back to artist biographies

Eric Heatherly
Swimming In Champagne

The late-night denizens of Nashville's Lower Broadway honky-tonk district already know these songs by heart. When Eric Heatherly blasts Into "She's So Hot," "Swimming In Champagne" or "I Just Break 'Em" they sing along with every word. It's quite a scene -- Vanderbilt college co-eds jitterbugging with hard-core winos, alternative rockers dancing on the bar alongside hookers, music-biz millionaires bopping with working-class hillbillies. They are united by the extraordinary power of Eric Heatherly's music.

The young man with the sideburns, hepcat clothes, two-tone shoes and Bahama-green Stratocaster has already inspired a fanatical following in Tennessee. In testament to his expertise on the guitar, he scored endorsements with Fender and Takamine before he had a record deal. Now, with the release of the debut Swimming In Champagne CD, the rest of the world is about to start singing along with Music City's after-midnight barroom crawlers.

Whether it's the roadhouse stomp of "Wrong Five O'Clock," the charming swagger of "Someone Else's Cadillac," the lyrical insight of "Freedom Chain" or the irresistible thump of Eric's reworking of the classic "Flowers On The Wall," this is music that grabs you by your shirt collar and doesn't let go. This isn't some cookie-cutter Nashville cowboy. This is a true musical personality -- a lead guitarist, a writer with an individual outlook, a son-of-the-South singer and a kick-butt showman.

"With me, what you see is what you get," says Eric Heatherly. "When we went in to record this album, we turned on the tape and just let it roll. 'Someone Else's Cadillac' is the first take.' It just felt too good to mess with it. The way you hear it is the way it was cut. That's all my guitar. This record is too good to mess with it. The way you hear it is the way it was cut. That's all my guitar. This record is about spontaneity. I just want it to jump out of the speakers ... maybe blow some speakers, too."

His edge-of-the-seat enthusiasm is easy to understand. Eric has had this record boiling inside of him for more than a decade, even longer, if you count his formative years.

The 29-year-old Chattanooga native can hardly remember a time when he wasn't a musician. His parents, truck driver Earl and postal worker Nola, are both big country music fans. Their home was full of records and Eric was raised on weekly trips to see country stars perform in concert, everyone from Ernest Tubb to The Oak Ridge Boys.

"The first thing I remember musically is that my dad had this two-tone, red and white '55 Chevy, and he'd take me out in the garage and turn on the power. We'd sit there on the seat together and he'd pop in a Hank Williams tape and sing along with it at the top of his lungs. I was maybe 4 years old. He was a star in my eyes."

A year later his dad brought home a guitar he'd rescued from the garbage dump and taught Eric his first three chords and his first son, Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues." The boy devoured the sounds of Conway Twitty, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Roy Orbison, and The Ventures, practicing so diligently that he wrote his first song at age 8 and was ready to make his stage debut by age 13. That performance, a talent-show rendition of John Anderson's "Swingin'," didn't go over particularly well with his break-dancing school classmates, but Eric Heatherly knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

"All I wanted was to be up there on stage in the lights. It was all I thought about. I would sit in class and underneath my homework I'd be lifting up the paper and writing a song. I never wanted to be like anybody else. My mother has notes in boxes that I wrote in kindergarten that say, 'I want to go to Nashville to be a star.' I always knew that I wanted to come up here."

A hotshot on guitar by his mid teens, Eric Heatherly joined a series of bands that played VFWs, pool parties, drugstore openings, car lots and anyplace else that would have them. After a year of college on a full music scholarship, he told his parents he wanted to make music his life. In 1990-91 he rose to prominence as the star attraction at a Chattanooga collegiate club called Yesterdays.

He moved to Nashville, then spent three years on the road, bringing his high-octane style to a boil in front of some of the rowdiest, drunkest crowds on the North American continent. That period of his life ended with a near-fatal car crash in Illinois that destroyed almost every bit of equipment he owned.

"The car was totaled. Flipped upside down. But there was the green Strat lying out on the highway. So I ran over, picked it up and strummed one chord and it was still in tune. I said, 'I'll use this guitar forever'."

He limped back into Nashville in 1994, this time with a staff songwriter's job at Orbison's Still Working Music publishing company. He parked cars at the Hermitage Hotel, shoveled gravel on roadways and worked for a landscaper. All the while the fire kept burning inside of him.

"I had gone to I don't know how many labels and producers, just banging their doors down. They all wanted me to put on a cowboy hat, a buckle and some boots. I told every single one of them the same thing: 'I'm a guitar slinger.' I was doing Carl Perkins and dreamy Roy Orbison-y ballads. They didn't want anything without a hat and a big acoustic guitar. I didn't practice for 20 years to stand on stage and strum three chords. I wanted to solo on guitar like Ricky Skaggs and Steve Wariner and Vince Gill. I wanted to be the next guy like that."

Thoroughly discouraged, Eric decided to head for the wrong side of Nashville's tracks to blow off some musical steam. In late 1996 he settled in as a weekly noise maker at one of Music City's most legendary beer joints, Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.

"I said, 'I don't care if we get paid or not. I just want to play every single week with a band doing all my original tunes and just make as much noise as I can.' I was dressing the guys in thrift store ties and vests. The room was gritty and grimy, just a no-hype juke joint. The owner said, 'I really don't think you'll last more than two or three weeks. But if you want to waste your time and do it, come on in'."

Within weeks a "scene" developed around the charismatic Eric and his sizzling country-rockabilly combo. By the time word reached Music Row about this young dynamo who lit up Lower Broadway like a firecracker, women were dancing on top of the bar and hundreds were singing along.

"These label people walked in and saw 250 people singing the words to every song and they couldn't believe it. I would watch the exact same people who weren't interested a couple of years before all of a sudden begin to light up. As they would walk out they'd give me that grin and wink and drop their business cards right into the tip jar."

Shania Twain hired him to back her on the 1997 Country Music Association Awards Show and he was subsequently offered a slot in her touring band. But Eric Heatherly stuck to his guns. After the TV awards he returned to Tootsie's and waited for fate to smile on him. It did. Twice.

He met his wife Heather, a Tootsie's bartender. When they wed last year she became, that's right, Heather Heatherly. Then Mercury Records at last turned him loose in the studio with producer Keith Stegall (Mercury Nashville's Sr. VP of A & R) to make music his way. No hat. No boots. Just talent.

"I asked Keith, 'Do I need to tone my style down a little?' He said, 'No man, just hit it.

Hit it, he does. Eric Heatherly's album is the work of a fire-breathing rockabilly evangelist. It brings back all the "edge," excitement and honesty that contemporary country music has nearly lost. Millions can now hear the sound that Lower Broadway's honky tonkers found so delightfully infectious.

"There was a truck driver who came into Tootsie's every Tuesday night. He did the same run every week, east to west. He'd run through St. Louis and somehow always made sure he got here for our shows. I talked to that guy and said, 'I can't believe you do this every week.' He said, 'It's what keeps me going'."

Amen, brother.

back to artist biographies