Larry Schwartz
Marti Brom was raised on records by the likes of Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and Billie Holiday. She’s shared a stage with Wanda Jackson and been likened to country great, Patsy Cline, just 30 when she died in a plane crash in 1963.
But the singer named the elder of her two children, Ivy, after punk rockers, the Cramps’ guitar player, Poison Ivy. “She’s one of my favourite female rock’n’roll musicians,” she explains.
Brom, who draws on classic country, rockabilly and rhythm and blues, is wary of typecasting. “I was a punk rocker and I was into new wave music in the ’80s. I love the Pretenders and I love Blondie and I love the Clash and I love the Cramps. So there are a lot of rock’n’roll influences on me but I always gravitated towards older-style music.”
The St Louis-born artist who moved to Austin early in her career says Australia reminds her of Texas.
Brom recently released two 45rpm vinyl records. Love and Kisses/Cracker Jack is a tribute to rockabilly and country singer, Janis Martin. She recorded the other, Goof Ball/Macumba Love with Boston roots musician, Barrence Whitfield.
Her air force officer husband, Robert, who penned the lyrics to Macumba Love, once persuaded her to audition for an officers’ wives club production of a musical titled The 1940s Radio Show.
“When we got married I had sung all my life but I had stage fright pretty bad and he convinced me I should audition for this play,” she says, “and it pretty much got me over it.”
She was once held in the Beehive detention centre at Gatwick Airport after trying to enter Britain, inspired by fellow American Chrissie Hynde, who co-founded the Pretenders in England. “I was probably in my early 20s,” she says. “I had this dream of going to England and forming a band, and I didn’t plan it very well. I didn’t have the paperwork, the work permits. They detained me overnight. I had to go home the next day.”
Born Marti Evans, she would dress up to go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings in St Louis with a young Michael Stipe before he moved with his family to Athens, Georgia, and founded REM. “He was an army brat and he lived in Illinois across the river. My boyfriend at the time was a guitar player and was starting a band and put an ad in the paper and Michael Stipe ended up being the singer.”
Her father was an English teacher, her mother an artist. They took the family to Italy for a year in the mid-1970s. Brom was living in Florence when she first heard Suzi Quatro sing Devil Gate Drive and “it was like, oh my god, I had never heard anything like that”.
“When I went back to the US the first thing I did was to go to a record store,” Brom recalls. “I found Suzi Quatro albums and she was even cooler than I thought. She was just little, petite, like my size, and she played the bass and wore leather jumpsuits, and I never looked back.”
The Age, 26-Oct-2013
Larry Schwartz Writer 