member that what fans see as the glamour of the touring experience, seeing many places, the applause, the adulation, the well-appointed buses aren’t perhaps all they appear to be, he replied, “It’s still traveling down the interstate in a metal tube at 70 MPH.”
And that is as good a revelation of the other side as I will likely ever hear.
Gone Far Too Soon 27 Club
Opportunity
It would seem that given the wealth that can sometime become a part of the successful musicians’ lives, the chance to be a part of many exclusive inner circles, and the requests to be met and their accompanying flattery, a person might come to believe that their success has no down side.
But the chance to accept all that is offered, the ability to purchase that which is often unavailable and to purchase excessive amounts of that thing can lead on to that infamous slippery slope to the Valley of Humiliation.
Gone Far Too Soon 27 Club
27 Club
And is some cases, the Valley of Death.
It is an exaggeration in the extreme to say that the life of rock and roll is a lethal one, a deadly one. Unfortunately, for too many, it was just that. And oddly, the 27 year old musician has been that.
In 2021, Over The Bridge developed an album called, Lost Tapes of the 27 Club. Over the Bridge is an organization that aims to change the conversation about mental health in the music community while providing a compassionate environment for members to thrive.
Why?
According to the site, 71% of musicians believe they’ve experienced incidences of anxiety and panic attacks.
68% of musicians have experienced incidences of depression
Suicide attempts for music industry workers are more than double that of the general population.
Lost Tapes
The project said this about the AI produced album:
As long as there’s been popular music, musicians and crews have struggled with mental health at a rate far exceeding the general adult population. And this issue hasn’t just been ignored. It’s been romanticized, by things like the 27 Club—a group of musicians whose lives were all lost at just 27 years old.
To show the world what’s been lost to this mental health crisis, we’ve used artificial intelligence to create the album the 27 Club never had the chance to. Through this album, we’re encouraging more music industry insiders to get the mental health support they need, so they can continue making the music we all love for years to come.
Because even AI will never replace the real thing.
How did they do this?
They had an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm listen to isolated hooks, rhythms, melodies, and lyrics of 27 Club musicians.
Their AI algorithm learned from the music, then generated a string of all-new hooks, rhythms, melodies, and lyrics.
An audio engineer took these AI-generated musical elements and composed the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club.
The following lists and examples show how popular music evolved during the 1960s. More artists began to write and sing their own songs and, of course, the style and content of popular music changed.
Having said that, notice the lack of Grammy awards for the new voices, the new perspectives, particularly of those who would go on to play at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. They are seldom seen on top lists and rarely recognized with a Grammy.
To view a list, click the green link and a new page will appear. An asterisk (*) next to a song writer indicates the performer wrote the song as well.
1960
List of 1960 #1 songs: 3 of 20 [15%] were written/co-written by the artist.
Grammy Record of the Year and top selling single of the year.
The Theme From A Summer Place
Percy Faith
Grammy Song of the Year
Theme From Exodus
Ernest Gold, songwriter.
Grammy Album of the Year
The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart
Bob Newhart
Billboard #1 album of 1960: Original Cast, The Sound of Music
