Jonathan Edwards Live In Massachusetts CD

Jonathan Edwards was born in Minnesota and played his first music on piano, taking a few lessons from the lady who lived next door and then learning by ear.He picked up guitar in high school in the early 60s. "I started on a $29 guitar and immediately started putting a band together, writing songs and learning all the contemporary folk songs of the time", he recalls. "I just loved it, loved everything about it, loved being in front of people playing music."He studied art in college but continued to play music. "I started getting electric about the time Dylan did, doing electric folk music. I joined bands by saying 'Can I be in your band?', and they'd ask, 'What do you play?', and I'd say 'What do you need?' I'm still that way. I still love to play different instruments. It helps me understand production techniques and performance capabilities". Instead of graduating from college, he decided to give music a shot. He sold the car that his father was lending him, bought a van for his band, and headed for the music scene in Boston.The band soon found work, playing "6-40" jobs--six 40-minute sets per night--all over New England. They played cover tunes as well as their own country blues originals under various names, including the Headstone Circus, St. James Doorknob, and the Finite Minds, and they made an album for Metromedia Records as Sugar Creek.After several years, Jonathan began to tire of the 6-40s and grew fonder of the sound of an acoustic guitar. "I just one night said, 'Hey fellas, this isn't sounding as good as it could, and I'd like us to sound more intimate'. I liked the sound of bronze strings on rosewood better than steel strings on magnets, and so I walked out of that club in Vermont, rented myself a van and PA system, and started traveling around the colleges in New England by myself, without gigs, just setting up in the lobbies of dormitories on a Saturday. Pretty soon I started getting a following. People would say, 'Has that guy been to your dorm yet? That guy just sets up, plugs in and plays all night'".Soon Jonathan was booked to open for acts such as the Allman Brothers Band and B. B. King, and he signed with Capricorn Records. "We took about a year recording the first album--different times, different studios, different sounds, different techniques", he says. "Recording was so new in '69 and '70. There was a song on the album called 'Please Find Me', and for some reason the engineer rolled over it. It got erased. We spent hours looking for it. We fired the engineer and put 'Sunshine' in its place".Like most of the songs on Jonathan Edwards, "Sunshine" was written shortly after Jonathan left the band. "I felt really fresh, really liberated", he recalls. "I just went out in the woods every day with my bottle of wine and guitar, sat by a lake near Boston and wrote down all those tunes, day after day"."Sunshine" was an energetic, happy-sounding statement of protest and independence. "It was just at the time of the Vietnam War and Nixon", Jonathan recalls. "It was looking bad out there. That song meant a lot to a lot of people during that time--especially me". It started on a Boston radio station, and before long it hit the top five on the national charts. It earned him a gold record in 1971.After the first album, Jonathan moved out of the city to a farm in western Massachusetts, which provided the rural, country inspiration for his second album, Honky-Tonk Stardust Cowboy on the Atlantic record label. This was an album of mostly self-penned acoustic, country-flavored songs about love and life and was closely followed by Have a Good Time For Me, also on Atlantic. This recording is a collection of songs written by Jonathan's friends, who, in those early years, were so important to his development as an artist, musician, singer, songwriter and performer.But after more than three years of working five and six one-nighters a week, Jonathan was ready for a change. In 1973 he and his friends got together to record a w