求谱
Celtic Country
艺人: Johnny Hiland 专辑: Johnny Hiland 吉他谱: 0 求谱: 1 拨片: 10 发 谱 求 谱
"I think Johnny Hiland is the most versatile guitar player I've ever heard. From Bill Monroe to Eddie Van Halen, he can play it all." - RICKY SKAGGS
If you tried, you couldn't make up a story this good: legally blind kid grows up in a trailer home in rural Maine. A guitar prodigy, he tours with the family band starting at age 8, wins local and regional competitions, moves to Nashville, ends up dropping jaws all over town, doing sessions with Ricky Skaggs, Toby Keith, Randy Travis, Janie Fricke and many more, and gets signed by Steve Vai when his manager leaves a demo snippet on Steve's voicemail box.
But indeed, this is true the story of Johnny Hiland, who will make his solo debut on August 10 with his self-titled album on Vai's Favored Nations label. Hiland, who was born with nystagmus, a condition of involuntary eye movement, grew up in Woodland, Maine and was known as the "blind boy." According to Johnny, "my dad was determined to not hold me back from anything I wanted to do. He had been a dirt bike racer when he was younger, so I had all kinds of bicycles and snowmobiles and a little Suzuki JR50 that I rode. My mom was worried sick, but Dad would say, 'Look, just don't kill yourself. And those kids who say you'll never drive a truck? Baloney. We live on a woods road, we've got a '74 SuperCab, so let's get in and go for a ride.' And he let me drive. I had a ball, but Mom just about had a fit."
She was more supportive of Johnny's fascination with music. Talent ran in the family, but it ran away with Johnny. From the start he felt a ferocious devotion to his instrument, often practicing on it for long hours into the night before being ordered into bed. By the time he was eight years old he was playing well enough to join the Three Js, his family's band. Under the auspices of the Down East Country Music Association, a regional group dedicated to promoting bluegrass and traditional American music, they began going on tours throughout New England, sometimes playing out of town every weekend of any given month. It didn't take long for the group, and especially its prodigious guitarist, to kindle interest.
"There was a year when I won DECMA's Instrumentalist of the Year for guitar, banjo, mandolin, and fiddle," Johnny says. "Then my sister and brothers and I won Entertainers of the Year. I won Male Vocalist of the Year, my sister won Female Vocalist of the Year ... We cleaned house. Then we got a plaque for Family of the Year; Mom and Dad were like, 'Goodness gracious, we get an award too? All right!'"
Two years after joining the Three Js Johnny made his first national splash by winning the Talent America contest, for which he was awarded a performance in New York City. Around that same time his parents took him to hear a Ricky Skaggs concert in Bangor; the experience stimulated him to start exploring beyond bluegrass into mainstream country music. His curiosity whetted, his technique sharpening, Johnny stretched his horizons in high school and started listening to an ever widening range of players: Doc Watson, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Eddie Van Halen...
Yet even with all this attention his parents made sure to keep him from being swept away by too much adulation coming too quickly. He learned to be prudent with the money he earned through music, budgeting to pay for his own new strings and supplies. And he kept up his grades in school, which led to his election as president of its National Honor Society during his senior year and eventually to his admission as a history major at the University of Southern Maine
"Was I going to make something of my life?..."
It took a while for Johnny to realize what should have been obvious from the get-go: Though his head had no trouble digesting the academics, his heart was somewhere else -- specifically, wherever the nearest guitar happened to be. "For me, going to college was nothing but practicing the guitar," he states. "Ever since I was seven years old I'd been saying that I wanted to go to Nashville and play on the Grand Ole Opry someday, but my mom and dad always insisted that I have something to fall back on. So I really went only to please my mom and dad."
Fate intruded after a few years, as the cassette versions of his textbooks failed to arrive in the mail until just a week before finals. Racing the clock, Johnny had been squinting at normal textbooks until the eyestrain triggered migraines. He worked as long as he could on a huge term paper. Then he reached a point where he couldn't do any more; his guitars, stored in their hard-shell cases under his bed, seemed to be calling him away from the computer.
That's when Johnny knew that things had to change. Drawing a deep breath, he stopped his work, erased the whole project, picked up his axe, and started to play.
"That was my defining moment," he says. "I love my mom and dad so much, but I had to ask whether this was about them or about me. Was I going to be Mr. Blind Boy, relying on his parents, or stand on my own two feet and make something of my life?"
The next morning he gave notice to the school. Chuck McGinty, his outreach counselor from the state, tried to dissuade him; Johnny invited him back to his room, played for him, and within minutes McGinty was on the phone to Johnny's parents, announcing that he was fronting the money to buy their son his ticket out of town.
Flying to Orlando, Johnny hooked up with a friend and former bandmate. Together they drove up to Nashville, determined to chase their dreams. On his first night Johnny made his way to Lower Broadway, where a cluster of honky-tonks booked some of the hottest players in town. Wandering into the World-Famous Turf, told he'd have to wait until midnight to sit in with the band, Johnny sat patiently, and then took to the stage. It took only a few seconds for the bartender to pick up the phone and start spreading the word that a tornado, with a Telecaster in his hands, had just blown into town.
It was 1996, the beginning of Johnny's residency World-Famous Turf. When an actual tornado flattened the Turf in '98, he transferred to Robert's Western Wear with Don Kelly's band, where his friendly demeanor and sizzling licks dazzled listeners and sent guitarists running for cover. Calls started to come in for session work. He played, as he had always known he would, at the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Opry, with Gary Chapman. Through his manager Mac Wilson he scored an opportunity to play for Bruce Boland, vice president of Fender Musical Instruments; a few days later he was invited to become the first unsigned artist to receive a full endorsement deal from the company.
"I was ready to start absolutely new..."
The last piece in this puzzle would be Johnny's first album -- but unlike the other successes in his life, Johnny Hiland took a while, thanks to the two complex, sometimes frustrating, and ultimately uplifting relationships that became its foundation.
The first was with Steve Vai, one of Johnny's guitar idols. Wilson impulsively left an excerpt from one of Johnny's rough studio tapes on Vai's voicemail; almost immediately Vai called back with an offer to sign with his Favored Nations label. That didn't take long, but the two years that followed exposed Johnny to a different pace, one that involved working on his songwriting, sending ideas back to Vai, getting feedback that was consistently positive yet kept pushing Johnny further toward finding a writing style that was as personal as his playing had been for years.
"Steve is the greatest rock guitarist," Johnny says, "so I listened to everything he said. But I started to get impatient. For two solid years I kept waiting to hear him say, 'Hey, great song, kid!' I hit the studio day after day, trying to find that voice he was looking for."
Then one day, he got it. "'Truth Hurts' turned the corner," he says. "I'd always written these country kickers or Satriani rock stuff. But this one was a ballad. I had eight bars of a cool melody. I'd written the chord arrangement. I thought about every detail as I was putting it together in the studio. And once Steve heard it and said 'that's it,' I knew I had thrown the old basketball away -- I'd flattened it, put my foot through it -- and gotten a whole new ball rolling. My attitude changed too. I knew that everything I had done to get to this point was in the past; I was ready to start absolutely new, with all I'd learned."
That's when the second critical relationship behind Johnny Hiland came into the picture. One night Peter Collins, whose production credits include Rush, Bon Jovi, the Indigo Girls, Queensryche, Jewel, and LeAnn Rimes, wandered into Robert's, heard Johnny tear it up, and made it known at once that he wanted to produce the young guitarist's debut. Their collaboration would be volatile -- "I fought him tooth and nail sometimes," Johnny admits -- but more often it was a matter of each finding inspiration from the other. "I love Peter like I love my own dad," he says. "He's brilliant, larger than life. Once we got to know each other the sessions were like clockwork."
It took a killer band to keep up with Hiland's energy and ideas, which explains the presence of Billy Sheehan, the "Eddie Van Halen" of the bass, Bill Holloman, who played keys and sax behind Hiland's main guitar hero, the late Danny Gatton, and drummer Pat Torpey from Mr. Big. This is a lineup that can keep up with Hiland's light-speed picking on "G-Wiz," "Swingin' Strings," and "Celtic Country." It can move with him through Western swing, screaming, razor-toned rock, and introspective ballads, and illuminate his soaring melodies on ballads like "Song for Helen" and "Truth Hurts" with sensitive empathy.
In other words, Johnny Hiland achieves something few new artists achieve in their first outing: a blend of taste and flash, in which emotional, solid composition and hair-raising performance complement rather than compete with each other.
Life for Hiland is, in a sense, like the accelerando he unleashes in his cover of "Orange Blossom Special." He's playing bigger sessions than ever; look for him on upcoming albums by Randy Travis, Toby Keith, Ricky Skaggs, Lynn Anderson, Janie Fricke, Rebecca Lynn Howard, and other headliners. He's appearing on two tribute albums, to Phish and Dave Matthews. He's shared the stage with Living Colour's Vernon Reed, funk master George Clinton, and Vai, Satriani, and Ynvgie Malmsteen on their G3 tour, each time more than holding his own. He's cut "Blues Newburg" and "Red Label," two devilishly difficult Danny Gatton songs, both of which he learned note-for-note in eight hours; each version is available for download through Line 6. Nashville Predators hockey games now feature the team theme song, "Stick It To 'Em Boys," written and performed by Hiland. He's even scored and played on the soundtrack for a proposed cartoon show, based -- not coincidentally -- on the adventures of a country band at Robert's Western Wear. Kids figure in Johnny's ambitions beyond music; a talented amateur artist, he's putting a coloring book together designed to give hope to disabled children.
So, it's true that you could never make up a story as good as Johnny Hiland's - nobody would believe you. And perhaps, more important, you could never make up a person as kind, warm-hearted, determined and talented as Johnny Hiland.
If you tried, you couldn't make up a story this good: legally blind kid grows up in a trailer home in rural Maine. A guitar prodigy, he tours with the family band starting at age 8, wins local and regional competitions, moves to Nashville, ends up dropping jaws all over town, doing sessions with Ricky Skaggs, Toby Keith, Randy Travis, Janie Fricke and many more, and gets signed by Steve Vai when his manager leaves a demo snippet on Steve's voicemail box.
But indeed, this is true the story of Johnny Hiland, who will make his solo debut on August 10 with his self-titled album on Vai's Favored Nations label. Hiland, who was born with nystagmus, a condition of involuntary eye movement, grew up in Woodland, Maine and was known as the "blind boy." According to Johnny, "my dad was determined to not hold me back from anything I wanted to do. He had been a dirt bike racer when he was younger, so I had all kinds of bicycles and snowmobiles and a little Suzuki JR50 that I rode. My mom was worried sick, but Dad would say, 'Look, just don't kill yourself. And those kids who say you'll never drive a truck? Baloney. We live on a woods road, we've got a '74 SuperCab, so let's get in and go for a ride.' And he let me drive. I had a ball, but Mom just about had a fit."
She was more supportive of Johnny's fascination with music. Talent ran in the family, but it ran away with Johnny. From the start he felt a ferocious devotion to his instrument, often practicing on it for long hours into the night before being ordered into bed. By the time he was eight years old he was playing well enough to join the Three Js, his family's band. Under the auspices of the Down East Country Music Association, a regional group dedicated to promoting bluegrass and traditional American music, they began going on tours throughout New England, sometimes playing out of town every weekend of any given month. It didn't take long for the group, and especially its prodigious guitarist, to kindle interest.
"There was a year when I won DECMA's Instrumentalist of the Year for guitar, banjo, mandolin, and fiddle," Johnny says. "Then my sister and brothers and I won Entertainers of the Year. I won Male Vocalist of the Year, my sister won Female Vocalist of the Year ... We cleaned house. Then we got a plaque for Family of the Year; Mom and Dad were like, 'Goodness gracious, we get an award too? All right!'"
Two years after joining the Three Js Johnny made his first national splash by winning the Talent America contest, for which he was awarded a performance in New York City. Around that same time his parents took him to hear a Ricky Skaggs concert in Bangor; the experience stimulated him to start exploring beyond bluegrass into mainstream country music. His curiosity whetted, his technique sharpening, Johnny stretched his horizons in high school and started listening to an ever widening range of players: Doc Watson, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Eddie Van Halen...
Yet even with all this attention his parents made sure to keep him from being swept away by too much adulation coming too quickly. He learned to be prudent with the money he earned through music, budgeting to pay for his own new strings and supplies. And he kept up his grades in school, which led to his election as president of its National Honor Society during his senior year and eventually to his admission as a history major at the University of Southern Maine
"Was I going to make something of my life?..."
It took a while for Johnny to realize what should have been obvious from the get-go: Though his head had no trouble digesting the academics, his heart was somewhere else -- specifically, wherever the nearest guitar happened to be. "For me, going to college was nothing but practicing the guitar," he states. "Ever since I was seven years old I'd been saying that I wanted to go to Nashville and play on the Grand Ole Opry someday, but my mom and dad always insisted that I have something to fall back on. So I really went only to please my mom and dad."
Fate intruded after a few years, as the cassette versions of his textbooks failed to arrive in the mail until just a week before finals. Racing the clock, Johnny had been squinting at normal textbooks until the eyestrain triggered migraines. He worked as long as he could on a huge term paper. Then he reached a point where he couldn't do any more; his guitars, stored in their hard-shell cases under his bed, seemed to be calling him away from the computer.
That's when Johnny knew that things had to change. Drawing a deep breath, he stopped his work, erased the whole project, picked up his axe, and started to play.
"That was my defining moment," he says. "I love my mom and dad so much, but I had to ask whether this was about them or about me. Was I going to be Mr. Blind Boy, relying on his parents, or stand on my own two feet and make something of my life?"
The next morning he gave notice to the school. Chuck McGinty, his outreach counselor from the state, tried to dissuade him; Johnny invited him back to his room, played for him, and within minutes McGinty was on the phone to Johnny's parents, announcing that he was fronting the money to buy their son his ticket out of town.
Flying to Orlando, Johnny hooked up with a friend and former bandmate. Together they drove up to Nashville, determined to chase their dreams. On his first night Johnny made his way to Lower Broadway, where a cluster of honky-tonks booked some of the hottest players in town. Wandering into the World-Famous Turf, told he'd have to wait until midnight to sit in with the band, Johnny sat patiently, and then took to the stage. It took only a few seconds for the bartender to pick up the phone and start spreading the word that a tornado, with a Telecaster in his hands, had just blown into town.
It was 1996, the beginning of Johnny's residency World-Famous Turf. When an actual tornado flattened the Turf in '98, he transferred to Robert's Western Wear with Don Kelly's band, where his friendly demeanor and sizzling licks dazzled listeners and sent guitarists running for cover. Calls started to come in for session work. He played, as he had always known he would, at the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Opry, with Gary Chapman. Through his manager Mac Wilson he scored an opportunity to play for Bruce Boland, vice president of Fender Musical Instruments; a few days later he was invited to become the first unsigned artist to receive a full endorsement deal from the company.
"I was ready to start absolutely new..."
The last piece in this puzzle would be Johnny's first album -- but unlike the other successes in his life, Johnny Hiland took a while, thanks to the two complex, sometimes frustrating, and ultimately uplifting relationships that became its foundation.
The first was with Steve Vai, one of Johnny's guitar idols. Wilson impulsively left an excerpt from one of Johnny's rough studio tapes on Vai's voicemail; almost immediately Vai called back with an offer to sign with his Favored Nations label. That didn't take long, but the two years that followed exposed Johnny to a different pace, one that involved working on his songwriting, sending ideas back to Vai, getting feedback that was consistently positive yet kept pushing Johnny further toward finding a writing style that was as personal as his playing had been for years.
"Steve is the greatest rock guitarist," Johnny says, "so I listened to everything he said. But I started to get impatient. For two solid years I kept waiting to hear him say, 'Hey, great song, kid!' I hit the studio day after day, trying to find that voice he was looking for."
Then one day, he got it. "'Truth Hurts' turned the corner," he says. "I'd always written these country kickers or Satriani rock stuff. But this one was a ballad. I had eight bars of a cool melody. I'd written the chord arrangement. I thought about every detail as I was putting it together in the studio. And once Steve heard it and said 'that's it,' I knew I had thrown the old basketball away -- I'd flattened it, put my foot through it -- and gotten a whole new ball rolling. My attitude changed too. I knew that everything I had done to get to this point was in the past; I was ready to start absolutely new, with all I'd learned."
That's when the second critical relationship behind Johnny Hiland came into the picture. One night Peter Collins, whose production credits include Rush, Bon Jovi, the Indigo Girls, Queensryche, Jewel, and LeAnn Rimes, wandered into Robert's, heard Johnny tear it up, and made it known at once that he wanted to produce the young guitarist's debut. Their collaboration would be volatile -- "I fought him tooth and nail sometimes," Johnny admits -- but more often it was a matter of each finding inspiration from the other. "I love Peter like I love my own dad," he says. "He's brilliant, larger than life. Once we got to know each other the sessions were like clockwork."
It took a killer band to keep up with Hiland's energy and ideas, which explains the presence of Billy Sheehan, the "Eddie Van Halen" of the bass, Bill Holloman, who played keys and sax behind Hiland's main guitar hero, the late Danny Gatton, and drummer Pat Torpey from Mr. Big. This is a lineup that can keep up with Hiland's light-speed picking on "G-Wiz," "Swingin' Strings," and "Celtic Country." It can move with him through Western swing, screaming, razor-toned rock, and introspective ballads, and illuminate his soaring melodies on ballads like "Song for Helen" and "Truth Hurts" with sensitive empathy.
In other words, Johnny Hiland achieves something few new artists achieve in their first outing: a blend of taste and flash, in which emotional, solid composition and hair-raising performance complement rather than compete with each other.
Life for Hiland is, in a sense, like the accelerando he unleashes in his cover of "Orange Blossom Special." He's playing bigger sessions than ever; look for him on upcoming albums by Randy Travis, Toby Keith, Ricky Skaggs, Lynn Anderson, Janie Fricke, Rebecca Lynn Howard, and other headliners. He's appearing on two tribute albums, to Phish and Dave Matthews. He's shared the stage with Living Colour's Vernon Reed, funk master George Clinton, and Vai, Satriani, and Ynvgie Malmsteen on their G3 tour, each time more than holding his own. He's cut "Blues Newburg" and "Red Label," two devilishly difficult Danny Gatton songs, both of which he learned note-for-note in eight hours; each version is available for download through Line 6. Nashville Predators hockey games now feature the team theme song, "Stick It To 'Em Boys," written and performed by Hiland. He's even scored and played on the soundtrack for a proposed cartoon show, based -- not coincidentally -- on the adventures of a country band at Robert's Western Wear. Kids figure in Johnny's ambitions beyond music; a talented amateur artist, he's putting a coloring book together designed to give hope to disabled children.
So, it's true that you could never make up a story as good as Johnny Hiland's - nobody would believe you. And perhaps, more important, you could never make up a person as kind, warm-hearted, determined and talented as Johnny Hiland.