Shared hotel rooms and 7-hour drives: RI native's new jam is a Johnny Cash tribute band

You might think that Steve Eisenstadt, after a career in public relations and recovering from a tussle with cancer, would embrace the leisure one anticipates at the age of 63.

But this thing has happened to him.

The kind of thing that can infuse even a suburban, self-admittedly humdrum dad like Steve with a certain insanity.

God help him, he’s in a band. And a rather unusual one: four 60-somethings who came out of retirement to sometimes drive more than 20 hours on weekends doing two or three shows while crashing in cheap hotels.

It’s a Johnny Cash tribute band called the Johnny Folsom 4, and they’re the real thing – sometimes selling more than 1,000 tickets, with a rescheduled date hopefully coming up in the fall at Cranston's Park Theatre.

Having gone to Providence's Classical High School, never playing an instrument until his mid-40s, Steve is still a bit shocked that this is now his life.

Before he joined IBM decades ago as a PR guy, he was a newspaper reporter, the two of us crossing paths in the ‘80s as Providence Journal colleagues. A number of journalists are rock 'n' roll wannabes, but few bring it off, so when Steve recently told me he’s living the kind of rocker life where he recently spent his wedding anniversary in a hotel room in Nashville sleeping next to the guitarist instead of his saintly wife, I wanted to know more.

So we chatted for two hours, leaving me thinking that being a boomer in a traveling band that is not the Rolling Stones seems like a “be careful what you wish for” situation.

The Johnny Folsom 4, all of whom have settled around Raleigh, North Carolina, do not have a private jet or luxury bus, so behold Steve on a recent Thursday sitting in the back of an old van for seven hours en route to his next show in a bar-with-a-stage in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The singer, behind the wheel, is a former marketing VP, the drummer a retired dentist, the guitarist a onetime electrical engineer.

And then there’s Steve, who plays stand-up bass – you know, the big cello-like thing – because that’s the Johnny Cash sound. They dress somewhat like the Blues Brothers, dark suits and ties, because that’s the Johnny Cash look. This is fortunate for Steve, who might not fit in with Mötley Crüe, since he still looks like a PR guy for IBM, nor could he grow long hair on account of he doesn’t have any.

Even after a daylong drive, there is often no time to hang at the hotel pool since, for an 8 p.m. gig, you need to be at the venue by 4. So there they are in the Knoxville bar, unloading their own gear, doing sound checks, then milling around a drab “green room” until, at last, it’s showtime.

Finally, they get to the hotel around 11 p.m. and are then up early to drive hours – and hours and hours – to the next night’s venue.

I ask Steve how, at his age, he stands such a schedule. Like, are the others holding him hostage or something?

No, he tells me he loves it.

“When you get on that stage,” he says, “and the audience is dancing and singing along, there’s nowhere else you want to be.”

Steve Eisenstadt grew up on the East Side, his dad passing on when he was young, his mom a teacher. After graduating from Boston University and working for a newspaper wire service in Washington, D.C., Steve got a reporter’s job at The Providence Journal in 1988.

His wife, Alison, is a Southerner, and the two moved to Raleigh in 1994, where, in time, Steve got into PR, mostly working remotely because he didn't want even a 10-minute commute.

His entry into music was quite random.

In 2006, a neighborhood friend in a “dad band” asked Steve if he’d join as an electric bass player. Steve, who'd never played an instrument, considered this to be nuts. He was 46, living a sedate life in the suburbs with a preschool teacher wife and kids ages 10 and 12.

But the guy kept bugging him, so for the heck of it, Steve bought a cheap bass and began lessons, and his teacher was stunned at how fast Steve picked it up. So was Steve. He would later say that you never know what might come naturally to you. Steve practiced hard and, for kicks, occasionally jumped in with local bands playing bars for free beers.

Last October, he was approached by the two main players in a Raleigh-based Johnny Cash tribute band. One was singer David Burney, a retired ad exec, the other drummer Randy Benefield, a retired dentist.

They wanted to try getting bigger gigs on the road, and their current bass guy didn’t want to travel. Was Steve interested? He was.

It would be ideal, they told him, if he could learn the upright bass. Somehow Steve did, which seems crazy to me – I myself took up guitar five or so years ago, and no chance I could play that in a band, let alone a different instrument. But Steve clearly has a gift for it.

He signed on, and even brought in a 60-ish guitar player he knew named John Fussell, a retired engineer.

Coincidentally, they had a Rhode Island booking agent – Joel Hanks of the Providence Music Group – who specialized in tribute bands. Still, a million bands want to go national, and the odds are minuscule. But Hanks began to get them gigs. Like, a lot of them.

So far in 2023, they’ve had dozens of shows, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Taunton, Massachusetts, drawing Steve into the intoxicating world of a traveling band.

But it’s also quite a grind.

The morning after that Knoxville gig, the four drove hours to play a brewery in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and the following day, hours more to what proved their biggest gig ever – a sold-out 1,500-person amphitheater in Lincoln City, Indiana.

Was he nervous?

“If you’re rock climbing,” he told me, “you can’t look down. You stay within yourself and enjoy every second.”

The next day, the drive home took 10 hours.

How, I asked, can a guy who couldn't bear a 10-minute commute handle that?

"For this," said Steve, "I'll drive and drive and drive."

He admitted it can be exhausting, especially for guys in their 60s.

"But the two hours onstage," he added, "are the world’s most powerful fountain of youth.”

The travel isn’t the only challenge. Despite occasional big venues, they only average between $300 and $600 per band member per show. Steve is thrilled at having a shot to make $10,000 from his music this year, but it’s not exactly Mick Jagger money.

So to make it work, they share hotel rooms, Steve with the guitarist, who has been known to snore. To cope with that, Steve constructs a wall of pillows on his bed for the illusion of privacy, puts in foam earplugs and turns on a speaker playing white noise.

But isn’t a rocker’s life supposed to be wild?

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“People often think bands are partying and throwing televisions out windows and jumping in the pool,” Steve says. “The reality at our age is you just want to go to sleep.”

He gave me one other insight into how obsessed he is.

This past January, as the Johnny Folsom 4 was starting to tour, Steve was diagnosed with tongue cancer. His doctors were able to avoid disfiguring surgery by treating it with radiation.

But it left Steve exhausted, at times wobbly, his throat so sore he couldn’t even wear a tie. His bandmates told him don’t worry, they had a fill-in upright bass guy to cover.

Steve insisted on playing.

“When you get onstage,” he said, “it’s like being shot with lightning, and all that goes away.”

He never missed a gig.

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I’ve checked out videos of the Johnny Folsom 4, and I will tell you they’re the real thing – the lead singer nails the Johnny Cash voice. And Steve, who earlier in life was so intrigued with the sound that he wore out a 3-CD set called "The Essential Johnny Cash," feels honored to help keep the music alive onstage. Sometimes, fans come up to them afterward in tears. Those, said Steve, are his most emotional moments.

So if you at some future point have a chance to see the Johnny Folsom 4, keep your eye on the Providence native in the background playing the upright bass.

He teaches a worthy life lesson.

We all, no doubt, can remember a time in our lives when we were hungry. That fades with age. Steve Eisenstadt is a reminder that just maybe, it’s not too late to find it again.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Johnny Cash tribute band brings RI native a new gig after corporate PR