With the help of fuzz, blues guitarist Eric Johanson gets into the raw experience of the moment on his latest album, The Deep and the Dirty.
BY JIM BEAUGEZ
WHEN GUITARIST ERIC JOHANSON was coming up, it wasn’t the slippery slide work of Elmore James and the tones of the blues greats that excited him. Once he began playing at age five, what kept him interested in guitar was the manic rhythm playing of Metallica’s James Hetfield.
“The rock albums with the big, thundering bass, the drums punching you in the chest and the guitars that sounded huge — that’s what drew me in,” Johanson explains. “Some of my earliest experiences trying to figure out what I was hearing came down to the tones and textures and the sound itself, rather than the notes and chords.”
Johanson’s obsession with building walls of sound with his guitar never stopped, even as his interests expanded to include blues. For evidence, listen to the tall tones on The Deep and the Dirty (Ruf Records), his fourth and latest album of original music, which are as ferocious and fuzzy as anything in Jack White’s catalog. Those tones have been part of his sound all along — like his speaker-shredding blast on “Till We Bleed,” from his 2017 debut, Burn It Down, and the adrenalized tones on “Buried Above Ground,” from 2020’s Below Sea Level — but they’re larger than ever now.
“I’m working on my sound constantly,” Johanson says. “When I get in the studio, it’s more or less just a snapshot of what I’ve got going on with the rig at that moment. I’m a big fan of that symmetry between the studio setup and the live setup.”
After starting out in 2010 as a guitarist for acts like Cyril Neville, Anders Osborne and the Neville Brothers, Johanson signed with Tab Benoit’s Whiskey Bayou Records in 2016 and has worked solo since. On 2021’s Covered Tracks volumes one and two, he dug mostly into acoustic instruments as he re-imagined songs by Nine Inch Nails, Chicago, Fiona Apple and the Beatles. But on The Deep and the Dirty, Johanson roars back on electric from the first notes of the opening track, “Don’t Hold Back.”
“I’m really into the raw experience of the moment,” he says. “I want this explosive kind of energy. There’s something about a really gritty Velcro fuzz that, to me, expresses the emotion I was trying to get across, especially opening up the record like that.”
Given what you’ve said about how rock music affected you as a child, I have to imagine tone remains your pri
