The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (13 page)

It was during these two months in ’62 that I also met two Mexican American guys who lived in the Mission District and were into some good music. One was Sergio Rodriguez, who played bass—we called him Gus. He worked in his father’s grocery store cutting meat in the butcher section. The other was Danny Haro, who played drums. Tony had found a job in Danny’s family’s tortilla factory and became good friends with Danny’s cousin Lalo—Danny’s father also owned a restaurant and some other businesses. Tony had been bragging about my guitar playing and introduced me to Danny. I remember going to the Haros’ house—his family had money, so he had a nice drum kit and records by musicians like the Royals, Little Willie John—the baddest black music. I’d say, “Hey, Danny, can I borrow your records?”

“Sure, just don’t scratch ’em.” Most of his friends were black, too. He even conked his hair.

But man, they were playing some corny-ass songs, like Elvis Presley music. They also had a lead guitarist who was pretty good, but he was no match for me. We got together a few times to jam, and they were freaking out because I knew all these songs and I could play chords and a lot of lead. I’ll be honest—I resisted showing them anything, mainly because I resented having to play on their level. I think we did two gigs together, but it didn’t feel anything like the gigs I was used to playing on Avenida Revolución.

I couldn’t get over being away from Tijuana—what was I doing in this school with these little teenagers when I could be making music, staying up late, and dealing with real life? It was a confusing time, but there was a lot of energy around, too. I won’t forget those few weeks in October when the New York Yankees beat the San Francisco Giants in the World Series at Candlestick Park, just a few blocks away from where we were living. It was one of the
longest-running World Series in history because of all the rain. Then we moved to Juri Street, right near the Mission District—it was bigger than the place on 3rd and had a small storage room that I’d hide in and practice guitar.

I had already started to study various guitar styles when I was in Tijuana. I wanted to cop the feel of Otis Rush, the feel of John Lee Hooker. Later I realized how blessed I was to find out early about three people—Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and John Lee Hooker. They were the foundation of my blues education. I had a few blues records, and so did my friends, and we’d listen to them over and over. I marinated myself in that sound. How did he get that sustain? How did he hammer
and
get that sustain? What about that vibrato? My father played violin with vibrato, but I picked my vibrato up from B. B. and Otis Rush, and I’m still trying to get it right.

That storage room on Juri Street was the only quiet place in our house—I’d go and work on the guitar in the dark. No distraction to my ears or eyes. I’d figure out a riff and try to match the tone. I’d try it seven times in a row—nope, can’t get it. It was dark in there, so you learned to trust your fingers. Eight, nine, ten—that’s not it. Damn.

Figuring out different blues styles was like taking inventory of 777 groups of bees around the world and tasting the honey that each one made. This one is more creamy; this one’s a little darker. What about this golden one? I had a taste for funky, raunchy guitar styles like the ones I heard on the records of Elmore James and Muddy Waters. I learned they call it gutbucket, or cut and shoot. John Lee Hooker was the king of that cut-and-shoot style. How come cut and shoot? Because in the places where they played that music, if they didn’t like what you played, that’s what happened to you. Some people didn’t want to hear any sophisticated blues: “Don’t put no fancy, freaking chords in there, man. Give me the shit.”

I learned there are guitarists who never bend a string—like Freddie Green, who played with Count Basie, and his comping was
un-freaking-believable. Later I learned about Wes Montgomery and Grant Green, and then Kenny Burrell. Those three for me would come to represent a kind of class and funky intelligence. People who don’t bend strings can move faster. To me, the players who did bend strings claimed a different place in my heart because they had access to immediate emotion that went beyond superlatives. They shaped notes like the people who shape glass—they do it with fire.

I kept at it, learning songs like “Let the Good Times Roll”—the way B. B. King did it—“I’m Blue,” by Ike Turner and the Ikettes, and “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” by Etta James. I’d get frustrated. I would stop, go out and walk around, look at people in the park, come back to that little room, and try again. Stop, take another walk, go back. I knew that I couldn’t be 100 percent like them even if I wanted to, because I was not who they were. But I wanted to know what it was they were accessing. I got the idea that it wasn’t just the guitar technique or which guitar or amp they used. I started to think it was who they were, what they were thinking of when they played. Whoever it was—B. B., Buddy, Freddie—something happened in that person’s life that hadn’t happened to me. That’s what made it their sound alone.

Charlie Parker said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” I began to live my life, and my own sound began to come out of that closet and out of my guitar. It took a while—lots of gigs in Tijuana and in San Francisco. Lots of life experiences—growing up, leaving home, and coming back. Then, ultimately, leaving home for good.

When you take your time and listen to the real blues guys, you discover that each one has his own sound and you can recognize them by things they do, all while realizing that they don’t repeat themselves. When you really dig into a blues it’s like riding a horse bareback in the night under full moonlight. The horse takes off, and he doesn’t throw you off. You go up and down and flow with the rhythm of the ride, go through all these changes, and never repeat yourself.

Too many guitarists never get past a limited vocabulary, and I can tell you that learning the blues never stops. Every time I play “Black Magic Woman” I’m thinking of Otis Rush, and at the same time my own sound is still developing. To my ears, just before he died Stevie Ray amalgamated all his influences—Albert King, Albert Collins, Lightnin’ Hopkins—to the point where he finally sounded like Stevie Ray. It took him a while. He had to get there, because he had supreme dedication. He lived the blues life.

Two months into that first school year in the United States, I really got into it with my mom. It came down to this: I had been giving my mom all the money I had been making at El Convoy long before the family split for San Francisco. That’s a year and half, nine dollars a week. It was a lot of money—she kept it all hidden away in a shopping bag. I knew a lot of it had to go to the family, most of it, but I also was planning on using some of the money to buy a new guitar for myself. I would remind her of that again and again. I told her, “Mom, you can have all the money, but save me a little bit so that when I see a guitar I want, I can get it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

We had a deal, I thought.

A few days after the World Series ended, I saw a Stratocaster that I actually liked, and I asked my mom for the money. There was a record store on Market Street that had a few guitars in the back. I saw it, and I knew that was the one! I had to have it.

For the longest time I had been playing this black Gibson Melody Maker that I had bought used for just thirty-five dollars. It had no case, and it was having trouble staying in tune. It was a good instrument, but it was what you would call a starter guitar.

My mom told me she had spent all the money. But she didn’t just tell me, she snapped at me—like, how could I even ask? No sense of graciousness and definitely no apology. Just, “We needed to eat and I needed to pay the rent and I spent the money.” I mean, at least present it to me in a way that was civil. She didn’t have the
diplomacy, and I didn’t have the wisdom that I now have, so we both just got pissed off.

That’s when I said, “Forget it. You broke a promise to me. I’m going back.” I was pissed and I said stuff that teenagers say and that I regret to this day, like, “I don’t even want to see you—I don’t want to live here, I don’t want to eat your food, even if you force me to. I’m going to make life miserable here.”

What could she do—argue? She knew I was serious. So she just raised the ante. She opened the door.

“Okay, you can go. Your father’s friends are leaving tomorrow for Tijuana for a two-week break. Here’s twenty dollars. Go with them.” My dad was silent about it at the time—his feeling was that I was old enough to make my own decisions. I was making money and able to support myself.

So I took the twenty dollars, packed my stuff, and left with those friends of my dad. It’s like I couldn’t get out of there fast enough—I was still so angry. Did I have a place to stay? Did I have a gig lined up? Did the guys at El Convoy know I was coming back? No, no, and no.

We drove all the way to Tijuana and pulled into town in the middle of the evening. It was dark, and everyone was dressed up as demons and skeletons. It was Halloween time back in the United States—in Mexico it was the middle of Day of the Dead celebrations. I had gotten out of the car and was standing there in the middle of downtown Tijuana. It was spooky and weird, and that’s when it hit me. For the first time in my life, I was alone, without a safety net. No going home to Mama. It was just me, and I was feeling it—I was scared.

Part of me noticed how small everything looked after being in San Francisco for just two months. Tijuana’s tallest building was only six or seven stories high, and it seemed like a shack.

I did something I never expected I’d do on my own—I went to church. I went straight to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the big cathedral downtown. I walked in at seven at night, went all the way to the front of the altar, kneeled down, and said, “The last time I was here,
it was a few years ago with my brother Tony. We walked on our knees from the front door all the way to the altar because he was having some serious toothaches and needed to get his teeth fixed. I did some penance that time, but I didn’t ask you for anything then, so I figure you owe me one.”

I kept looking up at her. “What I’m going to ask for now is that I want you to help my mom and dad and my sisters and brothers be safe where they are. And help me get a job tonight. That’s all I want.”

I did not go to the priest or anyone else. I went straight to the Virgin—that’s something I believe in to this day, that the relationship with one’s highest power should be a direct one. There are times when we all need a spiritual hug, when we need to feel comfort from fear and be reminded of the oneness we share with all that is around us. I also learned about the power of prayer from my mom, and that prayer is not a one-way thing. What I was looking for was a conversation.

It was not the first or last time I would speak with the Virgin. In 2003 I was on tour, and the day we played Mexico City there was a press conference. They asked me what I had been up to while being back home in Mexico. I told them, “Yesterday I was in Autlán, where I was born, and I went to the chapel where I used to go with my mom when I was a baby. I kneeled down before this big picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe and said thank you, again. Then I heard this voice that said, ‘I’m really proud of you.’ ”

There was a long pause. “Wait a minute: the Virgin of Guadalupe talked to you?” they asked. I think they were as surprised that I had gone into a church as they were that I had heard back from the Virgin. I answered their question with one of my own. “What kind of relationship do you have with God if you only talk and God don’t talk back?”

On that night I went straight from the church to El Convoy. It was the middle of the week, and they were busy as usual. Everyone was there—the bouncers, the strippers, the musicians. Man, they were surprised. Once I had crossed the border, that was it. Good-bye, Carlos. They looked at me as if I were a ghost. “Man, what are
you doing here?” The manager came down to talk to me. “You can’t be here. Your mom told us you were going with her to San Francisco. You need your parents’ permission because you’re underage.”

This is the part of the story that’s really tricky. I had a letter with me, which I gave to the club manager. It came from my mom, and it said that I could return to El Convoy and play there. But my mom swore till the day she died that she never wrote that letter! In fact she’d get pissed if I brought up the subject, and I can’t remember how I got it or who gave it to me! But I do remember pulling it out of my pocket and giving it to the manager, and I remember the manager opening it up and reading it. “Okay,” he said and shrugged his shoulders. “Welcome back.” Then he told the other guitarist to go home. “Go ahead—get up there,” he said to me.

My luck didn’t stop there. I played all through that night, but I still needed a place to stay. The drummer was a guy we called Tarzan. His aunt owned a motel, and he was staying in an extra room there—with only a mattress on the floor, a shower, and a toilet.

I moved in, and after a while we got a small black-and-white TV. I remember sitting there after a long night of playing at El Convoy, fermenting my brain on anything we could find on TV. We would watch and watch, and in a single three-hour stretch we might see Mahalia Jackson singing, Liberace playing piano, Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, and then
You Bet Your Life
with Groucho Marx.

I remember that TV to this day because it helped my English get better—I especially liked
Rawhide,
with Clint Eastwood. Soon my English was perfect—that is, perfect if I was going to go on a cattle drive. I can’t tell you how weird it felt in 2011 when I was inducted into the California Hall of Fame along with a bunch of other people—including the Beach Boys, Amy Tan, Magic Johnson, and Buzz Aldrin. Guess who came out to induct me? Rowdy Yates himself—Clint Eastwood! He said some nice things about me and shook my hand.

I was the last one inducted, and I thanked them for the honor. Then with Clint and Governor Jerry Brown standing near me, I told them what I thought about California’s governors when I was
growing up. My exact words were, “I grew up here in California when Brown and Reagan were here, not necessarily being nice to the campesinos. Not necessarily being in harmony with Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez. I don’t approve of creating airports and libraries for Ronald Reagan and people like that—because they were not nice.”