Photo courtesy of EricJohnson.com
As my head spun with all the terrifying implications of "Gimme Shelter" being used as background music in a casino (isn't that like Henry Kissinger using "Masters of War" for a speaking tour of Southeast Asia and Latin America?), guitarist Eric Johnson took the stage Thursday at the VooDoo Lounge with the rest of his trio: bassist Roscoe Beck and drummer Tommy Taylor.
Johnson, a lanky, affable Texan, is not your average guitar hero. Unlike his G3 tourmates -- Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, who do their best to look and act like they've come from a future where they are worshipped as gods -- Johnson has a distinctly guy-next-door persona, and his stage banter is unaffected, even endearingly awkward.
If there is a comparison to be made with Vai and Satriani, it's that the primary pleasure and point of interest of Johnson's music is his guitar playing. But unlike other band-fronting virtuosi who attempt to wow their audiences through hollow rock-god gestures and gimmicky technical flash, Johnson is a deeply soulful player who just happens to have incredible ability, something like Pink Floyd's David Gilmour with the chops of John McLaughlin. As Mark Wahlberg and John C. Reilly said in "Boogie Nights": He's got the touch.
Johnson's singing tone is legendary among guitar players, and stripped of any studio polishing, it's still remarkable, even amazing. He seems less to pick notes than to pull them out of his guitar, as if the
instrument is an extension of his hands; truly, his relationship with his instrument is such that his solo lines seem to have been waiting within the guitar for Eric Johnson to come along and play them.
This remarkable playing is done primarily within the context of a sort of tasteful, almost (but not quite) antiseptically clean rock music with clear echoes of Rush, the Police and the '80s albums by fusion
guitarists Allan Holdsworth (Tony Williams, Soft Machine, UK) and Bill Connors (Return to Forever).
While the set featured several particularly well-written pieces (including his hit "Cliffs of Dover"), even the merely average material was lit up by Johnson's tremendous playing. As with, for example, Dexter Gordon, even standards that one has heard a thousand times before are worth hearing once more for the confidence of phrasing, unerring note choice and tone that would comfortably seat a family of five. Or, to paraphrase Beck Hansen: "It's nothing that I haven't heard before, but it still kills me like it did before."
| Michael Judge, Special to The Star
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