I had gone for a walk earlier in the day, extra early so as to enjoy the cool damp before the sun had a chance to burn it away. But I'd been filled with a presentiment of the end of something. It didn't leave me all day long. My mind kept running through the thought, "What if today were the last day of your life?" We all have that thought, occasionally, but yesterday morning it was an unshakeable refrain that my wandering thoughts kept coming back to. Then later I found out via Facebook that Rick had died.
I'm not at all clairvoyant. The world seems to be full of loss these days, and I am on the downhill trajectory looking back, grasping at such straws as a cool, damp morning will give, so my morbidity is not any great surprise. But Rick's death adding a shocking coda to the gloomy refrain shook me. Coincidence is an article of faith with me. The chance overlapping and intersection of planes of human existence is what gives us the hallucinatory sensation of common destiny that undergirds "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
If you don't understand that sentiment, no matter. Rick -- the enthusiastically anti-religious Rick who read the Bible three times as a youth before seeking the essence of religion by immersing himself in music and reading -- would've given it an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
Rick and I soldiered (peacefully) for Tennessee at the Watauga Regional Library of blessed memory. He and the other stellar line staff did the real work out in the hustings. In those days there had to be somebody to bring the Internet, just the way there had to be somebody to bring the bookmobile. The Internet access and network connection provided by the Region was actually given unique statutory existence as a virtual entity: the Northeast Tennessee Public Library. Rick would have been its face, bringing the manna from the heaven of cyberspace to the hills of northeast Tennessee.
But I didn't get to know the inner Rick all that much back then. It was Facebook where Rick flourished and where we became actual friends. There Rick (as I always knew him) was Richard, an intellectual/culture magazine editor manqué who allowed his indefatigable reading and listening to spill out on his Facebook wall to the delight of such friends as I, who had the feeling -- listening to or reading yet another of Richard's dispatches from his passions -- "Hey, as much as I follow Rick's posts, I really should be paying him a subscription fee."
When I say that his knowledge of rock music was encyclopedic, I mean that a Richard Martin Encyclopedia of Rock Music would have been one of those sources that a reference librarian could not have done without. How else to answer those recurring questions about the role of the oud in Bay Area psychedelic music in 1967? (Ironic? Who, me?) Just when you thought you'd come up with a question to stump him, Rick would come back at you with somebody's mother of invention from his bottomless grab-bag of ephemera where every obscurity was someone's necessity, and Rick was the curator.
Speaking of inventions, Rick was an appreciator of my solid-body electric lap dulcimer. And I don't think it was just for its musical qualities. A native of Rural Retreat, VA, with deep roots, Rick was the kind of Appalachian traditionalist who understood that pioneering is in the blood of Appalachia, and pioneering is something that can't be allowed to be shut off by tradition. To stand still is to die. The trick is to pioneer within a tradition, and pioneering meant blazing trails into the universe and bringing your findings back home like some Meriwether Lewis of the mind.
Rick was solidly both the insider and the outsider. He was a curmudgeon, and he admired other such curmudgeons as Frank Zappa and Lou Reed. But that's because they represented the same kind of independent solidity that he possessed. Nobody was going to tell Rick who he was or what he was, or get anywhere with any put-downs. Rick stood on a solid foundation against all the forces that grind people down and belittle them. It didn't matter who you were: if you struggled against the powers that be, or if you were weird and unacceptable because that's how society had labeled you, Rick was on your side, cheering you to hold on and hold out because that's how the people win against the oppressors. "The people are the inside of everything," he might say. "Stand strong. Don't let anybody take from you who you are."
I like to think that Rick is somewhere, reading this, and both giving his quiet chuckle and preparing to tell me how totally I missed the boat about him. Ah well, no matter. His conveyances -- his thoughts, opinions, and the things he sent me to read or listen to -- always weighed with me, because you just knew that that was his life: he put his all into the absorption of what he read and heard, and sometimes share some element of what it was that he liked or didn't like about these things. And it was this that had value, as if it were some kind of nourishment, some calorie of conviction, that would give substance to some things I felt the same way about, but did not "know" about in the same solid way Rick did.
He told me, for example, how he loved drone music -- and I as a bagpiper and dulcimer player had my own affinity -- but there was something about his interest that piqued exploration on my part. And when I came up with a musical artifact that I thought he would enjoy not just for its flatted seventh drone but for the use of an Appalachian lap dulcimer played oud-style, it was only possible to think about it as being a testament to him, something along the lines of what the blind Irish harper O'Carolan did when he dedicated tunes to a patron and called them "planxty." So that was my working filename for the tune, which in its final form became Melungeon Dervish. It happened again when he challenged me to "top" a German fellow playing three recorders at the same time. That time I followed through with a proper dedicatory name and used the tune for an Eastertide video composition.
Wherever it is that Rick is chuckling, he's probably also refusing my wish that he rest in peace with a wag of the finger: "On a trip like this one? Haven't you heard of the music of the spheres?"
Thus it might not be on Facebook (where the wall he built is nonetheless an enduring legacy), but if my experience the other morning is any indication, I haven't heard the last of Rick Martin. However, I sure will miss his generous, intelligent spirit filling the here-below with good stuff to read and listen to.
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