A couple of days ago I ran across a fantastic track with Marvin Pontiac called “Small Car” which I immediately posted on the site. Both the artist and the song was totally unknown for me until then, but I felt the urge to explore more of him. The first thing I noticed then was the difficulty of finding any of his work on vinyl. In what I seemed as an impossible search, I stumbled upon a lot of doubtful information.
According to one of the sites I visited, Marvin was born in the thirties and was the son of a Malian father and a jewish mother from New York. His upbringing was trimmed with an unfortunate string of mishaps and as a musician his disdain and mistrust of the record business was well documented. He signed a record deal with Acorn in 1952, later scoring a major hit with “Pancakes” on the emerging underground scene in Nigeria. After a schism with the label owner he was later approached by a number of different labels, but Marvin simply refused to record with anyone unless the owner of the label came to his home in Sidell, LA and mowed his lawn.
After creating a disturbance on a local International House of Pancakes a few years later he was hospitalized on an Institution. Further down it was told that from 1971 he drifted forever and permanently into insanity. His behaviour lasted until one day in June in 1977 when he tragically died, fatally struck by a bus.
Fine, this is an amazing life destiny and a very tragical story of an eccentric artist, I thought. But there was something in me that found the whole thing to be a bit hard to believe.
When I googled his name again, there was another name appearing; “John Lurie”, which I thought was a bit peculiar. I read this guy’s biography and found out that Lurie is an artist and musician fron New York and that he was the man behind the release of “the Legendary Marvin Pontiac – Greatest Hits” back in 1999, which was purportedly a posthumous collection of Marvins’s work. What made the music and the whole myth of Marvin even more credible was that the album was praised by a large number of well respected artists such as Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Angelique Kidjo amongst many others.
But finally I found what I’ve had my doubts on from the beginning. This guy “Marvin Pontiac” was just a fictional character all made up by Lurie himself. The music on the record was actually written by Lurie and performed by a bunch of well – known session musicians from New York just a decade ago. The well respected artists Bowie, Cohen, Kidjo who gave this project an alibi were obviously all in on the joke.
I was finally satisfied but shocked for hours by the beauty and genius of this scam. I had been completely taken away by the mythological and interesting character of Pontiac whom I thought were making extraordinary and totally forgotten music and then, to my big surprise, just didn’t exist.
Consequently I’ll take the oppurtunity to post another beautiful track as an tribute to the myth of Marvin Pontiac and to his originator. If you want to know more of him there’s a fictional biography on Allmusic.com. My last wish is that somebody out there (Finders Keepers?) understands this treasure and re-releases “his work” on wax.
Marvin Pontiac – Pancakes
