Superstar

Across 40 years of his musical career, Eric Dover has seen it all. From playing with rock icons Slash and Alice Cooper to his newest effort, The Lickerish Quartet, Dover is Walker County’s Godfather of Music.

Words by Al Blanton | Images courtesy Eric Dover

The aroma of boiled peanuts drifted down the highway as two young teenagers eagerly waited for customers. This was the late 1970s, and the boys, longhaired and zealous, were undoubtedly dressed in bellbottom jeans and faded T-shirts. The hut in which they hawked their produce had been built out of the remains of a snaky, ratty, condemned family home in the community of Townley.

 “It looked like it had been there forever on the side of the road,” recalls Eric Dover. “It hadn’t.”

 For the boys, each day was met with great anticipation because there was no telling whom they might meet during a hard day’s work. Drifters. Gypsies. Regular Joe’s. All walks of life. But ultimately for Dover, selling boiled peanuts on the side of the road with his brother Karl did two things. It taught him a work ethic that would carry him the rest of his life, and it made him understand there had to be something more glamorous than being a peanut peddler on the side of Highway 78. As it turns out, that glamour arrived in the form of music.

 Dover’s fire for this artistic outlet was initially stoked around age 8 when his sister Tina would bring home Alice Cooper and Bad Company records. It wasn’t long before he found himself thumbing through magazines like Hit Parader, Cream, and Rolling Stone, searching for the newest albums to buy at local record stores, places like Records N’ Things, The Sound Shop, or Alan’s Discount Music—where he spent most of his money.

 After watching his brother-in-law play in a band, Dover was asked by his mother if he was serious about this music thing. He assured her he was, and she promptly signed him up for guitar lessons at Corrine Williamson’s School of Music in downtown Jasper. “[Mrs. Williamson] was about 75 years old and she was also responsible for starting a majority of the marching band programs in the county, back in the early days,” Dover recalls. “She was a wonderful lady. I learned how to read music. We’d play hymns and standards—you know, ‘Yellowbird,’ ‘Everybody Loves Somebody,’ and Old Rat Pack classics. That’s kind of where it started in a nutshell.”

 Throughout high school, Dover, knowing his fate as a musician was already sealed, concentrated on honing his craft by taking lessons from Marvin McCombs, music teacher extraordinaire at Walker College.

 “He was a fabulous teacher, wonderful human being,” Dover says of McCombs.

 That instruction eventually propelled him to a liberal arts scholarship at Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, where he studied music theory for two years.

 After his time in junior college, Dover moved to Birmingham and hooked up with a regional touring band called Baghdad. He replaced Will Ousley, who would go on to greater fame by playing for Christian recording artist Amy Grant and whom Dover describes as “probably one of the greatest guitar players, if not the greatest, I’ve ever known.”

 With Baghdad, Dover sampled the South like an all-you-can-eat buffet, bouncing from town to town throughout Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle. During this time, he also played with a couple of lesser-known bands and wrote and recorded music.

 Dover networked through live gigs and through his day job, working at Highland Music in Birmingham. He also started a band called Love Bang with some of his college buddies (the band was comprised of Dover, Chris Baker, Tony Brock, Scott Collier, and Eddie Usher). By this time, he was one break away from making it big. That break would eventually come.

 A couple of years passed by and Love Bang did an opening at Club Masquerade in Atlanta for a band called The Producers. Tim Smith, who played bass for The Producers, heard that the San Francisco-based band, Jellyfish, was holding auditions for a guitar player. “Jellyfish was a band I loved from the minute they came out. All my music nerd friends were into it,” Dover recalls. “So I put together a couple of songs, 3 or 4, a couple of originals. I did a cover of Bad Finger’s ‘No Matter What’ and I sent it to the guys. They were mixing their second record called Spilt Milk in L.A. and they called me a few days later and asked me if I want to come out and audition. So that’s kind of where I jumped off.”

 Dover played with Jellyfish until the band’s breakup in 1994. The day grunge icon Kurt Cobain died, Roger Manning, who’d played an array of instruments and provided vocals for Jellyfish, phoned Dover and invited him to L.A.

 “I was crazy enough to do it,” Dover says—and he loaded up his ’85 Ford Bronco and drove out to the City of Angels.

 For the first few weeks in L.A., Dover couched-surfed and looked for a drummer who could partner with him and Manning on the latest project. While auditioning at Nate’s Rehearsal in North Hollywood, a guy by the name of Mark Danzeisen informed him that Slash, the top-hatted icon for the band Guns N’ Roses, was looking for a singer for a new project called The Snakepit—a post GNR catharsis that was sure to provide musical pyrotechnics. After clearing it with Manning, Dover went over to Slash’s house in Laurel Canyon where he auditioned at a recording studio. “That’s where I recorded Beggars and Hangers-On,” Dover says. “I auditioned by writing that song and the lyrics.”

 A few hours later, Slash telephoned Dover to tell him he was in. Later, the name of the band was changed to Slash’s Snakepit, and for the first few months of existence, Geffen Records sent Dover and Slash on a promotional tour around the globe. “All we did was play acoustic guitar at local radio stations,” Dover says.

 Dover wrote or co-wrote many of the tracks on the album It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, which was released in February 1995 to commercial success, reaching number 70 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart.

 Describing Slash as an iconic musician on the level of Keith Richards or Van Morrison, Dover says playing with him as a “wonderful experience.” On a personal level, Dover praised Slash’s shrewdness and street smarts above all. “Slash is kind of mellow and low-key, really, but the cat’s really wise,” Dover said. “And I think growing up in Hollywood has a lot to do with that. There’s just a little different mentality growing up here in LA. I think you have to arm yourself against all the BS and being exploited at a pretty early age, because it’s a showbiz town. His babysitter was David Bowie, so, there you go.”

 “There’s a certain kind of quiet wisdom about him,” Dover adds. “He comes off as mellow and cool but there’s some smarts going on there the whole time.”

 The second rock legend in which Dover has been associated is the shock rock superstar Alice Cooper. In the early 2000s, Dover played guitar for Cooper’s band, both as a session musician (Brutal Planet, Dragontown) and as a guitarist and writer (The Eyes of Alice Cooper). “I can’t say enough good things about [Alice],” Dover said. “He’s another guy that’s seen it all. If you name it, he’s done it, and he’s done it three times over. I do consider him my rock n’ roll father, undoubtedly.”

 Now Dover is teamed back up with Manning on a project called The Lickerish Quartet, a three-man orchestral experience that has been likened to Queen and ELO. Back in the spring of this year, the band released their first album, Threesome Vol. 1, which featured the song “Lighthouse Spaceship”—an ethereal power pop track with enough vestiges of Jellyfish to make longtime Manning/Dover fans smile in their old Ford Broncos. Dover says the band is pushing for an October release for Vol. 2, and in the meantime, he is doing session work and working on tracks for a solo project called Sextus.

 Now 53, Dover says he is still mad about making music. “And that’s kind of rare to happen because as some people get older they sort of fall out of it,” he says.

 He firmly admits that across his long musical career he’s often straddled the fence between the hard rock and power pop world. Even still, he’s proven the Hamletian charge of “To thine own self be true.”

 “I don’t worry so much about rolling with the times or being trendy,” he says. “You really can only put out there what’s in your heart and do everything to the best of your ability, sing the kind of songs you want to sing. I like to change what I do and I like to change my songs, but trying to please everyone else rather than starting with myself is a bit of a fool’s errand.”

 No matter what happens from here or where his career takes him, Dover will continue to search for the next creative outlet to sate the appetite for music that’s been raging since he was a young boy in Jasper, Alabama.

 Besides, anything beats selling boiled peanuts. 78