The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (14 page)

Nobody said anything—you could hear the food falling off the forks of all the rich people sitting there. Jerry was not happy about my talking about his father, Pat, that way. Knowing Clint’s politics, I don’t think he would have wanted to hang with me that night.

Huerta and Chavez were the union organizers who led the Mexican migrant workers—people like my brother Tony. They formed the United Farm Workers and fought for their rights in the 1960s and got no support from Pat Brown or from Reagan. In the ’70s Jerry Brown supported Chavez and Huerta, so the UFW helped him get elected. Jerry Brown was back as governor, but he had recently vetoed an important UFW bill—just as Schwarzenegger had done four times before!

In 1962, when I was playing in Tijuana on my own, Tony was breaking his back in Stockton—exploited and underpaid. Almost fifty years later, I was standing in Sacramento, just an hour north of those fields, getting an award for being a great Californian. But the struggle was still going on. That’s why I said
“Sí se puede”
that night, which technically means “Yes, I can”—and basically means “We shall overcome.” Huerta came up with that, and Chavez used to say it all the time. I had to say something.

The Day of the Dead in 1962 was the first night of a long year on my own playing blues and R & B at El Convoy. By then the club had bought its own Stratocaster, so I could play that, and I had my Melody Maker. They were still calling me El Apache. I could tell I was getting better on the guitar night by night.

I learned many things during my year alone in Tijuana—songs, solos, chord changes. I learned what I had to do to stay in
tune, because I don’t want to have to worry about that when I’m playing. I learned how to pull and stretch the strings before I put them on the guitar—one, two, three, four, five, six times. Then tune them, then do it again, for three or four rounds. You have to bend them until there’s nothing to bend anymore. You have to tell them who’s boss.

I started to learn about phrasing, mainly from singers. Even today, as much as I love T-Bone or Charlie or Wes or Jimi, it’s singers more than other guitar players that I like to hang with. If I want to practice or just get reacquainted with my instrument, I think it’s best to hang with a singer. I don’t sing, but I will put on music by Michael Jackson and I’ll be right there with his phrasing, like a guided missile—I’ll do the same thing with Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin. Or Dionne Warwick’s first records—my God. So many great guitarists play a lot of chords and have great rhythm chops, and I can do that. But instead of worrying about chords or harmony, I’ll just try matching Dionne’s vocal lines, note for note.

I began to really learn about soloing and respecting the song and the melody. I think too many guitar players forget that and get stuck in the guitar itself, playing lots of notes—“noodling,” I call it. It’s like they’re playing too fast to pay attention. Some people thrive on that, but sooner or later the bird’s got to land in the mist and you got to play the melody. Imagine if the song was a woman—what would she say? Did you forget me? Are you mad at me?

I still hear what Miles Davis used to say about musicians who play too much: “You know, the less you play the more you get paid for each note.”

A few months after I got there, Tarzan and I got kicked out of the motel room, and I moved back to our old neighborhood to live with a friend of my mother’s who didn’t mind me coming home in the mornings. My mom had left some furniture there, so that helped pay for me to stay with the woman. I got used to the rhythm of late
nights again, sleeping through most of the day, visiting the beaches, and reading hot-rod magazines and
MAD
when I wasn’t playing.

I knew it was not healthy living. It’s not that I was smoking weed or taking anything hard. I was just having so much fun that life became a big, fast blur. But I was drinking a lot, and it started catching up to me quickly. Once, I found myself waking up in the street in the morning, still drunk and seeing some lady taking her child to church. She pointed at me and told her kid, “See? If you don’t listen to me you’re going to wind up like him.” I could hear my mom’s voice telling me that I was definitely not on the same page as she was—that I needed to come home or I would be lost.

In my mind I wasn’t just playing the blues—I was living the blues. Even then I had the same notion: the blues is not a hobby, and it’s not a profession. The best way to say it is: the blues is a deep commitment to a way of life. There were a few other bands with that kind of commitment—but only a few. I saw the Butterfield Blues Band with Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop in ’67—they had that Chicago sound
down
. In ’69, I saw Peter Green with the original Fleetwood Mac, the white British dudes who zeroed in on two things—B. B. King and Elmore James—and they played the shit out of that music. They had the sound of B. B.’s
Live at the Regal
album down almost as good as B. B. did! They lived the blues. They weren’t wearing it like a suit. That’s all they wanted to do; that’s all they did, and they did it so well. I couldn’t believe they were white. Same thing with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. They had that Louisiana sound and those Texas shuffles down.

I think the most idiotic question anyone can ask is whether white people can play the blues. If you need to know, go listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan at his peak. Playing the blues is not about what part of town you come from or what country. No one race owns it. Some people might think they do, but they don’t. I can hear blues in the music of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. Flamenco players have got the blues. The Moors singing to Allah have got the
blues. The Hebrew people in their prayers have got the blues. The blues is like chicken soup—it wasn’t invented in America, and we don’t own the recipe.

By the summer of 1963, I was getting older, almost sixteen. Things were changing on Avenida Revolución. Gene Ross disappeared—I didn’t see him again after I got back, didn’t even hear about him until he got killed. Javier Bátiz left Tijuana for the big city and the big time—for him, that meant Mexico City. During this time I think my family had been trying to reach me for a while, wanting me to come back to San Francisco. I don’t remember my mom sending any letters, but maybe she did and I didn’t see them. Or maybe I chose not to remember.

I did not want to go back. Years later my mom told me, “When you were in Tijuana I would get so worried. I used to tell your dad, ‘We have to go get Carlos,’ but he would just roll over to the other side of the bed and say, ‘Nah—let him grow balls and become a man. You can’t hide him with your skirt all the time.’ ” My dad was probably like most men at that time.

My mom persisted. Later I learned that when Tony was fired from one of the jobs he had, it gave her the perfect excuse to come down to Tijuana with him to find me—but I got word that they were coming and hid from them. They went back, but they returned a few weeks later, in late August, when I was playing at El Convoy. This time I had to face them.

Everyone remembers what happened a different way. Tony told me that he drove down with my mom and a friend. They went to El Convoy and asked the bouncer whether I was inside. “You mean El Apache? Yeah—he’s passed out over there. Get him out of here; he’s going to die.” He meant that the nightclub lifestyle was going to be the end of me. So they carried me to the car and drove me home.

My dad remembered my being a little more awake and resistant. He told a newspaper in 1971 that he came down with my mom,
Tony, and someone else, found me at El Convoy, and they used all their powers of family persuasion to get me to go home. “We did not force him… we convinced him by crying.”

The way I remember it was that my mom, Tony, and his friend Lalo suddenly were there, and I fought going back till the end. My mom knew what she had to do when she came to El Convoy. She told Tony to stand by the back door while she came in through the front. I was in the middle of a set, but as soon as I saw her standing there—
pow!
I was off like a firecracker, out the back door, where Tony was waiting. He grabbed me and lifted me off my feet while they were still moving. They basically kidnapped me—snatched my ass, put me in the car, and brought me back to San Francisco.

The one thing we all agree on is that I was silent all the way back in the car—just fuming. We also agree that all I had with me was my Melody Maker and amplifier—nothing else.

But really, what else did I need?

This band played at the Cow Palace and opened up at the Fillmore. With Danny Haro and Gus Rodriguez, 1964.

Music and sex—those were the two things that made the most sense to me when I was in school, growing up. That’s what I wanted to invest my time and spirit in. The guitar is shaped like a woman, with a neck you hold and a body you hug against yourself. You can touch your fingers up and down the strings, but you have to be delicate and know what you’re doing, especially if the guitar is electric.

If I had been a saxophone player, all day long I would have wanted to hear the sound of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri. I’d need to hear a certain tone in order to dip myself in it. The saxophone has a very masculine sound.

The tone of the electric guitar is different—no two ways about it. It gets a feminine sound—unless someone’s playing like Wes Montgomery. To me, Wes had a fatherly sound, gentle and wise, like Nat King Cole’s voice. But when a guitar player wants to get sassy and nasty, he just has to copy the way women walk and talk by bending the notes on the electric guitar.

I believe my guitar sound is feminine—it has a melodic, female sound no matter how much bass I put into it. It’s the nature of who I am—my fingerprint. I’ve accepted that. I think it’s a powerful thing to express the wisdom of women as a woman herself would, with female overtones.

It started with my father teaching me how to get inside a note, to penetrate it so deeply that you can’t help but leave your fingerprints on it. You can tell it’s working if you are reaching your audience. If you don’t feel it, your audience won’t, either. With the violin I could do that when I was playing “Ave Maria” in church. I could tell people could feel the hug I put into a note. I mean, everybody needs a hug. I learned about legato and long notes and knowing when to use sustain and when to hit an endearing hug note. But with a guitar I felt I could go further. I mean, there are hugs and then there’s someone sticking a tongue in your ear. That’s what I wanted to be able to do—the guitar helped me get there.

B
eing back in San Francisco was rough for a while. I made good on my promise from the year before—I locked myself in my room and refused to eat. When I finally came out, my mom had had enough. She got out another twenty-dollar bill and said, “You can go back, but this time we won’t be coming to get you.” I took the money and walked up to Mission Street, but then I thought about it. Then I thought about it again. I gave the money back and said, “No. I’ll stay.” That’s the only time I felt like that. All the other times, the excitement of the music and learning was more important to me than an obligation to family. That’s the honest truth.

My dad tried to make me feel better. “Son, in this country you
can have a good future. There are a lot of good musicians here.” I knew that. By then, all my heroes were American—B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters. I was dying to hear them and to meet them. But I would have to wait—first it was back to junior high. Man, I was not ready for that—not after a year on Avenida Revolución. I was still being held back in my grade, so by then I was almost sixteen, and I felt even older than the other kids.

It was good that I had my friends—Linda, Yvonne, Danny, and Gus—to hang with and play music with. They helped me keep it together, kept me wanting to stay in America. They accepted my being back like it was nothing special. “Okay—you disappeared last year, but now you’re back. No problem.”

But school? My mind was always somewhere else. The one thing I remember I liked to do was draw. Linda tells me she liked to sit next to me in class and watch while I drew big, complicated cartoons—action-hero stuff. I was really getting into comic books at the time. Then, not long after I returned—just a few weeks—I remember that Kennedy was shot and the whole world was in shock. Everything came to a stop. I knew then that this country was not what it seemed like in the movies, but I didn’t realize it could be so nasty and ugly. Back then I just accepted the news. But what a brutal thing to come back to in America.

We were then living in an apartment on 14th Street, in the middle of the Mission—the third place we lived in San Francisco. It was still a small place, but the apartment was bigger and better than the one on Juri Street, and the neighborhood was a step up and more mixed. Things were settling down there, but sometimes it could get tense fast, even with my brother Tony. On the one hand, I know he was extremely proud of me and would brag about me: “Oh, you have to see my brother. He’s going to come up here from Tijuana and show you. The shit these guys are playing—that ain’t nothing, man.” On the other hand, he was the one who put me in the car and wouldn’t let me stay in Tijuana. And when he would
drink he could get mean and piss me off. Usually I would just take a deep breath and look at the floor, because he could really fight.

One time Tony and his buddies had been out drinking, and he came home, wanting to sleep, but my sisters and I were watching the end of some vampire movie. “Turn off the TV,” he said, and then he just turned it off. Laura got up and turned it back on. “Hey, it’s almost over. What’s your problem?” Tony went back to the TV, but being drunk, he knocked my sister down. I couldn’t stand for that. I punched him right in the eye and grabbed a chair to defend myself because I knew I would have to. The whole house stopped—my mother was just watching this go down. Tony kept looking at me, not doing anything, and I’m thinking I’m an idiot because we were sharing a bed at that time! What was I going to do, sleep on the very edge of the bed?

By the time he had a steak on his eye, we had all calmed down. But Tony wasn’t happy. “I understand what you did—you were protecting your sister. But don’t you ever hit me again, man.”

I didn’t even think of doing that, but just a few weeks later Tony came into our room with his buddies. They’d been drinking again. One of them—it was Lalo, actually—sat on the bed, right on top of my guitar—
snap!
Broke it right in two. It was the Melody Maker, but still I was mad and ready to fight again. Somehow they calmed me down.

That happened on a Friday. The next Monday when I got home from school, Tony had bought me a brand-new guitar and an amplifier. It was a beautiful white Gibson SG with a whammy bar. Gibson had only been making them since ’61. Man, I grabbed that guitar—started smelling it, touching it. I couldn’t believe it. That was the same kind of Gibson I played at Woodstock—an SG, but a later model and a different color.

Tony was my hero again. My eyes were tearing up. Then he said, “Hey, Carlos, I just made the down payment. You’re going to have to pay for the rest of it. I’ll take you to the place where I’m working so you can learn how to wash dishes and earn the money to pay it off.”

That’s how I began my career as a dishwasher at the Tic Tock Drive In. I worked at the one at 3rd and King, just down the block from our first place in San Francisco. There were five of those diners across the city—they were popular and stayed open late, and eventually a bunch of us ended up working at one or another of them—Tony, Irma, Jorge, and I. Some of us also worked shifts at La Cumbre, the taqueria on Valencia Street that Danny Haro’s family owned. My mom was working less—she was busy being a mom—and my dad had his regular gig at the Latin American Club. The rest of us who were still in school and old enough had our routines—wake up early, go make tortillas at La Cumbre, go to school, come home, eat, then go to work at Tic Tock.

Tic Tock was owned by white guys, and the funny thing is that mostly they treated us better than the owners of the Mexican restaurants we could have worked in, such as La Palma. And it was definitely better financially than pressing tortillas—that’s why Tony started working there.

Not that it was perfect. I remember one day when Julio, one of the managers, came into the kitchen. It was a Wednesday—banana boat day—which meant that huge numbers of people were down at the docks, right near the diner, unloading bananas for the whole city, and the place was packed. But somehow the driver who was supposed to deliver the doughnuts that morning did not show up. Again.

Julio walked up to me. “Carlos! Tell your brother they didn’t bring us doughnuts again and we need them for the coffee rush. Can he go and pick some up right away?” This is all in English. Tony doesn’t speak English that well, but he definitely understood. He didn’t blink. He kept washing dishes and answered in Spanish, telling me to tell Julio that he’d gone for the doughnuts two weeks ago as a favor, that it’s not required of him by his union, and that he never got reimbursed for the gasoline he used last time.

“What’d he say?” So I had to translate, and by this time all the other workers had stopped what they were doing and were watching
us. “Really? Is he sure?” Then my brother said,
“Dile que se vaya a la chingada,”
and told me I had to translate it word for word.

“Yeah. He also says to go fuck yourself.”

I waited for something to happen, but nothing did. Tony taught me that day that it was important not just to be a good worker but also to know your value. Know your power, and have brutal integrity if necessary. There were three of us working there then—Tony, Irma, and I. If Julio had fired one of us, all three of us would have walked. Doughnuts or no doughnuts, the Santanas did a good job for them.

There were other lessons I learned at Tic Tock. There was a bad-looking pimp who would show up late at night, dressed in a pin-striped suit and panama hat. He always had the finest women with him, drove a Cadillac, the whole thing. When he walked in all the workers would stop and stare. He had a routine—first he’d sit his ladies down, make sure they had menus, then go put some money in the jukebox.

One night he came in and did his thing, and a redneck trucker walked in with his radio blaring a Giants game—“Here’s the windup, and the pitch…” Loud, loud, loud. The pimp went up to him and said politely, “Excuse me—I just put some songs on. I wonder if you can turn the radio down a little.” The guy looked at him and just turned it up louder.

We’re all stopped now. The whole diner is watching, thinking this is going to be a fight. The pimp—real smooth and quick—grabbed the radio, threw it hard onto the floor, then stomped on it with the heel of his shoe. It was all smashed to pieces. Then he reached into his pocket—we were expecting a gun or a knife—and pulled out a big wad of cash. He counted out one, two, three bills and put them in front of the trucker. “This covers it, man. I know you’re going to let me listen to my music now.” That guy’s face was red. He knew better than to say anything.

Tic Tock was where I first learned about American food—hamburgers, french fries, meat loaf, cold turkey sandwiches. My
favorite was their breaded cutlet and mashed potatoes—I ate that all the time, and I still love it. When we’re touring these days and have a night off in Austria or Germany, everyone knows I’ll be ordering Wiener schnitzel, even if it’s not on the menu.

The most beautiful thing about Tic Tock was the jukebox. I put so much money in that thing just to make it bearable while washing those big pots and pans full of gravy and bleaching the floors with scalding water and Clorox. That jukebox helped me stay sane those first few years I worked there. It had Jackie Wilson, Chuck Jackson, Lou Rawls, Solomon Burke, the Drifters. Also those first Motown stars—Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye. It was different from Tijuana—more sophisticated and soulful. Some of it had that gospel feel, like Solomon Burke had. The Impressions singing “Say it’s all right… It’s all right… It’s all right, have a good time, ’cause it’s all right.”

Stan Getz and Cal Tjader were on that jukebox—my first real taste of jazz. There was also Latin music with Afro-Cuban rhythms—Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría. “Watermelon Man”!

San Francisco was like that jukebox. Actually, San Francisco
was
a jukebox. The Mission was full of nightclubs, and I had friends there who had stereos. And San Francisco in general had lots of clubs and radio stations playing a variety of styles. KSOL—“Kay-Soul”—was one of the city’s black stations. That’s where Sly Stone started as a DJ. “Hey, you groovy cats…” He had his own thing that early. I heard a wild jazz organ on KSOL late at night—someone named Chris Colombo doing “Summertime” and just killing it. KSOL introduced me to Wes Montgomery, Bola Sete, Kenny Burrell, and Jimmy Smith. They played Vince Guaraldi a
lot
.

Tijuana was where I heard songs like “Stand by Me”—simple R & B tunes. In San Francisco I was suddenly hearing Johnny Mathis singing “Misty” and Lee Morgan playing “The Sidewinder”—a new level of hip. Basically, the city was a cornucopia of music—more than I had ever expected. I started hearing about clubs I would later try to sneak into—like the Jazz Workshop, all the way down Van Ness and over on Broadway, near the North Beach area.
Just a few doors down was El Matador, where I would hear Cal Tjader and Vince Guaraldi for the first time and later Gábor Szabó. El Matador was where I heard the amazing Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete for the first and only time. He was a phenomenon—I regret that I never got a chance to spend time with him and really hang out. I started hearing about the Cow Palace, down in Daly City on Geneva Avenue, where all the big shows were.