Remembering John Martyn (MP3-enhanced)

Damn. John Martyn has died.

The rough-and-tumble Scottish folk-rock songwriter and musician, whose influence reached much further than his name, was 60. No cause of death has been announced yet, but Martyn had suffered a number of health calamities in his last decade.

After a couple of records spent as an earnest folk troubadour in the late 1960s, Martyn unleashed a distinctive new singing style, part jazz-inflected slur and part whiskey-throated growl. Almost overnight, he also evolved a guitar technique that pioneered tapping and presaged the delay-pedal fireworks of U2’s The Edge; as early as 1970, he had begun duct-taping an Echoplex device to his acoustic guitar, allowing him to bend and sustain notes to generate a reverb-drenched, quasi-electric sound. (It helped that he was already a strong technician with elegant rhythmic sense.)

With 1973’s Solid Air (its title song written for friend and labelmate Nick Drake a year before Drake’s death), everything came together, and the handful of albums that emerged in its wake — through 1980’s ravaged divorce album, Grace and Danger — stand up fine alongside that decade’s best albums (and pretty much invented the chill-out genre, which isn’t as unflattering as it may sound today, even if it undersells Martyn’s considerable understanding of the blues and his convincing fury).

MP3s and video after the jump.