Everybody Deserves to Rock

After guitarist and spinal cord injury survivor Eric Howk joined the rock group Portugal. The Man, his bandmates found a way to make the experience accessible for him. Now, he wants to do the same for their fans.

Stairs, curbs, cobblestones, grass. As a rock guitarist who loved touring, Eric Howk traversed these surfaces every day without giving them a second thought. Then in May 2007, he was sitting against a wall in a friend’s backyard when it collapsed. He fell more than three meters into an unmarked construction hole and was instantly paralyzed below his sternum from a T4 spinal cord injury.

By his second day in the intensive care unit, Howk had a guitar in his hands, figuring out new ways to hold and position the instrument, even as he struggled to sit up without passing out. By day five, he was recording a track for a friend. Ever the studio perfectionist, he felt annoyed when the microphones would pick up the sound of his back brace knocking up against the guitar and the constant beeping of his patient monitor. “I felt like a swollen tick covered in hard plastic,” he recalls. But his objective was steadfast: “It was my therapy to get back into music.”

Howk had a clear goal, too. His band at the time, The Lashes, had a confirmed slot at a prominent music festival at the beginning of September, so he put all his energy into working with his doctors and physical therapists to find a way to sit with a guitar for at least 45 minutes. “It was unprecedented territory for everybody,” he says. “But it was not a conversation of whether it was going to happen. It was just how it was going to happen.”

And it did. Howk played the festival and a few other gigs, but he yearned to be on the road again. “I began playing with any band that would have me that wanted to go on tour,” he says. “Figuring out how to play a show is one thing; fguring out how to tour was a much longer process. That’s still something I’m trying to fgure out.”

For years, the rock band Portugal. The Man had had their eyes on Howk to join the group. Howk grew up in Wasilla, Alaska, with founding members John Baldwin Gourley and Zach Carothers, but Howk always had other commitments. “Growing up with Eric, he was always the best guitarist we knew,” says Gourley, PTM’s frontman. “He was always the dude you’d see in the hallway, just hanging out and playing guitar every day.”

But joining a major touring band as a wheelchair user presented a myriad of accessibility challenges for Howk. In the earlier years following his injury, he avoided flying on planes and drove himself to gigs up to a thousand miles away, but PTM played shows across the US and travelled abroad. When it came to venues, most didn’t have a working wheelchair lift – and many didn’t even have a ramp. And accessible tour buses? They practically don’t exist.

“In our brain, we’re just thinking about logistics, trying to plan everything out with buses, stages, with backstage, with festivals,” says Carothers, PTM’s bassist. “We were over-thinking, just lost in our minds.”

As they struggled to come up with a strategy, Gourley told the band they’d simply make it work. “John is a real good person when something demands action,” Carothers adds. “He brought out the Alaskan and was like, ‘Let’s just do it.’ That’s how we do everything in life, so let’s just jump in and learn how to swim.” So, as a band, they swam. And they few. And they carried Howk on and off the tour bus – or wherever he needed to be if it was inaccessible. Together, they made touring work, taking on each challenge day by day. “They make it accessible, just by carrying me on and off, you know?”, Howk says with emotion in his voice. “There’s kind of this one-size-fits-all approach to accessibility for a lot of things. But having adaptability and flexibility gets things done better. Sometimes, it’s smarter. Sometimes, it’s harder. But with every situation that we’re in, we approach it as the situation comes. That’s very much the spirit of this band, and I don’t think I could do this with anybody else. I know I couldn’t.”

Since Howk joined PTM in 2015, the band’s profile skyrocketed. In 2017, Portugal. The Man released its eighth studio album, Woodstock. The album produced two No. 1 hits on the alternative charts in the US, including the explosive mega-hit, “Feel It Still”. That song nabbed the group a Grammy in 2018, and they took their success on the road. The band toured across the US, Europe, and Australia with Howk, who gathered data on the accessibility of every venue they visited – the good, the bad, the despicable.

Over the years, PTM started to see some improvements, with local promoters taking note the more times Howk and the band passed through town. Gourley explains, “At the very least, what’s going to happen is, [the promoters will say] ‘I got to build that ramp. I got to build that ramp. I got to build that ramp.’ And then eventually, the ramp just stays. They start to make those changes more permanent.” But questions lingered. Did venues maintain accessibility standards after the band left town? And what about accessibility for their fans in the audience? That last question prompted the band to take more action. “We were sitting on all this information, and it wasn’t really getting used,” says Howk. “It was getting used for our benefit and for the backside of venues. But understanding that my experience as a concert player and the house’s experience as concert goers is often wildly different.”

Portugal. The Man wanted disabled fans to get the opportunity to see them live, and for their most recent North American tour in 2022, they launched PTM Night Out, a charitable initiative created to make their concerts ADA accessible and centered on the concept that “Everyone Deserves a Night Out.” Select winners were given the VIP treatment, with transportation to and from the venue, as well as an on-site escort and an exclusive meet-and-greet with the band.

“It’s a discovery and research project more than anything,” Howk says. “I don’t think that accessibility in ticketing for a lot of companies is working the best way. We know that it’s not one-size-fits-all, so it’s about having conversations. It’s easy to get hyper-focused on mobility access, but that’s just a tiny part of it.” Howk says solutions start to come from asking people what they need and not shoving them into a designated area. It’s about asking concert goers where they want to be, depending on their requirements.

After a successful pilot program – and with a new album on the horizon – the band hopes to take PTM Night Out on tour around the world, pushing venues to do better. “We’re seeing actual concrete getting mixed in wheelbarrows, like real-time repairs in venues where they’re listening,” Howk says. “We’re doing audits and doing the work.”

In September, PTM performed at the first-ever Cord Club event in Los Angeles, a Wings for Life fundraising event for spinal cord research. For Howk and the band, it’s an exciting opportunity to learn more about the comprehensive work being done across multiple studies. “Disability is as diverse as the people who are affected by it,” Howk says, “so you want to see a lot of different schools of thought, and it was heartening to see that approach. It was a beautiful night with a lot of optimism and a lot of hope.”