LOS ANGELES — Dewey Martin, drummer for the short-lived but long-resonating band Buffalo Springfield whose career after the group split never ignited like those of former bandmates Neil Young and Stephen Stills, has died. He was 68.
He was found dead Sunday by a roommate in his suburban apartment, longtime friend Lisa Lenes said Thursday. The cause of death has not been determined. “We believe it was natural causes,” Lenes said, adding that Martin had suffered health problems in recent years and played music publicly only sporadically.
Martin was one of the founding members, along with Young, Stills, singer-songwriter-guitarist Richie Furay and bassist Bruce Palmer, of Buffalo Springfield, a key progenitor of country-rock music. The group recorded three studio albums before disbanding after two years amid rising tensions and musical ambitions of the band’s talented but explosive leaders.
In his autobiography “Shakey,” Young praised Martin’s musical sensitivity. “You get harder, he hits harder. You pull back, he hits back. He can feel the music — you don’t have to tell him.”
“It’s a great loss,” Micky Dolenz, drummer for the Monkees, said Thursday. Dolenz said he became close friends with Martin in the late ’60s when both were working in and around Hollywood. “He was a great drummer. … And he was a really nice guy.”
Martin played on Buffalo Springfield songs including “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s the Sound),” “Mr. Soul,” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Woman” and “Broken Arrow.” He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the group in 1997.
“He didn’t want to go to the induction,” Lenes said. “But I told him, ‘You need to be there; you need to be acknowledged. When I saw him on TV, it was so great.’ “
When Buffalo Springfield broke up, Young launched a career that’s still going strong 40 years later, Stills moved on to Crosby, Stills &Nash (and sometimes Young), and Furay formed Poco, another early country-rock outfit. Martin’s fortunes remained closely tied over the years to his time with Buffalo Springfield.
He first began performing as the New Buffalo Springfield with other musicians. “We have a more powerful sound. … That’s the way I would compare it with the old group,” Martin told the Oakland Tribune in 1969. “Before it was easy-going country-western. Now we’ve added some electronic sound devices and Jim Price on amplified trumpet and trombone.”
Stills and Young successfully sued to prevent Martin from using the name without their participation. Still, in the mid-’80s, he and Palmer toured as Buffalo Springfield Revisited, and for a time in the ’90s Martin played shows as Buffalo Springfield Again at community events.
Martin was born Walter Milton Dewayne Midkiff on Sept. 30, 1940, in Chesterville, outside Ottawa, Canada, according to Buffalo Springfield scholar Nick Warburton’s Sixties Rock Archive Web site.
He moved to the U.S. looking for work as a musician and played on sessions in Nashville, Tenn., in the early ’60s. Even though Young and Palmer also were Canadians, they didn’t meet Martin until all had migrated to Los Angeles to take part in a burgeoning folk-rock scene that was spearheaded by the Byrds.
Young, Stills and Furay had crossed paths previously, and when they reconnected in Los Angeles in 1966, they decided to form a band. Within days of starting rehearsals with Palmer, they brought in Martin to handle drums. Nine days later, they opened an arena show for the Byrds in San Bernardino.
Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun signed the group at a time when he was trying to expand the label’s roster after years of focusing primarily on R&B, soul and jazz.
The group wasn’t a huge success at the time — the highest any of its original three albums charted was No. 42, and “For What It’s Worth” was its biggest single hit, peaking at No. 7 in 1967. But the group’s songs, mostly written by Stills and Young but also including some of Furay’s, have become an enduring part of the classic-rock canon.
Outside of his Buffalo Springfield incarnations, Martin formed several other groups, including Medicine Ball, which released one album that failed to chart.
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