Pandora Rant: Eric Johnson Is Not Blues

Monday, February 20, 2012| by Will Chen

If there's any indication this has been a mild Texas winter, I had to mow the yard last weekend. My typical yard work routine is to punch up one of my custom Pandora stations and get to it...this week's artist: Eric Johnson. Around four or five songs into the station stream, Stevie Ray Vaughn came on. This commonly happens with Pandora for some reason, presumably due to the Texas connection. Nine out of ten times, I'd simply skip the tune, not that I don't enjoy SRV, but I don't consider his body of work very similar to Johnson's and when I want to listen to fusion-y guitar stuff 12 bar blues just doesn't cut it. This time I let the SRV tune complete as I didn't want to mess with it while pushing the mower. Then another blues tune came on...and another. Now I realize Johnson has attempted (and generally failed IMHO) to do blues tunes over the course of his career, but his core style is pretty far removed from the blues. I would actually associate a player like Joe Satriani more with the blue than Eric Johnson due to the number of tunes in his catalog relying heavily on minor pentatonic melodic motifs (including a few pretty good straight up blues tunes). So please if you would Pandora, remove whatever "blues" tags you have attached to him. Eric Johnson is not blues.

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Comments (5) -

Brian said:

This is hilarious! I have a Coco Montoya channel that never fails to give me a little Everlast everytime I listen to it. Not exactly a blues guy.

# 2/22/2012 11:38:31 AM
Gordon Lewis said:

I agree. When I first heard of Eric Johnson all the articles I read implied that because he was from Texas his style was somehow rooted in the blues. Imagine my surprise when I listened to his music. Eric may be many things, but bluesy is not one of them. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't care for Eric's style myself, but neither do I care for most of what passes for "blues" these days.

# 2/24/2012 8:09:25 AM
Swamp Yankee said:

I agree - EJ is not blues.  However, the guy can really play Hendrix, so I suppose that would almost count as an exception.

To further support your point, I've seen a couple of concert videos of Joe Bonamassa recently - definitely a blues player.  But when he really gets going, he ends up at his (only?) really fast riff - which is a direct ripoff of Eric Johnson.  Every time I hear him go into this riff, I think "that's not blues, that's Eric Johnson".  

# 3/8/2012 6:20:08 PM
PaulPaul said:

Pandora is such a cool thing but yeah you will get these, you might also like pull ins from your tastes or wants. The key to Pandora is create a station, add the artists you want to hear and when anything else pops up reject it and it will not come up again. Within a short time you will create a station that is pretty tight to your wants. All in all an amazing deal for free. I have a couple stations, for Heavy Fusion, Guitar Heavy. And have screened out all the "Foo Fighter crap" that they commonly render as you might like.

And yes, second the issue, EJ is fusion not blues, like Malmsteen he might try to render a blues tune now and then but you are what you are.

# 3/14/2012 8:58:20 PM
Sketch said:

That may be true, but in his upbeat tunes (Cliffs of Dover, etc..) most of his playing seems to be based on straightforward generic pentatonic licks and major scale riffs, but somehow they don't sound generic when he plays them, haha.

Reminds me of W. A. Mozart. He rarely breaks out of the box to do anything that could be construed as offensive, lol. He built the box, haha. Like Mozart, EJ seems to create "regular" "vanilla" music.

Yeah, I'd hate to hear blues when I'm in an Eric Johnson mood... ugh... that's just so wrong.

# 3/16/2012 5:42:35 AM

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