The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (9 page)

I was still working out what I liked, but I knew what I didn’t like, and a lot of it was stuff I heard at home. My mother liked big bands such as Duke Ellington’s—she
really
liked Duke, I later
found out—and guys like Lawrence Welk. When she played that at home, I’d say, “I’ll be outside, Mom.” When she finished with the record player, then Elvis Presley ruled. My sisters would jump on the turntable with their Elvis records, then jump on me when I tried to leave. They would tackle me like they were football players and pin me to the floor, all four of them. The more I struggled, the more they’d tease me and scratch me. Part of me would be in agony, and the other part would be laughing, and my mom would hear us and come in.
“Qué pasó?” Whoosh
—they got off me. “What do you mean, ‘Nothing’? What happened to your neck, Carlos?”

Of course none of my sisters remembers anything about this at all. But to this day you won’t find any Elvis Presley records in my house.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Elvis. I was just starting to know the music that Elvis liked—Ray Charles, Little Richard. Later on, after I started on guitar, I would discover B. B. King, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters—all the string benders. But back then, I was just opening the door for the first time, checking out this
Americano
music, and leaning in the direction of early rock and roll and rhythm and blues. I didn’t know enough to have a name for it yet—but my dad did.

“You want to play that freakin’ pachuco shit?” Calling it pachuco was like calling it delinquent music, and my dad was not happy about it. I was around twelve at the time. He had made me play with him at a bar in the worst part of Tijuana—it was like tourist hell. The tables were all black from cigarette burns and who knows what else; there were no ashtrays. There was a cop who was putting his hands all over a woman, and I could see that she couldn’t protest because she’d end up in jail. The whole place smelled like piss and puke—worse than Bourbon Street in New Orleans. They expected us to play
norteño
music—Mexican
rancheras
with polka beats that they play in border towns and across the border.

Back then I thought that this type of music was meant to drink beer and tequila to, to feel sorry for yourself to. I just never connected with it. It felt like wearing somebody else’s shoes. It wouldn’t
go inside my body. Years later I would look back and say I hated mariachi music, but it really wasn’t about that—it was about my feelings. It was because this kind of music reminded me of painful, hard times with Mom and Dad, and it took me a while to look at it differently.

There’s so much that comes from Mexico that I love now that I know more about it—like those big mariachi orchestras with one hundred strings. Incredible. Or
son jarocho,
which is like flamenco but much funkier—just amazing. Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba” is a
jarocho
rhythm brought into a rock-and-roll format. Then there are groups like Los Muñequitos de Matanzas—the little dolls. They’re Cuban, but their lyrics could be totally Mexican: “I’m in the corner at this cantina / Reminiscing about the one that got away / And I wait impatiently for my tequila.” Those guys are still around and huge in Mexico.

I was too young to pick up any of this at the time. I was more focused on practicing my violin lessons for my dad. But I learned later to be proud of all the great music that came from Mexico, or that came through it. There’s so much cross-pollination of music there—from Europe, Cuba, even Africa. But Cuba especially: the
son, danzóns,
boleros, rumbas. Back in the 1950s Mexico City was like Miami is today: the city where musicians from Central America and South America came to record and go viral. The Havana connection was tight—we had Toña La Negra, the singer Pedro Vargas, and Pérez Prado, of course, who was the most popular one. Mexico City had the studios and radio stations, and they had movies that needed sound tracks, and it was all on the doorstep to the United States.

I was just ten when I first saw the influence of Mexico north of the border. I remember my dad rented me a mariachi suit—size small, but still too big. Then he took me with his band to play in Pasadena, which was around a three-hour drive from Tijuana back in 1957. This was the night before the Rose Parade, so the whole town felt like it was ready for a party. We performed for Leo Carillo, the Mexican American actor who played Pancho in
The Cisco Kid
on TV. He had this big, lavish house—it was the first time I had been in a place like that. It felt like we were in a Doris Day movie!

Leo was very proud of his heritage—in fact, all Mexican people are really proud of their mariachi and their food and the tequila. I remember Leo was a very happy and gracious person. He had all this Mexican food spread out, and we played all night for his American friends. The whole thing felt good—Dad was proud of me.

But this joint on the other side of Tijuana was something else. It wasn’t just the music—it was the whole scene, because in fact we were playing in a place where the style of music didn’t even matter. Nobody was listening anyway. Most of the people were too drunk or too busy working their own hustle.

I had to answer my dad straight right then, man to man, when he started picking on my taste in music. “Look at where we are and what we’re playing. Could the music I like be worse?” He looked at me and didn’t try to hit or spank me. But he got really angry. “Leave. Go. You always have to have the last word. You are just like your mother.”

He wasn’t wrong. I’ve got my mom’s fire, and it still gets me in trouble. Sometimes I don’t know how to hold my tongue or my temper. Poor Mom—I’m blaming her. My dad was completely the opposite. I never really saw my dad lose it with me—get really angry or anything like that. Later on I realized my dad was an example of what I could work toward—catching myself if I felt I was going to snap. From him I tried to learn to be more considerate and more understanding and trusting. I can tell you for me it’s still an every-day thing. I think one of the truest things I ever heard was Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s observation that we are all a work in progress, a masterpiece of joy still being created.

My dad was the one with taste
and
practicality. He loved his Agustín Lara and European music, but he played mariachi music to feed us. He never said he didn’t like mariachi or
norteño
music, but I don’t think he could afford to, and I don’t think Tijuana was meeting our needs anyway. My mother was pushing him to find better opportunities—pushing him north again, just as she had
done in Autlán. The next thing I knew he began to go to San Francisco to play. I remember going with him when he went to catch a bus across the border and saying good-bye.

Then he was gone, and I stopped playing the violin. I figured, “My dad’s not here to torture me, to make me play music that I don’t like.” I also never really liked the tone I got on the thing—it sounded corny, like some Jack Benny stuff. Many years later I was walking in Philadelphia, checking out a street festival with my friend Hal Miller, and I heard this young violinist. She could not have been older than fifteen, and she had the most amazing tone. Just lovely. I couldn’t move. I remember thinking if I had been able to get that kind of sound out of that instrument, there’d be one less electric guitarist playing today.

So I decided to give music a rest and play hide-and-seek with Rosa and just be normal with the rest of the kids. Of course my mother was not going to let that happen. She always had ideas—making plans, doing something. She was about to do something that would change my life.

The Strangers, with me third from right, 1962.

Music is a force that can divide generations, fathers and sons. It can also bring them together. My son, Salvador, was sixteen, and we were in the car—he was already in that mode when parents are the most uncool people, and so is their music. I was listening to John Coltrane’s
Live in Seattle,
recorded in 1965 with Pharoah Sanders—very challenging music. Salvador was looking out the window, real quiet. That’s one thing Sal and my little brother, Jorge, have in common—you can tell they chew on things for a while before they open their mouths. They think and are considerate of other people’s feelings. I could still learn from that. I say what comes into my mind, and sometimes I’ll read an interview in which I’ve gone and said something about another musician,
and I’ll say, “Damn, that was a little harsh.” Later on I’ll have to apologize to someone.

The music started to get real far-out, and suddenly Sal turned to me and said, “Hey, Coltrane’s playing Stravinsky right now. You know, Dad, you can’t just bug out and play like that. You got to know what you’re doing.” I was chuckling inside, but I kept cool. I know that music is not easy to listen to. But he was listening hard, and he had an opinion about what he heard. I respected that.

Not long after that, we were in the car and listening to—what else?—Coltrane, and again Salvador got quiet. Then he said, “You know, for a long time I thought that you and your friends Hal Miller, Tony Kilbert, and Gary Rashid were all a bunch of music snobs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I thought you guys were overly opinionated about music. But I was in the car with my sisters, and they started playing their music, and I felt just like you guys. I was thinking, “Oh, my God, do we have to listen to the Spice Girls over and over?”

I had to smile again—that made me think right away about my sisters and their Elvis records. It gave me great delight that Sal was thirsty for something more everlasting, and then it made me think of how we don’t connect with certain music when we’re young. Then we grow up and think again about the music we used to turn our noses up at. Like me and Mexican music.

I remember around the time I was disengaging from my dad and mariachi music, American singers were coming down to Mexico for material. Big stars such as Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole did whole albums based on Mexican music—even Charlie Parker did that
South of the Border
album. I can remember when everybody was singing “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás”—which is a song written by Osvaldo Farrés, who’s Cuban, but it was made famous in Mexico. And of course “Bésame Mucho,” which could be the most recorded song of all time next to “La Bamba.” A few years later, the Champs did “Tequila,” and after that, Herb Alpert did “The Lonely Bull” with the Tijuana Brass.

It’s funny, because at the time all those guys were crossing the border and coming south, I was starting to go the other way. It all started with
the songs I heard on the radio. It didn’t matter if I was Mexican or American, black, white, or purple. I could only hear one thing—the blues.

I
n the summer of 1961 my dad had been up in San Francisco for almost a year, and my mom could see I had lost interest in playing music. She also knew she couldn’t talk me back into it. But she was smart, and she wasn’t going to let all those lessons and all that playing go to waste. One afternoon she grabbed me and said, “
Mijo,
come here—we’re going to the park.”

“What? Where?”

“You’ll see.” Oh, okay. Here we go again.

I could hear the music even before we got there. It was a boogie kind of beat and echo, echo, echo—just bouncing off the buildings and trees. We walked into the park, and I saw a band doing its thing with funky amplifiers and electric guitars and a booming bass sound. They were playing a riff-blues number like “Last Night,” and then this one guitarist stepped up, and he’s wearing khakis, pressed sharp as a knife, and his hair was piled up in a big mop and cut close on the sides, like Little Richard’s. Real pachuco style, just like my dad hated. The guy starts soloing, and he’s got a very distinctive twang on his guitar that was popular back then—like Duane Eddy or Lonnie Mack.

It was like a UFO had landed in my backyard. I had seen guitarists on TV before, but not like this—hearing it live made the hair on my arms go straight up. This was so different—to see it happening in front of me, to see someone snapping the strings and feel the sound going through you. To see how the music was made. I’m sure my mom could see the effect on me just by looking at my eyes and my body. I stood there and listened and couldn’t move.

It was Javier Bátiz. He was one of the few guys playing that early style of rock and roll in Mexico at the time. He had come up playing with a black American singer and piano player from New Orleans named Gene Ross, who lived in Tijuana. Now he was leading his own group called Los TJs—short for “Tijuanenses.” And it was
pronounced “Tee-Jays,” not “Tay-hotas,” because we all wanted to be in with the in crowd, as American as possible. That group had some of the best players in Tijuana, including Javier’s sister. They called her Baby Bátiz because she sang “Angel Baby” so well.

Javier himself was one of Tijuana’s baddest guitarists, and his home gig was at El Convoy—a dance and strip club on Avenida Revolución. He was an amalgam of the three people he loved most: B. B. King, Little Richard, and Ray Charles. He had it down. But he didn’t sound like a parrot. He had really invested a lot of his own energy and passion into it.

Of course I didn’t know all this about Javier or the other musicians and their styles and fingerprints then. I didn’t even know Javier’s name. Not yet. All this made it more mysterious and attractive to me. What I could see was that it was not just the sound or the look of the band or the way they presented themselves. It was all that together. And I knew that this was not the kind of music that happened in that park too often. I’m not sure how they got the permit to play that loud outdoors, but there they were.

I remember thinking, with all my teenage conviction, “This is what I want to be. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Two things happened right away because of what happened in the park that day. First, I started following Javier around—I became his shadow. I was thirteen at the time; he was only three or four years older than I was, but in my eyes he might as well have been in his early twenties. He wasn’t overly friendly or anything to me, but he let me come and hang out at his place. He lived with his mother, and the first time I went to his place I noticed that everything smelled like glue because he was into model cars. His piano was covered with them! Wow. It was cars and records and guitars and music, and that was this guy’s life—which made him the coolest guy around.

Another thing about Javier was that his mannerisms were so different from anything I had ever seen—it was definitely not mariachi, and it wasn’t pachuco, either. There was nothing Mexican about his thing. It was a black American kind of charisma. He
was a slick dresser, and he had swagger and confidence, even in the way he grabbed the guitar. It all fit with the music he played and the way his guitar sounded. It made a huge impression on this little Mexican kid—I was even wondering what kind of water he was drinking.

But there was a price to pay to be around Javier. Two of the TJs didn’t like me and would try to shoo me away, punch me in the stomach, and pull my hair and my ears, just being bully assholes, and Javier did nothing to stop it. The worst was a saxophone player named Brachi. But he wasn’t going to stop me. In my thirteen-year-old mind, getting my ass kicked by this bully was worth it in order to get the goods. I was the youngest kid there with these older guys. One day I came home all red-eyed from crying, and my mom told Javier that Carlos had an older brother who would kick their asses if the mistreatment didn’t stop. It stopped. I heard years later they found Brachi’s body somewhere on the outskirts of Tijuana—that he made the wrong deal with the wrong people.

Javier’s bass player was nice—he looked like Jughead in the Archie comics—and the guy could really play the instrument, and he turned me on to Jimmy Reed. I remember going to his place, where he had a room with a bed, a dirt floor, and a phonograph. He would smoke a joint, lie on the bed, and put on a Jimmy Reed record, and that voice and harmonica had all the elegance and emotion of Duke Ellington’s music as far as I was concerned. I still feel that way.

The second thing that happened after I heard Javier in the park was that my mom immediately sent a letter to my dad telling him that Carlos found this music that he loves, that he’s following around this musician like a puppy dog, and he wants to learn electric guitar. She asked him to get one for me if he could afford it. I forget if he brought it with him the next time he got back to Tijuana or if he had someone else bring it. It was a big, fat Gibson—a beat-up hollow-body like the ones the jazz guys would play, black with a little yellow in it. I didn’t have a clue what to do. First thing I did was to go out and buy strings for it—nylon strings!

I learned fast after that—that you need steel strings, and that you have to play through an amplifier. I learned what a pickup was. My ears were already trained from playing violin, and I knew how to hold strings against a neck, but this was totally different. Different feel on my fingers; different tuning. I learned a few chords from watching Javier, but it was mostly my dad at the start—and listening to records and the radio, just trying to pick up what I could.

The thing is, I hung out with Javier, but Javier was not really a teacher. It’s been reported that he gave me lessons, but he was not someone who would say, “No; you’re doing that wrong. Play with this finger here and that finger there.” He let me hang around, he turned me on to different songs and the people I needed to know: B. B. King, Ray Charles. He had the albums, and he had the knowledge. But when it came to guitar technique, what he showed me mostly was his back. Really—that’s how he would play, so I couldn’t see what his hands were doing.

Of course years later I found out that making someone learn on his own is a big part of the blues tradition. You don’t want to make it too easy or too accessible. Even my future father-in-law, Saunders King, one of the best R & B guitarists of his generation, didn’t like to show me anything. My chops are my chops—go get your own!

I have been supportive of Javier and have acknowledged him accordingly. He has been a guest in my house. We have hung out together and played together—like when we jammed in Tijuana in 1993. I presented him with a Boogie amplifier and gave him one of my guitars. He now plays a Paul Reed Smith.

But I feel like I have to be careful now not to do things that will perpetuate the idea that some sort of debt is still unpaid. I owe Javier gratitude for turning me on to the electric guitar but not necessarily for showing me how to do it. What I learned about the guitar and about the music I would start out with—the blues—came from a whole school of teachers, some of whom I played with as a teenager and some of whom I got to know from listening to their records over and over.

Once I got turned on to the electric guitar, my whole world started to shift and change. It was like all the energy and conviction that had been spread out among boxing and girls and toys and candy was suddenly focused on just one thing: the electric guitar. It didn’t matter at first if it was just blues or R & B—what mattered was whether there was a guitar.

I started to pick up on guitar music everywhere—on the radio, on the records at Javier’s place—and I began to hear the melodies that went with guitars. Groups like the Ventures caught my ear, though I thought a lot of their stuff sounded like corny surfer music. But they were great players. Also Los Indios Tabajaras, who were as big as Elvis in Mexico. They were this bad two-guitar band from Brazil, and their shtick was posing as Brazilian
Indios
. They sounded like Santo & Johnny unplugged, smooth and precise. I’m sure Santo & Johnny grew from their style—that’s how it sounds to me.

As I said, I was mostly on my own after the few chords my dad showed me. I learned how to dissect a song by playing the record three or four times with the guitar in my hand, going up and down the neck of the guitar till I grabbed the right chord. It was easy after a while—I would focus on one part and then another. First the guitar, then the horns, then the bass. One of the first songs I learned all the parts to was James Brown’s “Night Train.”

I was teaching myself to listen, to figure out how to take a song apart and put it back together, like a mechanic. This is what the piano player, the guitar, the bass, the saxophone is doing. Being a kid, dissecting a song, I could do it for hours. It’s still fun for me. Just the other day I was dissecting the horn parts to Bob Marley’s “Iron Lion Zion.”

The first melody I learned to play all the way through was “Apache,” an instrumental by the Shadows, an English group. I really got that one down and loved it—so much so that it became my nickname for a while.
“Ahí viene El Apache,”
they’d say—here comes El Apache. When I found out there was this western called
Apache
with Burt Lancaster, that made me even prouder.