Wanderings of Eric Andersen Lead Him Back Into Musical Mainstream

For more than 25 years now, Eric Andersen has been following the itinerant ideal that first sprang out at him from the pages of Beat Generation writers.

It has not made for the steadiest of career paths, but every so often Andersen’s meandering brings him back into the current of the music industry’s mainstream.

In the mid-’60s, Andersen arrived in New York’s Greenwich Village in time to make an impression while its folk music scene was still booming. With signature songs such as “Thirsty Boots,” a fervent homage to the wandering minstrel creed, and “Violets of Dawn,” Andersen established himself as a writer of lyrical, romantic ballads.

The next big chance for a writer of sensitive, reflective songs came in the singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s. Andersen stepped forward in 1972 with “Blue River,” a delicately melodic, bittersweetly introspective song cycle that found its place within the Carole King-James Taylor-Joni Mitchell-Jackson Browne school of sensitive pop.

Now comes the ‘80s acoustic revival led by Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman and an ever-growing legion of strummers heartened by the idea that the public might actually want to hear songs with a certain level of literacy.

And here comes Andersen again (he’ll play tonight in a solo acoustic show at Bogart’s in Long Beach). Now a grizzled 46, the former folk Adonis is still handsome in a weathered, intense-looking way. And, as his fine new album, “Ghosts Upon the Road,” demonstrates, Andersen is still an impressive song craftsman--one whose latest work benefits from a new-found edge of narrative realism without losing his old romantic sheen.

“Ghosts Upon the Road” is Andersen’s first album for an American label since 1977. Through the ‘80s, most of his creative work (two albums and a film soundtrack before “Ghosts”) and personal concerns (he has a home outside of Oslo that he shares with a Norwegian painter and their three small children) have been centered in Europe.

Andersen, who also keeps a basement apartment in New York City, knew long ago that he wasn’t meant to lead a settled life played out in one spot.

“When I was growing up in Buffalo, I was reading a lot of books about characters who seemed a lot more interesting than the people I was seeing around the block and in school,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I knew they existed, but they weren’t in my neighborhood.”

In 1963, Andersen left college and hitchhiked to San Francisco in search of some of those Beat heroes, and to establish himself as a folk singer.

The night that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Andersen says, he found himself at a party at the home of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, along with such other Beat literary figures as Neal Cassady (the model for Dean Moriarty, hero of Jack Kerouac’s novel, “On the Road”), Gregory Corso and “a naked Allen Ginsberg.”

“They had a reading that night. They were much more left of Kennedy (politically). They were surprised (by the assassination), but apathetic,” Andersen recalled. “I was shocked about it, because I had sort of a boyhood dream of Kennedy, and then I meet these guys, and they weren’t dashed to the rocks.”

Andersen’s most significant San Francisco meeting was with star folkie Tom Paxton. “He found me playing some dive. He brought me to New York. He set me up.”

Andersen quickly won good notices and a recording deal with Vanguard, the leading folk label of the day. But before his first album came out in 1966, Andersen still had to go through the trials of the penniless, struggling artist. That rite of passage is recounted in the title song of “Ghosts Upon the Road,” a new 10 1/2-minute narrative about struggles for sanity and survival.

Among the song’s cinematic succession of scenes is an account of how Andersen dodged the Vietnam-era draft, then lapsed into a period of mental instability.

Andersen sings about how, in escaping the draft, “I’d been lucky to have been advised from some higher sources that I’d known.”

Among those advisers, he said, was Bob Dylan. “The first one I talked to (about facing the draft board in New York City) was Dylan,” Andersen said. “He said, ‘Just take mescaline, man. Just take mescaline, and you’ll be crazy.’ ”

Instead, Andersen decided to put on a crazed act without the aid of drugs. It worked: “I never got a draft card. But I did get a letter from the New York City mental health board saying their doors were always open.”

Andersen says the act he put on for the draft board lingered inexplicably during the time chronicled in the song. “I was a desperate soul. I had my days when none of it made sense.” He is writing an autobiographical screenplay about the period covered in “Ghosts Upon the Road,” an account that Andersen says is “very romantic” and “almost psychotic.”

The theme of incipient madness also appears in “Six Senses of Darkness,” a richly evocative new song that Andersen says was inspired by a more recent case of the night sweats. But if mental fragility and the spectral fading of the past are the twin shadows of “Ghosts Upon the Road,” Andersen also points to sources of brightness and healing in songs about love and the calmer, quieter life he leads in Norway.

Until now, Andersen had spent the 1980s selling his albums at gigs and by mail order. Among the American fans who kept up their interest in his work were Ronald Fierstein (Suzanne Vega’s manager) and Steve Addabbo (Vega’s record producer).

“They asked if they could manage me, and we proceeded from there,” Andersen said. The alliance, which began three years ago, led to a recording deal with Gold Castle Records, whose roster includes such other ‘60s folk boom veterans as Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Neuwirth. With Addabbo co-producing and members of Vega’s band serving as backup players, “Ghosts Upon The Road” has a crystalline, broodingly atmospheric sound similar to Vega’s recordings.

The stories, though, are very much Andersen’s.

“My angle, my niche is (to use) the vehicle of language,” Andersen said. “It’s not a pop-music trip per se. I never was a pop artist. I never had a hit. I’m in this for the long term. I got into this because I love words. To write truthfully you’ve got to write about what you know. And what you know is basically what you’ve lived.”

Eric Andersen plays tonight at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Mark Davis opens. Show time: 9 p.m. Tickets cost $8.50. Information: (213) 594-8975.