Alejandro comes back LAMF
Happy 72nd birthday to Austin's ageless rocker
This is an excerpt from “Austin On the Map,” profiles of the musicians who made this city cool to the world. Coming in 2024.
Moments after he stepped off the stage of the Continental Club on a Tuesday night in April 2008, Alejandro Escovedo was set upon by a couple of women young enough to be two of his six daughters.
"That rocked!" one said. “You kicked ass, man,” said the other. A few more well-wishers surrounded Escovedo like he’d just hit a home run, because in the nightclub diamond he just did.
"Look at that," said drummer Hector Munoz, whose association with Escovedo goes back to their time together in 1980s powerhouse True Believers. "It's just like it used to be, only better."
Escovedo's career had never been on an upswing like in 2008, when he signed to Jon Landau Management, which had done pretty well the past 30 or so years with a boardwalk poet named Bruce Springsteen. There was real heat behind the new album Real Animal, produced by glamrock king Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T. Rex), and the single “Always a Friend” was playing on every KGSR in the country.
But the most exciting part of Escovedo's return to glory from a near-fatal illness was what was happening onstage again.
'There's a creature in my body/ There's a creature in my blood/ Don't know how long he's been there/ Or why he's after us.' - “Golden Bear” (Alejandro Escovedo/ Chuck Prophet)
The voice on the phone in June 2003 was weak, weary, yet determined. "I'm gonna get through this," said Escovedo, who had collapsed after a performance in Tempe, Ariz., six weeks earlier. The ravages of hepatitis C, inflamed by Escovedo's continued use of alcohol after being diagnosed in 1996, had caused a physical breakdown. He threw up so much blood it took an emergency transfusion to save his life. An endoscopy revealed that Escovedo's liver was scarred, his abdomen riddled with tumors. He had a hard road of recovery and treatment ahead. "I'm gonna play music again," he said that June in Wimberley. Then a pause of deflation. "But it's never going to be the same."
Although there would be dour, confessional odes to come, Escovedo had to admit that he'd never again be strong enough to shift into the extra gear that used to stir such jubilant chaos after all the cello songs had been put away for the night. He was a boxer who set you up with the jabs, his sensitive boy songs. Then came the haymaker onslaught at the end, putting you on the ropes until you fell in a clump of satisfaction. We like him better when he walks away.
South by Southwest wasn't officially over each year until Escovedo and his band buzz-sawed and screeched their way through a 10-minute version of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that had fans leaping in pure, sleep-deprived delirium. Could it be possible that we’d never again have that Sunday night?
Escovedo thought so in 2003. But five years is a long time, sometimes longer than forever.
'We made it this far/ A little piece of fame/ Up on the bandstand/ Nobody knows no shame'
- 'Nuns Song' (Escovedo/Prophet)
Alejandro Escovedo was born to be in a rock 'n' roll band. It's the religion he’s followed at the cost of everything else, including health and family. He's one of those fragile souls who jumps into a life that swallows them whole. They can become caricatures or, like Escovedo, they play music that makes the audiences feel the way MC5 and the New York Dolls and AC/DC and the Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen made him feel. Having Landau and his business partner Barbara Carr guide his career was great, especially with Springsteen's goodwill as an automatic door opener, but it didn't mean anything when it was time to go on and the crowd wonders if you could bring the high heat like Juan Marichal.
'Real Animal" was a statement of full physical recovery, though that wasn't its intention. "I was looking back and I realized that I'd never made a real rock 'n' roll record," Escovedo said of a solo career that began with 1992's Gravity. Previously, the beam-shakers such as "Five Hearts Breaking" and "Everybody Loves Me" were mixed in with the more introspective numbers. But Real Animal is a musical memoir stuck on the "glamericana.” Even rare ballad "Hollywood Hills" sounds like a Mott the Hoople song.
The bouncy leadoff track "Always a Friend," the Springsteen soundalike that Escovedo actually sang with Bruce and the E Street Band in Houston in April, set the LP's theme. "It's about having the best intentions in a relationship, but you're out on the road, playing music and having a great time, which is a sure ingredient for disaster," he said.
As a man named Rock once said, a man is only as faithful as his options. "I remember coming home from a tour one time and someone was mad at me and my clothes and my records were flying out the door." The song pleads for understanding. "Every once in a while, honey, let yourself go/ Nobody gets hurt." It's his answer to "Racing in the Streets," the Springsteen song that seems to be about cars, but has a deeper meaning of what gets lost when someone is obsessed with a calling.
Although he didn't start playing music until he was 24, Escovedo said he wanted to be in a band since his older half-brothers (same father, different mother) Coke and Pete Escovedo played in Santana. "They looked different than everybody else," he recalled. "They were cool like Miles Davis or John Coltrane." But Alejandro hardly saw his older brothers, who were always on tour.
"Being a musician, the time gone can be devastating to your family life," said Escovedo, whose second marriage ended in suicide and his third and fourth in acrimonious divorce. "I have to be honest. I don't always have a great relationship with my kids. I've put them through a lot and they resent a lot of things I did. I've always wanted my kids to know that playing music is an honorable profession, but some of them have no interest because of what they've seen it do to our family."
The pivotal song of Real Animal is a song about having an incurable affliction. It’s named after the club where Escovedo fell in love with live music, where he'd see Buffalo Springfield and Love and Ike and Tina Turner as a teenager growing up in Huntington Beach, Cal. Two diseases: one makes you sick, the other makes you invincible.
At least that's what Escovedo thought, as he kept up the hard partying after-show lifestyle, even after being diagnosed with hepatitis C. "I was asking myself if following this music is what led to making me ill," Escovedo said of "Golden Bear's" dual message.
Escovedo said ideas for some of the songs came to him when he was flat on his back in Wimberley, slowly wasting away while Interferon treatments deadened his muscles. "When you feel that near to death, it's just like they say, your life is a movie that runs backwards. All these old faces and places were flashing." Escovedo said there was no nostalgic tug in those memories; they were simply people and places he'd probably never see again.
I'm gonna crawl upon the shore/ Roll in the mud and the clay/ Like the swallows of San Juan/ I'm gonna get back someday' - Escovedo/Prophet
He credits Tibetan herbs, administered by holistic healer Dr. Diki Nyerongsha of Los Angeles, as well as twice-weekly acupuncture treatments, with helping him regain his health. Ample Humboldt herb didn’t hurt. He was able to pay the bills during his three years off the road thanks to the Alejandro Escovedo Medical and Living Expenses Fund, which received proceeds from the 2004 Por Vida double-disc tribute record. Such Escovedo friends and fans as Steve Earle, Ian Hunter, Lucinda Williams, Cowboy Junkies, Los Lonely Boys, John Cale and Son Volt covered Escovedo compositions on an album that sold 40,000 copies- a high figure for a tribute LP.
"When I was finally well enough to get my sense of humor back, I started remembering all the joy in those old times," Escovedo said.
After singing about illness and introspection on 2006's The Boxing Mirror, a John Cale-produced album critics raved about then never listened to again, Escovedo reclaimed the times and the music that have always made him feel most alive on Real Animal. With every song co-written by kindred spirit Chuck Prophet, it’s a record about being such a fan that you learn to play - and then the real drama begins.
Real Animal closes your eyes and opens your mind to San Francisco in the '70s, when Escovedo played a guitar for the first time in the Nuns, whom he calls "the worst band of all time," but they’re actually well-regarded in retrospect, and part of punk history when they opened the final concert by the real Sex Pistols at Winterland in ‘78. The record takes you to the Chelsea Hotel of that era, where most of the spoons were burned on the bottom and Sid and Nancy fought through the walls until the night Escovedo emerged from the subway station to see sad Vicious being led away in handcuffs.
With “Chip N’ Tony,” the album takes you to Austin in the early '80s, where Escovedo moved with "cowpunk" innovators Rank and File, featuring a couple of other former S.F. punk rockers, the Kinman brothers.
Rank’s Austin migration story isn’t much different than yours. Looking around they said “let’s live here,” and got a house for cheap on Avenue D. The Kinmans got bored and moved on to New York or L.A., while the Escovedos kept the house. One morning at 7 a.m. I ran into Al at Wheatsville, where he was buying bread and peanut butter for Maya’s lunch and I was buying beer to keep the party going. We looked at each other with envy.
I have a chapter on Alejandro in All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music that covers that time from the True Believers to his 2002 heritage project By the Hand of the Father. So, lets skip to the part when he became part of Landau’s small roster.
"It's a good time and we're ready for it," Escovedo said, after signing with Team ‘Steen in April 2008. "We've been doing this for so long, nothing's gonna surprise us."
But a week later Escovedo had his name called and his knees almost turned to jelly. He was driving from Wimberley to Houston to have dinner with Barbara Carr before a Springsteen show at the Toyota Center.
"About two hours outside of Houston we get a text message that says, 'Can you be at sound check in 45 minutes? Bruce wants to do 'Always a Friend' tonight,'“ Escovedo recalled. “We're already doing 90 just to make the dinner. There's no way we can make sound check.”
On the plane to Houston, Springsteen listened to Real Animal on his headphones, and told Jan Stabile of Landau Management, "we're doing 'Always a Friend' tonight.” While Escovedo was enroute like a maniac, Springsteen and the E-Street Band worked out a slightly new arrangement, lengthening the intro and adding a chorus. “They rushed us in and Bruce invited me to his dressing room to go through the song a couple of times with him.”
Escovedo had never seen Springsteen in concert, and “was honestly blown away." He had a set list so he could see where he'd come in at the first encore. "So as it gets closer and closer, I'm really sweating. I'm really nervous." When the set ended, Springsteen came charging into the wings. "Where's Alejandro?"
This was the moment Alejandro Escovedo had dreamed of his whole life. He'd be playing one of his songs backed by one of rock's most legendary bands in front of 18,000 people, all on their feet. Facing Al, Little Steven strummed the first chord, and everybody fell in at the right time. This E-Street Band is pretty good. Alejandro rose to the occasion.
"Those four minutes were like the best parts of the past 33 years condensed,” he said. “I was looking out at all those people and I understood how a person could get addicted to that feeling."
But, then, Escovedo was hooked the first time he played a G chord on an electric guitar in front of 26 people in some hellhole in San Francisco's Tenderloin district . He was born to play rock 'n' roll, and heaven help those who expect anything more. Or anything less.