Sid: My guest many of you are familiar with him is Messianic Jewish recording artist Marty Goetz. And most of you probably don’t know much about his background. Actually you have a very similar background to me Marty you grew up in a traditional Jewish home in Cleveland and your grandparents were from Russia and Poland. My grandparents were from Russia and Poland. Yours was more of a conservative up bringing mine was closer to Orthodox. Just out of curiosity as a young man if someone were to say to you after Bar Mitzvah let’s say let’s say “What do you think of God?” What do you think you might have said? They probably would not have said that to you though.
Marty: First of all, hi and thanks for having me on and I would say that you are a little more authentic than I because I can tell by the way that you speak that you are a little farther east than I. I grew up in Cleveland and you sound like you are a little more east coast so.
Sid: Washington DC that’s everything but. (Laughing)
Marty: Closer to Ellis Island so. But they would ask me about God I probably would have said “Well, you know I go to Temple on the High Holidays and I celebrate Passover. And my great-grandfather was a tzadik, he was a scholar spent his life studying Talmud. My grandfather was orthodox and we celebrated Shabbos as we call it Shabbat every Friday night. And I would probably say that I’m a good Jew and I don’t need to know much more than that.
Sid: Well you went to Carnegie College in Pittsburgh and you found a friend there and then you went to another area that I was very familiar with the Catskill Mountains; the borscht belt.
Marty: The borscht belt.
Sid: What did you do there?
Marty: Well, the fellow that I met in college was the first one that I would say that confronted me with the reality of… he certainly didn’t say Yeshua haMachiach as Messianic Believers say. He said “Jesus Christ.” And he was of course a Methodist, raised Methodist, a very nice guy and we were together in Pittsburgh. I went to Carnegie Mellon University and he went to a business college there in Pittsburgh. He was a few years older than I. The way we got together was he was part of a little troop of performers under the tutelage of a guy named Don Brocket whose claim to fame was he was Chef Brocket on the Mr. Rogers show. Mr. Roger was filmed in Pittsburgh.
Sid: Hmm.
Marty: And Don Brocket put together these little views of performers. Burt had a wonderful tenor, Welsh tenor voice and I was a piano player with a little bit more of saloon singer sound. And we were put together in a bunch of different shows and Don had a show that went all the way to off Broadway. It was called “Sweet Feet” I don’t know if anyone was at any one of three performances.
Sid: Somehow I don’t think so Marty. (Laughing)
Marty: But it closed and when it closed Burt and I had really nothing to do and we decided, Don actually decided to put us together and make a little singing act out of it. I would play piano and sing and Burt would stand up and sing. And we did “Snappy Patter.” And we did “Show Tunes” and melodies from “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof” and that kind of fare. And when I graduated college Burt and I decided to make a shot at the big time; so we moved to New York and in New York we hooked up with an agent after about 2 weeks after being in New York. And she was the booking agent for a place called the Brickman Hotel up in the Catskills, the Borscht Belt, the Jewish Alps. And she hired us to be kind of like the house singers for the Brickman; we sang there many many times during the summer. Then she also would book us in all of the local hotels like Kutshers, Grossinger’s and the Browns.
Sid: Now those I remember because my uncle is as you might know his name was Jay Jason he was a comedian in the Borscht Belt and summers I used to travel with him. And so I would go to all of these great places.
Marty: Awe how great.
Sid: And eat that great food and…
Marty: (Laughing)
Sid: And the great entertainment but I don’t remember hearing you but I understand that you were really doing well with your partner until he got religious on you.
Marty: Well our name was Burt and Marty very cleverly.
Sid: (Laughing)
Marty: And we won the Best New Act in the Catskills our first season up there and then we went into the city and did a couple of club dates and we were making some pretty good progress. As you said “Burt became religious.” He went from just becoming just a Bible toting Methodist to a fully Pentecostal Born Again Christian. He had an experience at the place called the “Rock Church” which is in Manhattan and after that he was just a different guy you know; he wasn’t just a religious guy he was fully on fire for God.
Sid: And so did you put up with him or what happened with your relationship?
Marty: As I tell people he became Pentecostal and felt it was his obligation to Pente-Cost me…
Sid: (Laughing)
Marty: And no I could not stand it; as a matter of fact everybody that knew me thought of me as a very kind of soft spoken kind of kind of easy going guy. But he provoked such anger in me because I thought this was horrible; how did I end up with this religious freak, this Jesus freak. I felt sorry for myself, and I felt angry at whoever God was I felt angry at somebody that I had to be hearing about this and it embarrassed me. And I wanted to be in my 20’s I just wanted to get out in the world and do all the things that the world had to offer.
Sid: But yeah, but wait a second now you’re winning rewards and you’re doing well with this guy but just because he believed in Jesus you’re going to breakup with him?
Marty: Absolutely, it was horrifying to me I just could not stand being around him or anything he said. And also I thought “Well, this is not good because if we do well together then I’m stuck with him.” (Laughing) And he was a great guy and I liked him as a friend but I just could not stand the thought of being tethered to somebody who was this kind of what I thought was fanatical. So I basically one day said “I can’t do this anymore,” we broke up Burt and Marty, I don’t know if you read about it in the papers.
Sid: Not lately anyway. (Laughing)
Marty: We broke it up and I went and I just kind of starting playing in saloons and clubs and bars and any kind of bar that New York had to offer I played in. And Burt went on and continued to sing in the Catskills and it’s so funny that the Gentile from Altoona. And I ended up going into the bars in Manhattan, but Burt was a very tenacious guy and he wasn’t going to let me go and he would… he and his friends would show up… I played at this place called Beefsteak Charlies which is a restaurant with a piano bar. And he would show up with his friends and they’d come in and they’d sit around and they’d wait for me to finish my sets and they would have no qualms about telling me that Jesus loved me and had a plan for my life and I should know about Him because after all Burt would say Jewish people wrote the Bible and Jesus was Jewish. “Therefore Marty as my friend you ought to consider it.” But it just made me more and more angry and upset; so it wasn’t enough to break up the act I had to leave New York. This was in New York City, leave New York all together.
Sid: Now just left New York you went to the other coast I mean you really wanted to get away from it you went to California.
Marty: You got to go where people are normal so I move to Los Angles.
Sid: (Laughing)
Marty: So I ended up in Los Angles in 1978 and the only person that I really really knew there… well I knew a few people there but the person that I knew best was ironically one of Burt’s friends from the Rock Church who also was a also a Catskill Performer named Ann Alt. She had an act with a fellow named Michael in the Catskill Mountains as well. But she had moved to California about 6 months to a year before; so when I got there I looked her up. Oh I went to California with nothing, I just went… I had been writing some songs with my cousin, and I thought they were pretty good. So I stuffed a backpack and got a few hundred dollars together and headed to the West Coast and kind of hung out with Annie because she was you know a born again Christian too and she wanted to see me know God. She was all too happy to befriend me and to help me out there. And I have to confess that even though I was provoked to anger, but as the scripture says “I was provoked to jealousy.” So on my way to California, ironically I stopped in Cleveland, low and behold in the bookshelf in Cleveland was one of the big fat family Bibles.
Sid: I’ll tell you what. “Hold that thought right there.”
Marty: Yes Sir.
Sid: I want you to hear Mishpochah a selection from his latest album; it’s called “Sanctuary.” And there is such a sweet presence of God; such a calming. Some of you, you know been through the wars in this earth, in this life you’ve been through the wars. I want you to hear just a little bit. Let’s go to the selection “Song of Deliverance.”
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth