"I can't believe we've been here for two days, and I still haven't gotten to kiss the girl," Eddie said, as a makeup artist attempted a touch-up job in the dressing room of a Manhattan warehouse studio last month. "I'm not even going to get the girl in my own video. It's just like real life."
Actually, real life has been good to the 29-year-old Eddie, as he'd be the first to admit. Hard Cold Truth hits the stores today and soon he'll be touring the country to support it.
For John Eddie, playing music is still as exciting as a first kiss.
A 10th-grade dropout from Cherry Hill High School West, John Eddie, almost 11 years ago, began playing area clubs with his band, the Front Street Runners.
He didn't really have a lot going for him. He wasn't very fluent on guitar and his compositions were simple, three-chord journeys. As a singer, he missed as many notes as he hit.
Yet something made the Front Street Runners popular from the start: Eddie's beaming stage presence.
In the early days, Eddie said, the band would play as much as possible, four or five nights a week. Says the singer: "We were willing to turn tables over in a high school cafeteria and play on them if it meant we'd have an audience."
Eddie maintains that attitude.
A dazzling live performer (and a much-improved singer and guitarist), Eddie and his hot new seven-piece backup band, have played about a dozen shows in the last few weeks, gearing up for a national tour. Most of those performances have been in this area - at the Empire Rock Club, the Arch Street Empire, the Stone Pony, Joe Pop's, the Stone Balloon. And most have lasted close to three
hours, the band playing new stuff, unrecorded older originals and covers.
The record company gave Eddie a difficult time about playing the warm-up shows. They didn't want him to be overexposed.
"I just told them it's what I like to do on weekends," he said.
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