AND DAMN, HE CAN ROCK – Alejandro Escovedo
“If the music is going well I can get through anything,” says the Austin auteur. With a fiery new album in stores, the music’s going quite well, thank you.
Just what the hell is it going to take? That’s the longtime pressing question nearly two decades into the solo career of Alejandro Escovedo, at least for those of us who have been really listening and wowed time and again for most if not all of the last two decades. Will his new album, Street Songs of Love, released last week on Fantasy/Concord, be the one to finally at least lift him to a level of popularity that approaches what his musical merits?
Look up “critical darling” in the Dictionary of Rock and you’ll see Escovedo’s picture. His career has come to all but define the term for the modern age, especially its conundrum of the disparity between the deserved high praise for truly exceptional creative achievement and his rather low general public profile.
This writer is hardly the first one to ponder the issue. Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke already asked it a number of years ago: “What does it take to make this man a star?”
“You know… I have no idea what it would take,” Escovedo says. “Let’s face it, there aren’t many 59-year-old pop stars.”
On this spring morning in Austin, Escovedo is nonetheless garbed like a rock’n'roll dandy when we meet at 11 AM on the trendy South Congress Avenue strip: tight pants that look as if they were painted onto his lanky frame, a stylish vest buttoned tight, porkpie hat topping it all off. The look fits, as he has lived the rock life as fully as anyone since his musical career began with The Nuns in the mid 1970s. And even before then as a teenaged fan who bought into the dream as a faithful front-row follower of bands like The Faces and Mott The Hoople.
To review some major points on the Escovedo timeline, after The Nuns and time spent as the guitarist in country punk pioneers Rank and File, in the mid 1980s he started the aptly named True Believers, his Austin group that aimed to become an American über-rock band with a frontline of three singer/writers/guitarists: Alejandro, his brother Javier and Jon Dee Graham. They started out hopefully with a Rounder Records indie deal that got bumped up to a major label alliance with EMI. Then on the verge of the release of a second album that captured the band’s sprawling live power not heard on their first, EMI dropped them. The band eventually sputtered to an end.
Following time writing new songs during which Escovedo also humbly worked at Austin’s Waterloo Records, he debuted on his own in 1992 with Gravity – a stunning work of musical and lyrical literacy that marked him as his own quantity with a stylistic breadth and power of vision that sparked an ongoing trail of stellar reviews from the very first one (which this writer happened to pen) that continues apace today. If superlatives could be deposited in the bank, he’d at least be a wealthy man.
Then there was his near-fatal health crisis from the effects of Hepatitis C in 2002. It sparked an outpouring of fan contributions and benefits by his musical peers and admirers to help the uninsured Escovedo cover his medical bills and support his family, as did the two-CD tribute album Por Vida featuring artists like Lucinda Williams, Ian Hunter, Jayhawks, John Cale, Son Volt, Los Lonely Boys, Steve Earle and Calexico. It all raised consciousness of Escovedo’s merits far enough to help him win a major label deal with EMI’s Back Porch imprint.
Cale produced The Boxing Mirror in 2006. Then in 2008, the high-powered Bruce Springsteen management team of Jon Landau and Barbara Carr stepped in to handle Escovedo as he readied Real Animal for release. The collection of autobiographical songs was the fruit of a new songwriting collaboration with Chuck Prophet, and produced by Tony Visconti, whose work with David Bowie and T. Rex were essential building blocks of Escovedo’s musical outlook. His new managers pulled out a few big Jersey guns to help tout it: The Boss performing its single “Always A Friend” live and consigliere Miami Steve Van Zandt (a/k/a Little Steven) giving Escovedo major play on his Sirius satellite radio Underground Garage channel.
This time out Springsteen trades verses with Escovedo on the next to last cut of Street Songs. Bruce is one of two guest artists on the disc that serve as flagpole signifiers of what’s up on this release. Like Springsteen, Escovedo is a dedicated lifelong rocker of the highest order and best intentions. As with The Boss before Born To Run, he’s a treasure that deserves a wider hearing and rewards for his talent and labors.
Will that ever come? Who knows? But as the two sing on the song’s chorus: “You gotta have faith.”
***
On Real Animal, Escovedo sang/shouted in the opening line of its most smoking track: “All I ever wanted is a four-piece band!” Street Songs of Love is the record that fulfills that wish with an all but nuclear wham, bam, thank you ma’am.
He has played with a panorama of band configurations over the past 18 years or so. Most often it was a core guitars/bass/drum unit augmented by cello, violin and keyboards. He’s toured with a string quartet and in Austin in the 1990s would gather his Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra with horns, strings and additional percussion to fully flesh out all the musical dimensions of his melodic gifts.
Street Songs distills his band down to a molten core: longtime and ever more brilliant drummer Hector Munoz, magical discovery and secret weapon David Pulkingham on guitar, and new bassist Bobby Daniel. On the album and live (augmented by back-up singers), the combo Escovedo calls The Sensitive Boys simply rocks like God’s own favorite band.
“It’s mean, it’s swaggering. It rocks hard. It’s down to the essentials again: guitars, bass and drums, which is the intention in making this record,” Escovedo explains.
Visconti had “been pushing me to make more rock records,” he adds. “Real Animal was a rock album because he pushed that direction. It fit where we were going stylistically.”
And Street Songs bristles with such immediacy because everything was tested live and perfected before the tape rolled. Escovedo and crew did a nearly two-month-long weekly residency at Austin’s Continental Club late last year to work in the material. “T Bone Burnett told me something a long time ago when I was in The True Believers and we were just starting. I had heard Peter Case’s Blue Guitar record and I was just, wow, this is fuckin’ great. So I called Peter and said, I wanna make a record like this. And then I called T Bone and he gave me the most wonderful bit of advice: We weren’t ready to make a record. Go out and play for a year and make all the mistakes that you’re going to make on the road. And then come back and we’ll make a record. Of course I didn’t listen to his advice,” Escovedo notes with a rueful yet chuckling tinge.
The residency allowed him to “present new songs and develop them with the audience, with the band, with the singers. And then we took off and got in the van almost the following day [after the final Continental gig] – I think we had two days – and went on a three week tour that led us from Austin directly to the door of the studio,” he explains. “We played in Louisville on a Saturday night, we had Sunday off, Monday we were recording. Everything just lined up perfectly.”
And once it was time to track, the music barreled out quickly and powerfully. “We were really tracking like crazy fast,” says Escovedo. “We were doing four songs a day, some of them, just because we had played them for so long and we were ready, and we were so excited about the material. And we were really excited about the four of us just there with Tony. It was real intimate, it was very supportive. I played guitar a lot on this one. I didn’t play on the last one. I think it worked out to our advantage.
“It was just a feeling I’ve always had about making records,” Escovedo says of the approach. “And we’re a live band, man. That’s what we’re about. I think we make great studio records. But we’re not a band that stays home. We’re on the road constantly.” That’s also how Escovedo has made his living as well as cultivated his small yet devoted – and steadily growing – following. And if any record matches the conversion experience of a sizzling Escovedo show, it’s Street Songs of Love.
“I think Real Animal is where we finally got the rock and the strings together. I’ve done that for a long time, and I think for the kind of material I was writing and what I was saying in the songs, the strings were essential. And now I just wanna just party in a way, I just want to have a good time. And nothing makes me feel better than to play electric guitar… loud.”
And he’s found the perfect guitar foil in David Pulkingham, a lifelong player whose primary past experience was acoustic, from classical to ethnic. He’d only played electric jazz six-string before Escovedo hired him for his string quartet tour. But in just a few years as a rock player, Pulkingham has become a fierce, sharp and wise lead guitar savant whose work is as much the star of the album as the singer and his songs.
“He’s just a natural guitar player,” Escovedo raves. “The thing about rock’n'roll is that it doesn’t require a lot of the intelligence, or even the technical ability. So I had to dumb him down. But the beauty of it is that he was a willing participant. So with all that ability, all that talent, all that technique, what came out is beyond what I imagined. He’s not only a secret weapon but an essential part of the whole thing for me, as far as even songwriting is concerned too. I value him greatly. We’re great friends too. He’s a rarity amongst guitar players. [That is, no ego trip.] And he’s a wonderful human being.”
Then there’s Munoz, Escovedo’s brother of the road for years whose deep grooves and pugilist punch are as musical as they are rhythmic. “He’s a monster on this record, he’s so good live.” The addition of Daniels on bass brings it all to nuclear fission. “He’s everything I’ve ever wanted to find in a bass player – the missing link,” Escovedo enthuses.
And with the rocking combo of his dreams, it all comes easy. “I kind of like draw the map, and send David out with the troops and away we go.”
***
As the album’s title announces, Street Songs… is about love in its myriad forms at the primal place where the rubber of emotion meets the road of life. “Originally I didn’t want to have any idea of what the album was going to be about,” Escovedo explains. “I wanted no context, no framework at all. All I wanted was to write songs that were anonymous, transparent, but rocking – just an album of songs that were great rock songs.
After all, Real Animal was suffused with his personal history. “I wanted to get away from that. But as in all things in life, you can never escape your catalog or your life. So it became about what I was going through at the time,” he notes.
But broach that subject and Escovedo grows hesitant. “I really don’t want to talk about it,” he insists with a quiet finality. “Not everything has to be divulged to everyone. I learned that the hard way. And I’m not proud of it. When people read things in the media it just cheapens it, and it’s a sensitive situation. The full story is very complicated.”
Suffice to say that his third marriage, this time to poet Kim Christoff, is over. In the little city that talks big time behind backs – one of the sad strains infecting the Austin scene that makes it less than the musical paradise it claims to be – forked tongues have long wagged with an acidic venom over the local hero’s love life. There was the suicide of his first wife Bobbie some 20 years ago to which Escovedo applied wisdom and healing on his second solo album, Thirteen Years. Relations with long-divorced next wife, visual artist and sometimes rocker Dana Smith, remain strained.
Sure, Escovedo would rightly prefer that such matters those of us in Austin can’t help but know remain personal business, as none of us have walked his in shoes or those of the women who have loved him. And as he readily if not too proudly admits, “The lifestyle is very hard on relationships. What I do for a living is not conducive to a long-term relationship of any kind. Even with my musicians it’s hard to keep them going.” Yet it all provides a context that makes the album even more bracing and downright affirmative for any of us who have known romance that’s gone terribly and sadly wrong.
And Street Songs… is anything but a work of heartache. Rather, it’s the big beat of a heart that doesn’t merely gotta have faith but burns with the passion of… well, a true believer. And Escovedo remains a devotee of love. “Absolutely,” he stresses. I’m very clear, focused, infused with a sense of love. I love my life. I love my children. I love what I’ve done in the past and will do in the future.”
“I’m in love with love, and it broke me in two,” he sings, on the album’s strutting opening track, “Anchor.” On the pummeling punkish cut that follows, “Silver Cloud,” he is “the hungry man” who “needs your love” and is “a fool for your love.” Later on, he declares, “All I want is to fall apart with you.” Instead of giving in to love’s struggles and travails, Escovedo remains assertive, heartening and hopeful, framed by the wisdom that comes with a life fully lived and the lessons as a result heeded.
And also aware of the complications and complexities we all bring to our loving relationships, which he captures with chilling results on “This Bed Is Getting Crowded.” He explains how it’s “kind of a lover’s ghost song about the history and the ghosts we bring to bed. If you think that they don’t exist you’re crazy.”
He does admit that Christoff left him while he was on a retreat by himself in Mexico. “I was there for a month last August. I wanted to get away. I worked real hard on Real Animal, over a lot of time, a lot of ground. I needed a break. No better way to cleanse yourself of… just the fuckin’ scars, you know, let the scars heal than jump into the Pacific Ocean. It’s gorgeous down there.”
Prophet visited for a few days to get started on their next series of collaborations. “When Chuck and I get together it’s pretty electric. You’ve got to wear some safety gear,” Escovedo notes.
And to then return to another failed relationship “was difficult, and it was very….” He pauses. “It was easy to write the songs. I gotta tell ya that. For different reasons. There was a sense of liberation in a way. And yet there was a lot of melancholy in a way. It was a real fertile ground for songwriting.”
“These songs on this record are about love and so many shades of love and so many different capacities of love,” he continues. “‘Down on the Bowery’ is about a father and son – it’s for my son Paris. The fact that Ian Hunter sings it with me gives it another even kind of generational thing. It sounds like he’s singing it to me and I’m singing it to my son.”
And Hunter is like a rock’n'roll father to Escovedo. “That’s what I was thinking. When I hear him sing I think of all the times I’ve listened to his songs and all I’ve learned in his songs – the wisdom and clarity. The point is that it was the voice of my past, and now I’m passing what I learned from those songs and what I learned from Ian back on to my son. Just telling him to be a freak if he wants to be a freak, to be whoever he wants to be. Encourage him to be outside the norm of society.”
Hunter’s presence is the other guest signifier on the disc. He and Springsteen both represent Escovedo’s artistic aims as well as the notion that a rocker can mature yet not abandon the crunch’n'punch of rock’n'roll that was the siren’s call when young and full of piss and vinegar.
Springsteen’s manager Landau declared in his prior days as a music critic the oft-quoted line: “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Street Songs… is the album that makes this longtime music journalist, just a few years younger than Escovedo, believe that genuine rock’n'roll still has a future at a time when the style is at its lowest ebb since it first went large in the year of my birth, 1954.
Hunter represents the template for Street Songs of Love. Both in music and content, Mott the Hoople – a band whose inspiration has echoed throughout Escovedo’s career – suffuses the disc in spirit and attitude.
It’s an inspiration that harkens to Escovedo’s True Believers days. “What we loved the most about Mott was the ability to rock, and then those ballads were so beautiful: ‘I Wish I Was Your Mother’ or “The Ballad of Mott’ or ‘Saturday Gigs,’ great songs like that. His lyrics were so good, and the stories he told you were in such a personal focused way. I love that combination of the literary and rock. Real rock, not like….” Escovedo pauses. “I think a lot of songwriters try to rock and they aren’t rockers.”
And Street Songs is the album that declares in no uncertain terms: Escovedo may be one of the finest songwriters with a guitar and pen over the last two decades (and named in the 1990s “Artist of the Decade” by No Depression a few years before the era was even over). And damn, he can rock.
**
The question we opened with still remains as Street Songs of Love evokes another pile of praise from reviewers. “In another, less fragmented pop era, this would be the album of thoughtful but radio-ready love songs to finally get Mr. Escovedo the big national audience he deserves,” notes New York Times critic Jon Pareles. “Could it happen now?”
“I think if any album will give us a larger audience, this one could,” says Escovedo. Even though his solo career epitomizes the title of a song he wrote about The True Believers, “More Miles Than Money,” stardom and success are moot points as far as he’s concerned. Even if some lucre would indeed be appreciated. “I wouldn’t mind. I have a lot of kids to support,” says the father of seven.
On the other hand, “Does it matter at this point?” he asks with full rhetorical oomph. “I’m making really great records I think. I love my band. I think what we’re doing is still viable, still fresh. We’ve still got more records in us. The ideas aren’t drying up. The possibilities are endless as long as I stay healthy, which I am. I see myself doing this for quite awhile. I’ve been doing it for quite awhile.”
And the well still boasts considerable reserves. “David and I could make a record together. I could make an instrumental record with the band. We could make the dance-y rock’n'roll record that I want to make,” he posits.
“It’s funny now how my life has taken such a change,” Escovedo ruminates on how, since Real Animal, he went from having a wife and young daughter and living in a Texas countryside refuge to, for now, hanging his hat in a hotel. “But a lot of it’s coming together. Things are passing my way that are bringing me closer. I feel like it is. It feels like everything’s falling into place.
“That’s always been such a difficult thing for me in life. I’ve always felt like a lot of us are really displaced sometimes, like everything is a misstep. Almost but not quite there. And wanting it to be so badly,” he confesses.
Throughout it all, one love has never let him down: rock’n'roll. “It’s everything,” he concludes. “If the music is going well I can get through anything.”
By Rob Patterson – blurt-online.com