The 1985 Project Part 38: Marti Jones - Unsophisticated Time
Mixing memories with the ability to hear only half the record
Some things fall through the cracks of history. I have owned most but not all of the albums covered in this series so far. I certainly owned all of the albums Marti Jones released back in the 80s. But when I went to look for them, I discovered that at some point, I must have sold them off. This isn’t a complete surprise – I don’t have half the LPs I used to have because I realized that at my age, if I just listened to one record every day, I might not have enough life left to get through them all. And that’s not counting all the new stuff that keeps my life blood flowing.
Anyway, for most records I don’t own, it’s not a problem in the modern world. You can check them out on Spotify, or if that fails, as it did in this case, on youTube. Holy moley! Only half the songs on Unsophisticated Time, the 1985 debut album by Marti Jones, are available on youTube videos. I loved her music back in the day, and this album finished 38th in the Pazz and Jop Poll that year so I wasn’t the only one. But now, she’s barely a blip in people’s memories.
This means I can’t write as detailed a review as I do every other week. I can tell you that I was immediately attracted to the album because, since Jones is not a writer, she was singing songs by Peter Holsapple, Don Dixon, Richard Barone, and Elvis Costello, among others. This appealed to me right away. I never understood the rule that people who wrote their own songs should be automatically better than people who didn’t. Some people are naturally gifted interpreters, and Jones knew how to find songs by the best songwriters of her own time.
Of course, the very best song on the record – at least among the ones I could hear today, but I’m pretty sure this holds true as it’s been a fave of mine for decades – was written by a guy named Bland Simpson who is otherwise completely unknown to me. “Follow You All Over the World” has an indelible melody that floats up and down as the lyrics extoll the determination to put up with a horrible part-time lover just because of an irresistible smile. Jones eats this one up, and makes it all seem romantic even though the guy treats her like shit.
Marti Jones is a straight-forward singer, with no vibrato, no melisma, and only occasional nods outside the box. She is a lover of melody, and sings everything with conviction. Her version of Elvis Costello’s “The Element Within Her,” with guest vocals by Anne Richmond Boston of the Swimming Pool Q’s, is better than his original. I can’t say she tops the dB’s takes on “Lonely Is as Lonely Does” or “Neverland,” but she sings them beautifully. (I should say I’m operating from memory combined with a live youTube performance of the song in St. Louis at a concert I don’t remember attending but can’t believe I would have missed in 1986, especially since my friend Tim Lee was playing guitar with her.)
Don Dixon produced this album and played most of the instruments (though Mitch Easter of Let’s Active takes a scintillating guitar solo on “Show and Tell,” a song Richard Barone seems to have given to her without recording himself). A couple years later they were married and have been together ever since.
Marti Jones obviously never became as popular as I wanted her to be back in the day. But, gee whiz, can’t Omnivore Records do something about getting her catalog back in print?
I think this record would be an 8 out of 10 points, but with the caveat that I haven’t heard half of it in decades.
Beautiful account of a fantastic record. I wrote Bland Simpson a fan letter a few years ago--he ended up as an English professor at UNC. I mostly wrote him b/c I knew my dear internet friend Richard--now sadly gone from us--counted the song as a key one between himself and his wife. Bland wrote write back with this lovely account of the song:
I wrote "Follow You" in 1978, after seeing a photograph from the 1950s of actor George C. Scott following actress Ava Gardner down a street in, I believe, Spain -- they had been in a film together, he had fallen for her, and then after the shoot was over he kept chasing after her -- the caption to the photograph said something like: "That summer George C. Scott followed Ava Gardner all over Europe." Remembering a turn-of-the-last century newspaper quote from my old hometown (Elizabeth City, N.C., a river port), wherein an old man on the docks during spring harvest and shipping said: "I believe I would follow strawberries all over the world," I conflated the ideas above and dreamt up the far-flung romance of the song . . .
A suggestion for a future column. I was listening to The Roches' "Another World", and if there's ever an album that just breathes the air of 1985 ("We want to make our own work but still get MTV's attention") it's this one. The title track is a favorite of mine, but the whole album aims for a great synthesis of New York Art Scene sensibility and electronic pop.