I
Only What You're
Ready For
By Tom Lanham
photo by Kristin Burns
n the music industry, never underesti-
mate the sound man. From his back-of-
club vantage point, he usually sees –
and knows – all.
Two years ago, singer Dorothy Martin
was playing a small San Francisco night-
club with her namesake outfit Dorothy, to
a rabid crowd of mostly teenaged girls,
who had copied the quasi-Goth look she
sported on the cover of her brilliant blues-
metal debut Rockisdead down to the last
scarlet-lipsticked letter. It was eerie, watch-
ing them gather in small doppelganger
packs to study their idol up close, alert to
any subtle changes in her fashion sense.
The show was running well past midnight,
and as this writer was preparing to head
out to prepare for a pre-dawn workday, I
stopped to chat with the concert’s engi-
neer, a genial fellow named Scott from the
band’s native Los Angeles. “You weren’t
thinking of leaving, were you?” he
inquired. “If you were don’t, or you’ll miss
the set’s big surprise, a song she’s only per-
formed a couple of times before. I’m not
going to tell you what it is, but you do not
want to miss this!” Exhausted but curious,
I stood next to him at the mixing board to
see what was coming – it wasn’t penciled
in on his set list.
Martin did not disappoint. Her appro-
priately long-haired backing band began
building the riffs slowly, tentatively at first,
until her raspy banshee howl made clear
what she had dared to cover – Screaming
Jay Hawkins’ creepy classic “I Put a Spell
On You,” which she proceeded to tear up
like a seasoned roadhouse veteran, throw-
ing her whole body into the chorus. The
kids just stared. The significance of such an
old-school R&B catalog choice was proba-
bly lost on most of them, but they applaud-
ed politely anyway for this song they
weren’t expecting. “See? Was I right, or
what?” grinned Scott, with a convivial
chicken-wing nudge. Yes, we both agreed.
We had just seen greatness, a true star in
the making that – by our calculations –
could be headlining her own arena tour
within the year.
The estimate was off. Way, way off.
Although she masked it well in her take-
no-prisoners stage command, Martin was
falling apart inside, and soon after that
tour ended, her band would fall apart, too.
The illusion fooled just about everyone.
“But Scott knew,” Martin sighs, somberly.
“And he was with us on this last tour, and
he told me, ‘You’ve come so far, and I am
so proud of you.’ So I’m happy to call him
a friend, and a part of the family, and we’ll
have him on tour whenever our schedules
allow. So a few people knew, but not every-
body understands because they can’t relate
if they don’t struggle with the same thing.
So to everybody else, it wasn’t that big of a
deal – ‘So you’re hungover – so what?’
And I’m like, ‘Uh, no – I’m dealing with
guilt and shame every day, and I want to
feel good about myself. I want to feel like
I’m worthy of love’.”
That’s right, Martin adds. For ten long
years she’d battled the bottle, and around
the 2016 release of Rockisdead, the bottle
was most assuredly winning. On most tour
days, hangovers had riddled her with such
anxiety – often bordering on panic – that
she would disappear into her hotel room,
refusing to see anyone until it was show
time. Returning home afterward, the
drunker she got, the more her old band-
mates turned away from her, as did her
original producers, Mark Jackson and Ian
Scott. They needed to make money, so they
pounced on opportunities elsewhere, and
she’s fine with their survivalist decisions –
she doesn’t blame them, and wishes them
all well. “But at the time, I didn’t know
where I was going to go, and there was a
couple of months there where I didn’t
leave my house at all – I just drank. I fell
into a really deep depression, and it was
dark.”
It’s not like Martin’s life had been going
swimmingly before Mr. Booze moved in.
In Hungary, she never knew her birth
father – she only knows that she and her
mother had to book it out of that country
quick, finally settling in San Diego, where
she started kindergarten speaking English
as a third language behind Hungarian and
German. As a kid, she was shy with no
social skills, and she hid away inside R.L.
Stine’s Goosebumps book series instead of
interacting with other classmates. It gave
her a vast vocabulary, and soon she was
penning Gothic poetry, an art she’s main-
tained as Dorothy’s chief lyricist.
The optimist had high hopes of becom-
ing a bioengineer. But they were scrapped
when she followed a Moroccan boyfriend
to Los Angeles where she was sucked into
a green card scam, then eventually evicted
from her home after he maxed out all her
credit cards. Meanwhile, she was living in
her car and on friends’ couches while exist-
ing on the fringes of the entertainment
industry, finding work as a legwear model
and as a TV, film, and music video extra
with no reliable paycheck to show for it.
Once she tracked a poorly-conceived pop
EP in 2014, she swore off Hollywood forev-
er and moved to Las Vegas with a new
beau, where she settled into a life of placid
– if reluctant – domesticity. But the death of
her stepfather back in San Diego changed
everything.
Flying home to attend the funeral and
console her mom, Martin began cleaning
out her childhood bedroom, at which point
she found an old list of A&R contacts on
which she’d once pinned all her cham-
pagne wishes and caviar dreams