Alejandro Escovedo: All Roads Lead Back Home

There’s a well-earned weariness and wisdom to Alejandro Escovedo that slips out in his speech as well as his music. The sixty-one year old singer-songwriter has wandered the musical landscape for 40 plus years, building a large underground and cult following along the way. As the years and miles have gone underfoot, he has grown from a thrashing punk guitarist, to hell-billy founder and roots revivalist to a powerful lyricist and musician who parlays his emotional honesty into well crafted songs; songs that are, more often than not, haunting and as close to the bone as you’re likely to ever hear.

The Mexican-American musician comes to his calling honestly. Alejandro was the 7th of 12 children. His parents were Mexican immigrants who came to the San Antonio, Texas from Saltillo, Mexico. His father Pedro had played in mariachi and swing bands as well as catching work as a boxer, semi-pro baseball player and plumber. Alejandro’s two older-half brothers Coke and Pete had made names for themselves as renowned Latin percussionists (both playing with Santana’s band) and Pete’s daughter (Alejandro’s niece) is Sheila E., the percussionist who found fame working with Prince and as a solo artist. But Alejandro was, in his words, “a late bloomer” (as he told David Fricke in a May 2, 1996 Rolling Stone interview). “I was pretty aimless for a while”.

By the mid-70’s, Escovedo, who was born in 1951, had divorced his first wife and was living in Hollywood, California where he spent his time on the Hollywood Strip at the same time that punk was beginning to take hold on the West Coast. At an early Patti Smith concert, Escovedo met his second wife, Bobbie Levie.

Alejandro and Bobbie moved north to San Francisco where he wanted to study filmmaking. It was in school that Escovedo met Jeff Olener and the pair began a cinematic project about a band that couldn’t play and decided to cast themselves as the leads. Although the film was never made, the pair became the nucleus of the now much heralded West Coast punk band, The Nuns. By adding Richie Dietrich, Jennifer Miro and Jeff Ralph, The Nuns took San Francisco by storm, being one of the first ‘punk’ bands to play large venues. At the height of their popularity, they were a larger draw then even the national acts, like Blondie, that were being booked in the clubs. The Nuns were also the opening band for the infamous last show by The Sex Pistols at the Winterland Theatre in January of 1978.

A tour of New York City proved to be the undoing of the Nuns. Escovedo told Peter Blackstock of the alt-country magazine No Depression “ The first night we were there, we went to Max’s Kansas City to see the Heartbreakers play, and we sat at a table with Andy Warhol, and George Clinton was there, and Richard Hell (one of the founders of the punk scene)”. Escovedo decided to stay in New York and The Nuns returned to California without him.

Shortly after, he was contacted by Chip Kinman of The Dils (another very popular San Francisco punk band) who sought out Escovedo in hopes of forming another band. The Dils had broken up as well and Kinman was itching to get back to playing in a band. Kinman relocated to New York where he and Escovedo formed Rank and File, which had a distinct country flair with that same hard-edged punk undertow from their earlier days. Rank and File is considered by many to have been one of the very first bands in the cow punk / hell-billy sound. They quickly developed a hard core following in the New York area.

The band took to the road and as they passed through Portland, Chips’ brother Tony (also a former member of The Dils) jumped on board as the bass player. After the tour was over, the drummer dropped out and the band opted to relocate to Austin, Texas, a town known as a musical haven with a very supportive musical community. Once there, they added Slim Evans to the lineup and began touring again. While on the west coast, the band was signed by Slash/Warner. They recorded one album, Sundown that is often cited as a major influence to countless alt-country and roots rock bands. By 1983, Escovedo had begun to feel somewhat stifled by the Kinman brothers who had all but assumed control of the band. He left Rank and File to form True Believers with his brother Javier.

The True Believers took a departure from what Escovedo had been doing with Rank and File, developing their sound into a harder edged, garage-like rumbling thunder. But it was their fiery live performances that gave the band their reputation. The True Believers were signed to Rounder / EMI where they recorded one album, the self-titled True Believers in 1985. They took to the road in a lengthy tour to promote the album. An article written about the tour by roadie Pat Blashill (which appeared in SPIN magazine) spun a tale of wretched excess of sex and drugs put a heavy strain on Escovedos marriage. The band did record a second album for EMI but the band was dropped from the label just as they were preparing for a promotional tour. (The album was held back by EMI for seven years before finally being released as part of a Rykodisc package). The band broke up shortly after being dropped by EMI.

Alejandro returned to Austin where he took a job behind the counter at a record store, occasionally playing locally with his ‘orchestra’, which was a revolving assemblage of local musicians who would get together to play at local clubs. His marriage, which had been showing fault lines for quite some time, finally began to unravel. After Bobbie gave birth to their second daughter, the couple split in 1990. In April of 1991, Bobbie committed suicide.
Escovedo dealt with the heaviness left by Bobbie death by burying himself in his work. The result was his debut solo disc Gravity that was released in 1991. Most of the songs had been written while he was still in the True Believers but the closing track, Gravity/Falling Down Again radiates with the grief he was dealing with at the time. He told David Fricke in Rolling Stone that he rarely plays songs from that disc in concert anymore. “It’s hard to avoid it because if you want to know about me and the songs, I have to be honest about where they come from.” Around the same time that he was releasing Gravity, Escovedo had engaged in a side project called Buick MacKane (named after a track on T-Rex’s 1972 album Slider), which brought together his old school punk sensibilities and his love for 70’s glam rock. He continues to work with Buick MacKane on occasion.

The follow up disc, Thirteen Years, released in 1993, seemed to be a more mature continuation on the themes he was working on with Gravity. Thirteen Years was a concept album, which explored his thirteen-year marriage to Bobbie. Both Gravity and Thirteen Years received heavy critical praise. The next release, 1996’s With These Hands, a conceptual album dedicated to his father, showed a more upbeat Escovedo and included contributions by Willie Nelson and Jennifer Warnes as well as appearances by Sheila E. and his brother Pete.

In 1998, he released More Money Than Miles: Live 1994-1996, a very impressive live disc that captures the full musical spectrum of Alejandro Escovedo. In an interview with Joshua Klien, Escovedo explained his love of the live performance. “I love playing live. That’s really the most important aspect of this music making stuff to me. It’s really kind of the hardest road to choose, because you have to travel so much, and it’s hard on relationships and what-have-you. For me, it’s the most immediate response. I don’t want to become a recluse in the studio. I like the interaction between the songs and the audience.”

Bourbonitis Blues in 1999 and the critically acclaimed A Man Under The Influence in 2001 continued to showcase the musician’s deeply eclectic style, emotional honesty and fearlessness in his lyrics.

After a show in Phoenix, Arizona in April of 2003, Escovedo collapsed. Apparently he had been dealing with Hepatitis C for quite some time but without medical insurance, he had not sought treatment. His subsequent medical treatment took him off the road for the next year and the mounting medical costs nearly destroyed him. However fellow musicians put together benefit shows and released Por Vida: A Tribute To The Songs Of Alejandro Escovedo which was released in 2004 whose proceeds benefit the Alejandro Escovedo Medical And Living Expense Fund to help defray the astronomical costs of his treatment. Contributors included Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, John Cale, Jennifer Warnes, Ian Hunter, Son Volt and The Jayhawks.

By 2006, Escovedo had fully recovered, released Boxing Mirror and was back on the road. He has since recorded and released 2008’s Real Animal and 2010’s Street Songs Of Love. Escovedo explained his rather unique approach to recording Street Songs. He booked a two month long, Tuesday night residency at Austin’s famed Continental Club. He and the band would ‘build’ the album right there, right in front of the audience. “We would bring in three new songs every Tuesday night and we would play them acoustically first for the audience, and then I’d bring in the rhythm section, and slowly but surely we would add each piece … It started with the room half full, but it built until the last one was sold out.” By the time the residency was complete, they had a complete album. Two and a half weeks on the road brought them to the studio in Lexington, Kentucky where they cut the album 4 days. “By then we weren’t thinking about the songs. They were part of us already.”

That’s the thing about Alejandro Escovedo. When you first hear his songs, your first reaction might very well be that these songs were already a part of you. Even before you ever heard them.