Eric Heatherly

(What was it like for Eric to work for the better half if the past ten years trying to land a major record label contract?)

I don’t know how to explain just how excruciatingly painful this(his career path) ride has been. It’s been horrible. Anything that could be said, as been said to me,’ from’ Your demo(tape)sounds like The Mavericks on a bad day to, ‘You can’t do what you doing, it’s too different.’ I mean people wanted me to sing novelty songs with a bunch of A Player session musicians backing me up in the studio. At least half a dozen record executives brought me into their gigantic offices with gold records ling their walls and said to me, “If you’ll put on this cowboy hat and wear these starched jeans and cowboy shirt, we’ll have you on CMT in six months and you’ll be a big star.’ I mean this was all the way back in 1992, 1993. And I don’t know how many times I had to tell ’em,’ Hey no way man. I’m playing at the local bar on Friday and Tuesday nights, come and see my show and learn what I’m all about.’ Through the whole hat act, if you didn’t have that whole cowboy thing going on, then you were not somebody they’d want to even talk to. But I wouldn’t be someone I wasn’t, I wouldn’t compromise my integrity. I wasn’t brought up that way. My daddy didn’t raise me that way. So, for years I got told simply ,’No.’ but I knew, that at the end of the day, if you didn’t give in and you worked hard, you’d go back to that same guy who told you no and thank him for that no. Because when I was told that my music wasn’t any good, I went out and went to work at some blue collar job, like parking cars, and then I saved my money and used it to make a demo tape of the same song but better.

(Eric talks about the three years he spent playing clubs in Nashville and through the USA in various college towns across the country.)

There were nights when we played six hours straight. It was just rough man. That’s why my songs sound fresh man. I’ve played some of them for nine years, six or seven of them in front of an audience in some smoky club. Mean how many of these new country acts can says that they’ve done that. The true test of any of these acts these days is that, ‘How many of them sound live, like they sound on the record?’

(How does Eric feel now that his record is out and single is doing well?)

I’m so excited to see that it’s all finally coming to pass. It’s exciting to get something that’s different out and to give the fans a choice. To see the responses that we’re getting is great! It’s all finally come to be and it was worth the wait.

(Eric talks about his extensive collection of vintage 50’s, early ’60’s stage costumes.)

When I first moved to Nashville (1990), I was obviously broke. I needed to dress the band and myself in halfway decent stage clothes, because we weren’t going to do the cowboy hat, jeans, big belt buckle and boots look. So I went around town (Nashville) and looked in Salvation Army stores and Thrift Shops for clothes from the 50’s and early ’60’s. Well it was a gold mine. I found brand new(called dead stock) beautiful two tone bowling shirts and matching shoes and dress pants for like 15 or 20 bucks to outfit the entire band! So over the years, I gradually built up one of the largest collections of these outfits(vintage) clothes that anyone in Nashville has! I have it in storage and we take out certain outfits whenever we go out on the road. I mean, I’ve been doing this since 1990. Well, when we started playing at Tootsie’s (Where Eric has played for like three or four years.) we always were wearing that hip and cool look and pretty soon the patrons starting bringing me clothes. These older women started bringing me at Tootsie’s all of their husband’s closet’s full of old clothes that they hadn’t worn in years!(he laughs). I got a lot of it. So now I’ve got one of the biggest collections in town of this stuff and I’ll tell you,I’ve always got a high dry cleaning bill every week (he laughs). What wasn’t cool was, in the mid-90’s, when we were wearing this stuff, we had a lot of people tell us that it wasn’t cool because we weren’t wearing cowboy hats, starched Wranglers and a big belt buckle. Folks made fun of us, I heard that for years. But now it’s cool and it’s right and it’s working. I’ve never changed it’s finally cool again.