CHAPTER 3

The Strangers, with me third from right, 1962.

Music is a force that can divide generations, fathers and sons. It can also bring them together. My son, Salvador, was sixteen, and we were in the car—he was already in that mode when parents are the most uncool people, and so is their music. I was listening to John Coltrane’s Live in Seattle, recorded in 1965 with Pharoah Sanders—very challenging music. Salvador was looking out the window, real quiet. That’s one thing Sal and my little brother, Jorge, have in common—you can tell they chew on things for a while before they open their mouths. They think and are considerate of other people’s feelings. I could still learn from that. I say what comes into my mind, and sometimes I’ll read an interview in which I’ve gone and said something about another musician, and I’ll say, “Damn, that was a little harsh.” Later on I’ll have to apologize to someone.

The music started to get real far-out, and suddenly Sal turned to me and said, “Hey, Coltrane’s playing Stravinsky right now. You know, Dad, you can’t just bug out and play like that. You got to know what you’re doing.” I was chuckling inside, but I kept cool. I know that music is not easy to listen to. But he was listening hard, and he had an opinion about what he heard. I respected that.

Not long after that, we were in the car and listening to—what else?—Coltrane, and again Salvador got quiet. Then he said, “You know, for a long time I thought that you and your friends Hal Miller, Tony Kilbert, and Gary Rashid were all a bunch of music snobs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I thought you guys were overly opinionated about music. But I was in the car with my sisters, and they started playing their music, and I felt just like you guys. I was thinking, “Oh, my God, do we have to listen to the Spice Girls over and over?”

I had to smile again—that made me think right away about my sisters and their Elvis records. It gave me great delight that Sal was thirsty for something more everlasting, and then it made me think of how we don’t connect with certain music when we’re young. Then we grow up and think again about the music we used to turn our noses up at. Like me and Mexican music.

I remember around the time I was disengaging from my dad and mariachi music, American singers were coming down to Mexico for material. Big stars such as Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole did whole albums based on Mexican music—even Charlie Parker did that South of the Border album. I can remember when everybody was singing “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás”—which is a song written by Osvaldo Farrés, who’s Cuban, but it was made famous in Mexico. And of course “Bésame Mucho,” which could be the most recorded song of all time next to “La Bamba.” A few years later, the Champs did “Tequila,” and after that, Herb Alpert did “The Lonely Bull” with the Tijuana Brass.

It’s funny, because at the time all those guys were crossing the border and coming south, I was starting to go the other way. It all started with the songs I heard on the radio. It didn’t matter if I was Mexican or American, black, white, or purple. I could only hear one thing—the blues.

In the summer of 1961 my dad had been up in San Francisco for almost a year, and my mom could see I had lost interest in playing music. She also knew she couldn’t talk me back into it. But she was smart, and she wasn’t going to let all those lessons and all that playing go to waste. One afternoon she grabbed me and said, “Mijo, come here—we’re going to the park.”

“What? Where?”

“You’ll see.” Oh, okay. Here we go again.

I could hear the music even before we got there. It was a boogie kind of beat and echo, echo, echo—just bouncing off the buildings and trees. We walked into the park, and I saw a band doing its thing with funky amplifiers and electric guitars and a booming bass sound. They were playing a riff-blues number like “Last Night,” and then this one guitarist stepped up, and he’s wearing khakis, pressed sharp as a knife, and his hair was piled up in a big mop and cut close on the sides, like Little Richard’s. Real pachuco style, just like my dad hated. The guy starts soloing, and he’s got a very distinctive twang on his guitar that was popular back then—like Duane Eddy or Lonnie Mack.

It was like a UFO had landed in my backyard. I had seen guitarists on TV before, but not like this—hearing it live made the hair on my arms go straight up. This was so different—to see it happening in front of me, to see someone snapping the strings and feel the sound going through you. To see how the music was made. I’m sure my mom could see the effect on me just by looking at my eyes and my body. I stood there and listened and couldn’t move.

It was Javier Bátiz. He was one of the few guys playing that early style of rock and roll in Mexico at the time. He had come up playing with a black American singer and piano player from New Orleans named Gene Ross, who lived in Tijuana. Now he was leading his own group called Los TJs—short for “Tijuanenses.” And it was pronounced “Tee-Jays,” not “Tay-hotas,” because we all wanted to be in with the in crowd, as American as possible. That group had some of the best players in Tijuana, including Javier’s sister. They called her Baby Bátiz because she sang “Angel Baby” so well.

Javier himself was one of Tijuana’s baddest guitarists, and his home gig was at El Convoy—a dance and strip club on Avenida Revolución. He was an amalgam of the three people he loved most: B. B. King, Little Richard, and Ray Charles. He had it down. But he didn’t sound like a parrot. He had really invested a lot of his own energy and passion into it.

Of course I didn’t know all this about Javier or the other musicians and their styles and fingerprints then. I didn’t even know Javier’s name. Not yet. All this made it more mysterious and attractive to me. What I could see was that it was not just the sound or the look of the band or the way they presented themselves. It was all that together. And I knew that this was not the kind of music that happened in that park too often. I’m not sure how they got the permit to play that loud outdoors, but there they were.

I remember thinking, with all my teenage conviction, “This is what I want to be. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Two things happened right away because of what happened in the park that day. First, I started following Javier around—I became his shadow. I was thirteen at the time; he was only three or four years older than I was, but in my eyes he might as well have been in his early twenties. He wasn’t overly friendly or anything to me, but he let me come and hang out at his place. He lived with his mother, and the first time I went to his place I noticed that everything smelled like glue because he was into model cars. His piano was covered with them! Wow. It was cars and records and guitars and music, and that was this guy’s life—which made him the coolest guy around.

Another thing about Javier was that his mannerisms were so different from anything I had ever seen—it was definitely not mariachi, and it wasn’t pachuco, either. There was nothing Mexican about his thing. It was a black American kind of charisma. He was a slick dresser, and he had swagger and confidence, even in the way he grabbed the guitar. It all fit with the music he played and the way his guitar sounded. It made a huge impression on this little Mexican kid—I was even wondering what kind of water he was drinking.

But there was a price to pay to be around Javier. Two of the TJs didn’t like me and would try to shoo me away, punch me in the stomach, and pull my hair and my ears, just being bully assholes, and Javier did nothing to stop it. The worst was a saxophone player named Brachi. But he wasn’t going to stop me. In my thirteen-year-old mind, getting my ass kicked by this bully was worth it in order to get the goods. I was the youngest kid there with these older guys. One day I came home all red-eyed from crying, and my mom told Javier that Carlos had an older brother who would kick their asses if the mistreatment didn’t stop. It stopped. I heard years later they found Brachi’s body somewhere on the outskirts of Tijuana—that he made the wrong deal with the wrong people.

Javier’s bass player was nice—he looked like Jughead in the Archie comics—and the guy could really play the instrument, and he turned me on to Jimmy Reed. I remember going to his place, where he had a room with a bed, a dirt floor, and a phonograph. He would smoke a joint, lie on the bed, and put on a Jimmy Reed record, and that voice and harmonica had all the elegance and emotion of Duke Ellington’s music as far as I was concerned. I still feel that way.

The second thing that happened after I heard Javier in the park was that my mom immediately sent a letter to my dad telling him that Carlos found this music that he loves, that he’s following around this musician like a puppy dog, and he wants to learn electric guitar. She asked him to get one for me if he could afford it. I forget if he brought it with him the next time he got back to Tijuana or if he had someone else bring it. It was a big, fat Gibson—a beat-up hollow-body like the ones the jazz guys would play, black with a little yellow in it. I didn’t have a clue what to do. First thing I did was to go out and buy strings for it—nylon strings!

I learned fast after that—that you need steel strings, and that you have to play through an amplifier. I learned what a pickup was. My ears were already trained from playing violin, and I knew how to hold strings against a neck, but this was totally different. Different feel on my fingers; different tuning. I learned a few chords from watching Javier, but it was mostly my dad at the start—and listening to records and the radio, just trying to pick up what I could.

The thing is, I hung out with Javier, but Javier was not really a teacher. It’s been reported that he gave me lessons, but he was not someone who would say, “No; you’re doing that wrong. Play with this finger here and that finger there.” He let me hang around, he turned me on to different songs and the people I needed to know: B. B. King, Ray Charles. He had the albums, and he had the knowledge. But when it came to guitar technique, what he showed me mostly was his back. Really—that’s how he would play, so I couldn’t see what his hands were doing.

Of course years later I found out that making someone learn on his own is a big part of the blues tradition. You don’t want to make it too easy or too accessible. Even my future father-in-law, Saunders King, one of the best R & B guitarists of his generation, didn’t like to show me anything. My chops are my chops—go get your own!

I have been supportive of Javier and have acknowledged him accordingly. He has been a guest in my house. We have hung out together and played together—like when we jammed in Tijuana in 1993. I presented him with a Boogie amplifier and gave him one of my guitars. He now plays a Paul Reed Smith.

But I feel like I have to be careful now not to do things that will perpetuate the idea that some sort of debt is still unpaid. I owe Javier gratitude for turning me on to the electric guitar but not necessarily for showing me how to do it. What I learned about the guitar and about the music I would start out with—the blues—came from a whole school of teachers, some of whom I played with as a teenager and some of whom I got to know from listening to their records over and over.

Once I got turned on to the electric guitar, my whole world started to shift and change. It was like all the energy and conviction that had been spread out among boxing and girls and toys and candy was suddenly focused on just one thing: the electric guitar. It didn’t matter at first if it was just blues or R & B—what mattered was whether there was a guitar.

I started to pick up on guitar music everywhere—on the radio, on the records at Javier’s place—and I began to hear the melodies that went with guitars. Groups like the Ventures caught my ear, though I thought a lot of their stuff sounded like corny surfer music. But they were great players. Also Los Indios Tabajaras, who were as big as Elvis in Mexico. They were this bad two-guitar band from Brazil, and their shtick was posing as Brazilian Indios. They sounded like Santo & Johnny unplugged, smooth and precise. I’m sure Santo & Johnny grew from their style—that’s how it sounds to me.

As I said, I was mostly on my own after the few chords my dad showed me. I learned how to dissect a song by playing the record three or four times with the guitar in my hand, going up and down the neck of the guitar till I grabbed the right chord. It was easy after a while—I would focus on one part and then another. First the guitar, then the horns, then the bass. One of the first songs I learned all the parts to was James Brown’s “Night Train.”

I was teaching myself to listen, to figure out how to take a song apart and put it back together, like a mechanic. This is what the piano player, the guitar, the bass, the saxophone is doing. Being a kid, dissecting a song, I could do it for hours. It’s still fun for me. Just the other day I was dissecting the horn parts to Bob Marley’s “Iron Lion Zion.”

The first melody I learned to play all the way through was “Apache,” an instrumental by the Shadows, an English group. I really got that one down and loved it—so much so that it became my nickname for a while. “Ahí viene El Apache,” they’d say—here comes El Apache. When I found out there was this western called Apache with Burt Lancaster, that made me even prouder.

Funny thing is that years later—around the time of Supernatural—I discovered a tune from that movie called “Love Song from Apache,” and it was performed by Coleman Hawkins. So another song called “Apache” got under my skin. I had the honor to play that tune with Wayne Shorter a number of times, and on one special occasion at the Montreux Jazz Festival I played it with the great saxophonist Joe Henderson. The festival director, Claude Nobs, had the idea to have us play together, but the choice of song was mine. “Ahí viene El Apache” still applies.

After “Apache” I learned “Rumble” by Link Wray and tunes by Duane Eddy, including “Red River Valley”—we called that rebel music. “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia—one of my first songs with a string bend. I remember telling myself, “I got to learn that lick, man!” I got into Freddie King—the king of the instrumentals—with “San-Ho-Zay,” “Tidal Wave,” and of course “Hide Away.”

There was Billy Butler’s guitar solo on Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk”—every guitar player had to know that. No exceptions. Javier turned me on to Bobby “Blue” Bland, and I picked up on everything his guitarist, Wayne Bennett, was doing. Later I came to know how much of that was T-Bone Walker’s creation, almost note for note.

Playing any instrument is learning by doing, training your mind and fingers to do things. Getting frustrated but doing it again and again. I was hungry to keep learning—any tune anyone wanted to put in front of me—anything—I could figure it out on my own. I began to sit in with whoever would let me. Long before I played in any club, I had a chance to sit in and watch the TJs’ rehearsals. I started picking up things, little by little.

Of course I wanted to play in the TJs—who wouldn’t? At that time, Javier’s band was more together than any other band doing that kind of music in Tijuana. They were the band to beat. They were winning all the contests in Tijuana and other cities—Juárez, Mexicali. They had their regular gig at El Convoy, on the main strip. But they were already a unit. I hung out and sometimes sat in with them, but mostly it was just hanging.

I remember one time I got to go in the car with them to a battle of the bands in Mexicali, which is as far from Tijuana as San Francisco is from San Jose. The TJs went up against a band called the Kings and lost. I thought they were ripped off. But I started to see that other bands were invested in this same sort of blues sound and that other guys could play guitar really well, too. It was all eye-opening.

Tony used to get pissed off about it. “When are they going to let you play, man?”

“At least they let me go with them in the car to the dances and gigs that they do,” I’d say.

“Javier should invite you to play.”

“Well, it’s his band, and they only have so much time to play.” I made excuses for him because I wanted to hang around and learn as much as I could—plus I was getting to know the scene. Hanging with Javier opened a door to parts of Tijuana that I had never seen with my dad.

Tijuana was not Mexico City. Mexico City was international, and everyone there spoke Spanish. The music there came from Mexico, Central America, and South America—lots of it from Cuba. Tijuana was more about American influences, and everyone spoke some English or at least Spanglish. At the start of the 1960s, Tijuana was a rock-and-roll town.

You could find it all on Avenida Revolución. On the north end, close to the border, were the hoity-toity clubs, like the Oasis and the Shangri-La. That’s where you went for dinner and a sophisticated, Modern Jazz Quartet feel with piano and vibes, that sort of thing. Or Mike’s Bar, which had dancing to live music. The bands there had to know how to play all the latest dances, including “Peppermint Twist,” which was pretty killer. I remember when that came out in ’61. They called it a twist but it was really a shuffle, and man, Joey Dee & the Starliters could play the hell out of shuffles.

Further south on Revolución things got grungier. That’s where the strip clubs were, like the Aloha Club and El Convoy, where the TJs and other bands played and where I ended up playing. It was a little place with a bar to the right when you enter, a place for tables and chairs in the middle of the floor and under a small balcony, and a stage all the way in the back, where the band played. The girls danced right in front of the stage, then circulated among the customers, trying to get them to buy drinks and get drunk. It was dingy and dark and a bit smelly, but it was better than that joint with the norteño music that I couldn’t stand.

It would be one hour of music, an hour of strippers—like that, all night long, but it was never really about the music. The customers were there to get laid, and they were too busy doing that to pay much attention to the band and make any stupid requests. It was the band’s job to keep the party going and the customers drinking.

People began to hear that I could play. I sat in a few times with Javier and the TJs at El Convoy and started to meet other musicians and bands who played there, like the Strangers.

The leader of the Strangers was Manuel Delgadillo—he owned all the band’s instruments, so he would decide who played what, and of course he was playing lead. At one point he needed a bass player, and he asked me if I wanted to give it a try. I already knew how to play violin, which also has four strings, so I was ready to do that. It was this cheap Kay bass, but I enjoyed it and was getting good at it. Then we had our first gig—it was either the Aloha Club or Mike’s Bar—but we never got paid. My first real professional gig, and we got ripped off!

I continued to rehearse with the Strangers anyway, but every time we did someone would tell me that I played too many notes for a bass player—I was beating up Manuel! He decided to let me start playing guitar, and we kept rehearsing. Meanwhile, I was sitting in more at El Convoy, playing with their house band—not the TJs—and I started to get good at it. The first few times I got up to play, I was so nervous. I was so concerned with playing everything right that I couldn’t look at the people or anything else, really. My eyes couldn’t leave my fingers; I was busy making sure they were in the right position and on the right portion of the neck. I still do that a lot—focus more on what I’m doing than on the audience.

I wish I could tell you exactly when I played my first full gig on guitar, what I played, and how I felt—the one thing I remember is that I was allowed to play the club’s guitar, which was some kind of solid electric, which was better than the big hollow-body my dad had gotten me.

I also do remember clearly that not long after that I ran into Javier on the street. He told me he was leaving El Convoy, moving to a better gig at the Club Latino Americano, and did I want to go with him and play bass? What could I say? The TJs were the first band I wanted to play with, so I said okay. I showed up and went back to bass and was doing well.

The next thing I knew, the manager of El Convoy, whom we called Manolete, found me on the street. (The original Manolete, the John Coltrane of bullfighters, was gored to death by a bull. He had a big hooked nose, and so did the manager.) Manolete said, “You need to get off that bandstand and get back to the Strangers right now or you’ll never work on Avenida Revolución again.”

Whoa. He was a big guy, and I was this scrawny little thing, fourteen years old. He also didn’t like Javier all that much. Did I want to be part of that? Also, Javier’s band had its own thing going on. They were the TJs wherever they played. Being in the house band at El Convoy meant you had one place you would play—which also meant you had a home.

I thought about it for a minute. Javier’s gig was once a week, and El Convoy was almost every day. The job with Javier didn’t pay as much—and I wanted to play guitar. So I put down the bass, left Javier, and went back to El Convoy. I was already making my own career decisions—not that it felt that way at the time. For me, it was just practical and it made sense. I needed the work, and I needed to eat. My loyalty to friends was not going to feed me. But man, Javier was disappointed. He didn’t yell or anything; he just fixed me with a look, as if I were Benedict Arnold. That was it for Javier and me for a long, long time.

The El Convoy house band was basically a shuffle band, playing blues changes and three-chord songs like “Green Onions,” “Hide Away,” and “Think” by the Royals—not the later James Brown version. And definitely “La Bamba.” At that time, Ritchie Valens in Tijuana was like Bob Marley was later in Jamaica. He was the dude—a cholo Mexican. He was the only hero we had at the time—everyone knew Valens was short for Valenzuela.

Within months I could tell I was getting better, and I started to get confidence. I could tell because I’d see other kids my age who were also picking up the guitar, and they didn’t know how to make heads or tails out of it. I also started to figure out the different things you can do on the instrument. You can play the melody, which is the lead; the chords—the rhythm; and the bass line. Once you get all that down, that’s all you really need to know. Then you have to just work at it again and again until it becomes part of you. Maybe it was because I could do so many things with the guitar that I never felt like singing. But even when I was playing violin, singing was never my thing.

I could hear I was getting better, but I wasn’t getting any words of encouragement from anyone, really—not in those places in Tijuana where I was playing. Everybody was more into chicks or drinking or whatever they were into. I just had to say those words to myself. I would take a break from my gigs and walk around to some of the other places to hear them playing—sometimes they’d let me in, and sometimes I had to just stand outside and listen and pick up stuff. I got really good, because that’s all I did. That was my schooling.

All these clubs had some bands with some badass guitar players. There was one guy who was a terror: we called him Liebre Chica—Little Jackrabbit. He played with a ring pick on his thumb, like a country and western player, and had an incredible vocabulary, somewhere between B. B. King and a more jazzy sound. He would have had no problem dealing with Javier, and there was a lot of rivalry going on then! There was another guy, a Filipino, who would come around on a motorcycle with his Stratocaster strapped to his back. He was dealing speed and kept his stuff in the headlamp, which didn’t work—he’d just unscrew that thing and put all the drugs in there when he had to cross the border. He could really play, and I remember he was a little bit more giving than other guitarists. He taught me the chords to “Georgia on My Mind,” “Summertime,” tunes like that.

I’ll never forget the first strip club I went into. I was just fourteen and hanging with Jaime—he was a drummer who had these gorgeous sisters who had been in movies in Mexico City. I had done a gig with him, and he owed me money, so he said, “Come on; I need to pick up some money at the Aloha, and I can pay you.” This was at three in the afternoon, so I went from bright sunshine into what seemed like pitch-black. While my eyes slowly adjusted, I heard the drums going Bah-ba-bah, bah-ba-bah and the saxophone doing that snake-dance thing—I’m telling you, to this day, when I hear Thelonious Monk or anyone doing “Bye-Ya” I think about the music they played in those strip clubs in Tijuana. I’m sure Monk was thinking about that kind of beat when he wrote it.

Then I saw the stripper onstage. This was the first time I had seen a woman totally naked. She had tassels on her nipples, and she was making them twirl—first one direction, then the other, then in opposite directions, clockwise and counterclockwise. That was talent—four different ways! I’m thinking, “How does she do that?” and I just stood there. She saw me and how young I was, and she started laughing, then everybody saw me and started laughing, too. She grabbed one of her breasts and pointed it at me. “Come here, little boy. You look like you need some milk; you’re just so skinny.” Can you imagine? My first time in a strip joint, and I was being called out for staring.

I learned a lot from watching strippers and listening to how the drummers would support them—do a roll when she swings those tassels. Crash the cymbal when she throws a hip or does a kick. You had to have it together, because some of those strippers were straight from the country and they needed help, otherwise they’d look stupid. If they didn’t get a steady beat to dance to, they’d pick up a shoe and throw it—and they didn’t miss.

These were tough women. Not all of them were dancers, but many were ficheras, hookers. They didn’t do the deed at El Convoy, though—there were no rooms there for that. They would try to take the guy home or to a hotel and make some cash that way, and they were there to make money any way they could. While the band would play, the strippers would wander through the club, go up to some guy who just walked in, and say, “Want to buy me a drink?”

“Sure,” he’d say. She would ask for a drink and a Coke, then pour the drink into the Coke while he wasn’t looking and order another one, and another. Keep milking it till the customer had to pay the big tab. If you drank that Coke, you’d pass out after one sip! Every time she ordered another drink, she got a ficha, a little chit—which is kind of funny, because fichera is the word for “prostitute.” Anyway, she’d cash them all in at the end of the night and get paid a little extra. Sometimes that’s all the money they made.

People think I played behind the strippers, but I never did when they stripped. That was mostly the job of the drummers, to do a rhythm thing that worked with their moves. I played when everyone would get up and dance together.

But playing in that kind of environment… I remember some guys would bring their girlfriends there, start to drink, and get distracted by these beautiful strippers. Then their dates would get jealous. We could tell from the stage what was going on—the tension, the emotion. We’d decide to have a little fun and start playing a tune with just the right breaks and heavy rhythm—ba-da-bum, ba-da-bum—and next thing you know the girlfriend would be up and taking off her shirt, then her brassiere. Two or three times we were able to make that happen—actually strip someone who wasn’t a stripper. That’s when I realized that a guitar could talk to a woman.

I can’t tell you exactly when my perception changed from rock and roll to the blues, but it was like a laser when it happened. Over time you start to learn about it—you learn to understand that the blues is a very sacred language. It really has to be played by musicians who know and feel its history and respect its power. When you have people who do honor and respect the music like that—man, they are able to captivate. If they don’t, they have to play at it, they cuss and swear, and it’s like listening to a comedian who’s not funny. Nothing sounds worse than mediocre blues. If you don’t know how to play it, you have no business doing it. When you go to an altar at the Vatican you don’t start putting up graffiti and shit.

The blues is a very, very no-nonsense thing. It’s easy to learn the structure of the songs, the words and the riffs, but it’s not like some other styles of music—you can’t hide behind it. Even if you are a great musician, if you want to really play the blues you have to be willing to go to a deeper place in your heart and do some digging. You have to reveal yourself. If you can’t make it personal and show an individual fingerprint, it’s not going to work. That’s really where you find the magnificence in the simple three-chord blues, in the fingerprints of blues guitarists like T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, Albert King, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, and all the cats from Chicago—Otis Rush, Hubert Sumlin.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about the blues. Maybe it’s because the word means so many things. The blues is a musical form—twelve bars, three chords—but it’s also a musical feeling expressed in what notes you play and how you play each note. The blues can also be an emotion or a color. Sometimes the difference is not so clear. You can be talking about the music, then the feeling, then what’s in the words of a song. John Lee Hooker singing, “Mmm, mmm, mmm—Big legs, tight skirt / ’Bout to drive me out of my mind…” It’s all the blues.

To me, jazz is like the ocean—wider than the eye can see, with many places to go to and explore. I see the blues as a lake—you can look across it, travel around it, get to know it quickly. But you have to really dive into it, because it can be very, very deep.

A lot of musicians put down the blues—it’s too simple; it’s too limited. They criticize it because they can’t do it, and they have no interest in figuring out how to imprint so much feeling and emotion onto just three chords. Or a good blues shuffle? Just because someone plays jazz doesn’t mean he should dismiss a rhythm like that. I’m not going to name names, because I don’t want to get in trouble, but I am here to tell you that I’ve heard a few jazz drummers who do not know how to play a shuffle. Great jazz drummers. Again, some things are made of gold and should be respected that way. A good blues shuffle is pure gold.

The blues is nothing if not deep and emotional. The blues can be about joy and celebration, and of course imploring and lamenting—but the real blues is not whiny. Whiny is like a baby who’s not really hungry, but he’s still crying and maybe just wants to be picked up. That’s the trouble with a lot of guitar players trying to play the blues: they whine a lot.

Imploring means, “I need a hug from the celestial arms, from the supreme. I need an absolute hug.” That can happen to anybody. You can be rich or poor or healthy or sick. When a woman that you love more than your next breath leaves you, or when your own mom turns her back on you, that’s the blues. The things of the earth are things of the earth, and things of the spirit are things of the spirit—and the spirit has to have what it needs. When they talk about the healing power of the blues, that’s what they mean.

In Tijuana I would hear all sorts of music, Mexican and American, but for some reason it was the blues that felt most natural to me. I listened to the blues 24-7 and studied it as I had never studied anything before. In San Francisco we were the Santana Blues Band and played blues exclusively at the start. Then our music changed. We became Santana, but the blues was always part of the feel in the music. If you look at all the Santana albums now, you’ll see that there are a few tunes you could call blues—“Blues for Salvador,” obviously, and the beginning of “Practice What You Preach.” The jam with Eric Clapton on Supernatural. They aren’t strictly blues numbers, but that feeling will always come through my music.

I’ve been hanging around the lake for a long time now. Like jazz, the blues knows its own history. It has rituals and rules that must be respected. Everyone knows them, and everyone knows everyone—the guitar heroes and what they sound like. Who did you listen to, and where did you get your style? Who influenced whom, and who’s your daddy? It’s easy to hear that. I’ll put it this way—B. B. King has a lot of children.

There’s a story that Stevie Ray Vaughan told me. He had been playing in Texas for years before he got big in 1983, playing with David Bowie on “Let’s Dance” and sounding that nasty, stinging tone like Albert King. Then he was playing blues and rock festivals—the big leagues. The first time he ran into Albert after that, Stevie was so happy to see him. Albert was backstage, sitting down and working on his pipe. He didn’t get up, didn’t shake Stevie’s hand. He just looked at Stevie. “You owe me fifty thousand dollars.”

That was the price for copping his style. You know what Stevie told me? He paid it.

When I started out in Tijuana, I played funky three-chord blues changes. After a while, I started to get into songs like “Georgia on My Mind” and “Misty” a little bit. As time went by, I got more and more into the blues—black blues. And more and more, the guys I hung out with were into nothing but the hard-core blues—black American music. Other groups in Tijuana would want to play Elvis Presley or Fabian or Bobby Rydell, that Dick Clark kind of stuff. Yuck. Even when songs by Pat Boone and Paul Anka, songs like “Volare,” were popular and played on the radio, we didn’t want to touch that. We had a badge of honor.

Once I started going down that road, there was no turning back. The blacker the sound, the rootsier the guitar, the more I wanted it. That meant I wanted to hear black singers whenever I could. Tijuana had its resident R & B star, Gene Ross—he sort of looked like Joe Frazier. Don Lauro Saaveda, who ran El Convoy, had brought him down from New Orleans. Gene had a falsetto voice like Aaron Neville’s, with power, and he could play the hell out of the piano. He had a big repertoire of songs—many I didn’t know till he sang them: “Summertime,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.” He’d sing “I Loves You, Porgy,” and man, it just gave you chills.

Playing in the house band at El Convoy meant I eventually played as support for Gene and also behind these other weekend musicians, black Americans who came down from San Diego to play, like this one guy who called himself Mr. T and looked like he was Albert King’s brother. He would hit Tijuana, score some grass and some uppers, get up some courage, and sing “Stormy Monday Blues.” That was his one song, and he would kill it every time. Other musicians would come down from as far away as San Jose for a long weekend, spend all their money in their first night, then sing at El Convoy to make enough money to get back home on Sunday.

Gene and these black weekenders became my teachers—they took my blues training to another level. After a while I couldn’t learn anything else from the radio or records—I had to really, really get in it live. The only way was if these blues guys were right next to me like that, close enough for me to feel the way the singer would stomp his foot, and the way he’d be getting on that piano. I would learn by the dirty looks they gave me if I messed up the changes or the time. It was all extremely educational because I learned the ingredients—the rhythms and the flow, the sound symmetry—of that music.

I remember Gene would be at the piano, and the bartender would line up between five and seven shots of tequila, and that’s how many songs would be in the set. He’d finish one song and knock back a shot. The cat was blacker than black; his lips were purple, his eyes were yellower than yellow, and he had the prettiest voice I had ever heard. He also had the prettiest white girlfriend I had ever seen, like Elizabeth Taylor beautiful.

Gene was a rough dude—I remember one time his brother was visiting, and they started roughhousing with each other, just brothers messing around, and they almost tore the whole place down! Gene had served in Korea and could get real angry sometimes. Just a year after I left Tijuana for the last time I heard he got into a fight with some Mexican guy. He brought a knife to a machete fight, and that was the end of Gene Ross. It’s too bad he never recorded, because that cat had the most gorgeous voice.

Later on I got to know that Tijuana was a kind of Casablanca for black Americans—neutral territory away from the race war of America. Let’s face it: racism was very active then and still is, especially in San Diego, where you had a lot of white kids in the military who were raised thinking that way—angry, hating blacks and browns, looking for a fight. In Mexico everyone was on more even ground, and the Mexican police were just waiting for those racist kind of guys to get out of hand and give them some back-alley justice.

I want to say that it’s a cliché about the drunk American tourists acting ignorant and getting derogatory, but I witnessed that many times—drinking and getting a little too loud with their feelings about Mexicans. “You’re not in America now,” the cops would say and whale away at them with nightsticks. Then they would throw the tourists in jail and “lose” their passports for a few days. There were so many stories about Tijuana jails—they could be brutal. You did not want to mess with the police there. You were not going to win that fight.

The first time I experienced racism directed at me I had just started to get into the guitar. I was still a little light-haired, and the border was a lot more open then. A friend had taught me how to pronounce “American citizen” like an American would, and he told me that all I had to do was walk across the border and say “American citizen” at the checkpoint and just keep walking. And it worked! Then I would take a bus to San Diego and go to a place Javier told me about—Apex Music. They had the best guitars—Gibsons, Gretsches, Epiphones. I wasn’t so much a Fender guy, not even then. I found that you had to crank Fenders up really, really loud to get something out of them, or you would sound like the guys playing with Lawrence Welk.

I had just enough money with me to take the bus to Apex and back, so I never went inside. I was too intimidated. One time I was standing there just salivating, looking in the store window at these most gorgeous freaking guitars and amplifiers with tweed covers. I wanted to smell and know what they felt like in my hands! Suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Hey, you fucking chili-bean eater, fucking Mexican, Pancho Villa!” I froze. “Hey, I’m talking to you!” I slowly turned around and realized that there were two sailors screaming at me. “You fucking little Pancho Villa chili-bean eater!” What? Who? My mind filled with questions, but I just started walking away—quickly.

I was thinking that this was just like a bullfight—don’t get in the bullring, and you’ll be all right. Just keep walking and ignore them. I don’t know if they were drunk, but it was around four in the afternoon. They followed me for a little bit, screaming like idiots. Then they got bored and went to drink some more, I guess. That was the first time I actually heard the sound of pure hate directed toward me simply because of the way I looked. That wasn’t my first time across the border, but it made me think twice about going back.

By the beginning of 1962, I was playing all the time and learning fast. I had the steady gig at the Convoy, and it was a real high watching the music taking shape, doing songs by Etta James, Freddie King, Ray Charles—really getting to know that style of music. I loved it. When I started I only played weekdays—I would get there after school at 5:00 p.m. and play until 11:00 p.m., three sets a night. Then I got to play weekends on top of that, starting at eight and playing until five or six in the morning!

I was also back to playing my first instrument. Part of my deal with my mom when I first got the guitar was that I would get out my violin again and play as part of the church service every Sunday. I played “Ave Maria” and some classical pieces like Bach’s Minuet in G Major with this one accordion player. I don’t think they had enough money for an organ or a bigger band. I did that for almost half a year to appease my mom while I was getting stuck on the guitar.

I would get so high—on the music, on not getting enough sleep, and on playing all through the night. When I say high, I also mean dizzy—from forgetting to eat. It was funny, but I used to love getting out of the club in the morning, seeing the sunrise, and feeling light-headed from having played all night with no meal. If it was Sunday, I’d go straight from El Convoy to church and play “Ave Maria” on the violin and all that. I didn’t have really good eating habits, but my friends turned me on to going to the street corner and getting juices. I mean, carrot juice, celery, and raw eggs, and then they blend it and you drink it. Man, that would get me so high it would take me to the next level. I never smoked any pot then, though everybody around me did, but I got stoned just being in that environment, and then I started drinking and soon realized that was going the wrong way when I woke up one day passed out on the street.

The freedom I had during that year and a half was heaven. I was like a sponge. I was learning how to take care of myself in the music business, learning lessons such as the more steady the gig, the more likely I was to get paid. I had been naive, playing my first gigs and not getting paid at all; getting burned because of all the bullshit they’d tell kids—“We can’t pay you because you’re not in the union”; “Come back next week and we’ll pay you after the next show.” Yeah, sure. Some things my father could tell me about being a musician, but I had to learn most things on my own and to build myself up.

By the time I was the featured guitarist at El Convoy, I was making nine dollars a week. I had no idea about the other musicians, but once a week the manager called me upstairs to the office. I’d get my money in cash, put it in my pocket, and take it home to Mom—she got all of it. I didn’t question any part of this or try to negotiate. I was happy to be playing and to be part of the scene.

The education I was getting was a street education—I can see now that my view of people and of spirituality began from that experience. I started at the lowest level and learned to always watch out, because people would try to make me less than they were if I let them, try to shame me or guilt-trip me, then pay me less or not at all. I started to see that people put each other on different levels, looking down on someone or looking up to someone, and take advantage of that situation. It was the beginning of the way I look at things today—I don’t allow anyone to have superiority over me and try not to let anyone have inferiority under me. I was talking with another musician one night, explaining that I did not want to have to look up to anybody. “Not even God?” he asked. I was ready for that. By then I had been thinking a lot about God—my answer had the kind of conviction my mom had about religion.

“God doesn’t like to look down on anyone. Why should we?” I said. Even then in Tijuana I felt that was true and that it was important to realize it on a spiritual level and implement it on a street level.

I was in Tijuana for just seven years. For everyone, the years from eight to fifteen are when we grow up the most, when we become aware of the world around us. We start asking questions we will be asking again and again the rest of our lives. It was at that age when I first began to work and to play music. It was also when I went from G.I. Joe to “Where’s Rosa?”

First there was Linda Wong, from my neighborhood. She was like a teenage Sophia Loren, and she was my first big crush, but nothing happened. I was still figuring out how to talk to girls, but that started me thinking. There was a party one time with all the musicians and girls from El Convoy at Rosarito Beach, which is between Tijuana and Ensenada. We had drinks and the radio on, and Ray Charles was singing, “One of these days and it won’t be long…” Everyone paired up, and I could tell the girl I was with was disappointed she had to hang with this little kid. Still, she let me sneak a kiss. Then there was Rosa, who lived next door and would let me kiss her while we were hiding in the bushes. She didn’t let me go any further.

Having these experiences as a teenager got me to thinking about women, especially when I saw the girls who were stripping for money showing up at the church where I was playing the violin. It would be Sunday morning, and four or five of the women I just saw naked a few hours earlier were there. They had on nice, modest dresses and were with their small children, the girls dressed in little white socks and ribbons in their hair, the boys in their little suits. I began to realize that they had to do what they did to feed their kids, that they had little choice, and how hard it was for them in a culture that looked down on women for doing those kinds of things. I would talk to them, and they would tell me that they couldn’t go home because their parents for whatever reason would not let them back in.

I began to look at women with a different eye. I had a conversation with one of the bouncers at El Convoy—this big thug who was always teasing me and pulling my hair. We were eating at the back of the joint in the place they had for employees, and this guy was pissed off at something. Or at everything. He was talking and talking about this and that, and he finally made some hateful comment about women in general—“They’re all fucking whores!”

I don’t know why, but I had to ask, “You mean all of them?”

“Yeah, to me, all of them!”

I kept going. “Does that mean your mother, too?” Silence. “And your sister?” He slowly turned to me. “Man, I could kill you.” The only other person in the room was the woman who was cooking, and she looked at me as if I were crazy.

I had heard that kind of talk before from men. I’ve heard women speak about men the same way—“All men are dogs”—and that’s not right, either.

But what the bouncer dude said was so negative and filled with so much anger that I couldn’t just accept it. I had to say something. He threatened me, and I played it innocent. “Hey, I just wanted to know if you really meant all of them.” He looked straight ahead and finished his food.

That left a tone in my head—not to judge women but to appreciate them. Not to judge people because of what they do in order to live and survive. As I grew up I tried to approach the sexual drive with dignity and grace. Years later, when we moved to San Francisco, I would be up early walking to work at a diner and there’d be a line of guys trying to pick me up in the Castro. And I’d say, “No; I don’t do that, man.” I got to understand how women feel when they walk through the streets and a bunch of guys are looking at their bodies and saying whatever. You feel like prey.

Since then my perception has been that the relationship between men and women is always a work in progress.

One day at El Convoy I ran into one of the substitute teachers from my school. He looked a lot like Barack Obama, now that I think about it, and he was a great storyteller. He told us a tale about a poor woman who had found some burning embers in her stove to keep herself warm during the night, and the glowing coals turned out to be the eyes of a big cat. Not sure what lesson we were supposed to learn from that, but I liked the story and I liked him, so when I saw him at the club with his arms wrapped around one of the girls there, I said, “Hey, Teach!” He jumped away from the girl like she was one of those hot coals. “Carlos, what are you doing here?”

“I work here, man. What are you doing here?”

By summer of 1962, those two parts of my life just didn’t balance out anymore. It had not been easy playing music and going to school at the same time, so I eventually dropped out. My life with my family wasn’t balancing, either. My hours were getting longer at El Convoy—from 4:00 p.m. to midnight on weeknights, and on weekends from opening time till the customers left. Meanwhile my dad was back in San Francisco again and had Jorge with him. Tony had found migrant work up in Stockton—an hour east of the Bay Area—picking artichokes and peaches. Soon my sisters would follow, too. As my mom had done in Autlán, she was still thinking El Norte—and as before, it was her decision to go. There was no discussion. But I was older by then, and I wasn’t ready.