Last week Marti Jones was back in Washington, DC – the city where she and I had our greatest moments together during her career in pop music. (Actually, she was always on a stage with a band and her husband, while I was in the audience with my wife, but whatever – we’ll always have DC, Marti.) This time she wasn’t in town for a concert; she was preparing for the display of several of her paintings as “ambiance” (her word) on the set of a new play, After the Garden: Edith Beale Live at Reno Sweeney. The play re-creates a series of cabaret-style performances given in 1978 by the eccentric Beale – whom you might remember as “Little Edie,” the younger half of the peculiar mother-daughter duo portrayed in the 1975 documentary and 2006 Broadway musical Grey Gardens. Jones, serendipitously, had chosen the Beales as subject matter for her painting a couple years ago, and as a result she’s now receiving some of her biggest exposure to date as a visual artist.
It’s been a long time – nearly 20 years — since Jones had a major-label record deal, and nearly as long since she and Don Dixon ceased being regulars on the touring circuit. Over the last couple weeks Popdose has cast a spotlight on her music career, including a review of her recorded output last week and a recollection of her tours with Dixon the week before. Jones recently agreed to rehash her career during a phone interview, while sitting around her home outside Canton, Ohio. Perhaps because far too few music writers have sought her out recently – or perhaps because she (like Dixon, who’s also been quite generous to Popdose in recent months) is simply a terrific human being — our conversation resembled a reunion between old friends more than a run-of-the-mill interview.
Popdose: Are you in your studio today?
Marti Jones: No, but later I’m heading off to a recording studio. Dixon roped me into putting a generic female voice on a recording of our friend Jim Wann’s new play – it’s called The Great Unknown. [Wann is a longtime colleague of Dixon’s – the two performed with Bland Simpson as the Coastal Cohorts in their musical King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running.] I have to sing a song about climbing Mount Everest in my high-button shoes! His songs are always fun to sing, and this one’s great – Dixon keeps singing it to me as he dances around the room. And I’m getting paid – this time – which is nice.
Painting takes much more of your time than music these days. How did you go from pop star to painter?
My whole life, I wanted to be a painter. My grandmother was a painter, and my parents would always encourage me to take after her. I majored in art at Kent State, but meantime I had also started singing in clubs, and I did that for a livelihood through college. Then, you know, the music thing happened, and I had to put off the painting. I was actually very frustrated by it, and I would think all the time about picking it back up. But when I’d come home from a tour I would only be in one place for a couple days, and it was hard to grab onto anything and stick with it. (more…)
To fans of her four albums of marvelous acoustic pop in the mid-to-late ’80s, Marti Jones seemed on the cusp of becoming the next (albeit far hipper) Linda Ronstadt. Jones had inherited La Ronstadt’s knack for putting a mainstream sheen on the songs of neglected rock tunesmiths; meanwhile, her partnership (professional and otherwise) with 
Color Me Gone (1984)
For a few precious years in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the most communal experience on the pop touring circuit was a family affair. Recording artist-producer Don Dixon and his wife, the singer-songwriter Marti Jones, traversed the nation practically nonstop during those years, giving audiences in rock clubs and small theaters an irresistible two-for-one package: great tunes, of course, and the casual banter of two free – and kindred – spirits who were at the peak of their creative powers and clearly having the time of their lives.
“Those shows at the 9:30 Club were definitely special,” Jones told me last week. “We loved those audiences, because they obviously knew our songs and they were so wonderfully warm to us. We felt like we attracted fans who were a lot like us, so a lot of times it seemed like we were in a roomful of friends. There were a number of places like DC and the 9:30 Club during that time – pockets around the country where we got more airplay and could play larger venues, where we could count on folks showing up who were actual fans of our music. But then there were also times like the show I did at a little club in Detroit, where the marquee said ‘Mary Jones.’ I mean, that’s my grandmother.”
Don Dixon may never quite achieve the lofty stature of rock and roll’s Great Men, but there’s no questioning that for nearly 40 years he’s been one of the industry’s great guys. He’s a repository of well-told tales about musicians famous and forgotten; a producer of renown who midwifed some of the ’80s’ greatest “college-rock” hits; and co-godhead of a cult following that blossomed over years of onstage magic he created alongside his wife, singer Marti Jones. Through all of that, Dixon also has built a small but diverse catalog of recordings under his own name. His songs have explored themes ranging from the personal to the momentous to the ridiculous, but even as his work has matured Dixon has never forgotten the value of a great pop hook.
Most of the Girls Like to Dance But Only Some of the Boys Like To (1985)
