After years of being on the road, on numerous stages with countless players, and a Grammy nomination, a guitarist with local ties still has his hometown heart.
Back in 2017, Gasport native Pat Harrington was two years into playing with internationally touring band Victor Wainwright and the Train. He spoke with the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal ahead of the band’s performance at that year’s Buffalo Niagara Blues Festival.
At the time, the band was in the midst of recording their self-titled debut album at Ardent Studios in Memphis, where artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bob Dylan and B.B. King were drawn.
Harrington said that opportunity to record where some of his musical heroes had also done so wasn’t lost on him.
“I cut my guitar tracks in the same isolation booth that Stevie Ray Vaughan did,” Harrington said.
Reflecting on his career with the US&J last week, Harrington and the band were gearing up for the Riberfest in Madison, Indiana, where they would be direct support for the band Tower of Power. In some ways, the Madison area reminded him of Gasport.
“It’s got that small town kind of vibe,” Harrington said.
Prior to joining Wainwright and the Train, Harrington spent several years cutting his teeth on the local music scene. Like many a young player in eastern Niagara County, he got his first guitar lessons from Eric Koch at Red House Music in Wrights Corners.
Koch remembers thinking his then teen-age student had a knack for playing very early on.
“He had a little blue Fender guitar and he was just mesmerized,” Koch said. “Even at that age he hung on every word I said and then it was game on for him.”
“I think (Koch) saw something in me that maybe he didn’t see other students, that I just had that fire,” Harrington said. “I really wanted to learn.”
Over the next few years, Harrington would perform, attend concerts and network with other local and national players nearly every chance he got.
“He weaseled his way on to (Allman Brothers Band guitarist) Dickey Betts’ bus as a teenager,” Koch said.
“It didn’t feel like weaseling, it just felt like what I was supposed to be doing,” Harrington noted in reply.
He continued to network while attending Niagara County Community College and SUNY Fredonia. It was at that time he met his best friend and musical partner Owen Eichensehr.
Eichensehr recalled meeting Harrington a little more than a decade ago when his band shared a bill with Harrington’s band at Rhino’s Union Pub in West Seneca.
“I was pretty blown away watching him play slide,” Eichensehr said. “(After the show) We just hit it off and exchanged mutual words of praise.”
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After Harrington graduated from Fredonia with a degree in music business, he said he knew he still wanted to pursue music full-time, but found himself at an impasse.
“I didn’t really want to be a band manager… I wanted to be in the band,” he said.
During that time, he moved back to Gasport and worked a series of labor jobs while gigging locally on the weekends.
Harrington’s playing and networking caught the attention of one of his musical heroes, Bobby Whitlock, who performed with Eric Clapton in the band Derek and the Dominoes. Whitlock had reached out to Harrington to perform with him for a set of songs from the album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.”
“It was a huge honor and one of those huge moments for me (playing with) one of my heroes,” Harrington said.
Harrington specifically pointed to that performance as a crucial point in his development as a player.
“(Whitlock) was just encouraging me to develop my own voice as a player and he wanted to hear what I had to say,” he said.
Not long after that, Harrington got connected to his current gig with Wainwright while jamming down in Florida with fellow musician Damon Fowler.
“I told him I wanted to be touring, playing guitar in a band and playing cool music (just like he was),” Harrington said.
Not long after that, Harrington was recommended to Wainwright. After auditioning and hanging out with the band, he played his first gig with The Train at the Daytona Blues Festival in front of a crowd of about 2,000 people.
A move to Memphis and the release of their self-titled album followed.
Then the Grammys came calling.
Harrington remembered waking up to several missed phones calls and text messages one morning and from there found out The Train’s album had been nominated for the Best Contemporary Blues Album Grammy.
“We were just as shocked as anyone else to see that. Someone sent me the list of Grammy nominations and I had to read it like five times before I believed what I was seeing,” he said.
On the day of the ceremony, Harrington said, the band had to catch a cross-country flight from the east coast as they had just finished a week’s worth of performances on a blues music-themed cruise.
“We were on two ends of the country here that we’re trying to try to figure out how we can make this work. We went straight to the airport and we flew out to Los Angeles,” he said.
The band ended up arriving at the ceremony with 20 minutes to spare before the Grammy nominees and winner for their category was announced.
While they were ultimately beat out by Fantastic Negrito, Harrington and the band were grateful for the opportunity to be in the company of the industry’s top artists.
“(It was) an honor to have your name up there with that caliber of musicians,” he said.
Harrington admitted that the scale of the Grammys is a little different in person than it appears on TV.
“There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors going on. It seems like there’s this huge crowd in front of the stage, but the pit is smaller,” he said.
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After the Grammys, Victor Wainwright and the Train were determined to forge ahead with a new studio album.
“We just kind of took it as like, ‘OK, now it’s time to dig in even deeper,’” Harrington said.
Before their second album, “Memphis Loud,” was released, the COVID-19 pandemic brought live performances to a screeching halt.
During that time, Harrington decided to move back to his native New York with his wife Lydia. He began to retool his playing by giving online guitar lessons.
“It forced me to learn my instrument that much better so that I could teach and explain things better,” he said.
He also reconnected with Owen Eichensehr and, as live music slowly began to resume, they began to perform as the Pat & Owen Duo.
“We played a couple gigs and the project started to feel good. We realized how good we worked together,” Eichensehr said.
The duo draws upon various musical influences, from blues and rock to country and Americana.
“We’re musical brothers in the way we’re on the same page,” Harrington said. “We’re always inspiring each other and trying to learn new styles and things together. We push each other.”
Harrington continues to split time between The Train and playing with Eichensehr amongst several other musical projects.
“After Covid, we came right out the gate and it hasn’t really slowed down since. I’ve gigged more in these past two years than I have in my whole life,” Harrington said.
Through it all, Harrington stressed the importance of the support of his parents, Roy and Heidi, and wife Lydia.
“They’ve always been in my corner supporting me dream,” he said.
His next local gigs are slated with Eichensehr and the Pat Harrington Trio at The Taylor Theater in Lockport on Nov. 11 and an Allman Brothers Band tribute show at the Town Ballroom in Buffalo on Dec. 22.