The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (8 page)

My dad was a good teacher, but he wasn’t necessarily gentle. He would push me, and then the shouting would come, and I would start crying. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but the salt from all those tears started discoloring part of the violin. I just wanted to try to please my dad, and in my mind it all went together—the way the wood smelled, the way the strings sounded, the feeling of frustration.

It wasn’t long before my mom stepped in. “You’re breaking his heart, José. He shouldn’t learn music like that—it’s just too brutal.” She had seen Tony run away from playing music for the same reason. “We don’t have too much money, but why don’t you take a break from teaching Carlos and have somebody else do it?” My dad acceded to my mom’s request and found me a teacher—actually two guys. One was big, like linebacker big, and the other was older. I started going to their houses, which were nearby, to get tips on holding the bow and other things. They were both really good at showing me stuff, helping me build my character, and reaffirming the good things I was doing, which was the opposite of what Dad was doing.

Here’s a story about one of those violin lessons. One time I was at the older guy’s house, and he and his wife were arguing about something in the kitchen, and I was bored sitting there on the sofa.
My hands started to go between the cushions and I started feeling coins in there! Sure enough, I found almost two dollars—which was a lot of money for a nine-year-old in 1956. I quickly put the coins in my pocket, I did my lesson, and when I got half a block away I ran right to the store and spent all the money on M&M’s. The guy looked at me as if I were crazy. When I got home, my mom was hanging clothes on the line to dry, so I had the house to myself. I went inside, spread them all out on the bed, and separated them all by color. Then I ate them—first the green ones, then red, then yellow, then brown. I couldn’t stop.

It took me a while to like chocolate again after that. And when my mom found out what I did, of course she scolded me. “We don’t have any money, and you spent it on M&M’s? And you didn’t even share them with your brothers and sisters?” She didn’t spank me that time, but it was clear that she was less angry about my wasting money on candy than she was about my not giving any to my siblings. For her, it was always about sharing what you have with the whole family. That was the lesson that chocolate and money taught me—I think it freed me from thinking only about myself at a very young age.

Feeling the music was the first lesson, but money was a big part of it for my dad. He persuaded me to join up with two brothers who both played acoustic guitars, go out on the street, and make some money. I can’t remember their names, and we didn’t have a name for ourselves, but they were good. They knew the right chords, the right rhythms, and I had to really pay attention to keep up with them. I remember we had a big repertoire and could get the attention of the tourists. We would walk up and down Avenida Revolución, or take a bus to Tecate or Ensenada, and approach people. “Song, mister? Fifty cents a song.”

They would look at us, and we looked young. “Can you actually play those things?”

“Sí, señor.”

“Okay, play something.”

We’d play the obvious favorites, like “La Cucaracha” and “Bésame Mucho.”

We were good, and it was a good experience—my first band. Every experience has its lessons. For me, this one began with learning to deal with band members. They were brothers, but they couldn’t have been more different, and they were always arguing. I think they must have had different fathers. I also learned about eating other people’s cooking, because a lot of places where we played would feed us—chicken tacos, enchiladas. It was good, and it was different from my mother’s cooking.

But one of the best lessons I learned from working with those two was how to carry a melody—how important that is on any instrument, an absolute must. It was like learning how to walk with a glass of water, carefully, without spilling a drop, from way over there to this point here. I would find out later that a lot of guys really can’t carry a melody, and if you can’t do that I think you should just find something else to do. Every musician I love can do that, no problem. When a musician can do that one simple thing, he’s going to nourish people’s hearts and not tax their brains.

The other thing I got from playing with the brothers was confidence. I started to feel good about my playing and about doing it in public.

My father saw this and started to enter me into little music contests around Tijuana—at street fairs and radio stations—and I started to win prizes such as food baskets, big bottles of Coca-Cola, and some fancy buttons, all of which I would immediately give to my mom. “Fascination” was the tune that I would kill with—all the ladies loved that one. Most of the time I competed with mariachi singers—but one time when I must have been thirteen or fourteen it ended up that my sister Irma and I were the only ones not eliminated at the end of a contest. She sang a doo-wop song, like “Angel Baby,” and I played my song and I got the bigger applause. “I don’t think your sister took it so well,” I remember my mom told me.

It was around this time that I started to feel very uncomfortable with favoritism, embarrassed by the amount of attention my dad would give me. I could feel the distance that it put between me and my siblings. It was something I came to resent and another pattern that followed me through the years—an uncomfortable feeling that would come over me when certain people, including Clive Davis, Miles Davis, and Sri Chinmoy, would show an obvious favoritism toward me. I would come to see Bill Graham in his office, and he’d ignore other people. “Tell him I’ll call him back—Carlos, how you doing?” Even my mom would do it—she’d hang huge pictures of Deborah, the kids, and me in her house, but there would be smaller—or no—pictures of my sisters, brothers, and their families. I tried to explain it to her. “Mom, this makes me uncomfortable, and it’s not fair.”

“Why? This is my house and my choice.”

I had to say, “Well, actually, it’s my house, Mom—I’m paying for it. Please either take down those big pictures or put up the same number of the rest of the family—please.” Finally she understood what I was telling her and took them down.

The more music I played, the more I could appreciate my father’s talent for doing it day in and out. He was a natural-born leader and kept things together—a no-nonsense kind of guy. He had stature in Tijuana. They knew him and associated him with Agustín Lara’s “Farolito,” so much so that it became a signature song. When he performed, people expected it, like people later expected Santana to play “Oye Como Va.”

Years later, I was working with my son, writing the song for my dad—“El Farol”—that we put on
Supernatural
. What else could we call it? That’s when I got a call from Deborah saying that I needed to call my family right away—somebody had left. “Who? Where’d they go?” I could tell from her voice what she meant. My dad died just as we finished putting that song together. I was equal parts proud and sad when it got a Grammy the next year.

My dad commanded respect without saying a word. I never saw him reprimand or correct or get upset with the musicians he worked with—but he wanted them to respect themselves, too. My dad would look the musicians up and down to see how they were dressed. If he saw someone wearing dirty shoes or a wrinkled shirt, he’d say, “Go home and come back, because you’ve got to be presentable,
hermano
.” He wanted them to want to look their best.

A lot of it was simply being willing to trust the other musicians, and they paid him the same compliment. He could walk into a room, and people would greet him. “
Hola,
Don José. How are you?” One time we walked in together when someone was telling a dirty joke, and they stopped immediately.

My dad knew his position, how to work hard. He’s the one who first told me, “Never pay or feed musicians before they play.”

“Really? Okay, Dad.”

In the early days, he would bring me with him to a place where he was playing and put a quarter in my hand so that I could get some candy or grapes—grapes were my favorite. Then he’d tell me where to sit. Soon he had me playing with his band on some shows.

There’s a photo from around this time of my dad and me with a bunch of musicians, all dressed up—we look like Don Corleone’s henchmen, you know? You can tell by the way we’re dressed that we were playing for somebody who had a lot of money, real hoity-toity, a high-society kind of gig for Tijuana. I remember that the occasion was something like a twenty-fifth anniversary, a one-time thing, not a regular band gig. We were playing waltzes and Italian ballads—no polkas or any kind of
norteño
music for that crowd.

It was during this time, around 1957, that I went to hear my father play one day and met an American tourist who became friendly with my parents. I think the best way to describe him is that he was a cowboy from Burlington, Vermont. He got close to me while my dad played, talking to me and keeping me company. He was a character, and as a youth I was fascinated with him and didn’t know
better. Neither did my mom and dad. They couldn’t figure him out. At first they were suspicious of this gringo, but slowly he gained their trust. He showed up a few times after that and started buying me stuff like toy guns and holsters. Then he offered to take me with him across the border to visit San Diego.

What kid wouldn’t want to go? It would be my first time to America. My siblings and I were poor kids—we talked about America with wonderment, wondering what it would be like to cross the border and see the country. We knew about it from TV—
Howdy Doody,
the Little Rascals, and
The Mickey Mouse Club
. We could see America from our neighborhood in Tijuana—bright lights and nice buildings. San Ysidro was really just minutes across the border. It
smelled
different, I knew it. I wasn’t eleven yet, but I was ready to go.

My memories of what exactly happened are very sketchy, like old photographs more than a movie. Everything was going fine, then all of a sudden the man started molesting me. I’m not sure how many times it happened. I remember it sometimes happened in a car and sometimes in a motel room. It was just so sudden—there was the surprise of it happening and an intense feeling of pleasure mixed with confusion, shame, and guilt for letting it happen.

It was like not knowing the words to describe the prostitute who answered the door when we arrived in Tijuana. I didn’t know what to call what was happening to me when it happened—I didn’t even know that there were words for what the guy was doing. I could understand that there was an exchange happening—I do something for you, like buying you candy or toys, and you let me do something for my gratification.

But I had the feeling that something about it was very wrong. Then it was over until the next time. More candy, more toys. Later, when I learned what the word
molest
meant, I was able to describe it with the vocabulary of a grown man. But I wanted not to think about it—it was painful to remember. I was numb to it for many,
many years, until I finally realized where a lot of my anger and negative energy were coming from.

The molesting ended for two reasons—first, my mom heard about his reputation from a friend, and she confronted me. She did it in front of the whole family, in a way that made me feel like I was on trial, as if it were my fault. Man, we didn’t have the wisdom to know how to talk about it. “Carlos, get over here! Did something happen to you? Did he do something?” I was just standing there with everyone looking at me. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know the words! I was so ashamed and angry at the same time.

My father was silent about it, which I think was for the better, because there was no sense in attacking or killing the guy and then going off to jail with the rest of the family wondering, “What are we going to do now?”

That was the worst part of it—being angrier at my mom than at the guy who molested me, which only created more distance between her and me. It was a negative emotional pattern that took a long time to shed. One of the things I still regret is that I didn’t have someone at that time to sit me down and help me transform my anger, because it put a lot of distance between my mom and me. It was the reason I did not invite her to my wedding in 1973. I explained it to my in-laws by saying that she was a control freak and the event would be better without her. I would keep my distance from her for another ten years after that.

I know it hurt my mom a lot, too. Despite all those bad feelings, she turned out to be my best friend when it came to music, helping me in ways I didn’t even know about till years later.

The second reason the molesting stopped was that the cowboy found someone younger than I was and moved on. That was cool with me. A little while later he was driving in the car with some other kid, and the two of them were doing whatever they were doing, and they ended up crashing into a ditch. He became an invalid, collected some insurance, and moved out of Tijuana. That’s what I heard, anyway.

The whole thing had me growing up really fast, because I was thinking that this is not for me, this is a mistake, and I was starting to pay attention to a Chinese girl, Linda Wong, who lived near us. Her family owned a grocery store where we shopped, and I was totally fixated on her. So it all ended, and in my mind it was like it never happened.

Back in Tijuana I had to go to school; I had to go make money. I had to keep practicing the violin. By 1958 I had sold my last pack of gum and shined my last pair of shoes and started earning money exclusively from making music. I stayed with the violin for almost six years, on and off, from 1955 to 1961. During that time I was turning into a teenager. I was twelve when I saw Linda and had my first crush. She was thirteen but had the body of a twenty-year-old. She even smelled like an adult. I felt like I was eight when I was around her.

I was beginning to develop my own taste in music. There was a lot to choose from around me—the classical and dance music from Europe that my father taught me and the mariachi and other Mexican music that the tourists always asked for. There were
rancheras
from the country,
cumbias
from Colombia, and Afro-Caribbean clave music, which they called salsa and we called
música tropical
. There was the heavily orchestrated big band music that I first heard when I was trying to learn the
córneo
—music that I thought of when I heard the word
jazz
—which I associated with a dinner club in Tijuana called the Shangri-La. I called jazz Shangri-La music until Santana drummer Michael Shrieve introduced me to people like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk and turned my head around. Then there was American pop music and doo-wop songs on the radio and TV and singers like Paul Anka and Elvis Presley, whom my sisters loved and I hated.