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Escovedo looks back on career in new songs

By John Kenyon

Five years ago this month, musician Alejandro Escovedo collapsed after a concert in Arizona and was rushed to the hospital. Hepatitis C, something he had lived with for years, had wreaked havoc on his body, and he could no longer ignore its effects.

The next year was filled with treatments – both traditional and not – and tributes. A fund was started to help the lifelong musician with his medical bills, he was the subject of a tribute CD and several fundraising concerts. Other than live albums culled from existing tapes, he wasn’t heard from in more than a year.

Today, the Austin, Texas, musician is preparing his second album since that battle, his health now relegated to a passing comment deep in an interview. When discussing the subject matter of his new songs, which offer a sort of magic carpet ride through his more than three decades in the music business, Escovedo ponders what might have been.

“Some of them are painful experiences to live again. I lost a lot of friends,” he says of the past that inspired his newest songs. “A lot of the people I played with were damaged in some way, people I used to hang out with in San Francisco who were young, very vibrant types. Then drugs came in and created a very different type of people.

“There are some great highs in the memories, but some melancholy times,” he adds. When asked if he feels like he escaped a similar fate, he agrees that he has. “I feel lucky that I didn’t succumb to the temptations. Look at what happened to me, too. I could have been one of those stats. I feel great now.”

And there it is. His health is a footnote of sorts. Conversationally, at least. Creatively, it fueled his last album and is a driving force behind the one forthcoming. His last, The Boxing Mirror, was an at times difficult disc that captured some of the harrowing feelings of his sickness in its jagged, dark lyrics. The album, produced by Velvet Underground legend John Cale, opens with “Arizona,” a song about the collapse. “Have another drink on me,” he sings. “I’ve been dry since Arizona.”

“I think it’s a beautiful album, a dark record, not an easy listen,” he says. “I definitely didn’t want to make a feel-good record. Friends were encouraging me, saying it was an important record. But when we toured behind it we didn’t play a lot of those songs. It was like, ‘We made the record, and then OK, let’s move on now.’”

Moving on, but not necessarily forward. Instead, Escovedo is looking backward. Though he has always dwelled on the fringes of the mainstream, never experiencing a hit no matter the merits of his music, he has been in a handful of influential bands that took him around the country. He was a member of early punkers the Nuns and proto-alt-country act Rank and File, both from San Francisco, before returning home Texas to join the raging guitar army True Believers, the last with his brother, Javier.

All are touched on in songs on the forthcoming Real Animal, due in June.

“I had been thinking a lot about all the different people, all the different places,” he says. “People were asking me to write a book, but I’m not a writer in that sense. It became a song cycle in a way.”

He worked with musician Chuck Prophet, another critically acclaimed, commercially ignored songwriter who followed a musical path somewhat parallel to Escovedo’s over the past two decades. Tony Visconti, who helmed classic discs by David Bowie and T. Rex, among others, produced.

“I wanted to tell the story because it wasn’t a story of someone sitting back in his chateau looking back after great success, but a person who was still slugging it out, still on the front line, still remembering all the little pieces of the story that brought him to where he is now,” Escovedo says of the album.

As a solo artist, Escovedo’s music touches on several genres. At heart, it’s rock ’n’ roll, but there are strong elements of Latino music, folk and English glam rock. That leads to a sonic range that can veer from hushed acoustic beauties like “Last to Know” to the playful stomp of “Castanets” or the blazing guitars of “Break This Time.”

Escovedo first took a look back with “By the Hand of the Father,” a theater project that found him telling his family’ story through words and music. He’s a first generation Chicano from a large musical family – relatives include Santana percussionist Pete Escovedo and Prince protégé Sheila E – who explored that lineage in song.

“That was really important as a first step to tell this story,” he says. “That’s where it all started, how music played such a large part in their lives. Now it’s kind of me telling my story.”

Looking back affords Escovedo the opportunity to play “what if.” The True Believers, in particular, spur bittersweet reflection. He says it was his most important band, though it had the lowest profile. It released one major label record in the mid-1980s, but, like so many other talented groups, saw its follow up disappear thanks to consolidation and label politics. The group – which also included songwriter and guitarist Jon Dee Graham – split soon after.

“All our lives would have been way different,” he says when asked what things would be like if the band had stayed together. “We had three great songwriters, great guitar players. We rocked really hard, but we wrote songs that had stories and talked about people’s emotions in a way that other bands, great bands, didn’t have. There was an abundance of possibility.”

Escovedo felt that same possibility in 1996 when Rykodisc issued his acclaimed third solo album, With These Hands. The label also reissued the True Believers discs and an album from the singer’s hard-rocking side project Buick MacKane at that time, and it felt like he might finally make it. Instead, it was the latest in a string of disappointments.

“It was almost mild shock. I was – not like I expected it. I learned enough to know this business is whacked – I was in limbo. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

“All I’ve done is work, work, work,” he says of his thoughts at the time. “I’ve worked myself into this very precarious position health wise… What do I have to do other than setting myself on fire to get some attention?”

What he did was to continue recording and performing music, drawing the usual critical raves when he did. He says he began to realize that this was what his career would be.

“I realized that success is merely a word that is defined by how you feel about yourself,” he says. “It was me coming to terms with myself and accepting that what I had and the way people were reacting to my songs was as important as star power and financial success. It really fit in more with my personality, the kind of person I was.”

Alejandro Escovedo performs at 8 p.m. April 3 at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City. Tickets are $20 and are available by calling (319) 688-2653 or through www.IowaTix.com.