Whether playing or building, guitar man Danheim set the tone
The Houstonian added pages to the honky-tonk playbook as a member of the Hollisters and Wagoneers.
Eric Danheim pulled thick syrupy sounds from his guitar.
The Houston resident knew the honky-tonk playbook for the Fender Telecaster and added a few pages to it himself while playing with the Hollisters and the Wagoneers, two beloved country bands that leaned heavily on his playing. He struck a tone of his own, the sort of thing that earns admirers for a guitarist. Wagoneers frontman Monte Warden says other players would be awestruck at how Danheim did so without too many gadgets.
“Every band we’d open for and every band that would open for us, you’d see guitarists with every pedal and gear box, every damned bell and whistle you could possibly imagine,” Warden says. “Eric would just plug his guitar into an amp, and his tone was better than anybody else’s. Everybody asked him about it. ‘Hey, man, what is it that you do?’ I always loved his tone. And it wasn’t just me.”
A Houston native who played in several bands beloved in Texas, Danheim was also a master guitar builder whose Big Tex Guitars were lovingly made “new” versions of prohibitively priced vintage instruments. Danheim gave the entirety of his life to music until he died earlier this month, on Aug. 5, of liver failure. He was 58.
His passing left a lot of friends reeling.
“Everybody says nice things about you after you’re gone,” Warden says. “The great thing about Eric, everybody always talked about what a great guy he was while he was still here.”
His friend Mike Barfield, with whom Danheim founded the Hollisters, played with Danheim for decades.
“Playing in a band with someone is a shared gift,” Barfield says. “Writing songs with a friend is also a gift, and I had the joy and pleasure of sharing both with a friend I loved for 31 years. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without him.”
Danheim was born in Freeport in 1959. His family moved around Houston through his childhood. His sister, Angie Danheim Bynum, recalls a photo of him at age 5 with “a guitar in hand and a cowboy hat on.” She says he sang in the Methodist Youth Foundation at St. Phillips United Methodist in school as well as the youth choir. He graduated from Westbury High School in 1978 and, inspired particularly by Bruce Springsteen, started playing in bands, turning his days and nights upside down.
“I remember visiting him at his first apartment, and he showed me his ‘bedroom’ he set up in a closet,” Bynum says, “so he could sleep during the day.”
Initially Danheim had to play in bands such as the Rounders, with his friend Barfield, that allowed him to juggle performing with a day job in a computer room at the Houston Post.
In 1989, Warden was in between legs of a tour when Wagoneers guitarist Brent Wilson quit.
“We’d kicked off that tour at Fitzgerald’s, and he played that night and just blew me away,” he says. “It was one of those moments that grabs you and you think, ‘Who the (expletive) is that guy?’ Now, Brent was as essential as a Wagoneer could be, and there was no replacing him. But Eric was the first guy that came to mind to succeed him.”
Danheim quit his job and joined the Wagoneers for about two years. When the band called it quits, he hung around Austin a little longer, playing in Chaparral.
But he eventually returned to Houston and started playing again with Barfield. They hooked up with Denny Dale, a bassist from Nashville, and Kevin Fitzpatrick, a drummer from Atlanta, and formed the Hollisters, who played their first gig in June 1995.
The Hollisters quickly got traction in Houston and beyond. In 1997, they released “The Land of Rhythm & Pleasure,” a standout recording that worked the rich seams between honky tonk and rockabilly with little touches of soul, Cajun music and sounds from south of the border in the mix. The album’s first line jumped with a proud Texan brashness: “Here I am busted down in Lufkin,” Barfield grumbled. Throughout the song, Danheim’s little guitar figures offered a response to each line Barfield called out, with a break for a gnarled, reverb-filled solo.
“The Land of Rhythm & Pleasure” is still widely regarded as one of the great albums made by a Houston act.
A second album, “Sweet Inspiration,” followed three years later. Sadly, both are out of print today, and neither can be found on Spotify.
Danheim’s wife’s work took them to Seattle for a while. The Hollisters took a long break, and he played for a while out west with the band the Picketts. Eventually he returned to Houston, and the group reunited in 2011 for some shows.
In his later years, Danheim turned his attention to building guitars, specifically the solid-body electric instruments that captured his attention as a teen. He started as a dabbler, repairing his own and eventually building his own creations.
“He was a Fendercentric guy, and for a time Fender wasn’t making vintage replicas,” says Bart Wittrock, owner of Rockin’ Robin Guitars & Music and a friend of Danheim’s. “And we couldn’t really afford vintage instruments. So he figured it out himself. He didn’t wake up a guitar maker. He’d buy parts, build something, sell it and then build another.”
As a luthier, Danheim worked under the name Eddie Dale. He started Big Tex Guitars, for which he hand-built guitars that looked and sounded like vintage solid-bodies from the ’50s and ’60s. Danheim studied the formulas for lacquer and paint used on original Fender Telecasters and Stratocasters and Gibson Thunderbirds to ensure precise period detail. He deliberately applied a thin finish to the guitars to recreate the timbre and tone produced by old wood that had been played for years.
“He had a canny eye for details,” says Wittrock, whose store stocked and sold Big Tex instruments. “And he had an incredible talent for vintage feel and tone. And the more he learned, the better he got. His guitars kept getting better and better.”
Scarcity and collector demand pushed the cost of vintage originals into the tens of thousands of dollars. But Danheim’s Big Tex instruments offered comparable look and sound for a couple of thousand dollars.
And though those instruments reflect a sunburst-painted joy for creating something new, Danheim also struggled in his last years. Friends cite the death of his wife, Betsy, in a 2009 swimming accident in Hawaii as a turning point from which he never recovered.
Danheim is survived by his mother, Mary Danheim, his sister, Angie Danheim Bynum, brother-in-law, Bill Bynum, and nephews Matt and Mike Bynum.
His family has asked that any donations be made to the Eric Danheim Scholarship Fund at the IntoAction Recovery Center, 17337 El Camino Real, where he had received treatment.
A memorial service for Danheim will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at Cotton Ranch, 5443 Katy Hockley Cut Off Road with a reception to follow. andrew.dansby@chron.com