Stringed migration: Johnny A. has gone from backing guitarist to frontman
By Larry Katz
Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Conventional wisdom told Johnny A., "fuhgedaboudit.'' Releasing a CD of instrumental guitar music would get him nowhere.

A. didn't listen, and went a lot farther than he or anyone else expected. His 2000 single "Oh Yeah'' got him on the radio and his "Sometime Tuesday Morning'' CD got him a record deal.

Now the Malden-born, Salem-based picker - who celebrates today's release of his new "Get Inside'' Thursday at the Peabody Essex Museum - is doing it again. "Get Inside'' arrives without a syllable of vocalizing. The way A. looks at it, he does all the singing needed with his guitar.

"Sure, I have a regular diet of guitar players I love and listen to,'' he says. "But the funny thing is my inspiration comes from other music. I'm a guy who listens to songs. I'm as influenced by the Everly Brothers and the Beatles and Gerry Rafferty and Jimmy Webb as I am by any guitar player. I'm influenced by music. So when I play, I'm trying to deliver the melody like a singer.''

That approach is working for the veteran guitar-slinger. After spending much of the '90s backing ex-J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf and co-producing Wolf's "Long Line'' album, A. says, "I was a guy at a crossroads in my career.

"I didn't know how much longer I'd be able to continue making my living as a guitar player,'' he says. "As you get older, responsibility comes into the picture. When you have a family to support, how long can you do things without a valid income?

"So I decided to make my own CD, not as a career move, but as a way to leave something behind that would say, `This was me, this was my soul, my creativity.' Maybe somebody would find this record 20 years later and say, `Yeah, this guy was pretty cool.' I didn't make any compromises recording the CD. I just wanted to do something I could feel good about.''

The soul in A.'s music was audible. Almost as soon as he put out "Sometime Tuesday Morning'' in early 2000, Boston's WXRV-FM (92.5. the River) started playing "Oh Yeah.'' Other adult album rock stations in New England quickly followed suit.

"All the AAA stations started playing it,'' he says, "to the point that the record charted No. 8 Most Added in the country. It was weird because I didn't even have any distribution for the CD at the time.''

Several major labels contacted A., but no deal resulted. Just when he was on the verge of sinking all his own money into marketing his CD, an independent radio promo man warned him of the pitfalls of such a venture and put him in touch with guitarist Steve Vai instead. While A.'s guitar style couldn't be more different than Vai's more-notes-per-second approach, he signed a distribution deal with Vai's Favored Nations label.

"There was more to Vai than meets the eye,'' A. (for Antonopoulos) says. "He understood me musically. He's also a very smart and very fair businessman. After he licensed `Sometime Tuesday Morning,' he approached me about signing with him to do multiple records. 'Get Inside' is the first of three.''

On "Get Inside,'' A. expands by adding such local talents as organist Ken Clark and members of the Boston Horns to his basic guitar-plus-rhythm section lineup. He also takes a more aggressive musical stance while continuing to shuttle between pop, rock, country and jazz.

"I think the whole temperature of this CD is just a little edgier, a little more in the street,'' A. says. "There's the same mix of musics, but there's more confidence in my playing.

"On the first CD, I was in the early stages of being an instrumental frontperson. After years of playing in bands backing vocalists, I was in front with the guitar as the lead voice. I was trying to find myself. Now I've been doing it for three years in front of audiences. My new songs are a reflection of that experience.''

In addition to 10 originals, "Get Inside'' includes covers of two A. favorites from his '60s youth, Johnny Rivers' "Poor Side of Town'' and Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary,'' which gets reinvented as an uptempo jaunt.

"I tried to do Hendrix's solo as authentically as possible,'' A. says, "but the rest is deconstructed. It's got its own little hip-hoppy, acid-jazzy vibe. In a way, what I did is not unlike what Hendrix did when he took (Dylan's) `All Along the Watchtower' and transformed it.''

If A.'s guitar voice on "Get Inside'' sounds even more distinctive than before, maybe it's because he performed most of it using the Johnny A. signature model Gibson guitar pictured on its cover. As a byproduct of his unexpected success, A. got to design the hollow-bodied electric with a team of Gibson engineers. The ax, which Guitar Player magazine called "achingly beautiful,'' carries a lofty $5,562 list price.

OK, the A. guitar is for hard-core guitar freaks only. But not his music.

"I have a lot of guitar players come to the shows, sure,'' he says. "But I get plenty of women, too. And 17- and 18-year-old kids. Now I might do a tour of music stores, so I can get young people too young to get into my shows. If you're 12 and up, I'm looking to reach you.''

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