The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (10 page)

Funny thing is that years later—around the time of
Supernatural
—I discovered a tune from that movie called “Love Song from
Apache,
” and it was performed by Coleman Hawkins. So another song called “Apache” got under my skin. I had the honor to play that tune with Wayne Shorter a number of times, and on one special occasion at the Montreux Jazz Festival I played it with the great saxophonist Joe Henderson. The festival director, Claude Nobs, had the idea to have us play together, but the choice of song was mine.
“Ahí viene El Apache”
still applies.

After “Apache” I learned “Rumble” by Link Wray and tunes by Duane Eddy, including “Red River Valley”—we called that rebel music. “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia—one of my first songs with a string bend. I remember telling myself, “I
got
to learn that lick, man!” I got into Freddie King—the king of the instrumentals—with “San-Ho-Zay,” “Tidal Wave,” and of course “Hide Away.”

There was Billy Butler’s guitar solo on Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk”—every guitar player had to know that. No exceptions. Javier turned me on to Bobby “Blue” Bland, and I picked up on everything his guitarist, Wayne Bennett, was doing. Later I came to know how much of that was T-Bone Walker’s creation, almost note for note.

Playing any instrument is learning by doing, training your mind and fingers to do things. Getting frustrated but doing it again and again. I was hungry to keep learning—any tune anyone wanted to put in front of me—anything—I could figure it out on my own. I began to sit in with whoever would let me. Long before I played in any club, I had a chance to sit in and watch the TJs’ rehearsals. I started picking up things, little by little.

Of course I wanted to play in the TJs—who wouldn’t? At that time, Javier’s band was more together than any other band doing that kind of music in Tijuana. They were the band to beat. They were winning all the contests in Tijuana and other cities—Juárez, Mexicali. They had their regular gig at El Convoy, on the main strip. But they were already a unit. I hung out and sometimes sat in with them, but mostly it was just hanging.

I remember one time I got to go in the car with them to a battle of the bands in Mexicali, which is as far from Tijuana as San Francisco is from San Jose. The TJs went up against a band called the Kings and lost. I thought they were ripped off. But I started to see that other bands were invested in this same sort of blues sound and that other guys could play guitar really well, too. It was all eye-opening.

Tony used to get pissed off about it. “When are they going to let you play, man?”

“At least they let me go with them in the car to the dances and gigs that they do,” I’d say.

“Javier should invite you to play.”

“Well, it’s his band, and they only have so much time to play.” I made excuses for him because I wanted to hang around and learn as much as I could—plus I was getting to know the scene. Hanging with Javier opened a door to parts of Tijuana that I had never seen with my dad.

Tijuana was not Mexico City. Mexico City was international, and everyone there spoke Spanish. The music there came from Mexico, Central America, and South America—lots of it from Cuba. Tijuana was more about American influences, and everyone spoke some English or at least Spanglish. At the start of the 1960s, Tijuana was a rock-and-roll town.

You could find it all on Avenida Revolución. On the north end, close to the border, were the hoity-toity clubs, like the Oasis and the Shangri-La. That’s where you went for dinner and a sophisticated, Modern Jazz Quartet feel with piano and vibes, that sort of thing. Or Mike’s Bar, which had dancing to live music. The bands there had to know how to play all the latest dances, including “Peppermint Twist,” which was pretty killer. I remember when that came out in ’61. They called it a twist but it was really a shuffle, and man, Joey Dee & the Starliters could play the hell out of shuffles.

Further south on Revolución things got grungier. That’s where the strip clubs were, like the Aloha Club and El Convoy, where the TJs and other bands played and where I ended up playing. It was a
little place with a bar to the right when you enter, a place for tables and chairs in the middle of the floor and under a small balcony, and a stage all the way in the back, where the band played. The girls danced right in front of the stage, then circulated among the customers, trying to get them to buy drinks and get drunk. It was dingy and dark and a bit smelly, but it was better than that joint with the
norteño
music that I couldn’t stand.

It would be one hour of music, an hour of strippers—like that, all night long, but it was never really about the music. The customers were there to get laid, and they were too busy doing that to pay much attention to the band and make any stupid requests. It was the band’s job to keep the party going and the customers drinking.

People began to hear that I could play. I sat in a few times with Javier and the TJs at El Convoy and started to meet other musicians and bands who played there, like the Strangers.

The leader of the Strangers was Manuel Delgadillo—he owned all the band’s instruments, so he would decide who played what, and of course he was playing lead. At one point he needed a bass player, and he asked me if I wanted to give it a try. I already knew how to play violin, which also has four strings, so I was ready to do that. It was this cheap Kay bass, but I enjoyed it and was getting good at it. Then we had our first gig—it was either the Aloha Club or Mike’s Bar—but we never got paid. My first real professional gig, and we got ripped off!

I continued to rehearse with the Strangers anyway, but every time we did someone would tell me that I played too many notes for a bass player—I was beating up Manuel! He decided to let me start playing guitar, and we kept rehearsing. Meanwhile, I was sitting in more at El Convoy, playing with their house band—not the TJs—and I started to get good at it. The first few times I got up to play, I was so nervous. I was so concerned with playing everything right that I couldn’t look at the people or anything else, really. My eyes couldn’t leave my fingers; I was busy making sure they were in the right position and on the right portion of the neck. I still do that a lot—focus more on what I’m doing than on the audience.

I wish I could tell you exactly when I played my first full gig on guitar, what I played, and how I felt—the one thing I remember is that I was allowed to play the club’s guitar, which was some kind of solid electric, which was better than the big hollow-body my dad had gotten me.

I also do remember clearly that not long after that I ran into Javier on the street. He told me he was leaving El Convoy, moving to a better gig at the Club Latino Americano, and did I want to go with him and play bass? What could I say? The TJs were the first band I wanted to play with, so I said okay. I showed up and went back to bass and was doing well.

The next thing I knew, the manager of El Convoy, whom we called Manolete, found me on the street. (The original Manolete, the John Coltrane of bullfighters, was gored to death by a bull. He had a big hooked nose, and so did the manager.) Manolete said, “You need to get off that bandstand and get back to the Strangers right now or you’ll never work on Avenida Revolución again.”

Whoa. He was a big guy, and I was this scrawny little thing, fourteen years old. He also didn’t like Javier all that much. Did I want to be part of that? Also, Javier’s band had its own thing going on. They were the TJs wherever they played. Being in the house band at El Convoy meant you had one place you
would
play—which also meant you had a home.

I thought about it for a minute. Javier’s gig was once a week, and El Convoy was almost every day. The job with Javier didn’t pay as much—and I wanted to play guitar. So I put down the bass, left Javier, and went back to El Convoy. I was already making my own career decisions—not that it felt that way at the time. For me, it was just practical and it made sense. I needed the work, and I needed to eat. My loyalty to friends was not going to feed me. But man, Javier was disappointed. He didn’t yell or anything; he just fixed me with a look, as if I were Benedict Arnold. That was it for Javier and me for a long, long time.

The El Convoy house band was basically a shuffle band, playing blues changes and three-chord songs like “Green Onions,” “Hide
Away,” and “Think” by the Royals—not the later James Brown version. And
definitely
“La Bamba.” At that time, Ritchie Valens in Tijuana was like Bob Marley was later in Jamaica. He was the dude—a cholo Mexican. He was the only hero we had at the time—everyone knew Valens was short for Valenzuela.

Within months I could tell I was getting better, and I started to get confidence. I could tell because I’d see other kids my age who were also picking up the guitar, and they didn’t know how to make heads or tails out of it. I also started to figure out the different things you can do on the instrument. You can play the melody, which is the lead; the chords—the rhythm; and the bass line. Once you get all that down, that’s all you really need to know. Then you have to just work at it again and again until it becomes part of you. Maybe it was because I could do so many things with the guitar that I never felt like singing. But even when I was playing violin, singing was never my thing.

I could hear I was getting better, but I wasn’t getting any words of encouragement from anyone, really—not in those places in Tijuana where I was playing. Everybody was more into chicks or drinking or whatever they were into. I just had to say those words to myself. I would take a break from my gigs and walk around to some of the other places to hear them playing—sometimes they’d let me in, and sometimes I had to just stand outside and listen and pick up stuff. I got really good, because that’s all I did. That was my schooling.

All these clubs had some bands with some badass guitar players. There was one guy who was a terror: we called him Liebre Chica—Little Jackrabbit. He played with a ring pick on his thumb, like a country and western player, and had an incredible vocabulary, somewhere between B. B. King and a more jazzy sound. He would have had no problem dealing with Javier, and there was a lot of rivalry going on then! There was another guy, a Filipino, who would come around on a motorcycle with his Stratocaster strapped to his back. He was dealing speed and kept his stuff in the headlamp, which didn’t work—he’d just unscrew that thing and put all
the drugs in there when he had to cross the border. He could really play, and I remember he was a little bit more giving than other guitarists. He taught me the chords to “Georgia on My Mind,” “Summertime,” tunes like that.

I’ll never forget the first strip club I went into. I was just fourteen and hanging with Jaime—he was a drummer who had these gorgeous sisters who had been in movies in Mexico City. I had done a gig with him, and he owed me money, so he said, “Come on; I need to pick up some money at the Aloha, and I can pay you.” This was at three in the afternoon, so I went from bright sunshine into what seemed like pitch-black. While my eyes slowly adjusted, I heard the drums going
Bah-ba-bah, bah-ba-bah
and the saxophone doing that snake-dance thing—I’m telling you, to this day, when I hear Thelonious Monk or anyone doing “Bye-Ya” I think about the music they played in those strip clubs in Tijuana. I’m sure Monk was thinking about that kind of beat when he wrote it.

Then I saw the stripper onstage. This was the first time I had seen a woman totally naked. She had tassels on her nipples, and she was making them twirl—first one direction, then the other, then in opposite directions, clockwise
and
counterclockwise. That was talent—four different ways! I’m thinking, “How does she do that?” and I just stood there. She saw me and how young I was, and she started laughing, then everybody saw me and started laughing, too. She grabbed one of her breasts and pointed it at me. “Come here, little boy. You look like you need some milk; you’re just so skinny.” Can you imagine? My first time in a strip joint, and I was being called out for staring.

I learned a lot from watching strippers and listening to how the drummers would support them—do a roll when she swings those tassels. Crash the cymbal when she throws a hip or does a kick. You had to have it together, because some of those strippers were straight from the country and they needed help, otherwise they’d look stupid. If they didn’t get a steady beat to dance to, they’d pick up a shoe and throw it—and they didn’t miss.

These were tough women. Not all of them were dancers, but
many were
ficheras,
hookers. They didn’t do the deed at El Convoy, though—there were no rooms there for that. They would try to take the guy home or to a hotel and make some cash that way, and they were there to make money any way they could. While the band would play, the strippers would wander through the club, go up to some guy who just walked in, and say, “Want to buy me a drink?”

“Sure,” he’d say. She would ask for a drink and a Coke, then pour the drink into the Coke while he wasn’t looking and order another one, and another. Keep milking it till the customer had to pay the big tab. If you drank that Coke, you’d pass out after one sip! Every time she ordered another drink, she got a
ficha,
a little chit—which is kind of funny, because
fichera
is the word for “prostitute.” Anyway, she’d cash them all in at the end of the night and get paid a little extra. Sometimes that’s all the money they made.

People think I played behind the strippers, but I never did when they stripped. That was mostly the job of the drummers, to do a rhythm thing that worked with their moves. I played when everyone would get up and dance together.

But playing in that kind of environment… I remember some guys would bring their girlfriends there, start to drink, and get distracted by these beautiful strippers. Then their dates would get jealous. We could tell from the stage what was going on—the tension, the emotion. We’d decide to have a little fun and start playing a tune with just the right breaks and heavy rhythm—
ba-da-bum, ba-da-bum
—and next thing you know the girlfriend would be up and taking off her shirt, then her brassiere. Two or three times we were able to make that happen—actually strip someone who wasn’t a stripper. That’s when I realized that a guitar could talk to a woman.