Eric Howk is a musical jack of all trades. A multi-talented musician, he plays various instruments for the band Portugal. The Man. He grew up with the band’s lead singer John Gorley in Alaska, which he attributed to why the band is currently on a mountain town tour.
KHOL’s Rachel Stevens chats with Portugal. The Man’s Erik Howk. Allowed only 40 minutes in the free version of Zoom, Stevens and Howk still managed an in-depth conversation about Howk’s journey. (Rachel Stevens)
“It reminds us of home. It’s also way more exciting to go up a gondola to get to the stage than it is to go through a TJ Max parking lot and a suburban neighborhood. It’s just, I think the connection to the land and the energy and the people, from it is, is 90% of what’s still filling our gut,” Howk said.
Howk moved from Alaska to Seattle in 2000 when he was 18 and started playing in bands that got pretty big, including The Lashes.
In 2007, Howk started talking toGorley about joining his band Portugal. The Man. Everything was ready to go, but then Eric was in a freak accident.
“I was sitting on a little retaining wall. The wall goes back. I try to catch myself in, like, the laurel bush behind me. And then that went down. And then I fell into a hole. No one else knew it was there when to catch myself and I just landed really bad.,” Howk said.
His T4 vertebrae went through his spine. His spinal cord injury paralyzed him mid-chest down and he lost sensation and movement of his legs.
Howk immediately started to use a wheelchair. At the time, Portugal. The Man was doing 250 shows a year on the road.
“I figured it was over. I figured touring was done for me. And at the ripe age of 25, when I fell in that hole, I was like, you know what? I had a pretty good go with it. You know, at that point, I thought that I had hit every echelon that there was to hit,” Howk said.
He took a break from bands and invested his time in producing and co-owning a music venue in Seattle. When he did start playing with bands again, he would stick to weekends and local shows. But the adventure of touring kept calling his name.
Howk talks about the process of getting back on the road.
“I had to kind of tiptoe back into it. Now it’s been 17 years of making my carry-on bag smaller and smaller, basically, and figuring out like what I can do without. Because a big part of just like being able to do this touring thing is staying light and staying mobile and, being able to adapt into a bunch of different situations as they come,” he said.
In 2014, seven years after Portugal. The Man originally asked Howk to be in the band, he said, “yes.” The band has toured extensively in the past decade. But in 2020, Eric had a reckoning with his drinking. He was using drugs and alcohol to try and fix his pain.
“We were always moving. We were always doing another thing. I remember kind of every element as that. Two nights ago, the path to the stage was a beautiful boardwalk to a botanical garden. I was like, man, the last time I was here, I was looking at that botanical garden underneath the boardwalk and being like, I might throw up on this. I go I go back to a lot of the scenes of the crime because we’re still on those same routings, still hitting those same cities,” Howk said.
Howk is super familiar with Jackson Hole. Most recently, he came to work on the music for the documentary “Full Circle”, which featured sit-skier Trevor Kennison, who was attempting to be the first sit-skier to do a double backflip into Corbett’s Couloir. The film also features the story of Barry Corbett – who also became paralyzed from an accident.
The classic Wyoming sunset highlights the Teton Range while Portugal. The Man performs. (Jack Catlin)
“He [Barry Corbett] was this incredible ski filmmaker in the 70s and 80s. He was shooting a ski film in the early 80s, and he leaned up the helicopter to get the shot. His helicopter hit a bird. Out went Barry, and he landed nearly 100 ft down and was paralyzed. This was at a time when spinal cord injuries had just kind of recently stopped being an early death sentence. So Barry literally wrote a book called Options, And it’s like, hey, kid, you got hurt. What’s next? Options was a book that I had received in the hospital 17 years ago, before I knew who Barry Corbett was or what Corbett Scholar was.”
This was Howk’s first visit back to Jackson since scoring “Full Circle” in 2022.
Portugal. The Man played July 16, 2024 up on Snow King, with those unchanging mountains as a backdrop. Eric Howk adorned the stage with guitar, vocals, and a bit of keyboard.
