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Ed Pettersen insists he’s being mellow. Of course, he’s making the point by gesturing broadly, breaking into quick bursts of laughter, leaning his six-foot-plus frame forward and locking eyes with his listener, and drawing glances from other customers at Nashville’s Star Bagel. As far as they’re concerned, Pettersen seems about as mellow as a rocket at Canaveral, counting down and aiming for the stars. “Hey!” he’s saying, sounding more downtown than down-home. “I am mellow, kind of. I mean, I used to swing from chandeliers. But I had to do that! I needed experience! I needed stories! How could I write this stuff if I didn’t fall off and crash a few times? That explains two things: the way Pettersen has lived his life, and the sound of his extraordinary new album, The New Punk Blues of Ed Pettersen. Let’s take the album first. It has, first of all, the same rough energy that drove his music back when he was sharing a flat in Manhattan’s Lower East Side with Scott Kempner of the Del Lords and playing until the grimy dawn at places like the Mercury Lounge, the Red Room, and CBGB’s Gallery. But there’s more this time around — a depth in his writing that suggests that all the streams of his experience have fused into one strong current. There are songs on Punk Blues about never being able to go back to where you’ve been, even as you live within the shadows of what you’ve left behind (“Chelsea”) and trying to make sense of senseless times (“Gather the Family ‘Round”). There are songs written from the viewpoint of a missing child (“Tabitha”) and from a place on the living room couch, watching hell unfold on TV from half a world away (“Baghdad”). There are songs about people Ed has known: his friend and mentor Ed Kempner (“Top Ten”), his wandering sailor grandfather (“June, 1945”), and even Ed himself (“Burning Up”). They fit together as fragments of our lives always do: never neatly, with some pieces rubbing awkwardly against each other but more often falling into place and creating pictures you never expected and won’t ever forget. That leads us back to Pettersen himself, who is already apologizing for how strange his story has been and how hard he knows it is to cram it all into one single bio. For example . . . His mother’s family was Italian; their politics were conservative, their outlook based on faith and hard work. His father was a wanderer and adventurer who hung out with Jack Kerouac and indulged in chemical recreation with Allen Ginsberg. By the time he was ten years old, Ed was working heavy duty construction along with his grandfather while dreaming of more exciting locales. Music had its place in those dreams, despite suspicions from both sides of the family that practically any other option made more sense. And so it took a back seat for a while to hockey, whose competitive, macho essence kept everyone happy, including Ed, who played well enough to make a national junior all-star squad. Most of his teammates moved on to the NHL; Ed might have too, if not for a shattered elbow that removed him permanently from the ice. Recovery included a two-year sojourn in Japan, then back to the U.S. where forays into film and music (and chandelier swinging) alternated with paying jobs in sales and copywriting. When the corporate world could no longer contain him, he settled fulltime into a career as a starving recording artist. A well-received acoustic folk disc, Desperate Times (1995), and the Americana charting alt-country classic Somewhere South of Here (1997) emerged. Two more indie discs achieved limited release but touring and distribution efforts were disrupted by a surprise visitor. This little surprise was acute intermittent porphyria, a rare genetic disorder that drops in every now and then, long enough to disrupt things for a while before going back into hiding. Luckily for Pettersen, he was already well into music by the time it hit. The old tenacious streak kept him focused. “My illness made me a better musician by about 300 percent,” he insists, “because it made me say to myself, ‘You know what, jackass? If all you can do is sit in bed all day, why don’t you really get good at guitar? Why don’t you learn to play banjo and mandolin? Why don’t you dig in and try to write even better songs?’” And so, around 2001 and ’02, as Pettersen describes it, “I started getting my stride, with my own voice as a writer. People had been comparing me to Bruce Springsteen, but now they were starting to say, ‘Wow, this sounds like Ed Pettersen.’” Not coincidentally, he pulled up his East Coast stakes at that same time and moved to Nashville. Settling alone into an apartment — his wife would follow later from New York — Pettersen began writing and cutting demos of new material. The songs came almost too fast; they’d shake him from sleep long enough to jot a few notes, and then a few hours later, as the sun rose, he’d flesh them out on bedside demos. Most of these he showed to his friend Bob Olhsson, a world-famous engineer who helped define the Motown sound of the sixties. Olhsson, who had also relocated to Music City, made suggestions and helped connect Pettersen to the local writer community. “The changes were immediate,” Pettersen says. “The more I listened to Big Bob’s voice, the better the music got. The mixes improved. The vocals improved. With the pressure of co-writing on Music Row and just being in Nashville, the songs improved — I mean, even the cheesy, crappy, hat-act songs you hear at songwriter rounds here are very well crafted. My songs not only started getting better; they started changing direction as well. Some of them were getting more socially conscious than anything I’d written before. Everything — the songwriting, the production, the heart — came together.” With that, Pettersen hit the studio, where once more Olhsson played a critical role, at the console but also on the phone as he lined up an assembly of demigods: session aces David Hungate, Catherine Styron-Marx, and Ed Greene, Motown bass icon Bob Babbitt, and the incomparable guitarist Reggie Young. For all the polish they brought to the table, these veterans infused Pettersen’s songs with garage-band empathy, balancing insight and innocence in proportions that even studio pros find hard to achieve. And that, essentially, is the story of The New Punk Blues of Ed Pettersen. Of course, there’s plenty more to say, as the folks eavesdropping at Star Bagel know well. We haven’t even touched on his second-degree black belt, the friendship he forged years ago with rock icon Dion, the career he’s building as a producer in Nashville, his famous aunt, or even his magnum opus — The Song of America, a history of the American people’s music going from the early seventeenth century to the present. For now, though, Punk Blues says it all. This music is where he is right now. As for where he’s going, well, that rocket at Canaveral, the one we left just before liftoff, could be bound for anywhere. And, as with Pettersen, the ride, even more than the destination, is what really matters. "Roots-rockin
and country-rollin' is one way to sum up Ed Pettersen's fine
approach to laying down some great songs." Gavin, "the
personal warmth with which Pettersen creates will call to mind the
traveling troubadour of a Woody Guthrie." John Blenn "John
Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen, and Elvis are abducted by aliens
who not only probe them but mix and match their parts."
Fairfield County Weekly, Aug 1997 "Strong
songwriting and good rock n roll chops dominate this
collection..." (CRLM) Dirty Linen, Dec 1997 |
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discography (writer/artist) Desperate Times EP (DIM Records), 1995 discography (artist/contributor)
For Anyone Who's Listening - A Tribute miscellaneous credits
The Best of the Del Lords (Restless) 1999 |
producer credits
Desperate Times/Ed Pettersen 1995 film Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey 1994 |
contact information
e-mail edpettersen@srrecords.com
Handshake Management • Contact: Charlie Stewart • Tel: (512) 731-3543 • HandshakeMgt@aol.com
