Joni Mitchell, "Refuge Of The Roads"

also Van Morrison and John Martyn

I’ve found myself getting into conversations about music lately, and they’ve had away of leading into my habit of lamenting what happened when the freewheeling days of FM radio were replaced with formatting, and, to quote from an earlier post, the vanishing from the airwaves of the “99.9% of classic rock music that the corporate “Classic Rock” stations tossed in the trash sometime around 1979, so they could put the same 100 songs on endless repeat.”

Rock music wasn’t all that was disappeared. The great cleansing of Insufficiently Commercial music from privately owned and newly syndicated FM music radio also included great vast archives of of other genres of music, and of music that defied genre. I don’t even think in genre. I just hear music, and sometimes songs by different artists that fit together uncannily well. Here are three of them.

This trio of tunes begins with the peerless Joni Mitchell, “Refuge Of The Roads”, from the 1976 album Hejira.

followed by Van Morrison, from Hardnose The Highway, musing on “Snow In San Anselmo”

and a gent who’s less well-known than either Joni or Van Morrison- John Martyn, the title track from one of the great deep cut lost classic albums of the 1970s, One World

John Martyn had a personality that was, for better and worse, sort of a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Nick Drake. I hope he’s been forgiven his trespasses. He got some good music out of that unwieldy, feral soul of his.

“I’ll always believe in a Creator. The birds sing too sweetly, the trout are too beautifully spotted.” John Martyn, born Ian David McGeachy