The Beat of My Own Drum (14 page)

Ironically, I was a lot more socially comfortable among my classmates once I knew I was leaving. Being in a band meant that I was suddenly regarded as “cool.” I felt in control of my life for the first time, holding my own with professional musicians and being propelled into my future by a newfound sense of purpose. I halfheartedly finished the last of my assignments, which allowed me to pass from tenth to eleventh grade, then I left and I never went back.

Many years later I was offered an honorary GED from Oakland High School. I thanked them for the thought but turned them down flat. I felt it would be a disservice to those who’d stayed, studied, and made the grade. I wanted to earn my GED authentically or not at all.

I truly regret not graduating. I missed out on graduation from junior high school because I left Montera after the riot, and I didn’t graduate from high school, either. It wasn’t until much later when I saw my nephews and nieces graduating that I realized what I’d lost out on. I sincerely wish I’d stuck it out so that I could have earned my high school diploma and fully experienced the ceremony itself with its prom party—a significant rite of passage in any teenager’s life.

Earning my GED is on my bucket list of things to do—and I’m going to do it, if only to make Moms and Pops proud of me. I might even throw a party and turn it into a real high school graduation ceremony. What was to eventually become my glamorous life may have given me a unique “real world” education, but I wish I’d realized at fifteen years old that the real world could have waited and that I’d forever regret denying myself a complete education.

Thankfully, Pops finally accepted my decision, because he’d also quit school at fifteen to follow his musical heart. Once he’d seen me perform, he recognized the passion in me and he honored it because he’d felt the same way. True to his word, he allowed me to take Victor’s place in the band and go on tour with Azteca.

I no longer had to dip my toe over the line of the stage.

I was on it!

When Azteca was booked to play some shows in Colombia, I thought I might faint from excitement. I’d never even left California before, and I couldn’t wait for my first chance to step over a very different kind of border.

Flying to Bogotá proved to be one of the scariest experiences of my life, however. I’d never been on a plane before and wasn’t used to the terrifying sensations. When I went to the bathroom midflight, I didn’t think to lock the door behind me, and so I was embarrassed when a huge man walked in as I was sitting on the toilet. Then when the landing gear dropped, I thought something was wrong with the plane. I was scared out of my wits, but I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t a seasoned traveler, so I resisted the urge to cling to Pops, screaming “We’re all going to die!”

Colombia was even more of a culture shock. From the moment we arrived, it felt like we were in the middle of Mardi Gras. It was an amazing experience for someone who hadn’t yet turned sixteen. Fortunately, I had plenty of people around me to keep me from harm. Apart from the musicians and crew in our own band, we must have had twenty others in our entourage—mostly for protection.

Cocaine was on offer everywhere. As soon as we got to our hotel, we were mobbed by dealers selling giant rocks of coke—which would have cost a thousand dollars in America—for five and ten bucks. Needless to say, some of the guys were lining up.

My mother hadn’t been overly worried about me going to such a place, but she should have been. Even the coffee had coke in it, and after a few sips I was wired. The night we arrived, the partying began. Pops took me into a room and locked the door. As I watched in amazement, he prepared two lines of cocaine and told me, “Have you ever had this before?”

I shook my head.

“I want you to try this right now in front of me. Everybody will be doing this, so I want you to be careful and tell me every time you do this, okay?”

All my childhood in the sixties, I’d grown up around musicians who smoked pot and took other drugs pretty much every day. It
was just part of the Californian musical scene. Alcohol was too. There was no way my parents could hide it from us children when our homes were makeshift studios, but they always tried to instill caution in us, along with a sense of moderation. It worked—for me, at least. I have never been one for drugs and am not that much of a drinker.

Although I was surprised that Pops was complicit in my trying cocaine, I knew that he was doing it that way so that I wouldn’t be tempted to try it without his supervision.

I did try blow a few times in Bogotá, but it was way too strong for me. I was running around the hallways bouncing off the walls. My eyelids felt like they were stuck open and my heart raced, which scared me. I needed to take something to calm me down.

Instead, Pops bought a bottle of Hennessy cognac most nights and let me have a little, too, and it became our drink. He called it “spider leg.”

We were in Colombia for nearly two weeks, and the promoters had made the mistake of promising to take care of food and incidentals. What they didn’t realize was that there would be so many of us or that people would take advantage. Cart after cart came rolling along the corridor until the bill got so high that on the second day the promoters stopped paying.

“We’re cutting you off!” they said.

I’d always taken it for granted that I could walk freely down the street, but in Colombia I couldn’t. Men carried machine guns, and the whole place felt extremely dangerous. Whenever we did venture outside, and always with bodyguards, a few people shouted, “Go home!” which I couldn’t fathom. Pops never let me out of his sight. We did manage to go shopping one day—to a place with the best platform shoes ever, complete with huge square heels. We emptied that store. I couldn’t wait to get home and show Moms.

Our first gig was to be played in the middle of the Santamaría bullring—the largest in the country. The event was humongous. The stadium was built in the 1930s and could hold up to fifteen thousand people. Our stage was set up midfield, which meant we had to walk to it from the outer ring, stepping over pools of blood where they’d just slaughtered a bull. That place was nuts.

The first night I was so excited that my butterflies were doing a tango. Ever since my crazy solo at the Civic Center they’d been fluttering inside for each performance, keeping me company as I prepared to do what I love most.

My heart raced. My body felt electric. My breathing was shallow. I never felt more alive, wrapped inside the moment, than I did as I waited to play for a live audience. It was the purest form of self-expression I had, giving of myself through music. Since that warm Colombian night, I realized that the day the butterflies are gone is the day I’ll stop playing.

The butterflies are what keep me alive.

Feeling them prancing in Bogotá, I checked myself out in a mirror once more and made sure I looked like a rock star. Then someone suddenly shouted, “Okay! Let’s go!” and we ran into that bullring to tumultuous applause.

My school friends back home were sitting in one of those dreary portable classrooms studying algebra, and there I was in a bullring in Bogotá with my Afro, in a funky top and pants, ready to perform with some monster musicians for a massive Latino crowd.

I could hardly believe what was happening.

Geographically, I was more than nine thousand miles away from those portables. Psychologically, I was on another planet.

Pops took his place behind the timbales and—on his cue—the band began to play. The crowd went ballistic. I couldn’t believe how much our music was appreciated by people who were willing
to embrace whatever we played for them. That night I gained a newfound understanding of the power of music to bridge cultural divides.

I sat waiting behind my instruments, my mouth dry with nerves. Then, after a few minutes, Pops gestured to me to go ahead.

Okay, Sheila
, I told myself.
It’s time to fly to the moon
 . . .

13
. Roll

A prolonged and reverberating sound

Pride and the passion

Laugh all night, cry all day

If true love is old-fashioned

Should we pass or should we play?

“PRIDE AND THE PASSION”

SHEILA E

V
isiting Colombia had been such an amazing experience that I was sorry when it was time to leave. That feeling quickly changed, though.

While entering Colombia had been an almost seamless process, leaving was nothing short of traumatic. The customs officials there pulled all our bags at the airport and searched everyone for drugs. There was a frightening and aggressive energy to the guards, and I began to feel uneasy.

Pops was talking to them in Spanish, but I couldn’t understand him or what anyone was saying. I kept saying, “I’m only fifteen! I don’t do drugs!”

Then, while Pops was being questioned, a female guard asked me to accompany her. I argued with her for a couple of minutes until she pulled out a gun and waved it in my face, repeating, “You come with me!” I looked across at Pops in terror. He asked them where they were taking me, and they showed him a room and he told me, “It’s okay, Sheila. Do as they ask.” I followed the guard and her female companion into the room, and they shut the door and informed me in broken English that they would be giving me a full-body search.

I exploded with rage and fear. The tough little kid from Oakland fought back, yelling at them, “Oh, no, you’re not! I don’t have any drugs on me!”

That’s when one of the guards pulled out a gun again and pointed it at my heart. There I was, separated from Pops, in a faraway country for the first time in my life, secluded in a room with strangers and a gun at my chest. As I watched in horror, the female guard stretched a surgical glove onto her right hand and informed me she was about to begin the search.

Shaking violently all over, I began to sob. My legs buckled, and I begged her, “Please believe me! There are no drugs! Please don’t search me! Please!”

I must have convinced her that I was telling the truth, because she looked at the other guard, spoke Spanish very quickly, and then pulled off the glove.

Thank you, Jesus!

She released me to join the rest of the band, who were all undergoing interrogation. I ran to Pops and refused to leave his side. I wouldn’t even use the bathroom and held it all in.

The officials kept us for hours. They riffled through all our possessions and ripped the heels off all the treasured platform shoes we’d bought, searching for hidden rocks of cocaine. They didn’t find anything, thankfully, but they still declared that we couldn’t
leave the country. They kept our equipment and told Pops he’d have to meet with a government official the next day to “negotiate” our release. Scared and confused, we went back to our hotel.

Pops and I got up early the next morning and went to the government office as advised, but the officials refused to meet with us. They ignored us the next day too. Finally, late on the third day, they let us in and informed us that we’d have to pay ten thousand dollars to leave. Pops didn’t object and handed over most of the profit from the tour, eager to do whatever was required to get us home.

I don’t think any of us exhaled until that plane lifted its wheels off Colombian soil. The Colombian officials kept our equipment for months before shipping it back to us, so not only did we not make any money on the tour, nobody had their instruments to play. The entire experience ruined my first big tour, and it took me a long while to get comfortable with international travel. As soon as the tools of our trade were returned to us, however, we went straight back on the road to earn the money we’d lost. And work we did. That next year flew by in a blur of gigs, but I can honestly say I loved every minute.

What I didn’t love was having to split up with Tam when I officially left Grito to tour full-time. I really liked him, but he wasn’t the one for me and, musically, I needed to fly.

Being in Azteca, surrounded by so many men and the vocalist Wendy Haas, was an unusual experience. Everyone was so much older than me, although I was very comfortable around them, having grown up right before their eyes.

What was much more of a challenge was witnessing the many infidelities, especially as I knew that many of them had wives or girlfriends at home. There was a lot of drug abuse backstage, too, which had always made me uncomfortable, but I tried to ignore the negatives and focus on the positives.

Besides, I was still so excited to be a part of the group, and I cared for them all deeply. Despite my lack of interest in joining some of their recreational activities, I still loved being with them and learning from them. I especially loved hearing their stories from the road or legendary recording sessions. I wanted to hear about the challenges and triumphs they’d faced in the industry.

I may not have been learning anything academically, but my street-smarts IQ was shooting through the roof. In any event, the lessons I learned on the road were far more valuable than anything I could have learned in high school.

Traveling with Pops over the next few years, we played big venues and little ones. Later on, Pops started playing tiny dive bars around the Bay Area like the Shell on Grand Lake, which had dark smoky rooms that smelled of stale cigarettes and beer. Aptly named, it was just a shell of a club.

On any given night, there might have been three people sitting at the bar, all of them permanent fixtures. Two others might have been sitting at a table in the corner, hardly noticing our band setting up right in front of them. The place held only about twenty people and—counting the band and the bartender—there would be about ten of us in all.

Those were the leaner years. Fame, financial security, and the validation of critics never came overnight. There were many, many gigs like that one—a far cry from the sold-out arenas that I’d had a taste of and that would come again much later.