Bio

How it all started….

Martin began his musical journey in his early teens when he fell in love with the trombone.  His parents, ever eager to support his musical interests, built a sound proof room in their basement allowing Martin to blast away to his heart’s content while they happily carried on with their quiet lives, safely ensconced in another part of the house.

While following his trombone-playing path through high school, youth orchestra and college, AM radio slowly seeped into Martin’s consciousness, the airwaves filled with the sounds of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Four Tops and other practitioners of the kind of music that was clearly not going to be appreciated on the upper floor of the house.

Some early success…

He moved to Boston in the early ‘70s, a city overflowing with folk, blues, rock and jazz music, and found a scene full of bars and coffee houses where a solo artist could play and make a little bit of money.  His first group was a folk trio called Wanderlust: three songwriters, all three acoustic guitar players (what were they thinking?).  The band packed up an old Pontiac with a PA system made of speakers screwed into pieces of plywood, shoved into the back seat of the car with Zack, a half-labrador/half-greyhound pooch perched on top of the cabinets.

During the following months they plied their trade throughout the bars and restaurants of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.  Alas, the Wanderlust musical misadventure came to its inevitable conclusion when, after having spent five days a week traveling and playing music, the bandmates became convinced they needed to spend even more time together, and hit on the idea of sharing an apartment in Wendell Junction Mass. This experiment lasted two months. With the demise of Wanderlust, Martin was on his way home to Washington.

Another go…

Once back in the DC area, Martin performed as a solo folkie for a few months, but soon decided it was time to plug in and go electric.  He purchased a used late 60’s Les Paul and a Peavey amp, pulled together a new band and began hitting the mid-Atlantic bar scene in search of fame and fortune.

The Martin Welling Band played an eclectic mix of folk-rock, blues, funk and country music in empty bars and packed houses, for good-old boys and upscale drinkers, in the middle of big cities out to the middle of nowhere.  But after a year and a half it became apparent their strange musical mix was more of a goulash than a soufflé, and in the end, unable to settle on a musical concept or a collective identity, the band members went their separate ways.

With the breakup of the Martin Welling band, Martin headed north to New York City, where, with his usual foresight, he pursued his musical ambitions with no job and a pregnant wife.  And so, as the real world pushed aside his creative aspirations, he settled into a quiet life working in Information Technology for a New York law firm, playing and writing songs on the occasional weekend while raising his young family.