May You Never

Back around 1974, I moved in for a while with my best friend from my grade school years, Rick, and his mother back in Rochester, New York. Rick and I had been inseparable (with the usual ups and downs) from the second grade until I moved away to attend high school in Central New York. I graduated mid-year and moved back to Rochester, but did not - most emphatically - want to live with my mother. (Loved her dearly, but could not get along with her in close quarters. Actually, the whole family is like that - we get along better in inverse proportion to proximity). Rick had started playing the guitar in the years we had been apart and he got me interested in learning, too. So I bought one - a not very good one - and proceeded to try to learn from Rick.

I spent a lot of time practicing and actually started picking it up pretty quickly. Rick was actually a good teacher; very patient. Naturally, he taught me things he knew and loved first. A lot of Beatles songs (Rick had been a huge fan since we watched them together on Ed Sullivan - yeah, we'd been friends that long). Also a lot of songs I was not familiar with by artists I had never heard of. We agreed to disagree on some of them but he got me interested in a lot of artists. I shared some of my favorites with him and we figured out how to play them together. When it was time to move up to a better guitar we both went and bought our new ones from a little shop in a really bad neighborhood from a man named Eldon Stutzman. He was an amazing guy, kind of cranky as I recall, but he knew how to voice a guitar like nobody I have ever known since. I still have the Takamine F-360S he sold me that day. He carved away the struts inside to make it sound even better than it did "off the rack" so to speak. (A professional session player once offered me three times what I paid for that guitar, cash on the spot. He loved that guitar. Obviously, I refused - I loved it more.)

Anyway, one of the artists that Rick introduced me to, on vinyl at least, was a guy by the name of John Martyn. Maybe you've heard of him, maybe not. You may remember one of his songs that was covered by a more household name, Eric Clapton. That song, May You Never, is probably John Martyn's best known general circulation song, but he's done a lot more, for a lot of years. The album I heard it on - and still own on vinyl - was Solid Air. The title song of that album was written for John Martyn's friend and fellow Island Records artist, Nick Drake, about a year before Drake took his own life. So, here's a fine John Martyn performance of May You Never. (Link to Solid Air here. With some unbelievable bass playing from Danny Thompson. Seriously.)