Trigger Music
True Believer
His bands come and go, and so do his record deals, but it doesn’t seem to faze Alejandro Escovedo, who only wants to play rock and roll—even at 46.
BEFORE AUSTINITE ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO had ever played a single note of music, he was an aspiring filmmaker. His first effort, done with a group of friends in San Francisco, was 181�2, the story of a young punk with more attitude than talent who, on the verge of his nineteenth birthday, was certain the end of teenagehood equaled the end of life itself—or, at the very least, the end of art, rebellion, and rock and roll. “We really believed that twenty or twenty-two was too old to rock,” Escovedo says now. “That once you were no longer a teenager you couldn’t sing about teen angst.”
That was more than two decades ago. Since then, Escovedo, who turned 46 in January, has been in half a dozen bands and recorded for almost as many labels. He’s sung about teen angst as well as grown-up pain, having experienced plenty of both. He’s shared the stage with artists as varied as Johnny Rotten and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. He’s been feted as the next big thing and written off as yesterday’s news. And he is universally a critical favorite—with the requisite modest sales figures.
In other words, Escovedo is a member of that unique species known as the Texas musician. Like Joe Ely, Steve Earle, or even the internationally famous Willie Nelson, he’s more familiar with the ring of a cult following than with the ringing of cash registers. Nevertheless, he has been able to keep on making music for most of his adult life. There have been concessions and sacrifices along the way, plus many grueling months on the road, but for the most part, he has gotten by without compromising his artistic choices. He’s a survivor, a stubborn person who knows what he wants, and if he has irritated people and made a few mistakes, the career that has resulted from his determination is a quiet triumph.
Escovedo’s latest project, Buick MacKane, perfectly illustrates both his music-for-music’s-sake attitude and his bad run on the business end of things. Buick is a four-piece garage band—guitarist-vocalist Escovedo, drummer Glenn Benavides, bassist David Fairchild, and guitarist Joe Eddy Hines—that was never intended to be more than a group of friends chasing down Jagermeister and turning up amps. Their debut album, The Pawn Shop Years, was eight years in the making, as they were never overly concerned with making it. Nevertheless, their high-volume frivolity has found a home at the well-known independent label Rykodisc, which will release the album later this month, mainly because Escovedo already had a solo deal there. And therein lies the rub: Last November Escovedo’s contract with Ryko was terminated, as the saying goes, “by mutual agreement.” According to Escovedo, Ryko was dissatisfied with the sales of his most recent release, With These Hands, and proposed to cut the budget for his follow-up, halving both his personal income and his studio expenses. Escovedo declined, hence the agreement to disagree.
It was a fairly shocking development. As an independent operation that occasionally competes with larger record companies, Ryko is supposed to be an artist-friendly haven that specializes in long-term, mutually fruitful relationships, particularly with major-label refugees like Bob Mould, Throwing Muses, and (for reissues) David Bowie and Elvis Costello. Ryko doesn’t drop artists, and artists don’t leave Ryko. Ryko spokeswoman Darcy Mayers characterizes the split as the hardest thing the company ever had to do; Escovedo, she says, was the kind of artist who “represents why people work at a company like Ryko.”
It certainly seemed like a match made in heaven at the time. “It’s the perfect place for me,” Escovedo told the Austin Chronicle in the spring of 1996, just after Ryko had released With These Hands, and both label and artist were gearing up for the many good things to come. He played the label’s South by Southwest showcase in Austin. He did the Conan O’Brien show and got some radio play while earning his usual reams of good press, including a splashy feature in Rolling Stone. Last fall he toured with band-of-the-moment Son Volt, played two weeks of gigs in Paris, and joined Bruce Springsteen at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Woody Guthrie tribute.
After all that exposure, however, With These Hands has sold only about 15,000 copies, a figure that is actually smaller than the numbers his two previous solo records put up on the much smaller Watermelon label. But no one was expecting platinum sales from an adventurous, literate, and musically ecumenical singer-songwriter in his forties. “They had always spoken of me as a long-term artist,” Escovedo says. “I felt like our whole relationship was based on trying to establish a career over five years. Maybe they expected too much too soon.” That may well be, but it’s also a symptom of a recession that has been affecting the entire music business—according to Mayers, Ryko is struggling along with everyone else, but unlike other labels, it doesn’t have a few superstars to help bankroll the rest of the roster.
Escovedo is more disappointed than bitter; he made a lot of friends at Ryko, and all concerned are looking ahead to the release of the Buick MacKane record. Then he will indeed move on. As a 25-year veteran of the music business, he has already suffered every indignity record companies (or audiences) can come up with—and he has seen it all. As someone who has had music in his life before, during, and after the punk explosion, Escovedo’s career has an almost Forrest Gump—like quality to it: He has done a little bit of everything and been a little bit of everywhere.
For starters, music has always been part of the family business. His father, Pedro, in addition to being a prizefighter, ballplayer, plumber, pipe fitter, and picker, played in mariachi bands. Alejandro was born in San Antonio, the seventh of twelve children, and his eldest siblings, from a different mother, lived in Northern California. (They include world-famous percussionists Coke and Pete Escovedo; Pete’s daughter is former Prince protégée Sheila E.) In the late fifties, looking for a better life and an escape from the anti-Mexican climate in Texas, Escovedo’s family moved to Southern California. “It was very Grapes of Wrath,” he says. “We left the dog, the cat, all our furniture.” He spent his teenage years in Huntington Beach, where he dreamed of playing pro baseball and stood out as the only brown surfer among bleached-blond California boys. He grew up quickly, becoming a father himself at the age of seventeen; there was another child and a wholehearted effort to make the marriage last, but it didn’t work out.
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