BITTERSWEET HEART OF THE RODEO

BITTERSWEET HEART OF THE RODEO

Americana’s original cow-hunk Alejandro Escovedo keeps on buckin’

Zachary Lipez

In the year that “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’N’ Roll),” AC/DC’s bagpiped salute to art being a job, was released, Alejandro Escovedo was 24 years old. Despite belonging to a family that already counted multiple members of Santana amongst its numbers, Alejandro was not a musician. Worse, he was a Stooges fan, years before being an Iggy Pop fan meant you were contractually obligated to start a band. That was the year that Escovedo, as a film student at College of Marin who needed a band for a student film about musicians who couldn’t play their instruments, picked up a guitar. It is indeed a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. What’s left unsaid is that, if you want to rock and roll, even if you don’t care about the top, even if you suspect that the top is mainly for phonies and cornballs, even if you’re intent on carving your own path, well, that’s a bit of a hike as well.

Born one of 13 children in San Antonio on Jan. 10, 1951, Alejandro Escovedo is a rock ’n’ roller, in the traditional sense. In that he knows the long way by heart and can pull off wearing hats that would make a square man crumble. Being amongst the first to play punk music in the Americas, he put the “alt" in “alt-country” long before the marketing division of counterculture came up with the appellation. He started off in a band he describes as “fuckups with guitars” with “no intention or, you know, ambition,” and ended up writing songs so enduring that they’ve been covered by such folk artists as Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, and Sheila E. (who also happens to be Escovedo's niece). The man has been up and down the proverbial mountain so many times that there are entire Escovedoblazed detours that could be named after him (with some, like “cowpunk,” that’d be much improved if they were).

While singing “Some people think I’m ugly/ Some people think I’m dead,” Escovedo has continued to both keep it sartorially tight and not die. In fact, over the past few decades, Escovedo has lived so fully—weathering industry shitstorms, blood disease (besides even the cat scratch, boogie woogie, or “of a 103” variety of fevers that come with the territory), and a literal hurricane—that seeing him still standing, you’d think he was thriving. Which, in his fine-ass fashion, with a new album, Echo Dancing, which pisses out the poison with vigor almost unbecoming for a man of 73, he is. As CREEM editor Jaan Uhelszki more succinctly puts it, Escovedo is “a sage, babe, historical marker...a national treasure who still looks good.”

Without considering too much the man’s pivotal place within various cultural waves or his guitar style (as much Santo & Johnny as it is Stooges & Chuck Berry), it’s worth noting that, prior to becoming a national treasure, prior to helping to kick-start punk, prior to being “the world’s worst pot dealer,” and prior to film school, Escovedo was a surfer.

“Being a Mexican surfer in those days was not easy. Mexicans and surfers always fought. It was ugly because back then the surfers were all white. Unless they were Hawaiian. They were more jock-y. Orange County, you know,” Escovedo says early into our hour-plus interview, his soup and salad untouched. “I had long hair and I was a good surfer, and they thought I was Hawaiian. With my face I’ve always been mistaken for Chinese, Japanese, Tahitian... The Tibetans think I’m from Tibet. So it was hard to kind of find an identity. But because of the battles, when they called me Hawaiian, rather than getting my ass kicked, I was like, ‘Yeah, bro.”’

Sometimes—when he’s discussing an estranged brother or being self-flagellatingly rueful about being exactly as brave as can be expected of an outnumbered teenager who just wants to hang out on the beach without having to be the Rosa Parks of hanging ten—Escovedo talks so plainly it hurts to hear. Other times, when discussing his art, he talks equally plainly, but within metaphor.

“I remember seeing Townes Van Zandt play to a quiet room and watching him just make the room lift,” Escovedo says. “That’s what I like. It’s like surfing. It’s thrilling, and then it’s gone.”

Escovedo has a song called “Everybody Loves Me” (off of 1999’s Bourbonitis Blues) that contains the lines “Well, I swim, I surf, but I never drown/Well, everybody says they love me but I don’t know why." The original version might have been, in part, inspired by the Dr. Hook song of the same name, but it’s performed as pure Texas psych. This year, with his album of revisitations and acknowledgment of transformation (with rockers and ballads alike rerecorded in the spirits of artists like “Suicide, Eno, Cluster, all looking over our shoulder”), Escovedo updates the song as something industrial and haunted. The lyrics—which are as good an encapsulation of his ethos as any of the thousands he’s written—are unchanged.

Echo Dancing ends with a rerecorded version of a song (“Wave”) that opened A Man Under the Influence, his album from nearly a quarter century ago. The song (in both versions) uses “wave” as a verb, waving goodbye as a metaphor for getting real, real gone. But the tidal metaphor applies, even if it’s in how Escovedo sounds entirely rejuvenated in the new recording, pulling a Scott Walker in reverse to show that some thrills keep coming back.

Throughout the interview, the flat and black wide rim of Escovedo’s Stetson provides shade for the man’s sunglasses, which also remain on. Whether the shielding of his eyes is in accordance or contrast with a larger sensitivity is a question not yet addressed in any of Escovedo’s expansive catalog of metaphors. He sings of hazel eyes, red behind closed eyes, eyes at rest, and the eyes of a bartender slow to deliver another double. He’s sung about “looking for America in a record shop,” and he’s covered “Pale Blue Eyes” enough times to keep Lou Reed in brand-new katanas well into the afterlife. But, in person, he’ll keep his eyes covered.

Unlike some of punk’s more strident anti-historians, Escovedo’s transformation was less of a rejection than a continuation. Besides his family’s musical bona fides, the not-yet-a-guitarist was, from an early age, immersed in the sounds going in and out of California at the time.

“I was living on the beach, and I loved records. There was a guy on Main Street at a record store in Huntington Beach, and he would order me all the English imports that would come in. That’s where I learned a lot about the Pretty Things, T. Rex, Roxy. I was just devouring all of that stuff, you know?” Escovedo says. “I saw the Doors. I saw Jimi Hendrix. Then when the English stuff started to happen, I saw Mott all the time. I’d follow them around. Because now you had the bands that were kind of leading the way to punk rock because they were more accessible. They would come down and talk to you."

He goes on: “The show that really kind of just blew my mind and changed my world was Patti Smith at the Whisky a Go Go. The first time she played, it was just Lenny, DNV [Richard Sohl] on piano, and Patti. It was on a Wednesday night. Nobody there. I’d read some of her poetry and stuff, but suddenly I saw something that was completely different than everything else. It was more about the street.

“That was what really got me as a fanboy. Never, never thinking that I would be part of that as a musician. And then when I went to San Francisco, my friend Jeff Lehner and I were making a movie about the worst band in the world, you know? We couldn’t play, but we thought, ‘We look so cool.’ So we became the band in the movie.”

That band, the Nuns, would eventually open for the Sex Pistols on the night of the U.K. boy band’s infamous final performance at the Winterland Ballroom. When John Lydon ended the show by saying, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” a naiver scenester might have been shocked. Escovedo had already wrangled with aggro surfers, teachers who butchered his name into “Alex” because “Alejandro" was too difficult for their biscuit-dry mouths to pronounce, and a counterculture that self-regarded itself as being egalitarian while still telegraphing to a Chicano teenager that there was no way in hell he’d ever be able to pull off thin white dukedom. Conversely, punk (even the proto-punk of a Mexican-American band like ? & the Mysterians) had opened up a different path.

“The thing about punk rock, in the beginning, is that it was open to everybody. And I know that where I grew up in San Francisco, you know, anybody that had something to say was welcome on stage, and there were a lot more women involved. There was a lot more diversity and minorities.” And while it was also true that, as Escovedo says, “suddenly when we played the Sex Pistols show, the suburbs had gotten ahold of punk rock. And that was the turning of the tide for us. Suddenly we realized punk had nothing to do with us,” Escovedo neither needed a Brit to tell him that life wasn’t fair, nor was he ready to write this new world—that he was concurrently exploring and helping create—off as a cheat.

Instead, Escovedo started living at the Chelsea Hotel (at the time, a somewhat dingier concern than what’s been depicted in the recent works of Taylor Swift) alongside Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. As Escovedo sings on “Chelsea Hotel ’78” (off of 2008’s Real Animal^ he’d “come to live inside the myth of everything we’d heard." While the results of that aspect of that particular utopian project were probably inevitable, and Escovedo was still an inventive guitarist rather than a songwriter, his repertoire was broadening in creatively perverse and fruitful ways as he quit the Nuns, played with the underappreciated scene queen Judy Nylon, and eventually decamped from both the city and troped punk signifiers entirely. With Chip and Tony Kinman from the Dils, Escovedo formed Rank & File and moved to Austin, the Texas college town where freaks still (at the time) held some sway over the punk-derived/adjacent scene.

Rank & File are generally credited with being among the first “cowpunk” acts. Cowpunk is/was a subgenre—a mix of, you guessed it, punk and country music—born out of punk’s inherently retrograde nature, Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s id, and a wholesomely patriotic refusal to cede the wearing of cowboy hats to Nick Cave. As music, it had its charms. As a category designation, less so. “I hated it. I still hate it. Punk rock was so broad.... We didn’t even think about what to call ourselves. It was always the press that needed a tag to throw on you. Like ‘cowpunk’...that was disgusting. It created this kind of need to.. .well, anybody with a bolo tie and the Telecaster was cowpunk, you know?

That’s why I didn’t fit in, because I was still playing the half stack Marshall and a Les Paul Junior. Because I love the New York Dolls and I love distortion and the Stooges.”

Quitting Rank & File after one album, Escovedo joined his younger brother Javier (who’d previously been in the Zeros) to form the Tme Believers. That band would become a cautionary tale about rough-hewn roots-punkers dreaming beyond their means and succumbing to the false temptations of ’80s hard rock. Listening to the band’s songs now, it’s hard to hear the compromises or gloss that the True Believers were dismissed (by critics) for at the time. But retrospect does make clear the inevitability of the band’s implosion. Not punk enough for what punk had become in 1986, not oblique enough to appeal to R.E.M. fans, not traditional enough to swim in the same ten-gallon hat as Dwight Yoakam, and with no chance in hell of ever actually appealing to the hard rockers they were accused of pandering to, True Believers were an outfit caught in the same bind as so many left-of-the-dial bands in the ’80s who wanted to play “authentic" rock ’n’ roll music successfully. They wanted to pay their rent (which alienated their fans, who wanted them to heroically fail) but couldn’t manage to prostitute themselves hard enough to impress the ears of your average hair metal teenybopper or MTV programmer.

“ANYBODY WITH A BOLO TIE AND THE TELECASTER WAS COWPUNK, YOU KNOW?”

In True Believers’ specific case, it didn’t help that a band fronted by two Chicano rockers didn’t have a “La Bamba” with which to cross over. Indeed, throughout the ’80s, Alejandro would hear about radio programmers spurning his music because the deejays couldn’t pronounce his name and otherwise figured that Los Lobos more than fulfilled any “ethnic" rock quotient for the decade.

Shockingly, bringing in Jeff Glixman, producer of multiple albums by Kansas, to oversee True Believers’ second album didn’t help the band top the charts. Possibly because their label was folded into Manhattan Records, who had their hands busy promoting a lil’ cowpunk by the name of Richard Marx. Regardless, the album wasn’t released until 1994, seven years after the True Believers broke up.

When Alejandro describes him and his brother as the “Ray and Dave Davies of Chicano rock,” he laughs. He doesn’t laugh when he describes how the two brothers haven’t spoken in 15 years.

“I wish I’d never been in a band with my brother, because we loved each other so much. And I love my brother. After the band, we’ve never been close. It’s horrible."

When asked if he could call his brother tomorrow, he says, with a softness that this reporter won’t presume to read, “I couldn’t do it. And he wouldn’t answer. I checked up on him a few years ago. Through a friend. And he said, ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’ So, okay, that’s kind of a rough thing, especially in a big family where we, you know, we just lost my oldest brother. I’d like to think that our parents taught us nothing but love for each other and respect and admiration. I mean, that’s a really cool family to be from. What we’ve done musically, I would compare it to anybody, the Jacksons or, you know, the Cowsills...” At that, Escovedo finally laughs again, allowing everyone at the table to exhale, before adding, “I know CREEM magazine is not about writing this kind of stuff, but, you know, that’s the truth."

Escovedo is no nostalgia junkie. He’s fulsome in his praise of his peers, citing the beauty of a recent Nick Cave performance and his love for Los Lobos and Tucson heroes like Dan Stuart or Howe Gelb. And he’s appreciative of some of the more unjustly unsung of his longtime contemporaries (he tours with James Mastro of the Bongos and, at his last NYC show, brought ex-Voidoid Ivan Julian on stage). He’s equally enthusiastic about collaborating with artists who were knee-high to a grasshopper when punk started (he’s recently recorded with Broken Gold, the Austin band fronted by Riverboat Gamblers/ Band of Horses guitarist Ian MacDougall) or babies for the first couple punk revivals (at that NYC show, Escovedo’s band was joined by Starcrawlers’ Henri Cash). In conversation, he big-ups acts like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Billy Nomates, Idles, the Hives, and Fugazi (“one of my favorite bands of all time”), and he talks about all these (relative) youngsters in the same tone of admiration he’d used while talking about the Freedom Rock canon. He’s even come around to the Strokes despite them sounding, to him, “a bit like a Broadway musical."

But, in the moment as he may be, the past is also present and raw in Escovedo. And that’s the way he seems to like it. If not “likes,” exactly, it’s how he lives it; rendering questions of nostalgia moot by treating history as a phantom limb. When he discusses the end of his band that he’d been in with his brother, it’s as if the schism had occurred that morning.

“Self-loathing has always been a part of some sort of creative room that you go to, for me. And I’ll be honest with you, it’s painful, right? But it resulted, when I finally started writing, in my focus being on expressing all that stuff. I didn’t write my first song till I was 30. I was happy just being in the band. I liked the leather pants and the cool haircut and the cool guitar,” Escovedo says about two of the first songs he wrote; the first of which, “The Rain Won’t Help You When It’s Over,” the True Believers recorded. The second of which, they didn’t... “I wrote a song called ‘Five Hearts Breaking’ and I brought it to the band, and my brother just hated it. Because it wasn’t rock ’n’ roll enough. It was more a narrative kind of song. And he hated it. And that started the division in, and eventually the demise of, the band. But it was kind of like the birth of my solo stuff.”

Outside of Buick MacKane (a raucous saloon band that sounded like Crazy Horse, the Sidewinders, and all the other bands one can think of that are named after feral beasts on purpose), he’s never joined another band. Escovedo’s going at it alone (or at least under his own name) officially started with 1992’s Gravity. Since then, the self-loathing that has been such an integral feature of his “creative room” has been added to. There’s lost love, caught love, ruminations and denunciations of the lies America tells itself (and everyone else), and more songs for dead friends than an Irish wake.

“I think there’s more and more kids that are starting to kind of understand that it’s not just old man’s music. But it’s a marathon, an ultra-race, right? And it doesn’t matter how you get through it, but to get through it is a great honor, I think. I really admire the people, like the old blues guys, who grow to be old and still play. As long as I can tell the stories, I think there’ll be an audience to listen to because, you know, you’re kind of like a survivor of a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Which isn’t exactly right. Because 30 years in, that world does exist. For Escovedo, so for anyone listening. While there are already tribute albums devoted to his songcraft on the books, Echo Dancing can be seen as the ultimate testament to the man’s catalog. A project—which could be dismissed as either ego or (if you’d spent any time with Escovedo) insecurity— should instead be seen as an instinctual continuation of a body of work where the impetus for each song is as boisterous within the artist today as it was when he drew from it a decade or more prior.

Escovedo played the Bowery Ballroom back in April of this year. As Escovedo writes songs favored by the kind of rockers who either dress and imbibe like bikers or dress like NPR hosts (and drink like bikers), the crowd was collegially rode hard and put away wet. Not for nothing was “Sonica USA"—a tribute, from 2018’s The Crossing, to Chicano punkers and frizzyhaired allies alike—dedicated to the memory of Wayne Kramer, a man who fully inhabited the years he was allotted. Further, midway through the night’s set, Escovedo dedicated his song “Sensitive Boys” to his oldest brother, Manuel Escovedo, who died a week before.

The original version of “Sensitive Boys” (off of 2008’s Real Animal') was written for metaphorical brothers: fellow travelers on the long way to the top who might’ve been born to lose but who declined, thank you very much, to be consigned to that particular cliche.

“I wrote that with Chuck Prophet. We were thinking of people like Jeffrey Lee Pierce, my brother Javier, our own bands—Green on Red and True Believers—and all of us who were traveling throughout the country in the ’80s playing rock ’n’ roll for the sheer love of it,” Escovedo would explain a few days after the show. “I remember one night somewhere in Kansas we were taking a break at a truck stop after a gig and we ran into Charlie Musselwhite and his band. We started chatting with one another when Social Distortion drove up. We all stayed and had a chat before going our separate ways." Inspired by this roadside summit, Prophet and Escovedo wrote the song “about those times and those kinds of bands. The industry sees us as having fallen short, because we didn’t sell enough records, or we weren’t commercial enough. But that’s bullshit. And we know that.”

The 2008 version of “Sensitive Boys” is a stringladen, mid-tempo blues track; an appropriately romantic ode to tight bros from way back when. At the Bowery Ballroom, Escovedo played the song as it is on Echo Dancing. Starting with a simple “I miss him,” the song was rendered as a plaintive, Zevonesque piano ballad. What was initially a bittersweet tribute to wildness was transformed into a recurring epitaph, with every line of the chorus drawn out to outlast—just barely—truncated waves of mellotron. When Escovedo ended with a quavering “Sensitive boys/I need you more than ever now,” the room rose. Maybe not to the top, but high enough that the view was worth it.