Alejandro Escovedo

Escovedo’s story is interesting not because he got sick and almost died. That’s the most common story in the world; it’s a story that’s going to happen to all of us sooner or later. Escovedo is interesting because he has a rare gift for turning this universal experience into songs that clarify the feelings behind the facts.

Even before he collapsed in Tempe, his music was haunted by mortality. Many of his early songs tried to make sense of the 1991 suicide of his estranged second wife. Many of his mid-period songs tried to make sense of the hitless songwriter’s life, where so much is said and so little is heard, a career summed up by the album title, More Miles Than Money. And now his newest songs deal with the fact that death knocked on the door once and could always knock again.

The power of these songs comes not so much from the lyrics as from the music. Escovedo’s words set the scene, name the characters and provide the premise, but the real drama is in the sound. It’s the sound of punk rock’s electric and percussive instruments pushing forward while the acoustic instruments of Mexican folk music and classical chamber music pull back; it’s the stabbing notes of fretboards and drum skins set against the sustaining notes of violins, cellos and steel guitars. Ground up between these opposing forces are the lead vocals, a curious blend of Tex-Mex melodrama and hipster-bohemian skepticism, a deadpan description of early morning’s existential crisis.

Since 1970 or so, it has been difficult to create a genuinely new sound within the guitar-rock format; Escovedo is one of the few to pull it off. The style he created for his six solo studio records, from 1992’s Gravity to this year’s The Boxing Mirror, is so different from anything else in rock ’n’ roll that the industry hasn’t known what to do with it. And though it never sold many records, this sound may end up as one of the most influential inventions of the ’90s. After all, who in the 1930s would have said that Robert Johnson would become one of the decade’s most influential artists? Who would have said it of Woody Guthrie in the 1940s? Or of Professor Longhair in the 1950s? Or of The Velvet Underground in the 1960s? Or of Townes Van Zandt in the 1970s?

It took Escovedo a long time to come up with that sound. By the time he turned 24, he still hadn’t picked up a guitar; he was still a fan rather than a player. It was 1975, and he was living in the Palo Alto Hotel, a transient flophouse full of penniless bohemians and former mental patients in San Francisco’s Polk District. Some of the residents were so zonked out on their meds that they couldn’t even calculate the right height for a successful suicide jump. “A third story jump ain’t high enough,” he later sang. “It’s just a mess on Market Street … The neighbors spend their days washing their socks and staring out the windows in a Thorazine haze.”

That song, “Sacramento & Polk,” first appeared on Escovedo’s 1999 album, Bourbonitis Blues, but he re-cut it for the new album, just for the chance to do it with producer John Cale. After all, Cale’s 1974 album, Fear, was something Escovedo listened to every day at the Palo Alto Hotel. Cale thickens the arrangement with distorted guitar, sawing cello and thundering drums ’til you can actually hear the “Thorazine haze.”

Escovedo co-founded primitive punk band, The Nuns, in San Francisco. He moved to New York and joined the Judy Nylon Band and the heady milieu of the downtown punk scene. Then he joined Rank & File, a new band led by Chip and Tony Kinman who were pioneering a fusion of punk and country music. When Rank & File moved to Austin, Escovedo was back in his native state and surrounded by reminders of the border culture he thought he’d left behind.

“I was like the George Harrison of Rank & File,” he says with a laugh. “I was completely overshadowed by Chip and Tony, because they were so good. But I wrote songs anyway, because I knew there was something I needed to say. I started to write when I was past 30, so I wasn’t interested in writing about teenage things. My favorite film teacher in college had told us that the best stories are usually family stories, so I started writing about my family.”

To get these new songs out to the world, Alejandro quit Rank & File, phoned his brother Javier in Los Angeles and told him, “Come out to Austin; we’re forming a new band called the True Believers.” It was 1982, and by 1983 the band was opening for Los Lobos in Austin. When Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo added his accordion to the True Believers’ set that night, a bond was forged, and the two groups would tour together off-and-on for the next four years.

“Los Lobos made me get serious about music,” Escovedo confesses. “They were really good at their instruments and they were open to all kinds of music. We were both blending Chicano roots and rock ’n’ roll, but my rock is so different than Los Lobos’. They’re coming from The Band and Creedence, while I’m coming from the Stones and Stooges and all that aggression and angst. And their Chicano roots are different, too. You can tell Los Lobos apart from the Texas bands, because we have that Tejano-blues aspect, that San Antonio sound of Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez.

“Back then it was important to declare that rock ‘n’ roll was our music, too. My parents listened to Mexican records, but they also listened to Frank Sinatra. We listened to The Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye growing up. When you heard bands like Love, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs and ? & the Mysterians, you were hearing Mexican-Americans playing rock ’n’ roll. After we met Los Lobos, Javier and I could hear the Chicano influence that had crept into our voices and our guitar lines without our ever being conscious we had put it in there.”