Eric Johnson Goes There and Back With Unreleased Material

Necessity is certainly the mother of invention and for guitarist Eric Johnson, that resiliency came in handy when COVID-19 hit. And while we’re five years removed from that global pandemic, the native Texan is still reaping the benefits of digging out unreleased archival recordings and pulling together a project whose foundation was heretofore overlooked material. The result was a pair of albums he released in 2022—The Book of Making and Yesterday Meets Today. With the last two or three weeks of touring snuffed out in the beginning of 2020 when the lockdown kicked in, Johnson went home to Texas with plenty of time on his hands and not much to do. 

“I have a recording studio and I have a tape closet with tons of finished and unfinished stuff I never released,” Johnson explained. “Because musicians weren’t really getting together, I just started pulling material out of the closet and I started find all these unfinished cuts. I just decided to start trying to listen and see if I could find anything that was interesting and worth finishing. About 65 percent of it is the older stuff that I never finished.”

Johnson spent a year and a half cobbling together these songs with seven extra cuts left over that he turned into Takeouts, a digital-only EP available through a QR code fans can download after purchasing physical copies of The Book of Making and Yesterday Meets Today. The 18 songs that make up these double albums range from the mid-tempo ballad “My Faith in You,” where Johnson’s gentle vocals are juxtaposed by his nimble, but never excessive soloing to the light vibe of “To Be Alive,” which finds guest vocalist Arielle’s phrasing carried along by subtle piano and guitar accompaniment. Elsewhere, goodies range from the Larry Carlton-flavored title cut to a crisp reading of the blues standard “Sitting On Top of the World” that has just enough grit in it and is one of those nuggets that has periodically popped up in Johnson’s sets over the years. 

Also included is “Another One Like You,” co-written with Christopher Cross, who Johnson was once a sideman for and whose friendship dates back to when the duo were teens and met at a legendary concert Deep Purple was playing at San Antonio’s Jam Factory. What would have otherwise been a standard gig was more surreal given the fact that a 16-year-old Johnson’s band Mariani was opening up for the future Rock and Roll Hall of Famers and Cross wound up subbing for Ritchie Blackmore, who was ailing to the point of being briefly hospitalized.

“Ritchie was in the hospital and he couldn’t play,” Johnson recalled. “The promoter of the show had an assistant named Christopher Cross who helped him do all the shows and that was kind of his gig when he wasn’t playing music. Chris was such a huge Deep Purple fan that they said they’d do the show and hired Chris and he came onstage and played Ritchie Blackmore’s part. Back in those days, Chris was 17 or 18 and back in those days, he was a real rocker—long hair, a Flying V and a Marshall [stack]. He was totally different than his music got later. I met Chris that night when he came up and asked if I minded if he could use my amp because he didn’t have one there. We became friends that night.”

Johnson’s creative path went from ‘70s sideman to the likes of Carole King and Cat Stevens to launching his solo career in the ‘80s with his 1986 major label debut Tones and his 1990 Grammy Award-winning follow-up Ah Via Musicom, whose centerpiece was the hit instrumental “Cliffs of Dover.” And while that may have been the Texan’s greatest commercial success, he is deservedly well entrenched with the guitar-playing set. His instrumental prowess has found him touring as part of the South American leg of G3 with Joe Satriani and John Petrucci, being part of the 2014 Experience Hendrix Tour and hitting the road with fellow guitarist Mike Stern on the duo’s Eclectic Guitar Tour that same year. When the pandemic hit, Johnson was in the middle of supporting EJ Vol. II, an all-acoustic project. With this current tour, he intends to dust those songs off thanks to the unique approach he’ll be taking when he hits the stage. 

“We’re going to do something a little different this time and playing two sets,” he said. “I’ve done solo acoustic tours before but this time, our first set is going to be acoustic with the whole band. We’ll do a full acoustic set and then we’ll come back and do a full electric set. I’ll be incorporating some of EJ Vol. II into that first set.”

Eric Johnson will be appearing on October 10 at The Suffolk, 118 E. Main St., Riverhead. For more information, visit www.thesuffolk.org or call 631-727-4343.