“Cat Stevens asked me to play on his recordings… it never got to the point where I felt like I could add as much as I wanted”: Eric Johnson reflects on his early session career with Carole King and Christopher Cross – and getting fired by Donald Fagen

It’s interesting to speculate on how the instrumental guitar boom might have gone if Eric Johnson hadn’t released his 1986 debut solo album Tones. It was a pivotal moment – but the virtuoso admits he enjoyed session work so much that he considered sticking with it.

Johnson insists that Satch and Vai had “a lot” to do with the explosion in technical players, and his record came after years of working with the likes of Cat Stevens, Carole King, Christopher Cross and Steve Morse. But Johnson admits that others were probably better in the session field, as his style of creativity thrives on a slow burn rather than a light-speed race.

“Sometimes I came up with stuff that was just different than jumping in and playing a generic guitar part,” he says of his best sessions. “It’s composing something like a part, instead of just filling stuff in.”

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His departure from that world worked out. Tones was the gateway toward virtuosic success, culminating in 1990’s Ah Via Musicom, which featured signature track Cliffs of Dover.

“Sessions helped me get a wider grip on music,” he says. “It’s impossible not to let a little bit of that rub off on you when you watch songwriters like the ones I worked with. Without that I’d probably be like a chimpanzee hacking at the guitar!”

How did you first get into session work in the ’70s?

“I was in a contract that just wasn’t working out, and I wasn’t able to pursue records and touring. I kind of went insular and underground for a few years, and I got offered different session things.

“I guess it started with Cat Stevens. I moved to New York for a while, and I had a manager called Nat Weiss, who had Emperor Records at the time. I met Cat Stevens through Nat and he asked me to play on some of his recordings.”

On the surface – mostly based on what you’ve done since – working with Cat is an interesting juxtaposition.

“I didn’t play with him for that long. I played on a couple tracks, and we were going to do a tour and we were rehearsing for it. But it was right at the point where he was deciding to get out of music and follow his spiritual practices, so the tour never happened.”

What were Cat’s expectations of you as a guitarist?

“Well, it never got to the point where I felt like I could add as much as I wanted. I don’t mean playing crazy guitar – just stuff that would have supported him. He just wanted some kind of atmospheric guitar behind what he did.”

What was your typical rig like at the time?

“I’d either use a Fender or Gibson guitar, and a Fender Twin Reverb. I might have used a tube overdrive or an Echoplex. That was pretty much it – either a clean tone, or urn the amp up for a semi-dirty tone. And I had this thing called a Mini-Boogie, which was a predecessor to the Tube Driver.”

How did you end up working with Carole King?

“That was great – I was fortunate to play and tour with such a brilliant songwriter. She liked Austin, Texas, and wanted to come down here to make a record. There was a real nice studio on Sixth Street at the time. When she started a record here, they were looking for musicians and they called me in to audition.”

Christopher Cross - Minstrel Gigolo (Official Lyric Video) - YouTube

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What kind of tones and textures did you use on Carole’s album, Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King?

“It was mostly clean guitar and rhythm stuff. Every once in a while there’d be some kind of little lead thing she’d want me to do. But it was mostly just backing her up with rhythm parts and little licks behind her vocals.”

You also worked with Christopher Cross – you’d known him since the early ’70s.

“I met Chris when I was in a group called Mariani. We were opening for Deep Purple, and Ritchie Blackmore got food poisoning and was in the hospital overnight. Deep Purple had to do this gig, and Christopher was a real hot-shot guitar player, and he knew all the songs, so they hired him for that gig.

“I met him that night. At the time he was more of a rocker. He played a Gibson Flying V and had long hair! He was totally different from what he did later. We got to be friends after that gig.”

Is that why you played on Minstrel Gigolo from his album Christopher Cross?

“Yeah – years later, after he became very successful with his first record, he asked me to do a guest spot. He had three or four different guitarists, like Larry Carlton and Jay Graydon. He asked me to play on that one song with him.”

Given Chris is a player himself, did he have different expectations than Carol or Cat, for example?

“A little bit. Hard rock guitar had been his main gig, and he just happened to have a really great voice and he got more and more into writing pop tunes. But he had a real affinity for guitar; he understood all the old guys – rock players, blues players. He was well aware of all that vocabulary on guitar.”

Before you recorded Tones you did a session with Steve Morse’s band, which ended up being the song Distant Star. That seems like it was the start of what we’d come to know as your style.

“Steve and I became friends when I was in the Electromagnets and he used to play with Dixie Dregs. We’d be touring around and we’d cross paths. Steve really, really helped me get my career started – and he also gave me a lot of good musical direction.”

A year later you went solo as a career. Could you have become a go-to session ace instead?

“Yeah, because I always enjoyed doing that. It felt good – it’s fun, you know? It’s not about having to be in the spotlight; it’s about how can you contribute to helping someone make their song better. But I think a lot of cats would be better at it than me because they write faster.

“Sometimes I take too long, you know? I want to sit and think about what to write. When I was working with Carol or Cat, during rehearsals, I’d have time to formulate a part. But sometimes a session pro only has five minutes to come up with something and nail it.”

Distant Star - YouTube

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Did you ever encounter any disasters during your session career?

“Oh, yeah! There was a famous country artist – I can’t remember his name. The piano player had played almost every fill in-between the vocals. He was doing a thing between every vocal.

“The producer wanted me to put something in there besides chords, but I couldn’t find any room. I hadn’t learned every lick the piano player had done, so I couldn’t harmonize, double, or come up with a continual part. I got fired from the session because I couldn’t get it.

“I once worked on a session for Donald Fagan – that didn’t work out too well either. Not because of him; he was just looking for a certain thing, but I don’t think that I came up with it immediately.

“Sometimes you want to go with that first impulse. But I guess the first thing I came up with wasn’t good enough or something. So, those two things were learning experiences – or examples of times that it just didn’t work out.”

Tones pre-dates the virtuoso explosion of Satch and Vai. Could you have set the table, so to speak, without your training as a session player?

“I like to approach guitar like a compositional, orchestral type of thing. With Carol, Cat and Chris, I saw these great songwriters. Doing an instrumental thing, it’s about how you can make it speak like a song with constructed, composed parts.

“I learned to try to have a melody and to compose structural parts that would make the song play as if it were a vocal tune.”

What do you think the instrumental boom might have looked and sounded like without Tones?

“Oh, there’s so many great players, as we know from watching YouTube today. There’s a lot of great players you’ve never heard of, or who never pursued a career. Maybe they just didn’t have ambitions to do it as a career, or to get known.

“So I think it would have always been there. People like The Ventures and Duane Eddy, and even some things with Hendrix – even though he was a vocalist – did that. The groundwork was already laid. But as far as the ’80s instrumental guitar stuff goes, of course, Joe and Steve have a lot to do with that.”

The culmination on your end is Cliffs of Dover. How did your session experience contribute to writing it?

“It allows you to be tuned into when you’re ready to step into something. It’s not always simple. When you do all this homework, you learn about music and you construct something. It’s more than just ‘you do your part’.

“That’s readying yourself technically and emotionally. You have to have the mechanical ability to reproduce something that comes out of the air. With some songs, I don’t think we can really take full credit for them. I think they’re just floating around as ideas.

“I think I wrote Cliffs of Dover in, like, five or 10 minutes. And then I could take a song I’d spent months trying to write, and it wouldn’t work. I don’t know where that all comes from.

“But I think it’s important that I learned a lot from those guys about not just settling for some guitar things. That’s kind of the purpose, you know – It’s about trying to come up with something that is really built into the songs, and to lift the song up.”

• Eric Johnson’s next tour commences on September 28.