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Garrick Alden: The Man Behind the Music
By Marcy Barack, March-April 2003
Meet the songwriter and guitar phenom responsible for the original tunes in AARPmagazine.org’s Online Jukebox.
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In composing and laying down tracks for AARPmagazine.org's Online Jukebox, Garrick Alden drew on inspiration from Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck, the Beach Boys, The Ventures, early Elvis Presley, and Santana. "I love all kinds of music," says Alden. Guitar, he says, is "the instrument of modern times."
Alden recognizes that he is a lucky man. Says the 45-year-old Virginia native, "I've never, ever been out of work playing music." Since the 1970s, Alden has made his living as a full-time musician, playing and singing with bands, writing songs, and recording.
Alden took up guitar at age 10 and formed a band with his buddies in third grade. By the time he was in fifth grade, his group whipped the challengers in a battle of the bands competition. "When (Jimi) Hendrix came along when I was a little kid," Alden recalls, "it just blew me away. I was totally into him." At age 11, Alden wrangled a backstage meeting with the rock legend before a show at the Washington Hilton. "I was so afraid. He was my idol. We gave him some BS story that we wanted to record some of his songs. He said, 'Yeah, go ahead.' It was a great experience."
The day after he finished high school, Alden was at work, playing with bands that offered up top 40 rock tunes. In the early '80s, a friend asked Alden to sit in with his country band. "At first it was weird," Alden says, "but then it hit me hard. Merle Haggard, George Jones, Hank Williams Jr., Ricky Skaggs… I loved it. It was a whole different kind of music for me."
Then he headed over to Nashville for an audition. "My first day, I got this killer job." He wound up playing with The Four Guys on the Grand Ole Opry for nearly two years.
Alden still plays rock and jazz, funk and fusion ("a really wild conglomeration of rock and jazz with everything mixed in"), but country is closest to his heart. Alden was singled out as a world-class country guitar player by the late guitar legend Danny Gatton in an article in the prestigious Guitar Player Magazine.
A consummate musician, Alden plays bass guitar, piano, lead electric guitar, acoustic guitar, banjo, and drums. Frequently, he plays all of them—and sings, too—when cutting demo records for songwriters. Perhaps the most versatile instrument in his studio in Laurel, Maryland, is a Trident 80B console, which he uses to record and mix multiple tracks.
Most recently, Alden alone, billed as the band Pray for Rain, supplied all the vocals and instrumental tracks for a contemporary country demo of Kurt Hulschoff's "Mama Cried." The record captured so much airtime on Phoenix station KONY that a national management company has signed Hulschoff and Alden to prepare a whole album.
Alden and his own band, Wildfire, recently backed up veteran recording artist Ronnie Dove. At other times, Alden has worked with "Blues Brother" Dan Aykroyd, Mark Bright for Curb Records on a Cactus Choir recording, Stella Parton (Dolly's sister), Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of Steely Dan, and the All-Star Congressionals, made up of members of Congress.
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