By Sylvia W. Chan

Cluttered.

Yeah, I think, following my host, Martin Luther, down the dim hallway that leads to the kitchen of the small but utilitarian one-bedroom basement unit he occupies in Hunters Point – it's cluttered. A pair of dusty, P-funk-style platforms strewn across the floor catch my eye, as does a slightly burnished Super 8 camera resting beside the kitchen sink, where a few, brightly colored cups float in the dishwater. Thumb-tacked everywhere are posters of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and Ice Cube, their edges curling next to the colorful handwritten scrawl emblazoned across every wall, proclaiming affirming aphorisms like "We don't know what the game is," "Reproduce Reciprocity Respect," and one that I find particularly charming, "2 B Oneself/iz 2 */N/Your Own/LIFE!" Mounds of magazines, books, and CDs scale the walls like ivy.

As I survey the scene, I'm rather impressed with the mishmash, how it all seems useful, how it all just fits. This, I decide, is clutter of the very best sort – purposeful, meaningful, nurtured. It's a clutter where everything has a place, where character is reflected, and where, amid it all, creation occurs.

For across a small kitchen counter – from which I clear business cards, mail, and other sundry items to make room for my reporter's notebook and tape recorder – lies the thing that all passionate clutter must possess: a soul. This soul resides in a square of space (measuring at most, six by six foot) crammed with pretty much everything Luther – soul singer, songwriter, producer, independent record label owner, lifelong San Franciscan – needs to make music.

There's the basics: a keyboard, microphones, amps to plug his electric guitar into. And then there's the fancy stuff, things like the soundboard, the drum machine, and a sampler, all connected into the powerful brain of a Macintosh G4 computer. Only when it comes time to lay down vocals, Luther tells me, does he have to leave the central control station. Even then, he doesn't go far – the apartment's bathroom, where sheets of egg foam hang to deaden the sound, serves as vocal booth. It's an impressive setup, to say the least, one that not only takes full advantage of the space at hand but does so ergonomically; as the more-than-six-foot-tall Luther sits down in the swivel chair to show me how he works, it all seems downright spacious.

It was here that Martin Luther McCoy (and yes, that's his real name, though he dropped the "McCoy" for his stage moniker) recorded many of the songs on his debut album, The Calling. Completed in 1999, the record was released independently through Beyond Entertainment, the label Luther began with friend and colleague LaMara Davidson last year. It's a remarkable debut, and not just because the tracks recorded in Luther's home sound as polished as anything laid down in a state-of-the-art studio.

No, what's impressive is that The Calling is a "soul" album in every sense, one that Luther conceived and completed as a result of his own soul-searching, and one he hopes will inspire listeners to do the same.

"This is my favorite track," he tells me in his velvet-tar, Barry White-smooth baritone, while punching a few buttons. Suddenly, the room fills with the sounds of "Soul Assassinator," the record's opening song, one that begins with Luther's throaty, multitracked voice over a sinewy Rhodes hook, a mournful wah-wah guitar, and a slow, slinky electric bass. "Don't you want to live your life?" he croons in the song's opening line. Later in the song, in falsetto, Luther poses another difficult question: "Have you seen my soul today?"

He tells me the song was almost entirely improvised, lyrics and all, the result of a few ideas that he and his friend and frequent songwriting partner Pascael Arceneaux had one day last year while hanging out in the studio.

"The creation of that song was spontaneous," he says, "and prompted me to start working on a solo project."

"Soul Assassinator" deals with issues of self-awareness and self-realization, and many of the album's consequent tracks reflect Luther's desire to use his music as a means to speak to his community with songs like "Gang.sta" (with its refrain of "Mama, don't let your baby grow up to be a gangsta") and "Civil War" (a blues litany set over sounds of war-machine guns, marching, and chaos that reflect violence's toll on the black community). Luther says he wants only one thing from his listeners, and that's for them to look inside themselves and gain some introspection from listening to his music – because, he explains, he's looking at himself and putting his life out there, both "all the things that are cool and all the things that are fucked up." He's hoping folks hear what he's saying.

He knows there aren't a lot of soul/R&B artists out there today with a social agenda, and he knows he'll have to go through alternative outlets to bring his music to more people. Beyond's now got offices in both San Francisco and New York City, and Luther travels often between the two cities, hustling to gain exposure whenever and however he can.

• • •

Luther's a native San Franciscan, and today he's sporting a T-shirt that reads "San Francisco" across the chest, over baggy, blue cargo pants. His father, a retired police officer, and mother, a former teacher, moved here from Texas to settle in the predominately African American community of Bayview-Hunters Point, where Luther, 30, still lives and works. Sadly, he's a bit of an anomaly in this regard – many of those in the black community have moved out of the neighborhood to seek safer, more affordable housing in other parts of the Bay Area as a result of the city's housing crisis (you've heard about it?).

"The community will disappear if things keep going the way they're going," he sighs. "It's a financial inevitability."

Growing up in HP, Luther's seen the city go through a lot of changes; he notes that even with all the prosperity that's supposed to be going on in this town, there aren't a lot of options for black youths in the city. "In the last 20 years, dope culture has pretty much numbed everybody to what's essential," he says. "That culture runs the streets, it drives the current. Kids here are all being affected by this aggressive, inner-city culture, this cultural behavior that's tearing us up, breaking us down, and destroying our inner fabric." Though his parents raised him in the church and kept him out of serious trouble, Luther admits that as a teen, he was "just as much of the problem as the solution."

It wasn't until he graduated from high school and left to attend Morehouse, an all-black college in Atlanta, that he realized the importance and strength of community and its possibilities. He believes the lack of community among African Americans in San Francisco, a result of years of disenfranchisement and disillusionment, plays a major role in this breakdown of morale among youths, and he thinks the black community needs to take a long, hard look at itself and realize that it, too, is to blame.

"I've always felt an absence or a void of a certain livelihood for black people in San Francisco, one that we may not have established for ourselves and one that will probably never exist unless we decide to do it for ourselves." He sees more community among African Americans in New York.

Luther is perhaps one of the few Bay Area artists working in the soul, R&B, and funk genres, though recently he performed with local R&B acts Ledisi and Dwayne Wiggins in "Bring Mumia Home," a benefit to raise money and awareness for death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. But Ledisi and Wiggins both reside in the East Bay, and one wonders: is Martin Luther the only soul singer living and working in San Francisco? And if so, why the hell does he stay here, considering the city's continued disregard for people of color and the poor and its ever increasing lack of venues for entertainment and nightlife?

Luther won't rule out the possibility of moving to New York someday but says with conviction that he wants to continue to live in the town where he was born. He's got a stake in the community here – and soon, perhaps in September, he hopes to start hosting Tuesday evenings at the Justice League, making it a place where local talent can meet in a supportive, comfortable environment.

In the end, Martin Luther's a man whose soul has roots in San Francisco, in Hunters Point, in his recording studio. This is where his clutter is, and he's a part of this town as much as it's a part of him.

"You wanna know why I stay here?" he asks, leaning back in his swivel chair and looking me straight in the eye. "Here is something that I want my children, when I have some, to know. That there's a legacy they've been a part of and to not forget it."

more noise | return to top | sfbg.com