Songwriter Eric Andersen developed his literary chops hanging out in San Francisco with Beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. He moved to Greenwich Village during the early ‘60s folk revival, and wrote songs that Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Johnny Cash would cover. Andersen appeared in an Andy Warhol film with Edie Sedgwick and befriended Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe while living in the Chelsea Hotel. He crossed Canada by train in concert with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and the Band, and recorded with friends Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Townes Van Zandt. But before all that counter-cultural glory, Eric grew up middle class in Pittsburgh, aiming for a conventional career.
Eric Andersen: I worked in a cancer research institute for two years, and then I went into pre-med programs, and then I got a motorcycle, started riding freight trains, and I just took my guitar and went out west. I went to California, I was just on my own, just a kid with a lot of nerve, chutzpah. So I went into this place called the Coffee Gallery. It was a Beat hangout where Kerouac and John Wieners, the poet, he was there. A lot of people, Ginsberg, Howard Hesseman was the bartender and he okayed me, I was underage. So I’d be playing a couple nights a week there, Janis Joplin played a couple nights, Dino Valenti who wrote “Come On People Let’s Get Together,” we were playing on the doorways and this guy named Gregory was playing the boxes, and I was playing guitar and he was playing the harp, and I was doing that, moonlighting doing that in the streets. Then Tom Paxton found me, brought me to Greenwich Village, and I got in the singer-songwriter scene.
Nick Spitzer: For you, who were some of the appealing songwriters and performers around Greenwich Village?
EA: Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, all these people coming down, playing for six nights a week, so I would sit at their knees, that’s where I got my master’s degree, my PhD.
NS: That first record sounds like a journey, Today is the Highway.
EA: Well I mean I kind of had that Jack London look on the cover, and I was on the beginning of the journey. My idea of writing is that you just get in a little dugout canoe and start rowing up the the river. Doesn’t matter where you end up, the destination isn’t important, it’s the process and the writing itself. I like to make the discoveries as they go along in my subconscious or whatever is flowing through me. It’s a visitation, and you’ve got the pen and you just scratch it down. That’s how it is.
NS: The Festival Express Train. Could you set the scene about that one on the rails and how it went down?
EA: It was Buddy Guy, the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Janis Joplin, the Band, this was a traveling train, a party on wheels. I was like this skinny, shaking kid singing songs, and believe me it was a nerve-wracking experience to get up alone in front of 40,000, 25,000 people or so. And they kept putting me back on the show because of the reaction of the audience.
NS: And you had a lot of time to spend with Janis too, maybe you could say a little bit about that.
EA: That’s how we became friends, Janis walked over to me and she held out a copy of Rolling Stone, and there was an ad in Rolling Stone with my picture in it for Warner Brothers that said, “Anybody who looks as good as this shouldn’t sound as good as this.” And she put it in my face and says, “What’s your record company trying to do, kill you, man? What are they doing to you?” And I miss her everyday. People like that, friends of mine, Rick Danko, Townes Van Zandt, there’s people that you wonder where they all go. Then you think about well maybe the question is why are we still here?
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