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“Anyway, UCLA accepts me and I’m working in Fred’s store, and he says, ‘Okay, go sell Martin guitars.’ I told him that I didn’t know how to do that and he realised I didn’t know anything about Martin guitars at all. “I thought, ‘Okay, what the hell?’” says Chris. Walecki put an alternative proposition to Chris: that he should come down to Los Angeles, attend UCLA and work in his music store to give him a taste of the business. I had this image of scuba diving all day long.” I said that I didn’t know, because, at the time, I was considering going to the University Of Miami to study marine biology. “Fred Walecki was visiting the factory and asked if I was going to join the family business. It was a Californian guitar-shop owner who finally tipped the scales. I was never the president of the senior class” My father and I had a challenging relationship but my grandfather Martin and my grandmother Daisy would go out of their way to get me to Nazareth for a week or two in the summer, where I was exposed to the business.” My grandparents though, Mr Martin and my grandmother Daisy, must have recognised that there was a possibility that I would be the next Martin. My mum did nothing whatsoever to encourage me to even pay attention to the business. My parents were divorced and it was a bad divorce. We begin by asking whether he’d always known he would one day work in the family firm.
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He talks with a rare candour, his answers free from jargon and buzzwords. This appreciation recently culminated in his appointment as the chair of NAMM, the prestigious US musical instrument trade association. Over the years, Chris Martin has matured into the role of head of one of the world’s most important instrument-makers and is widely admired in the industry. It’s an open secret that grandfather Martin saved the business and mentored Chris, who has been a popular and famously steady hand at the helm since he took over in 1986. Chris is candid about the strained relationship he had with his father, Frank Herbert Martin, and how it was Chris’s grandfather CF Martin III who rescued the company after questionable decisions and a major union dispute nearly ran the business off the rails in the 1970s. That isn’t to say that hiring family is a guaranteed way of getting things right. Martin remained a family-owned and run business and, however much a hired CEO may love their company and its products, it’s tough to imagine they could feel quite the same way about guarding the Martin name and legacy as does Chris Martin IV, the great-great-great-grandson of its founder, who runs the company today as chairman and CEO. What really set Martin apart, though, was quality, both of manufacture and sound – and what ensured both was an uncompromising sense of tradition. Similarly, the adoption of the 14th-fret body joint had a significant impact on the sound and playability of the modern acoustic guitar and was once again copied by pretty much everybody else. This label adorns the inside of the earliest documented instrument with X-bracing, delivered to soloist Madame Delores Nevares de Goñi in 1843.
It’s true that Martin was at the bleeding edge of new developments in guitar-making, such as X-bracing and dovetail neck joints, and once it was perfected in the 1930s, the dreadnought became probably the most copied guitar shape in history. What allowed Martin to climb to the top of the tree and remain there for the best part of 200 years? It wasn’t just product innovation. Plenty of other companies came and went during the intervening 187 years but Martin persevered and prospered – though not without a few ups and downs along the way – setting the benchmark against which premium-quality acoustic instruments are measured. The Nazareth, Pennsylvania-based doyen of acoustic guitars was founded in New York by German émigré Christian Frederick (Friedrich) Martin in 1833 and was one of the pioneers of the steel-string acoustic guitar, which was to become an essential component of popular music throughout the 20th century. For all their hell-raising, wild living and love of anti-establishment posturing, guitarists can be as besotted with heritage as any card-carrying National Trust devotee – and no brand delivers guitar heritage better than CF Martin & Company.
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