Martha's Madman

The Zoo Crew has got Martha's Madman spinning right now, and if you have ever sat with the second side of Watch you already know why the room goes quiet for a second when that one comes up. Manfred Mann's Earth Band cut it for the 1978 album, recorded the year before at Workhouse Studios down on the Old Kent Road in London, and it sits between a live take of Davy's on the Road Again and a live Mighty Quinn like the odd one out that somehow became the keeper. Lane Tietgen wrote it. The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, a Bay Area jazz-rock outfit with guitarist Jerry Hahn, organ man Mike Finnigan, Clyde Graves and George Marsh, put the original on their 1970 album and opened the record with it. Seven of the ten songs on that LP were Tietgen's. New York Times writer Verlyn Klinkenborg later recalled buying the thing as a Berkeley freshman and having a scrap of Martha's Madman pop into his head twenty years on, a few up-tempo phrases of guitar, bass, drums and Hammond B3, then digging the vinyl out of a barn because the digital shops had nothing. That is the kind of song that hides in a crate and still finds you.

Tietgen was a poet, singer and guitar player out of Topeka who landed in the San Francisco area and wrote the sort of pictures other bands liked to steal. Earth Band had already taken his Captain Bobby Stout for the debut album in 1972, and that one stuck in the live set for years. Martha's Madman waited until Watch. The words are a small fever dream. Martha has a madman standing hidden in the shadows with a long curved Turkish dagger and a jeweled handle. He tells her the world is full of freaks and geeks and simples, and he hides like a leprechaun under stones and in the ripples. She thought she knew the pool of time until somebody threw a stone in it, the surface broke, and she got nervous. The last word she gets is that she may have to wait around another thousand years. Prog fans on the German site Babyblaue Seiten have called the Earth Band reading a favorite, and one of them noted it once won an online poll as the best-loved Earth Band song of the lot. Side two of Watch was nothing but covers, John Simon and Robbie Robertson, Tietgen, and Bob Dylan, and a lot of listeners who wore the record out in tea rooms still rank that stretch as the high point.

Watch was the eighth Earth Band album, part studio and part live, out on Bronze in Britain and Warner Bros. in the States on the 24th of February 1978. Pat King had just come in on bass. It was the last album for guitarist Dave Flett and for original drummer Chris Slade, who later took the kit for AC/DC. In West Germany the record sat on the charts for 69 weeks, peaked at number 3, and went platinum in 1981. The singles were California, a live Mighty Quinn, and a live Davy's on the Road Again, so Martha's Madman never got the radio push and still outlasted a lot of the hits with the people who actually bought the album. The cover has its own road story. On a Scandinavian tour a fan named Michael Sanz handed Manfred a print of an oil painting to sign. Manfred liked it, asked if Sanz had painted it, and when the art student said yes he had a job. Swedish tour manager Thomas Johansson is usually credited with the idea of a man on a runway with his arms out, ready to lift off. Sanz later said he thought the idea was Manfred's, because Manfred suddenly threw his arms wide and ran down the sidewalk to show him the pose. Sanz painted a 60 by 60 centimeter oil from that briefing, and the picture became one of the late-seventies rock sleeves people still recognize at a glance.

Manfred has never pretended the band was a songwriting machine. In a Louder interview he said he is not very good at writing songs, that none of them in the Earth Band were, and that people who complain about covers ought to be grateful the band does not write its own, because those would be terrible. He listens to the radio, catches a melody, and rebuilds it. Dylan and Springsteen got that treatment over and over. Tietgen got it twice, and Martha's Madman is the deeper of the two, more trance than single, with the Minimoog and the guitars circling the lyric instead of punching a chorus. Chris Thompson was the voice on a lot of the Watch material, and the arrangement keeps the unease instead of sanding it down. That is the Earth Band habit. Take somebody else's picture and hang it in a bigger room.

The man behind the keyboards started a long way from the Old Kent Road. Manfred Sepse Lubowitz was born in Johannesburg on the 21st of October 1940, raised in a Lithuanian Jewish family, son of David Lubowitz and Alma Cohen. He studied music at the University of the Witwatersrand and worked as a jazz pianist in the clubs. Between 1959 and 1961 he and childhood friend Saul Ozynski recorded as the Vikings, reckoned as South Africa's first rock and roll band. He was strongly opposed to apartheid, left for Britain in 1961, and wrote for Jazz News under the name Manfred Manne, after the American drummer Shelly Manne. The name shortened to Manfred Mann and stuck. In 1962 he met drummer and keyboard player Mike Hugg at the Butlins holiday camp in Clacton. They built a big blues-jazz outfit called the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, slimmed it to a five-piece, and signed to EMI's His Master's Voice label in 1963. The producer suggested they call the group Manfred Mann. From 1964 to 1969 they were all over the British charts, with Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Pretty Flamingo and Dylan's Mighty Quinn all reaching number one at home. The pop image got them into scrapes, especially in Ireland, and old bandmate Klaus Voormann, who had played with the Beatles, later said he kept telling Manfred the music needed to get earthier. Manfred has said he cannot confirm the story and does not much care, so Voormann can have the credit.

The hit group split in 1969. Manfred and Hugg formed Chapter Three, a jazz-rock experiment that lasted two albums. In September 1971 the Earth Band came together with Mick Rogers on guitar and vocals, Colin Pattenden on bass, and Chris Slade on drums. The name was Slade's suggestion after they had kicked around Arm Band, Head Band and Elastic Band. Manfred wanted something with band in it, because it nearly rhymes with Mann, and Earth tied the straighter rock sound to the ecology talk of the time. Early on they were still billed as Manfred Mann. A Dylan cover, Please Mrs. Henry, was the first single. Randy Newman's Living Without You was the one that carried the Earth Band name in America. Through the seventies they kept the cover habit and got louder, Blinded by the Light and Spirit in the Night from Bruce Springsteen, then Watch, then a long run that paused in the late eighties and picked up again in the nineties. The band is still out there, with Manfred, Mick Rogers, Steve Kinch, John Lingwood and Robert Hart, working rooms across Europe the way they have for decades.

If you want the long trail, the official home is Manfred Mann's Earth Band, where the tour dates and the old stories sit together. The band keeps a page on Facebook and posts as Manfred Mann Official on Instagram. Fans who like the deep crates use Platform End, the Earth Band archive, which lists Martha's Madman right under the Watch covers next to California, Davy's on the Road Again and Mighty Quinn, and ties it back to Tietgen and the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood. Lane Tietgen died in July 2020. The song he wrote about a woman, a dagger and a broken pool of time is still the one the Zoo Crew likes to drop when the room needs something stranger than a hit. The Zoo Freaks know the drill. Stay with THE ZOO and the next deep cut is already on the way.