“I got fired because I couldn’t get it!”: Eric Johnson relives his most disastrous studio session
You wouldn’t think it, but even Grammy-winning guitarists have been fired from studio sessions. Just ask Eric Johnson.
Speaking in a new interview with Guitar World, the Cliffs of Dover icon looks back on some of his earliest and most humbling experiences as a session player, and the one time he got sacked mid-session by a country singer because he simply couldn’t come up with the goods.
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“He was a pretty famous guy,” Johnson recalls. “But the piano player had played almost every fill in-between the vocals. Like, he was doing a thing between every vocal, you know?
“So, the producer wanted me to put something in there besides chords, but I couldn’t find any room to put anything in there or play it.”
In order to contribute meaningfully, he says, he would’ve had to learn “every single lick the piano player did” to “either harmonise, or double it, or come up with a continual part” – a task that proved impossible at the time.
“It was taking me forever,” Johnson says. “And I just got fired from the session because I couldn’t get it.”
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last time Johnson found himself struggling in the studio.
“I was working on a session for Donald Fagan, and that didn’t work out too well, either,” the guitarist recalls. “Not because of him, he was just looking for a certain thing, and I don’t think that I came up with it immediately.”
“Like, sometimes, I guess you want to go with that first impulse. But I guess the first thing that I came up with wasn’t good enough. So, those two things were learning experiences, or some examples of times that it just didn’t work out.”
Not that any of that had slowed him down. If anything, those tough sessions were just part of the long road toward the tone and artistry he’s now celebrated for – a reminder that even guitar heroes have bad days at the office.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
