Eric Johnson: Live from Austin, Texas
Anyone who has a taste for virtuoso rock guitar should own this album. Eric Johnson is one of the great players, and if my limited acquaintance with his studio albums is an accurate sample, he’s one of those atypical rock musicians whose live recordings are actually superior to his studio work. Reportedly he’s very much a perfectionist, and it may be that he polishes some of the life out of his work in the studio. All I can say for certain is that of the three or four songs here which I’ve also heard in their studio versions, these live performances are definitely superior (with the possible exception of “Zap,” the album version of which sounds like a live-in-the-studio take, as if the three musicians were actually playing together, with little studio tinkering afterward).
This disc is actually a 1988 Austin City Limits appearance, recently issued on New West as part of a series of Austin City Limits concerts by a lot of good people. I heard this or a very similar take of “Cliffs of Dover” years ago in the form of one of those little plastic magazine inserts which served, you might say, as the mp3 samples of the phonograph era. In spite of the poor sound quality I thought it was one of the greatest pieces of electric guitar work I’d ever heard, and put it on a tape which soon got lost or given away or broken. A few years later I heard the studio version, from the Ah Via Musicom album, and it just didn’t seem the same: the fire and the edge weren’t there. That version won a Grammy, so somebody must have liked it a lot. I guess they didn’t know what they were missing.
How to describe Johnson’s playing? Well, of course there’s speed—that’s part of being a guitar wizard—but it’s not mere speed. To my taste his favored tone packs a lot of emotional punch, at least on these live tracks. He has the long singing sustain that you expect from a Stratocaster player, a bit in the mold of Cream-era Clapton, but a little more precise and focused, a little smoother and richer, but definitely not without bite. It’s a very vocal tone, somehow—to my taste he does the guitarist’s trick of turning a singing line into a sudden scream or howl better than anyone. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe his melodic vocabulary; I suppose it’s basically blues-oriented, but there’s all kinds of unexpected stuff in there, unusual leaps that are musically potent. Whatever the musical explanation may be, what comes through is a very positive kind of excitement. He played in this area recently, and in a pre-concert interview with the local paper said something to the effect that he just wanted to get people elated for a while. Yep, “elated” is the right word. (No, to answer the obvious question, I didn’t go—I have tinnitis and am very wary of making it worse by exposure to rock-concert sound levels.)
Of course there’s always the problem of fitting the virtuoso into a group. That difficulty may have something to do with the fact that Eric Johnson is not a household name. His singing and songwriting are nothing to get excited about, but he seems to want to do them. (Maybe he’s like a lot of us, taking for granted the gift he actually has, and wishing for ones that he doesn’t have.) To my taste most of the compositions here serve the purpose of providing frameworks for killer guitar playing, but wouldn’t be of a lot of interest otherwise. “Cliffs of Dover” is an exception—the playing and the composition are an inseparable unit, and in my opinion make for one of the greatest rock instrumentals ever.
Any day now, copyright owners are going to crack down on YouTube, but as of right now you can see and hear this performance of “Cliffs” there. Check it out.
Samples of the other tracks at eMusic.
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