In Memoriam Chance Martin (1946–2023)
We’re sorry to share the sad news that our friend Chance Martin passed away last night. We’re grateful to Chance (aka Alamo Jones, the Voice in Black aka the Stoned Ranger) for collaborating with us to reissue his utterly unique 1981 private-press countrydelic masterpiece In Search in 2013. It was our seventh release, and one of the first in which we went all-in with extensive liner notes, archival materials, and an unbelievable oral history.
In Search was one one chapter in a long life filled with music, working alongside his mentors Johnny Cash and Cowboy Jack Clement and the team at Sirius XM Outlaw Country station. Spending time with Chance was like stepping into the pages of a Charles Portis or Barry Hannah story, offering access to the bizarre, mythic underbelly of Nashville—and, arguably, a means of circumventing the bounds of material reality. We’ll never forget those days cruising around in his old Mercury, the Maroon Unit, hearing tales of partying with Tanya Tucker, Michael Jackson, and Uzi-toting Miami assassins.
You can read more about this iconoclastic Nashville lifer and legend and hear and buy his music here. In his honor we’ve included some of the baffled critical acclaim for our reissue of In Search below.
Read the In Search Liner Notes & Oral History (text only)
As ringleader, maestro, and indomitable troubadour of Nashville’s most private, elusive, and exclusive far-out scene—the Dead End—visionary artist and Nashville lifer Chance Martin could have stepped from the pages of a Portis novel, Barry Hannah story, or Coen Bros. script. After working for and touring with his friend and mentor Johnny Cash as cue card man, stage manager, and lighting designer for eight years, in 1977 Chance began a new life. By the time he was thirty-one, he had already worked stagehands union gigs for all the greats, hung with them and partied with them backstage, and realized that it was now or never—time to turn off all the outside influences, hunker down, and make it new, or else. So he started writing songs on Johnny Cash’s D35 Martin, a gift from the master.
Chance and his gang holed up in the Dead End, the kitted-out “bonus room” above his parents’ garage on a cul-de-sac in a residential South Nashville neighborhood, complete with reel-to-reels, bed, bar, a Head of Security, and a Sergeant at Arms. Under the direction of Chance as guru, they spent five years in secrecy and self-imposed musical isolation, writing songs and recording endless hours of work tapes, periodically emerging under the cover of night, in a convoy of limos and people-movers, to record midnight sessions at the Music Mill and Cowboy Jack Clement’s.
The result was In Search (1981), a fierce, inimitable, and mythmaking countrydelic masterpiece of insular inspiration and absolutely singular vision and scope. Despite its intensely personal origins, long gestation, substantial financial costs, and deadly serious deliberation, the album betrays very little in the way of outside influences or traceable authorship. Commanding, aggressive, and unabashedly masculine, it literally sounds like nothing else we’ve ever heard—this is as close as we’ve gotten to unique music (if there is such a thing), the real deal, an obsessive, private-press triumph of the imagination. The closest analog we can (tentatively) venture is some unholy pot likker of Waylon Jennings, Funkadelic, the Fields of Nephilim, and the Bob Seger System: a strange Southern Gothic, alternately frightening and funky, and utterly transfixing. One can only wonder as to which interstellar channels Chance is tuned, but whatever he’s hearing is not the same transmission that the rest of us hear. And God bless him for it. Live The Search.
