Storied local guitarist Erick Preston restarts 25 year old Hendrix tribute show

“I didn’t have my own amplifier, so I took a record player,” Preston explained. “I took the wires that connect the needle cartridge, and I put a couple of wires on it and a plug, and that was my first amplifier. It wasn’t that loud so I took that and I disconnected the speaker and sent those wires up to the stereo with a plug on the end, and the first thing I got was feedback and a distorted sound.”

At this same time, his brother and his brother’s friends were listening to records in the house. Popular bands of the day The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones could be heard regularly. Somebody brought over a Hendrix album and someone told Preston, “Man, he sounds like you.” The other bands at the time had a clean, pristine sound and Hendrix, with his distortion and feedback, made an impression on Preston, along with a whole generation of musicians.

Preston was, at first, more of a fan of Hendrix’s lyrics than the legendary guitarist’s music. “He has some incredible lyrics,” Preston said. “He paints pictures with the words. I used to put the headphones on and listen and it was great. Good therapy, it took care of my headaches and stuff like that.”

Preston said that daydreaming about the visuals in Hendrix songs made it possible to visit another world without ever getting high on drugs. Preston referred to Electric Lady Land in which Hendrix sang “In 1983 A Mermaid I Shall Turn To Be.” Preston plays the song solo to start his second set in the Purple Haze tribute show. “It’s very creative,” Preston said.

Preston has been playing the Jimi Hendrix tribute off and on since 1984. Preston had been playing a few Hendrix songs in a cover band. After the band broke up, Preston’s managers’ suggested the Hendrix show. Reluctant at first, Preston went for it and soon realized he had a bigger connection to Hendrix than he thought. That was years ago, in one of the previous incarnations of his Hendrix tribute show. Three years ago, Preston decided to give it another try.

“It’s been going pretty well,” Preston said. “We’ve been doing test market shows. That’s all I’ve been doing, just trying different shows, different formats, trying to find out what works and what doesn’t work. We finally have a new digital sound system We have a new digital light system. It’s off a computer. It’s all programmable. I’m still putting together the stage show.”

Whippersnappers in Londonderry, New Hampshire will host the next show, all ages, on January 20^th. Potential agents and managers will be there to see if Preston’s show is one they’d be interested in working with. Preston seeks to get into clubs in five states. He said he is getting calls from clubs around the country to see if he’d be interested in bringing his show to their venues. Research has revealed to Preston that there are only about three Hendrix tribute shows in the country. So, competition is scarce while renewed interest in Hendrix is mounting due to the volume of previously unreleased material now being released by the organization Experience Hendrix.

Preston explained that Purple Haze is the name of the show while The Erick Preston Band is the name of the tribute band itself. Preston talks to the audience in between songs to inform about Hendrix and he also likes to play some of the lesser known gems from the guitar god’s catalogue.

Technically, there have been many challenges. Preston wants to get things down pat before he moves his show to small auditoriums. He also wants to deliver a concert sound in nightclubs without having to drag in thousands of pieces of equipment. Preston has a sound system that “responds to the energy that’s on the stage,” he said. “The format is digital instead of analog. Just like doing a light show, you can program scenes.”

The band includes bass player Jimmy Sambataro who has been working with Preston for several years. Preston said that Sambataro understands concepts that other bass players do not. “A lot of people don’t understand about playing Hendrix. It’s not all jamming, jamming, jamming and filling this and that. It’s actually playing the spaces and letting the spaces express the music. He’s one of the few bass players around that actually understands that. He also teaches.”

Drummer John Medeiros Jr., of Manchester, New Hampshire, is now the third member of the Erick Preston Band in the Purple Haze tribute show. Aside from being a teacher, Medeiros is also a guitar player and that gives him insight into what Preston is doing. “He has some very unique concepts,” Preston said. “He’s a great reader. The guy’s wrote out almost the whole first show he did with me, almost wrote the whole thing out while we were playing. He’s very meticulous, and also, he has a little bit of that avante-garde in him. That’s cool.”

Preston said the combination allows the rhythm section to play off of him and vice versa. Preston’s brother, Insan Saute, will play drums at the Whippersnappers show on January 20^th. Saute’s approach will change the flavor, as he’s from a background in jazz, fusion, and R&B.

Preston’s observations of the greater-Boston music scene over the years have not always been joyful. He’s seen clubs dump bands in favor of a DJ. He’s seen clubs go from paying bands to making bands pay to play. Years ago, clubs used to pay for a band’s lodging if they traveled 70 miles or more. He also said clubs used to book a band to play up to five nights in a row. “Clubs can’t even consider that concept these days,” he said. “A lot of what’s going on around here is a reflection of what’s going on in the country. Eventually, it should start picking up. Things are getting band, and the worse things get, the more people go out to forget about their problems for a while.”

Preston jumped into the music scene in 1965. He hails from a family of musicians. His brother, Jimmy Preston, was playing guitar and drums in bands that played school dances. When one of his brother’s drummers got sick, Preston ended up playing drums, at age 12, at a school dance. He then started playing bass in clubs and he soon after played in a studio at 13. These school dances were in Preston’s native Lawrence, Massachusetts before club dates in Merrimack and Methuen Mass. Boston club dates came soon too.

At a slightly later stage of Preston’s music career, the musician played something called “street music.” There were many rhythms in it, based on music from the 1960s, using congas and other percussion instruments. “You could sit on a street corner and you get all these different rhythms, polyrhythms, and you get a bass line to put on top of it. It came from big cities like New York, LA, and San Francisco.”

Preston played this music in underground bands. “It was great stuff,” Preston said. “It’s what we call today garage band. Even Kurt Cobain, he was considered a garage band, Nirvana. He was famous and he was still considered a garage band and they started calling it grunge. It was just an evolution.”

In the late 1980s, Preston had a band called Power Of Four. He said it was such a good combination of players, who enjoyed the music so much, work didn’t feel like work. That band could write and record a new song within two days. Today, Preston records in his Lawrence home studio.

Preston’s sites note that his band plays and writes in the original genres black metal and experimental. His original song “Couldn’t Tell You What To Think” is on ReverbNation. The song, Preston said, is like a Celtic tribal war chant. “I’m trying to do things with a twist,” Preston said, “with my own writing. I like all styles of music, and I like to experiment. I like to combine anything and everything I possibly can.”

Preston also currently plays in a ten piece cover band called The B Street Bombers. He calls them “a G.B. band on steroids.” Expression has been the key to the band’s success over three decades. The B Street Bombers don’t play cover songs as they were originally written. They have some fun with them. Preston has been with this band off and on over the years, playing solidly all over New England with them for the last four.

After 40 years in the music business Preston still keeps at it because “it’s a way of life. There’s a necessity, a completion of oneself.” Being able to express himself on stage keeps him hopeful. Within the past three years, he’s almost lost his life four times. Stoke, heart attacks, and a bad car accident slowed him down for a while.

The Hendrix tribute has opened some doors for since he recovered. “I get to express myself in ways I don’t at home,” he said. Preston’s youngest daughter is four years old, and she’s already dabbling in harmonica, keyboards, and guitar. The only CD that she listens to is a recording of one of the Hendrix shows. “She’ll dance, and she’ll pick up the guitar,” Preston said. His daughter, like a young Jimi Hendrix, pretends to play the broom like a guitar. “I can’t express the connection between myself and my daughter, but it’s incredible, incredible and intense.”

Preston plays a 1997 Fender Jimi Hendrix Voodoo strat that was autographed by Mitch Mitchell and other notables. His other guitar is a VG Strat, a synthesized guitar that can replicate the sounds of other guitars, changing from one to another with flick of a switch. He carries two 4 by 12 Marshall cabinets and a Fender bass 135 for his guitar head. He also has a Hot Rod Deluxe that gets played through his Marshalls.

These days, Preston has a crew that is willing to travel and he is currently looking for agents and managers for Purple Haze

www.eppurplehaze.com