Take the Guitar Player for A Ride: Everyone Wants Erik Cirelli In Their Band

Dave Newman

Erik Cirelli is on stage tonight at the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern, playing lead guitar for The Emily Rodgers Band.  It’s a Monday, almost midnight, and the room is maybe one-third full.  For a guy who claims he hates to perform, Cirelli is ripping it up on slide guitar, taking Rodgers’ beautiful indie folk music to the knife’s edge. The crowd, chatty through the previous bands, finally turns towards the stage and listens.

Cirelli just turned 42. He’s been doing this a long time, playing guitar for bands he loves. And bands, it seems, love him back. Tonight, it’s Emily Rodgers. In a couple weeks, it will be The Chad Sipes Stereo. Somewhere in between, Cirelli plays guitar with Lohio. Twice, he’s been in bands that have won the Graffiti Rock Challenge. Overall, Cirelli guesses, he’s played in thirty bands, all of them based in or around Pittsburgh.

Asked if he has any rock n’ roll dreams left, Cirelli says, “I guess that I would like to be able to make it my primary source of income, but if it hasn't happened yet I’m not getting my hopes up.” Then he adds, “I hate absolutely anything pertaining to the music business.”

Emily Rodgers says, “Erik abhors having his picture taken. Abhors.”

In publicity photos, Cirelli appears to be hiding.

Greg Dutton, frontman and main songwriter of Lohio, says, “He's a really selfless guy and not prone to narcissism.  So, no, he isn't involved in a whole lot of the press type things that Lohio does.”

When Cirelli first started playing out, he hid on stage, too. The audience got his guitar and his back. As Chad Sipes says, “It's funny that he plays in three bands because he hates playing live.”

It’s also funny that Cirelli is sober because when he started the goal was to get in a band, play live, make a living playing music, and get hammered, not necessarily in that order.

But before that, before music was any sort of possibility, there was Mel Bay’s Modern Guitar Method, Book 1. Cirelli was 14. He learned to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”  It wasn’t Led Zeppelin or even Kiss, two of his first loves, but it was a start.

By 16, he was listening to Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhodes. He was drinking beer while he practiced. He started listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn and the blues. Asked if his parents were supportive, Cirelli says, “Always,” but he quickly adds, “I think that if you asked my father he would probably say that getting me a guitar was probably one of the worst decisions of his life.”

After high school, Cirelli headed to Penn State University. He started giving guitar lessons. He joined his first band, Big Wednesday. He quit going to classes. He kept drinking. Now, it wasn’t just beer, but gin and shots of Jägermeister, too.

“Both drinking and guitar playing had a terrible effect on my college career,” he says.

In 1992, still in State College but dropped out of school, Cirelli joined Out of the Blue, a pop band that favored spiritual lyrics and extended jams. In 1993, the band rolled into Pittsburgh and won the Rock Challenge. Out of the Blue found a huge audience around Western Pennsylvania. Cirelli’s drinking escalated, a lot of it onstage.

“I can’t remember why I quit the band,” he says. “But I suspect being an idiot had something to do with it.”

By 1994, he was in Pittsburgh for good, ready to play music and drink in all the great dive bars the city has to offer. He found work as a janitor at a club. “I learned the correct way to mop a floor,” Cirelli says and laughs.

He met the woman who would become his first wife, a rock n’ roll chick with a huge Aztec sun tattooed on her belly. “She liked to spend money,” Cirelli says. “She wouldn’t have been with me if I wasn’t a musician.” It was perfect for a lead guitarist: everything revolved around booze and music, preferably both at the same time.

The next big band for Cirelli was Soda Jerk, an alt-country whirlwind known for its songs about drinking and lost love. This band, too, won the Rock Challenge and captured a solid audience.

Alex Brenner, the lead singer, says, “We drank a lot together and had a great time. We spent a lot of time talking about gear and listening to the Replacements and Bob Mould.”

Cirelli ripped rockabilly on the three Jerk albums he played on, occasionally playing what the other guys in the band call “chicken pickin’.”

Like the country artists they admired, everyone drank a lot. Sipes, who was the bass player for Soda Jerk long before he founded his own band, says, “Erik taught me how to chug a beer.  Then I realized he wasn't chugging. That was just the way he drank.”

On a short tour, Soda Jerk headed to Nashville to open for new-country superstars Montgomery Gentry. Brenner says, “We had no clue who they were and all we wanted to do was drink as much Jim Beam as possible.” 

Back in Pittsburgh, after an afternoon gig on the South Side, Brenner says, Cirelli got kicked out of Dee’s Bar. Cirelli insists it never happened, saying, “I was deemed too drunk to enter.”

He quit his job as a janitor and found a corporate job that “basically sucked,” he says.

The last high from alcohol was at hand. “I think that if anything it made me more creative to a point, less afraid to take chances or to open up emotionally,” Cirelli says.

Then it didn’t.

“Drinking was as big of a part of performing as I was or the music was,” Cirelli says.

The guys in Soda Jerk couldn’t stand each other. During one of their last shows, Cirelli smashed his guitar on stage. “Like an asshole,” he says. “Someone came up to our keyboard player afterward, gave him a dollar, and said it was the best show he had ever seen.  I didn't even get the dollar to help pay for the repairs.”

So the band broke up. His day job was worse than ever. His wife maxed out his credit cards and bailed. “I would guess that drinking certainly contributed to the dissolution of my first marriage,” he says. Then, laughing, “I'll always be thankful for that.”

But it wasn’t funny then. Cirelli had wanted a life in music, and all those rock n’ roll dreams, all the booze and the music, were gone. He was a drunk with a terrible job and no band. “I lost interest in playing,” he says. “It just seemed pointless at the time.”

At 34, Cirelli quit drinking. He did it quietly, much in the way he handles playing in bands. He didn’t work the 12 steps that AA recommends or go to meetings in church basements. He read a lot, he says, “to take me out of my own life.”

Cirelli is middle-aged now. He works as a data programmer, a job he says he likes. Last summer, he incorporated husband and guitar player when he married Emily Rodgers. His love of hair metal, punk, and the blues has expanded to include Richard Thompson and Mary Halvorson, a free jazz player. He reads constantly. What started as a love affair with Charles Bukowski has changed into a love affair with books.

And there are these three bands, and the musicians who love him.

Sipes says, “I've always felt that of the three bands mine is his canvas, because he is the only guitar player.  When I write a song I have to ask myself if it will keep Erik interested.  I try to do different things and he always expands on them with his boundless imagination. Of the three bands, I am proud to say he was in my band first.” 

Dutton says, “Erik is selfless in his approach to music. He's doing what best serves the song rather than what best showcases his skills.  In Lohio, at times he's using about 10 percent of his talents.  He plays with an incredible amount of restraint. Sometimes it's about what you don't play, as much as it is what you do play, and Erik has a good understanding of that.”

Rodgers says, “When Erik plays, he is emotive and thoughtful. I'm certain that everything he is thinking and feeling is expressed in his playing.” Then she adds, simply, “Everyone should know who Erik is. He’s that great.”

Tonight’s set at the BBT ends around 1. Cirelli guesses he’s played something like 1000 shows over the years, some to as many as 4000 people, others to zero paying customers. It doesn’t matter. The one thing Cirelli loves is playing guitar.

“Playing guitar makes me very happy.  I like the freedom of it, which I lose the moment I step on stage.  But to be fair, playing live can be a very cathartic experience.” After packing away his pedals, Cirelli heads to the bar.

Twenty-five years into his musical career, Cirelli is still camera shy. I had to beg him for this interview. At a time when everyone wants attention for either being sober or for being a rock n’ roller, when being sober or being a rock n roller is half of VH 1’s programming schedule, Erik Cirelli is happy off to the side. He plays his guitar with the people he wants to play with and he plays it exactly how he wants it to sound. And everyone appreciates him for it.

By 1:30, Cirelli is ready for home. Asked what his first thought is when he plays his last note of the night, he says, “Get me the fuck out of here,” and he laughs and orders a three-dollar Coke.

Dave Newman is the author of the novel Please Don't Shoot Anyone Tonight and four poetry chapbooks. He lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania.