Eric Johnson is all over the Web. Of course, you have to do a little
judicious surfing but the first place to get your feet wet is at
http://www.ericjohnson.com, the official Eric Johnson website. Here you
can download previews of five songs from Venus Isle, with four 30-second
previews of “Manhattan,” “Lonely In The Night,” “Song For Lynette,” and
“S.R.V.” (a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan) then a full-length preview of
“Pavilion.” These DLs are available in in three audio formats:
StreamWorks, RealAudio or Shockwave Audio. You can also order Venus Isle,
check tour dates, and — what else — link to other sites.
From here, I
jumped to http://www.ericjohnson.com/g3.html, the site for G3. This site
carries info on the G3 tour and is linked to Steve Vai’s page
http://www.vai.com/musician.htm and
Joe Satriani’s page http://www.satriani.com.
Sometimes “official” Web
pages ignore fan-based pages but from the official EJ site, where there’s a link to
http://admin.inetport.com/~jdekan/eric/, the sanctioned fan page.
This page has a nice big graphic of Johnson
playing and carries the Chronicle’s 1994 interview by Raoul Hernandez as
Johnson’s official “biography”. This fan site is regularly updated and gets
a big thumbs-up from me.
At the fan page, click on its links and it offers,
among others, http://www.hollywoodandvine.com the Capitol Records site.
Bet you thought you’d escaped that one! Locally, Usenet newsgroups such as
austin.music and alt.music.texas will carry audience-based commentary
on Eric Johnson, always interesting for its local angles.
Hey Eric! How
about some surf tunes?
– Margaret Moser
This article appears in September 27 • 1996 and September 27 • 1996 (Cover).