Ed Martin has passed away.
I first encountered Ed in the late 1990's, I think, although maybe earlier. I had been a DJ on WREK for many years, and Ed Martin would call in frequently. Perhaps it was to comment on something I had just talked about on air -- I would often do things like describe the album cover, mention the record label, anything I could think of, basically liven up the place. Or perhaps I was giving away tickets to a show -- he got into lots of shows around town via winning passes from WREK. I know he went to a lot of those shows, but I think he also knew that a lot of those giveaways result in ZERO calls, and he was just relieving us of the embarrassment.
After a hiatus from WREK, I returned to essentially rebuild the place, taking a behind-the-scenes engineering role rather than on-air. Around then is when I actually met Ed in person. He had enrolled in some city planning coursework at Georgia Tech, and had decided to come by WREK and see what he could do to help. Although he and I joked that he had only enrolled at GT so that he could get to work at WREK -- which wasn't that unreasonable, that's how awesome WREK was. At the time, I was on the warpath to restore the radio station following years of neglect, and I quickly learned that Ed was just about the most supportive and reliable friend you could have. One of the things I was doing at WREK was understanding every niche of the operation and documenting it for future students, and Ed helped me understand the sports production side.
Ah, yes, Ed and sports. His favorite sport was women's volleyball, one of the sports at Georgia Tech that was big enough to warrant radio coverage, but not big enough for the Big Bucks commercial radio. Ed was a natural, of course, providing play-by-play and color commentary as the situation dictated. He certainly had a deep knowledge of the game, but that didn't stop me from endlessly ribbing him about him doing women's volleyball so he would get to hang around those lanky Amazonians in short shorts.
By 2002, two other guys and I had successfully rebuilt WREK to the point where we had a pretty decent digital audio system up and running, and Ed promptly got to work in it, filling it with music. His specialty is 20th century composition, and so he ended up taking care of the morning classical music programming for a while. But he was really in his element producing "IDs". An ID is a short, 20 to 30 second bit of music identifying the radio station -- we had to have a selection of these in the recorded archive so that the automated music system could play them at the top of the hour, when the FCC requires us to say "WREK Atlanta" on the air. You can surround it with whatever nonsense you want, but the station call latter and city of license need to be spoken. And Ed made THE BEST IDs. OH my god, they were so good. They ARE so good -- they can still be heard today! Next time you hear some kooky ID with a deep southern voice, it's Ed.
"WREK Atlanta. Because one never knows, do one?"
(over a ragtime piano bit)
"WREK Atlanta. We've been bringing boogie to the world for 35 years and we're not tired yet."
(over a blues boogie track)
"And you can 'get happy' with WREK Atlanta."
(over an old "get happy" blues tune)
"Stay in touch with your inner college student with WREK Atlanta"
(over some manic indie rock mess)
"WREK Atlanta. It's what college radio was meant to be."
(over a raucous cover of Wild Thing)
Another one of my favorites has Ed simply stating the ID over a craaaaazy Spike Jones soundtrack.
If you'd like to hear some of these, and you are reading this before January 28th, Jon Kincaid played them on his radio show. Go to the Personality Crisis page on WREK's website and click "last show" to start listening via WREK's running archive. The first ID plays about 45 minutes in, and Jon provides his own remembrances. He plays a whole raft of them near the end of the 2-hour show. The show playlist is here.
Outside of WREK, Ed turned me on to the annual Atlanta Orthographic Meet, aka the adult spelling bee, or just "The Bee" as Ed would call it. Held at Manuel's Tavern every year, this is fantastic annual event allows adults of all stripes to come down and informally discover that they don't know squat about spelling. It's a truly humbling experience. Ed had won it a couple times, and made his way onto the committee of people that run the event every year. Seriously, if you win this event, you are way smarter than nearly everyone in town, and in ways that the rest of us can't even imagine (linguistics, law, medecine, etc.). I suspect that at some point Ed and I were hanging out at the WREK studio and I probably pontificated about some spelling matter, and Ed slyly told me about "The Bee". I'm sure he knew that the experience would correct my ego a few notches. But I'm a lifer there now, and have been to every one since 2004 or so. It's always held on the Saturday after Valentines Day, so Feb 21st this year -- come on out!
About 10 or so years ago, Ed moved out to California, specifically Nevada City CA, where he'd spent some time in the past, and took up some civic duties there. I honestly don't know what he did, but occasionally he'd put up a profile picture of him working duty at a polling station or scolding the county government or something, so clearly he was busy out there. Thing is,when you talked to Ed, you can try to get him to talk about himself, but he'd turn it right around, and you'd end up not knowing about all the crazy great stuff he was doing.
He helped out at Nevada City's KMVR for a while ("Music of the world, voice of the community" says my t-shirt) but apparently got annoyed with them and transitioned over to helping out the kids at nearby UC Davis and KDVS. Naturally, the kids there took to him, even more than we had at WREK, and he dubbed himself the radio station's "senior mascot" (click for a great profile of Ed).
A few years ago, I started getting into electric cars and pretty much became a full-time nutjob on the topic. Well, Ed latched right on, and interviewed me for the KDVS zine. I'm not really sure what this was doing in a college radio zine, but Ed was so incredibly supportive, and I was certainly happy to go on and on for what turned out to be four pages.
For years he had a show on alternating Saturday's called "Cactus Corners", and thanks to KDVS's fantastic online archive, you can still listen to much of it, or even download it. Even if 20th century composed music (aka avant garde classical) isn't your thing, just wait until Ed got on mic, as it was always fascinating. His reliable use of the "royal we" always cracked me up.
I did some internet spelunking and dug up these links:
https://www.facebook.com/cactuscorners
http://cactuscornerskdvs.blogspot.com/ -- posts from Dec 2010 to Oct 2013
http://169.237.101.62/shows/past/show_id/1146/ (2010 show playlists, no audio)
Here's just the last six months of the show:
http://library.kdvs.org/archive/view/show_id/2982 (show audio, Mar-Jun 2014)
http://169.237.101.62/shows/past/show_id/2982/ (show playlists, Mar-Jun 2014)
http://library.kdvs.org/archive/view/show_id/2822 (show audio, Jan-Mar 2014)
http://169.237.101.62/shows/past/show_id/2822/ (show playlists, Jan-Mar 2014)
I've taken his last two shows (extracted from the pages above) and linked them up for you in the table below. Ed's voice is just a click away ...
| date | description | stream | download |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10-May-2014 | playlist and notes | audio stream | audio download |
| 07-Jun-2014 | playlist and notes | audio stream | audio download |
That last show above, for June 7th, aired just before Ed headed out to the mountains. Over the years, he had done some fire watch duty. A friend had a regular gig that Ed would substitute for, as needed. Read this excellent New York Times article about the lookout duty, and check out the photo archive. Can you imagine?
Click on Ed's Facebook profile to see the outpouring there. The man was well loved by so, so many people.
I'll leave you with this wonderful little video that the KDVS folks produced a couple years ago.
Carry on, Dude.
Yours, Chris