I don’t know if you know the name, “Eric Weissberg” but, if you love music, you should. Eric was certainly best known for creating one of the biggest instrumental hits ever, “Dueling Banjos,” as popularized by the movie, “Deliverance.” But Eric was also one of the most in-demand session musicians of all time (playing on albums such as Bob Dylan’s “Blood On The Tracks” and Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”). And long before that, he was a New York kid who loved folk and bluegrass music. As a kid, Eric would do absolutely anything to hear music, to be around music and, especially, to play music.
Eric was one of my old road dog buddies. Back in the bad old days of the 1900’s, he played banjo and a variety of string instruments behind a Sixties-Era Rock Star Who Shall Remain Nameless when I was SERSWSRN’s tour manager.
This SERSWSRN was truly exasperating to work with. He was a boiling rage of insecurities which manifested in a variety of ways, one more awful than the next. He was preparing for his first tour in some years and he was nervous enough to begin with but, with this tour looming, he was in an absolute unending panic. His behavioral response was to bounce back and forth from wheedling to explosions of anger. These would bring on waves of vicious self-recrimination, marked by aggressive weed smoking and skin rashes. He would then go into utter withdrawal, the marijuana having gutted his once-lovely singing voice, the one thing his remaining fans were supposed to be paying money to hear. He couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand himself.
All of this seemed to be a test of the environment, a sort of temperature-taking to see if his once mighty Rok Star cred was still vital. It wasn’t.
“Wrong answer! Let’s try that again.”
(No, seriously, please don’t).
This tour started with such promise. How did I end up trapped for weeks with this miserable failure of a human being in this rehearsal studio in North Hollywood. Well, as Joseph Shabalala had taught me in Zulu, “Thula nhliziyo na lapha sekhaya” (“Be still, my heart, for even here I am at home”). Surely there’s something to redeem this ghastly abyss.
Well, I guess there were a few things. After rehearsals finished, I would put the top down on my Mustang and drive back over Laurel Canyon Blvd to my spot at the Riot House on the Sunset Strip (come on: it was LA in the Nineties!). Little Richard would often be standing at the top of the driveway and would shake my hand as I entered (he lived there). Sometimes I would pop next door to the Comedy Store to see the next 10 years (and the previous 10 years) worth of TV comics doing their stand-up sets.
My pal Michael Ackerman, who lived down the street on N. Kings Rd, was (and is) always a joy to hang out with but I couldn’t get him to stop asking me about what had happened at rehearsal that day. Finally, just to get him off my back, I would break down and tell him (“So SERSWSRN says, ‘Mitch, these monitors; they’re just not inspiring me to sing.’ So I say, ‘What’s the matter, SERSWSRN? Too much percussion? Want a little reverb?’ And he says, ‘There’s just not enough blue in it. The sound should be like a falling leaf.’ A FALLING LEAF?! What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?”). As the fury of remembering the day’s insults boiled up in me, there Michael would be, failing utterly to suppress a shrill fusillade of laughter. I have to say I enjoyed his pleasure at hearing these stories but, at the time, they gave me no joy.
So, back to Eric Weissberg: the one person I could talk to who was in the same boat as me, the one person I could commiserate with, was Eric. Only, Eric didn’t seem to be bothered by SERSWSRN the way I was. I thought of myself as a seasoned pro at the time but Eric was in a whole different category of “seasoned.” I was a seasoned rock’n’roll road survivor but Eric was seasoned at life.
Eric Weissberg had seen the mightiest ups and downs. He had become an enormous pop star (constant pop radio rotation, juke boxes, variety prime time TV appearances— all of the hallmarks of pop stardom during pop stardom’s golden age) by doing what he loved in a completely uncompromising way. Not only that, but he elevated the global profile of the extraordinarily esoteric musical genre of bluegrass, almost single-handedly. How many people in the world ever get to do something like that? And then, inevitably, the pop machine that had vaunted his music, chewed him up and spit him back out. Where the hell do you go after having that kind of ride?
Eric had taught himself, probably at a very early age, to be succored by his love of music. He really wasn’t bothered by being in SERSWSRN’s band, by the outbursts, by the out-of-control controlling behavior, by SERSWSRN’s failure to hit the top notes. Eric was there to support the songs in the way SERSWSRN wanted. That was all Eric asked, to have some toothy music to work with, so he was happy. Or he could make himself happy.
Eric and I hung out quite a bit during those couple of weeks. One night, he invited me to go see the Mets play the Dodgers at Dodgers Stadium. We had a great time, watching the Angelenos roll in during the third inning and then leave in the seventh to beat the traffic. It was a beautiful night. We didn’t care that it was a lousy game of baseball; we were enjoying having absolutely nothing better to do.
This was adorable: Eric was a motorhead. He had a stunning collection of cars and motorcycles and he carried a little book of photos of them around with him. He had the legendary AC Cobra, he had one of the very first Cadillacs ever made and he had a glorious 1952 Bentley R-Type Continental. He told me about going to a car show in England and seeing a car that looked just like his beloved 1952 Bentley. So he walks up to it and starts talking to the owner. This guy is one of these posh British gentlemen, to the manour born. And this guy is telling Eric about the car and going on about it being the very first one that ever rolled off the line, hand-assembled by British craftsmen. So Eric starts feeling a little sheepish; he thought HE had the very first one but apparently this proper fellow had him beat. Eric takes out his registration and shows it to the guy and the guy visibly withers. It turns out that Lord Finsonhinson had the SECOND 1952 Bentley R-Type Continental ever made. Eric’s was the first.
So I asked him in as unobtrusive way as I could if he had come by all this fabulous hardware as a result of Dueling Banjos. No, he said, this is what you got if you were a studio musician in the Seventies and Eighties who didn’t do coke (this line got a mighty guffaw back then because many of the studio musicians from the glory days had gotten lost in that blizzard; it was a rueful, joyless laugh).
SERSWSRN ended up firing me from that tour. Can you believe that? It was the only time in my life that I’ve ever been fired. Of course we ended up working together again later and he apologized to me for that. Apparently firing me was part of his self-medication for his rattled nerves; he thought it would make him feel better if he fired somebody. Well, fuck that guy.
I ran into Eric 10 years later in Columbus Circle. He was busy with work but he took some time to talk with me. A sweet guy whose love of music was so utterly sincere that you couldn’t help but get caught up in it, something the whole world discovered for a minute there.
Eric died yesterday in Detroit at the age of 80. He had suffered with Alzheimer’s the last few years and had left the music world a number of years ago. After someone dies, people like to say, “He died doing what he loved.” Eric Weissberg LIVED doing what he loved. I think he made the better choice.