What do Tom Constanten of the Grateful Dead, John Popper of Blues Traveler, Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors, Jon Fishman of Phish and Cyril Neville of the Neville Brothers all have in common?
Besides all being talented and successful musicians, they’re all friendly with a guy from Durham named Greg Martens. And they all come to Maine to play his shows, when he asks.
“He’s got one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever encountered, always thinking about other people. When he asks me to do a show, I know I’ll be treated like royalty,” said Neville, 74, from his home in Slidell, Louisiana.
Neville says he appreciates that when Martens asks him to play a show, it’s to help others. For nearly 20 years, Martens has been organizing concerts in Maine, usually one big one each year, to raise money for hunger prevention programs in the state. The latest shows in his Go Big For Hunger series are happening Thursday and Friday in Portland, at Portland House of Music and Bayside Bowl. The headliners for both shows include Neville, Constanten, drummer Wally Ingram of Timbuk 3, multi-instrumentalist Oteil Burbridge of Dead & Company and the Allman Brothers, guitarist Steve Kimock and bassist Rob Derhak of moe., who lives in Falmouth. Several dozen local acts will play each show as well.
Martens, 59, grew up in Camden and left Maine in the mid-1980s to follow the Grateful Dead around the country. He sold T-shirts from his pickup truck and became friendly with the band members. In the early ’90s, he spent several years selling merchandise for another jam band, Blues Traveler.
Those years helped him start a network of friends in the music industry that continued to grow after Martens came back to Maine around 1995 and started booking shows for the Stone Coast Brewing Co., a popular Portland music venue at the time. Besides working with bands over the years, friends of Martens say the main reason he is able to get so many well-known musicians to play his benefit shows is his gregarious personality and the fact that he’s not intimidated by celebrities.
“He has a magnetic personality and a very easygoing way. Musicians hate it when somebody gets all fan-y and acts intimidated, but Greg is not like that. He has all these musician friends, and he just acts normal around them,” said Doug Luther, a Brownfield-based recording engineer who has known Martens for more than 40 years.
A FAMILY AFFAIR
Oteil Burbridge, formerly of the Allman Brothers and currently with Dead & Company, will perform at Greg Martens’ Go Big For Hunger shows in Portland. Photo by Jay Blakesberg
Martens’ benefit shows are an outgrowth of the lobster cookouts he started throwing for touring musician friends after he moved back to Maine in the mid-90s. When musicians he knew – or friends of musicians he knew – would play Portland, Martens would throw a lobster bake. Martens said he loved working for jam bands, specifically, because of the sense of family among the fans and everyone involved with putting on the shows. So, of course, after he left the road, he wanted to keep in touch with people he considered family.
“At a Grateful Dead show or Blues Traveler show, you see the same people every night. A Rolling Stones show is great, but you don’t see the same people,” said Martens. “I really liked that sense of community.”
Martens said he became passionate about music in high school, in Camden, at first because he thought it was a way to meet girls. But he took up drums and soon realized the girls were only interested in the guitar players, he said. He first saw the Grateful Dead in 1979, at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, but wasn’t yet considering a life on the road. Instead, he went to college at Boston University and the University of Maine, getting a degree in business administration.
Greg Martens, holding a poster advertising his upcoming Go Big For Hunger shows, featuring famous musical friends he’s made over the years. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer
It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that he decided to follow his heart and go on the road, following the Grateful Dead, selling T-shirts. His father helped him convert a pickup truck’s bed into a sleeping compartment, with a drawer underneath the bed for his T-shirts. He started selling T-shirts with designs by the noted Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher at Dead shows.
At some point, a representative of the band came to his booth to tell him that members of the band really like the shirts and wanted their own, including Bob Weir and Mickey Hart. He was told he could sell his shirts “anytime and anyplace” that the Grateful Dead was playing.
He said selling T-shirts and merchandise was hard work – he’d have to jostle for position with dozens of other vendors at 6 a.m. the day of a show – but it also paid off. He said he made $100,000 some years, selling merchandise for bands and at concerts.
Around 1992, he got an opportunity to go on tour with Blues Traveler, then an up-and-coming jam band. On tour, he met musicians in other bands, including the Allman Brothers, Soul Asylum and Lemonheads. He decided to come back to Maine around the time Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia died, in 1995.
In Maine, he sold Stone Coast beer to retail outlets and booked shows there. He continued to throw parties for musician friends too. Then in the early 2000s, he read a news story about hunger rates in Maine increasing and thought he might use his musical connections to help. Around 2004, he started organizing benefit shows, usually around his March 3 birthday. So it was a party for him, for his friends and for a good cause.
Guitarist Steve Kimock, who has played with several members of the Grateful Dead besides forming his own bands, will perform at Greg Martens’ Go Big For Hunger shows in Portland. Photo courtesy of Big Red Barn Productions
For about eight years, Martens donated money from his benefit shows to the Good Shepherd Food Bank, based in Auburn. He says with sponsors and matching donations, those shows raised more than $250,000. For the last eight years, the shows have benefitted Full Plates Full Potential, an organization dedicated to ending childhood food insecurity in Maine, and have raised about $90,000, Martens said.
Justin Strasburger, executive director of Full Plates Full Potential, said he thinks the fundraisers have been successful because Martens knows how to build relationships and make the most of his opportunities.
“He’s sort of like Forrest Gump. He’s been in all these settings and had all these experiences, but he’s taken the time to get to know people and build relationships,” said Strasburger. “So when he asks for something, it doesn’t feel transactional.”
The musicians who have played Martens’ shows say they appreciate how well and personally he takes care of them, giving them far better treatment than they might get at other shows in a place the size of Portland. He pays for them to bring their families if they want, and he’s even bought a separate plane seat for a musician’s guitar. He makes sure their food, hotel and transportation are first-rate and makes sure they have fun.
“When he asks me to do a show, I don’t even do my usual three-second hesitation, because I know I’ll be taken care of, ” said Constanten, 78, who was the Grateful Dead’s keyboardist in the late 1960s and now lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico. “He took me to a Red Sox game once, and we had a wonderful time.”
Part of taking care of the headlining musicians, Martens said, is to make sure he pays them well. Yes, they like Martens, but they need to make a living too.
Martens founded Go Big For Hunger as the umbrella group for his fundraising shows in 2016, but before that, he held his benefit concerts under a variety of names.
One of the bigger shows Martens organized was in 2013, timed for his 50th birthday, at Port City Music Hall and The Big Easy in Portland. He called that show the F.O.G. (Friends of Greg) Festival, and it featured Barron of Spin Doctors and Popper of Blues Traveler. At the time, Popper called Martens “a big, beautiful guy with a big, beautiful personality.”
Martens himself played percussion in several bands and today sings and raps at shows he puts on. He’ll be performing at both shows this week.
“(Blues musician) Taj Mahal once told me I was one of the best rappers he ever saw,” said Martens. “I told him I must be the only one he ever saw.”
Neville says he enjoys playing Martens’ shows because Martens brings together talented musicians who also share a laid-back style and love of music and community.
“You get to jam, and it feels very special. Everybody respects each other, and everybody’s heart is wide open,” said Neville. “His shows are some of the most musically pleasing ones I’ve ever done.”
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