Martha and the Muffins – Black Stations/White Stations
Martha and the Muffins – Black Stations/White Stations
The best thing about the punk scene for me was not the music per se, but that it gave the tools for making music back to the people. Musically, the mid-1970s was characterized by bloated, overproduced corporate rock, full of overwrought guitar solos swimming through soggy arrangements of leaden songs that were far too long and far too uninteresting. The punks stormed the musical Bastille and freed popular music. Once the corporate stranglehold had been broken, bands began springing up everywhere, especially in colleges and art schools. A lot of these early bands took punk’s shock creed to heart and named themselves the most offensive or violent or confrontational names they could think of, just to get in your face. As a reaction to that, a group of friends at the Ontario College of Art who had formed a band decided to try to find the least threatening name they could, and they came up with The Muffins. Sticking vocalist Martha Johnson’s name in front, they had the goofily appealing Martha and the Muffins.
The name wasn’t meant to stick. It was just something to put on the flyers for their first gig while they thought of something better. After arguing over a bunch of other possibilities (The Appliances, The Furious Clones, The Gel Heads, Oui Oui from Paris, etc.), they stopped trying and realized their true calling as Muffins.
Martha and the Muffins were never true innovators, happily following in other people’s footsteps. The first album of theirs that really caught my ear was 1983’s Dansparc, which jumped on the polyrhythmic/found sound/faux ethnography bandwagon that was all the rage after the one-two punch of Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. That was followed a couple of years later by what is probably my favorite album of theirs, 1984’s Mystery Walk, which opens with Black Stations/White Stations, a commentary about how segregated radio stations were at the time – to the extent that there was speculation about whether a musician like Michael Jackson would ever get airplay on a white radio station. This was, of course, back when Michael Jackson was still black.
Black Stations/White Stations is a strong departure for the group, who signaled the change by paring down to two members, vocalist Martha Johnson and guitarist Mark Gane, and briefly changing their name to M+M (Mark was apparently getting tired of being a Muffin). They hired some of the best studio musicians around to fill out their sound, including the incredible, seemingly six-armed drummer Yogi Horton, who committed suicide shortly after this album was released. This track opens with the exhilarating fluid bass of Tinker Barfield, and features incredibly tight and punchy horns of the Brecker Brothers. Far funkier than anything they had done before, or would do again, Black Stations/White Stations climbed the charts and was only stopped from reaching the top by Minnesota’s own funky midget, Prince, who was flooding the world with songs from the Purple Rain dynasty.
After Mystery Walk, M+M continued to change their sound (and changed their name back to Martha and the Muffins, realizing they were alienating their fans) and I lost interest in the path they were pursuing, but those two mid-career albums still have a great deal of appeal to me.
The other bit of interesting trivia concerning Martha and the Muffins is that after their initial success with the song Echo Beach and a tour opening for Roxy Music, the band started to splinter. After their original bassist left, they hired Jocelyn Lanois to man (or woman, rather) the anchor of the rhythm section. As it turned out, Jocelyn had a brother named Daniel, who had a small studio an hour outside of Toronto. After recording some demos with him, they tapped him to produce their next few albums (including both Dansparc and Mystery Walk) and he became instrumental in helping to shape their sound. Daniel Lanois would then go on to become one of the most important producers of the 1980s and ‘90s, hooking up with Brian Eno and producing or co-producing the albums that brought fame and fortune and international acclaim to U2, Peter Gabriel, The Neville Brothers and Emmylou Harris, among others.