Future perfect

Eric Andersen shares his Memories

by David Ritchie

In 1990, I approached Townes Van Zandt after a show in Fort Worth to have a CD signed (the objective wasn't really the autograph but the chance to speak with one of the greatest lyric-poets in the world). I asked him to recommend something that he was listening to. He stopped writing, thought for a moment, and said "Eric Andersen."

When I spoke with Andersen last week, a year after Townes's death from a heart attack, he was gratified to hear of the mention. "Townes was one of my best friends. It was a terrible blow, he was a great writer and a beautiful human being."

Having spent most of the past 15 years in Norway, Andersen was not as visible as Townes; but this week he begins a sweep across America to introduce songs from his new release, Memory of the Future (Appleseed), and to reacquaint the country with the music he's been making since the '60s (he appears this Sunday at the Bull Run).

Born in 1943, Andersen was raised in Amherst, New York, where he immersed himself in the books of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg while also teaching himself guitar and piano. In '64, he entered the emerging Greenwich Village songwriting scene that included Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Dave Van Ronk. Dylan already had three albums out when Andersen caught the attention of Robert Shelton of the New York Times who wrote about the "New Dylan Movement," a tag he quickly regretted since it placed the artists in Dylan's shadow before they were established. Andersen gives Shelton credit, though, for trying to start a buzz about their songwriting, which was breaking out of the three-minute song structure. "Music then was mostly jukebox oriented, Tin Pan Alley, Sinatra; nothing like this -- people writing long songs about anything they wanted to write about: free expression, politics, civil rights, psychological situations, humor, tragedy. . . . No one really had anything to prove -- to get a hit or whatever."

Andersen's romantic and poetic style set him apart. His songs, backed by his accomplished fingerpicking, were most often reflective and philosophical rather than political. He was signed to Vanguard, which put out his first four albums, introducing early classics like "Thirsty Boots" and "Violets of Dawn."

In 1972, Andersen released Blue River on Columbia, which was his largest-selling album to date. Poised for what might've been his big break, he recorded his follow-up album, Stages. Mysteriously, though, the tapes of those sessions were lost during a Columbia management shake-up. The momentum from Blue River was gone, and his next two albums on Arista were his last American releases for 13 years. Having met and married a painter from Norway, he settled with his family in a house outside of Oslo, touring and working mostly in Europe.

Andersen reappeared in 1989 with the critically acclaimed Ghosts Upon the Road, the title track of which reflects on the life he led during the '60s in Cambridge and New York, a life many in his circle did not survive.

Then in 1990, miraculously, the missing tapes from Columbia were found, and Stages was finally released after 17 years.

In the next few years, he released two albums on Rykodisc with the Band's Rick Danko and Norwegian songwriter Jonas Fjeld. He also contributed a reading of "The Brooklyn Bridge Blues" to Kicks Joy Darkness, a CD collection of Kerouac's poetry. That CD offered him a chance to appear beside Ginsberg and a host of veteran and younger hipsters, from William Burroughs to Jeff Buckley. And he recently wrote an article for The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats (June 1999 on Hyperion Press), an anthology of 70 different essays on the influence of the Beat Generation written by the likes of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed.

Andersen began work in 1990 on what was to become his most ambitious album, Memory of the Future. The tapes were initially recorded with just his vocal and guitar and then made their way around the world where, one by one, selected musicians overdubbed their part onto the tape. It was an improvisational building-block process that in the end featured the creative input of Richard Thompson, John Beasley, Benmont Tench, and Howie Epstein, among others. The album will be released November 17, and the tour offers the chance to hear him perform the songs solo, along with others from his 35-year career.

As a parting shot, I asked Andersen the same question I'd asked Townes Van Zandt years ago -- what artist would he recommend? "Frank Tedesso from Chicago. He's brilliant and nobody knows him." Remembering my ignorance about Andersen eight years before, I got off the phone and immediately ordered Tedesso's CD. n

Eric Andersen and Keith Greeninger perform at 7 p.m. on October 11 at the Bull Run Restaurant. Tickets are $12. Call (978) 425-4311.