April 27, 2003

Eric Andersen Distills the Present From the Past

ast year when Eric Andersen passed through New York to play a show, a friend e-mailed writers, critics and potential fans to drum up enthusiasm. Mr. Andersen faced stiff competition from other musicians who were also performing in the city that night, so his friend just laid it on the line. "How many of those artists," he asked, "have written songs as good as Eric Andersen's?"

Very few songwriters have built a body of work as consistently strong as Mr. Andersen's. Beginning in 1965 with "Today Is the Highway," he has recorded a series of albums that, taken together, constitute a kind of poetic autobiography, a sonic journal of his movement through the last four decades in the United States and Europe. Early songs like "Violets of Dawn" and "Thirsty Boots" capture the excitement of Greenwich Village in the mid-60's, a time when Mr. Andersen stood alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton and helped found the singer-songwriter movement. His best-known album, "Blue River," appeared in 1972 and features the haunting ballad "Is It Really Love at All?"

Since 1989, Mr. Andersen, who is now 60, has explored the grip the past holds on the present. Each of his albums since then — "Ghosts Upon the Road," "Memory of the Future" and "You Can't Relive the Past" — describes characters who inhabit a landscape of alluring and sometimes dangerous specters, whether former lovers ("Belgian Bar") or neo-Fascist yearnings that pulse restlessly under the surface of modern-day Europe ("Rain Falls Down in Amsterdam").

Mr. Andersen's new album, "Beat Avenue," a double CD, wanders that thematic terrain as well, to similarly compelling effect. The first disc consists of 12 songs in which the singer looks back in anger, amusement and regret both at his own reckless youth ("Stupid Love") and at a pre-9/11 innocence ("Before Everything Changed"). "What once was Charles Bukowski/ Is now Emily Dickinson," he sings, chronicling both the loss of bohemian wildness and the pleasures of more precise literary epiphanies. "Salt on Your Skin," "Run Away" and "Shape of a Broken Heart" are romantic memoirs that Mr. Andersen delivers in a whispery rasp, as if he were recalling dreams and scanning them for any meaning they might have. The past holds few answers, however. "When you're looking for what you're missing," he concludes reluctantly, "You ain't looking at what you got."

For the songs on that disc Mr. Andersen fashions a sound that recalls the raucous Gypsy rhapsodies of Bob Dylan's "Desire." ("Beat Avenue," in fact, is dedicated to Mr. Dylan.) Eric Bazilian's electric guitar veers between driving rhythms and searing leads, while the violin of Joyce Andersen (no relation) soars over the top. Female singers, including Phoebe Snow and Mr. Andersen's daughter Sari, provide a sensual counterpoint to Mr. Andersen's brooding vocals.

The second disc of "Beat Avenue" includes the 26-minute title track on which Mr. Andersen, who will perform tomorrow night at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, recounts a poetry reading and party he attended in San Francisco on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As Robert Aaron conjures a jazzy musical backdrop on keyboards, tenor saxophone and trumpet, Mr. Andersen, who was 20 at the time, recollects the simultaneous shattering and realization of many of his dreams. He had moved to San Francisco to meet the Beat poets he idolized, and he is wonderstruck to be in the presence of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady and Michael McClure. But his joy is inextricable from the murder in Dallas earlier that afternoon.

Mr. Andersen's best work has always drawn on the complex emotions summoned by scenes like that. Love comes, but it is never what one expects. Moments of the deepest joy and ease are often merely the prelude or aftermath to cataclysm. And, as "Beat Avenue" well demonstrates, the past refuses to dissolve safely into memory but exerts a pull that one can never fully escape.  

Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.