With "Beat Avenue," Eric Andersen continues his genre-defying creative evolution, in which the only constants are his motifs of love, lust, and the loss of innocence, exotic travel and a yearning for home, the constant motion of trains, rivers and time itself. No singer of pleasant, conventional folk songs, Andersen is an original, unpredictable and timeless artist of major stature.
Accompanying guitarist/keyboardist Eric on most of this double-disc are such A-list musicians as former Hooters guitarist Eric Bazilian (who wrote Joan Osborne's hit, "One of Us"), vocalists Phoebe Snow and Lucy Kaplansky, multi-instrumentalist Robert Aaron (longtime member of hip-hop star Wyclef Jean's band and session man for David Bowie, Laurie Anderson and Mary J. Blige), jazz-fusion bassist Mark Egan (Pat Metheny Group, Ornette Coleman), powerhouse drummer Shawn Pelton (of the Saturday Night Live house band and sideman to Shawn Colvin, Billy Joel, and Sheryl Crow), and The Band's Garth Hudson on keyboards, accordion and sax. Other musical contributors include Eric's singer-songwriter daughter Sari on duet and supporting vocals, and violinist/solo artist Joyce Andersen (no relation).
The new set's first disc contains 12 new Andersen compositions encompassing the various musical styles Eric has absorbed, expanded or pioneered. His poetic, sensual lyrics are married to electric and acoustic instrumenta- tion with rock, folk, country and blues-flavored arrangements. There is an apocalyptic urgency and musical edge that propels songs like "Ain't No Time to Bleed," "Rains Are Gonna Come," "Great Pyramid" and "Before Everything Changed," a spooked unease to "Under the Shadows" and "Feel Like Comin' Home," and smoldering desire mixed with regret on "Song of You and Me," "Salt On Your Skin" and the howling "Stupid Love." "Shape of a Broken Heart" and "Runaway" exemplify the troubled tenderness of Andersen's best ballads.
The second "Beat Avenue" disc contains only two songs, neither remotely fitting the "folk troubadour" tag Eric's earliest work inspired and has long since outgrown. The 26-minute title track is, in Eric's words, "part of an ongoing personal ritual of trying to break and burst the borders of the usual safe singer-songwriting approaches." The song, which Eric has worked on for the past fifteen years, is a hypnotic, cinematic account of a watershed day in world history - November 22, 1963. Combining spoken and half-sung vocals, programmed musical atmospherics, and real instruments, "Beat Avenue" recounts the day, night and immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination as experienced by the then-20-year-old Andersen, who had hitchhiked to San Francisco to meet and mingle with his Beat Movement heroes.
"'Beat Avenue' was originally written as a companion piece to the songs 'Ghosts Upon the Road' and 'Trouble in Paris' as another long, cinematic narrative, employing a new, unconventional concept of songwriting that I was exploring," explains Andersen. "But the reasons for its delayed appearance were twofold: the length of the track, which we solved by making a second CD, and finding the right soundscape and beat to carry the distance and hold the listeners' attention for 26 minutes. Robert Aaron created the backing track using a similar approach that we used in recording 'Memory of the Future'."
Multi-instrumentalist Aaron (woodwinds, bass, guitars, keyboards, sax and trumpet) set the song to a low-key, atmospheric jazz/blues accompaniment. His musical relationship with Eric includes session work on Eric's last two Appleseed CDs, "Memory of the Future" (1999) and "You Can't Relive the Past" (2000).
"I was happy to finally hear the finished version," says Eric. "After 15 years, it was very close to what I imagined it to be, a dream turned into a reality. I tried to paint a feeling and a picture for people that brings them there with me, on the streets and the rooms.
"Until Sept. 11, for most Americans, there had been two watershed events in their history - Pearl Harbor and the death of Kennedy. That 'Beat Avenue' was recorded soon after the time of the twin tower tragedy was a complete and mind-boggling coincidence."
On the night of President Kennedy's death, Eric attended a poetry reading in the Haight-Ashbury by Beat mainstay Allen Ginsberg, then joined Ginsberg and fellow Beat poets and writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, David and Tina Meltzer, and Neal Cassady at a post-reading gathering at Ferlinghetti's house in the San Francisco hills. Shock, somber conversation, and marijuana smoke eddied through the building, as did a naked Ginsberg, the ever-amped Cassady, and an impressionable and wide-eyed young Eric.
The kaleidoscopic "Beat Avenue" is followed by "Blue Rockin' Chair," an earthy, carnal 12-minute country blues akin to some of the tracks on "You Can't Relive the Past" that Eric recorded in Mississippi with several blues musicians associated with the Fat Possum label.
Working within and without traditional song frameworks, wielding a vivid poetic skill, a fearless approach to songwriting, and muscular musical backing, Eric Andersen has created a masterpiece on "Beat Avenue" that should explode forever the folksinger pigeonhole that has confined his popular reputation for too long. He is a unique and enduring artist who has earned a broad and ageless audience.
Although he arrived in New York's Greenwich Village during the urban folk explosion of the early '60s, song poet Eric Andersen's personal, introspective compositions steered clear of topical protest and traditional folk songs, setting the template for the singer-songwriter movement that blossomed later in the decade and still flourishes today. The late Robert Shelton presciently described one of Eric's earliest compositions as "typical of the new language and poetic patterns of what will one day be called 'an Eric Andersen song'."
The distinctive qualities of "an Eric Andersen song" have been recognized for almost 40 years by music fans and fellow musicians - Eric has recorded more than 20 albums of original material, and his songs have been covered by artists including Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Grateful Dead, Linda Ronstadt, Rick Nelson and many more.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1943, Andersen grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where he taught himself to play guitar and piano. As a teenager, he formed folk groups and immersed himself in the writings of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and "Beat Generation" writers and poets. Eric hitchhiked west to San Francisco in 1963 to seek his Beat idols and started performing original songs in local coffeehouses. An encounter with the Beats on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination inspired his cinematic 26-minute song epic, "Beat Avenue," the title track of his 2003 double-CD. The rootless freedom of life on the road and the experience of mingling with the Beats were to become major forces on his life and work.
"Discovered" by Tom Paxton in a Bay Area coffeehouse, Andersen returned to New York City at his urging. By the spring of '64, Eric was playing clubs in the Village, creating and recording some of his best-known songs - "Violets of Dawn," "Thirsty Boots" and "Come to My Bedside." Andersen's career suffered a heartbreaking near-miss in 1967 when a potential signing to Beatles' manager Brian Epstein's roster collapsed with Epstein's death.
Ensuing decades found the peripatetic Andersen playing concerts and festivals around the world and recording a series of major-label albums.
Eric's closest encounter with a wide, non-folk audience came in 1972 with the release of his "Blue River" album on Columbia, his best-selling record to date, which was subsequently tagged as "the best example of the '70s singer-songwriter movement" by the Rolling Stone Record Guide. Cruelly, the tapes for the follow-up "Stages" album that would have consolidated Eric's growing audience were mysteriously "lost" by the label. Belatedly found and issued in remastered and augmented form in 1991 as "Stages: The Lost Album," the recording won the New York Music Award as "Best Folk Album of the Year" and was called
"a masterwork" in Rolling Stone.
The last half of the '70s saw Eric releasing two albums on Arista and performing at a few of Bob Dylan's initial all-star Rolling Thunder Revue shows before recording several records issued primarily in Europe.
Andersen's first major American release in more than a decade came in 1989 with "Ghosts Upon the Road," which garnered New York Music Awards for "Best Contemporary Folk Album" and "Best Contemporary Folk Performer."
In the early '90s came a new musical partnership for Eric with The Band's vocalist-bassist Rick Danko and Norwegian
singer-songwriter Jonas Fjeld. The trio recorded two albums; their self-titled, award-winning debut was reissued with a bonus live disc in 2002 as "One More Shot."
In 1999, Appleseed issued Eric's first new solo album in ten years, "Memory of the Future," and its blues-drenched follow-up, "You Can't Relive the Past," in 2000.
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