30 Years of Southern Psych Pop: John T. Baker and the Martini Age

Shoulda Beens

In the post-punk, college rock world of the 1980s, the American South seemed poised to rise again, thanks to the wide-eyed, DIY enthusiasm of bands and artists like REM, the dBs, Mitch Easter and Let’s Active. These groups looked beyond the blues-fueled cliches of “southern rock” and created a brainy new kind of guitar pop that owed more to Television, Devo, and XTC than it did Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers.

In eastern Tennessee, John T. Baker was watching. He’d spent nearly two years on the road fronting a cover band that played every frat house, night club, and Indian casino in the southeast. But being a human jukebox for a living, even a good living, was getting old. He started writing songs that he had no time — and no band — to play, and he couldn’t stop.

So Baker walked away from his $1,500-a-night cover band, moved to Memphis, and formed the Martini Age, a guitar-centric pop band that proudly wore its Gang Of Four, Robyn Hitchcock, and Richard Thompson heart on its sleeve. He locked himself in the attic with his cassette four-track and wrote music — and more music, and even more music. Some of it was beautiful, some of it was brutal, and, yeah, some of it was downright weird. But all of it was worth hearing.

Sadly, none of the record labels Baker approached agreed. By the early 90s, the louder, simpler, angrier music coming out of the pacific northwest ruled the industry, and crafty, melodic bands like the Martini Age were left to wither on the vine.

But Baker’s story didn’t end there. Tune into this episode to find out what happened next, and how John T. Baker has kept the Southern art-rock faith for the last 30 years.

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