The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (16 page)

The one album that knocked me out was by the Kinks. My mom was still holding on to the money I was earning, but she’d give me a little now and then. When she did I’d get the latest Spider-Man comic and an album or two. I remember getting Little Walter’s greatest hits and the Kinks’ first album, and then going, “Shit! This is different—what a heavy sound.” Those guys were about chords, not single notes. They were a big influence on me. Danny and others in our band liked the Yardbirds, and that was fine with me, too.

By then my band was one of the best bands at Mission at the time. Like a rhythm section for hire, the three of us would join up with other groups; then there would be different singers or guitarists or horn players in front. We were the guys to get. One time we played in the Dynamics, wearing suits and playing with two saxophone players—Andy Vargas and Richard Bean. Richard later got together with my brother Jorge and formed the Malibus, which then became Malo.

I was still working at Tic Tock while Danny was making tacos and Gus was cutting meat. We were gigging and keeping busy, playing pizzerias and birthday parties. We never did Mexican events, because most Mexicans didn’t want to hear our kind of American R & B music. “You guys are too loud,” they would say. They wanted to hear music from back home—mariachi,
norteño
. That was my dad’s territory.

I remember one time Danny’s or Gus’s parents asked us to play
a party where they would have asked for songs like that, and I said no. I think Danny and Gus would’ve been okay doing those songs—they didn’t have the negative emotional attachment that I had because they didn’t grow up with the things I had to see. I just told them I don’t want to play baptisms and bar mitzvahs. I told them I didn’t know any of those songs, even though I did know them, and that was the end of that.

The school used to hold open auditions for their Friday night dance parties, and we would win again and again. One time a student who was from Samoa saw our audition and invited us to play at his birthday party. Everything was going great until we finished our second set and asked for our money so we could leave. He looked at us and said, “You guys ate too much food, man. I’m not going to pay you.” He was the one who invited us to help ourselves—we didn’t know there was a limit on how much we could eat! The other guys started to argue with him, but I just pulled away. I went back to the kitchen, where our equipment was, saw his birthday cake sitting there, and carefully took it apart and laid it in my guitar case. Then I got the other guys and said, “Come on—let’s just go.” Later I showed them what I’d done. We ate the cake and laughed. I thought it was better to get even than get angry.

We never really had a singer. We played lots of instrumentals, and Gus sang sometimes. I would help out on songs like the Righteous Brothers’ “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” “I Need Your Lovin’ ” by Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford, and “Do You Love Me” by the Contours. They were shuffles and boogies, mostly—more about the rhythm than about a lead vocal part.

I met Joyce Dunn at a jam in late ’64—she was a
singer
singer, with a real blues energy to her voice. She was from Oceanview, just ten minutes from the Mission, so we were able to get together and work out some songs, soul tunes like “Steal Away” and “Heat Wave.” It was definitely a new thing at the time—a black singer backed by Mexican Americans and a Mexican guitar player. Michael Carabello would tell me that the first time he ever saw me play was
during the few weeks we played with Joyce. She was a lot of fun and later went on to work with musicians such as Boz Scaggs and record a few songs under her own name.

The first half of ’65 went by fast—suddenly my first year of high school was over, and it was summer. Many biographies that I’ve seen say I graduated from Mission that year, but I graduated with the class of ’67. With Danny and Gus and the horns, we were still playing the blues, or our version of the blues. But it seemed like the world only had room for British groups: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, especially “Satisfaction,” were
everywhere
.

Sometime that summer we heard that KDIA, which was the soul station for San Francisco back then, was sponsoring a band contest at the Cow Palace—the prize would be an opportunity to play your song on the radio and open a show for the Turtles and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, who both had big radio hits. Hundreds of bands showed up, but it turned out that most of them were just covering songs by the Rolling Stones and the Who, and the station wanted originality. Most got eliminated in the first round, and we got more and more excited as the day went by. We also got nervous. Because we had so much time to hang around, Danny, Gus, and I got to drinking, and we fucked it all up! We made it to number three. It felt good—until we lost.

“Wooly Bully” was Sam the Sham’s hit song, and you couldn’t get away from it that summer. We learned that tune and must have played it a hundred times—everyone wanted to hear it. I remember my sister Laura asked us to play for her wedding that June in Pacifica, at a place called La Paloma. We had everyone up and dancing to “Wooly Bully.” I remember that because Tony’s new wife was very pregnant at the time, and if you say “Wooly Bully” like you’re speaking Spanish it sounds like you’re saying “big stomach.” Later I learned that Sam’s real name is Domingo Zamudio and that he is a Mexican American from Texas.

That summer I was also listening to B. B. King’s
Live at the Regal
. It was so valuable to guitarists like me, who hadn’t yet had the chance to see B. B. in concert—but on this album we could
hear him dealing directly with his people, a
black
audience. It still makes me smile when he sings, “I got a sweet black angel / I love the way she spreads her wings,” and the ladies start screaming. What could be sexier than that?

My second year at Mission started in September, and not long afterward the first album by the Butterfield Blues Band came out. To my ears, it was the best example of a musician staying true to the real electric blues—the Chicago blues—and making it work with a rock-style beat. The rock influence was not too much; it was just right. A big reason for its success was Michael Bloomfield, who played the group’s lead guitar—soon he was my number two hero, just behind B. B. He was the first of the new generation of guitarists after Buddy, Albert, and Freddie.

Sometime during that fall, another singer came into the band—Al Burdett. He was from the Fillmore, on the other side of town. He sang the blues and didn’t stay with us for more than a few months, but he turned me on to the most important blues album of that year—Junior Wells’s
Hoodoo Man Blues,
featuring a great guitarist called Friendly Chap. Only that wasn’t his real name—it was Buddy Guy, and because he was under contract to another label at the time they called him that. Everybody heard that album—the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix. Buddy’s way of playing guitar on “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” became the only way to play that song.

That fall, I met Michael Carabello for the first time. He was a friend of Yvonne’s and would have been at Mission High except that his baseball skills got him into San Francisco Polytechnic. He remained close with his friends in the Mission, where he lived. Carabello had gotten hooked on music when he played congas in these informal jam sessions at Aquatic Park, very close to North Beach, and had even sat in once with Vince Guaraldi. Carabello came by Yvonne’s basement, which was one of the places our band would jam. Later he told me he was blown away by what he heard. I liked him—he was hanging out more than playing at the start, but we had the same enthusiasm and intensity about music. He only
had one conga when we met, but he had a nice feel when he played—and he was listening to a lot of new sounds as well as the blues.

Most important, Carabello took me to Aquatic Park. I don’t know if they still do it, but back then, in ’65 and ’66, they used to let this circle of conga players play. It would be maybe ten or twelve of them sitting around, playing with one or two flute players, the brothers drinking wine from leather flasks that they’d hang on their belts, smoking weed. The sound was intense when they got going.

Carabello and I had another mutual friend, Jimmy Martinez, who did something that totally turned my head around. Jimmy knew what he was doing, too, because one day he came up to me, laughing, and said, “I got an album here that’s basically going to kick your ass!”

“Yeah? Okay, bring it on.” What else was I going to say?

He was right. It was Chico Hamilton’s
El Chico
—the one featuring the Latin percussionists Willie Bobo and Victor Pantoja and a guitarist named Gábor Szabó. I liked the way it looked from the first time I saw it—Chico was dressed in a toreador cape, and some of the songs had Spanish titles, such as “Conquistadores” and “El Moors.” I knew Chico was a jazz drummer, but the album didn’t sound like any jazz I’d heard before. It had a lot of Latin in the music as well as a lot of other things, too—soul and lots of great grooves.

But it was Gábor’s guitar that hit me hard—I heard that and could feel my brain molecules starting to expand. His sound had a spiritual dimension to it, and it opened the gates to other dimensions for me. You could tell he listened to a lot of Indian music, because he put a drone part in the music. It was trance music—he could play the simplest melody but still go deep. He was the first guitarist who opened me up to the idea of playing past the theme, of telling a story that isn’t just a regurgitation of the head of a song or other people’s licks. Gábor took me away from B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed—he was also the first jazz musician who started playing Beatles and Mamas and Papas songs and other ’60s rock and pop tunes—even before Wes Montgomery started doing “Goin’ Out of My Head.”

El Chico
was like a road map telling me where I had to go next. I immediately went out and got Willie Bobo’s album
Spanish Grease,
and by the next year I would get Gábor Szabó’s
Spellbinder
—“Gypsy Queen” was on that one—and Bobo’s
Uno-Dos-Tres,
which had “Fried Neckbones and Some Home Fries.” Both those songs would help shape the Santana sound. At the same time, another friend turned me on to Thelonious Monk—his live version of “Blue Monk,” recorded in San Francisco, pushed me even further, made me rethink the blues and what could be done with it: “I know there’s a blues in here somewhere. It must be—it
says
blues.”

By the end of ’65, the influence of all these new musical ideas was starting to show in the band’s repertoire—and Carabello was in the band. We were still playing the blues, but we were expanding what we played, just as we were expanding what we listened to. We were playing “Jingo,” by the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji—that was a staple of those Aquatic Park jams. I was happy to be playing and making music. I did it whenever I could, wherever we could practice, and whenever we could get gigs. When I wasn’t playing I was rehearsing or jamming. When I wasn’t doing that I was thinking about it or dreaming about it. It really was all I wanted to do; there was nothing else. School? That was a place I went to on weekdays—and sometimes not even then.

In junior high I felt I didn’t fit in because I was trying to figure out who I was. At Mission I didn’t fit in because I knew who I was and the school didn’t have anything for me. I could have taken music lessons, but in those days it was either classical music or marching-band stuff—nothing that had anything to do with electric guitars or blues. A lot of the classes I was taking didn’t make much sense, either. In my second year at Mission High, I remember being given a test that included some historical stuff in it—and it was all about US history, which I had not had a chance to study yet. But it was supposed to be an aptitude test—not a history test.

I got angry and told the teacher I was not going to take the test. “Why not? What’s wrong with it?” the teacher asked.

“Look at these questions. I just came here from Mexico. I can
see already that I don’t know these answers. This test is for white people. Where are the questions about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata?” I wouldn’t cooperate because it felt like the test was designed to make me fail—why couldn’t I answer questions that were relevant to my world and my experience?

I’m not sure now how that all ended, but I do remember that I had to explain it to the principal, too. It just felt like high school and I were not meant to happen. It wasn’t all bad, though. I had one teacher who inspired me to really think.

Mr. Paul Knudsen was my art teacher, and he had a funny way of doing things. He’d get the whole class into funky overalls, line us up in front of paper that was covering the walls from floor to ceiling, and tell us to dip these long metal wires—like thick guitar strings—into the paint and slap them against the paper. Or he’d give us long bamboo poles with brushes tied to the very end, and we’d have to paint from across the room. He was talented—he could look at you and draw a portrait without glancing down at the paper, and it would be great.

One day Mr. Knudsen asked another student to take over the class while he took me into another room to talk. “I took the liberty of looking at your grades since you’ve been here in the United States, and they’re bad,” he said. “But I noticed that you got good marks at James Lick in art, and you’re pretty good in my class. I’ve also heard that you’re a pretty good musician. Tomorrow we’re going to the Academy of Art—I really want you to see what you’re up against if you’re thinking of getting into painting or drawing or sculpting.”

He looked me dead in the eye. “The reason I’m telling you this is because the world is getting too crowded—there is no room for fifty percent. You must be one hundred and fifty percent in whatever you do, whether it is art, music, or anything else. Okay?” I was a little scared—he was right up in my face. When a teacher singles you out and corners you like that, you either get defensive or you open up.

No one, not even my parents or friends, had spoken to me like
that before. The field trip the next day was interesting. But being in a drawing class with a naked model didn’t matter. I was thinking about his words. Mr. Knudsen opened me up.