Eric Wood
New urban folk musician who really experienced life to its fullest (including jumping freight trains and a four year break to build a log cabin).
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It was 1978 on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Carrying his guitar, Eric Wood turned the corner onto West 3rd and into Gerdes' Folk City Bar. It was the end of an era in what's now usually called the West Village. Some say that era began when a young Bob Dylan walked into that same bar and offered up a unique hybrid of rural Okie slang, Delta blues and New York City street life, giving birth to urban folk.
But Eric peered into the Folk City doorway and saw only the past, remembering his dreams of coming to this place where his favorite songwriters played. To his east, the timbre of what the future held was still hidden in the alley, where exotic sounds carried by the new immigration waves from Brazil, Islam, Ireland and Africa were meeting American instrumental jazz. There was no world-music category in the record stores. To his west lay what Wood feared the future could become. The Avenue of the Americas with its first West Village McDonald's rumbled with a precursor of a looming boom-box disco era. Most of the people inside Folk City still called it Sixth Avenue. Even further west, the aristocracy was buying up and renovating the historic Greenwich Village townhouse streets where Dylan, Joni Mitchell (who Wood credits with the fusion of folk and jazz), Janis Ian and Tim Buckley once walked. Wood walked east.
Wood may lay claim to one of the longest stories of stick-to-it-ness in music business history. By the time he landed his first record deal, he'd already spent nearly a quarter of a century writing, performing and recording. And for six years before that, from the time he ran away from his Ohio home at fifteen in 1967 to the day he left for Nashville in 1973, he too was riding across the country in VW microbusses, dropping acid, and jumping freight trains as part of Pete Townshend's "My Generation." His first novel chronicles these experiences. He even experienced a One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest- like two month stay in a state run "nuthouse" in 1968. It was during these times that his songwriting skills were developing.
In 1973 he signed his first song contract with Jerry Reed's Vector Music and his second with Kris Kristofferson's Combine Music. His next twenty years (except for a four-year break to build a log cabin from hemlock trees on an isolated piece of upstate NY mountain land) were spent in New York City. Wood's first decade of performing in NYC clubs was during a time when urban folk was almost entirely drowned out by the pounding disco beat that dominated the Eighties. With other then unknown and now older songwriters like Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, Frank Christian and Frank Tedesso, Wood kept the stages warm at clubs like the legendary Folk City and the Fast Folk organization's Speak Easy. Later, his band of mostly jazz musicians performed at the Knitting Factory and Bottom Line between tour dates opening for both Vega and Colvin (after their first album releases) as well as Richard Thompson, Cowboy Junkies and poet /novelist Jim Carroll.
Now, not-so-young anymore but nevertheless new urban folk acts like Wood have more company their own age. Their experience is evident not only in their songs and accomplished musicianship but in the fact that they often publish their own material and have enough studio experience to produce their own records. And unlike their predecessors who were swooped up by the monsters of the music industry before their first records ever appeared, they often work in side-by-side relationships with record companies that license their music for manufacturing and distribution, thereby maintaining control over their own destinies. If and when a major label gets involved, they've already built their audience pretty much in the same way Woody Guthrie did it in his day; by word of mouth.Contact
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Comments (34)
Hello Eric,
I'm interested in hearing some music by you, by reading your interview you sound like you have some talent, so when ya post some stuff, let me know...thanks
ADAD Records
Great work...Real nice work... keep it up... If you get a chance, I just added an entire CD with 13 songs for Free Download.
Great work...Real nice work... keep it up... If you get a chance, I just added an entire CD with 13 songs for Free Download.
Great work...Real nice work... keep it up... If you get a chance, I just added an entire CD with 13 songs for Free Download.
Great work...Real nice work... keep it up... If you get a chance, I just added an entire CD with 13 songs for Free Download.
