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Eric Johnson - Tones

#2
I filled in for some gigs this past summer while the band's normal bass player attended to some day gig duties. One of the songs I learned and played with them was Trademark. Definitely a cool tune for bass! There's a lot of tasteful runs in that one.

Right now, my guitarist wants us to learn Cliffs of Dover, which would be a really cool song to pull out once in a while.
 
#5
EJ is not very prolific, so it's easy to list all of his recordings over about a 20 year period:

- Tones
- Ah Via Musicom
- Venus Isle
- Alien Love Child, which is a live recording
- Bloom

...plus a pre-solo days recording with a band called the Electromagnets.

All of his records are good, although a fair part of his music begins to sound the same to me. I do like the third act of his recent one, Bloom, which has some stuff that is really different. You might want to check that out.

Bass players - on the earlier CDs, he mostly used Kyle Brock out of Austin with a little Roscoe Beck here and there. Recently he has been recording with Chris Maresh, who was a contemporary of mine in the University of Texas Jazz program. All of these guys are great players.

My favorite Eric Johnson trivia point - it was him playing guitar on the old Christopher Cross song "Sailing". If you go back and listen to that, it is blatantly his tone.

Great discovery - you will have a nice time getting to know EJ as a player.
 
#8
Man, Johnson has been around, what...30 years?

I recall a Guitar Player mag from way back with EJ on the cover...the title had something like, "Who is Eric Johnson & Why Is He On Our Cover"? Definitely an early guitar-cult hero.

Check out his early Texas-Fusion band called The Electromagnets...IIRC, Zappa said "...they were like Mahavishnu with a sense of humor." I think Audiophile Imports stocked it(once upon a time).
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:12j4eaw04xs7

I second Tones & Ah Via Musicom.

Also, a bit of trivia-
I think Johnson appeared on one track of Christopher Cross' debut...at the time, that was about the only recording you could find of him.
 
#9
Eric is the guitar player that SRV a long time ago said,"watch out for this guy"! He's been around a long time,but only popular in musician circles. Fantastic tones,and super smooth technique.never gets boring.Ah Via Musicom and Venus Isle are top notch.
 
#10
Alien Love Child with Chris Maresh, I saw that band and Maresh is a burner for sure! Other great Maresh stuff is with Monte Montgomery.....especially the live album.
 
#11
jerry said:
Alien Love Child with Chris Maresh, I saw that band and Maresh is a burner for sure! Other great Maresh stuff is with Monte Montgomery.....especially the live album.
Click to expand...
He is a very good player. Check out "Magnetize" from Bloom for some really cool funk-ish chops.
 
#12
Thanks guys, not sure why I never heard of him before. Must have spent too much time listenneing to old classic rock albums from the '60 and '70s.

You know I always liked that Cristopher Cross tune, but never had a clue who the musicians were that played on it.

I think I'll start with Ah Via Musicom and Venus Isle and progress on to the others.

Another guitar player that I only recently became aware of is Walter Trout, But I'll save that for another day. :bassist:
 
#14
We spent a couple of days in class strings in college breaking down Zap off Tones. One of our professors told us that he dropped out of UT and got the money his father would otherwise have spent on college and used it to further his musical career. I've never really looked it up to see if it was true. That professor had a tendency to tell fantastic tales.
 
#15
I saw Christopher Cross with Eric on Guitar ages ago at University of Houston, it was when "Sailing" & "Ride Like The Wind" first came out. But I even saw Eric years before that at a small club called Whiskey River when he was not well known at all.
 

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