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Alejandro Escovedo is one of American music’s best-kept secrets – a rootsy singer and guitarist beloved by Bruce Springsteen and Stephen King. In 2010, as he prepared to release a new album, Street Songs Of Love, Classic Rock met up with Escovedo in New York to talk fame, fortune and near-fatal illness.
It’s late after a long day at Sirius Radio in New York. Alejandro Escovedo and his band have been recording interviews and an album-long live session for Dave Marsh’s Kick Out The Jams show.
“That was fun,” says Alejandro afterwards, sitting in the Sirius boardroom. We’re 36 floors up, above the twinkling lights of Sixth Avenue, as night falls across the city and the sun sets into the Hudson River. Howard Stern stares down from every spare bit of wall space, his fist clenched. Alejandro seems not to notice, heading instead straight for Bo Diddley’s guitar which hangs on the wall by the window. He touches it tentatively, before uttering softly: “Bo. Cool.”
The 59-year-old is one of American rock’s great cult figures. Bruce Springsteen, Ian Hunter and Stephen King are all fans, and Tony Visconti and John Cale have produced his albums. He’s the songwriter’s songwriter, and one of the best live acts you’ve probably never seen.
Pipe-cleaner thin and wearing a natty silk scarf and expensively cut suit, Alejandro belies his rigorous gigging schedule, tough upbringing as one of 12 kids, and his battles with hepatitis C. His manner does nothing to indicate that in the past year he’s had his heart broken, too.
His first band was something of a happy accident. He didn’t start playing guitar until he was 24. “It was 1975 and we started a band, but only because we were making an indie movie,” he recalls. “We were big fans of Warhol and Cassavetes, and we were making this film about the worst band in the world, sort of based on The Stooges, and we decided we would play the band – because we looked cool, not that we could play anything. I rented a guitar that I never took back, and we became the Nuns.”
Notorious for their behaviour off stage as much as on, the Nuns became a footnote in punk’s history by opening for the Sex Pistols’ final gig, at Winterland in San Francisco. Then Alejandro moved to New York and into the Chelsea Hotel.
“That was ’78,” he says. “Sid and Nancy lived there, and there were a lot of interesting people around like Neon Leon and Joe Stevens the photographer. One day there was my girlfriend, myself, Sid and Nancy, Quentin Crisp and Charles James the designer all going up the in elevator, just chatting about where to go to eat or whatever. It was a good time.”
His next band, cow-punk crossover outfit Rank & File, took Alejandro back to his beloved Austin, Texas, but it took his next band, the True Believers, to bring the singer’s vision to life – a mixture of the music he’d grown up listening to: traditional Cuban and Mexican music, Elvis and the Big Bopper, punk, country and blues, soul and surf music.
Strange, then, that although he had a band that seemed to realise all his dreams, he chose to go solo at the beginning of the 90s with the Gravity album.
“I loved that band,” says Alejandro. “After the True Believers broke up I really didn’t want to be in a band again. I didn’t think that I would even play music any more. We got dropped by EMI a month before our record came out. We tried to struggle on, but it’s hard to take that kind of hit. My brother left to join another band and we just gave up on it. I had to get a job, and that’s when I went to work at a record store. I had a daughter in Austin and I just felt like I’d had my chance, that I wasn’t going to do it any more.”
Then a request to sing at a benefit for a radio station started a solo career that saw him build a huge cult following, work with Ryan Adams’s Whiskeytown, and be named Artist Of The Decade in 1998 by the alt.country magazine No Depression.
I had to get a job, and that’s when I went to work at a record store. I just felt like I’d had my chance, that I wasn’t going to do it any more.”
Alejandro Escovedo
In 2003, while showcasing the remarkable theatrical song cycle that charted the journey his parents’ generation had taken across Mexico and the US, By The Hand Of My Father, Alejandro was struck down by a prolonged and dangerous bout of hepatitis C. As a touring musician living a true troubadour’s life, suddenly he could neither work (and he wouldn’t be able to for another two years) or pay for the crippling medical bills he was faced with. Solace came in the shape of the two-CD tribute Por Vida that included John Cale, Ian Hunter, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and the Jayhawks covering songs from Alejandro’s considerable catalogue.
“It was a strange time. I was so very sick,” says Alejandro, “And of the first songs to come in was Ian Hunter’s version of One More Time – which I’d really tried to write as a copy of a Mott The Hoople song – and I was in a very, very emotional state, and I remember listening to it and just breaking down. I thought about how many Mott The Hoople records I had listened to, and then to have him make it sound like it was supposed to sound, it was an incredible moment.”
As if recovering from hepatitis wasn’t enough, Alejandro also had to recover from the revelation that his song Castanets was on then US President George W Bush’s iPod. He dropped the song from his set-list until Bush was on his way out of the White House. “Apparently his publicist [was] the one that put his music into his iPod,” he says. “And then it turned out that it wasn’t even my version of his song, it was the Los Lonely Boys’ version.”
Alejandro says that for his latest album, Street Songs Of Love – which features guest appearances by both Bruce Springsteen and Ian Hunter – he wanted to get way from writing about himself. But surprise heartache has lead to him making a record that is, in his own words, “an open confession”
“There was no premeditation to it, it just happened,” he says. “I’m glad it took the course it did, because it exposed a lot of things that I was battling with. I learned a lot about myself through this record. I’d been in a relationship for 10 years that I thought was going to be great, and it turned out to be something completely different. Then, after I’d been separated for a while, I met someone who I felt I could trust and start again with.”
As this father of seven children gets ready to take his leave, he concludes of his new record: “So I’ve ended up with an album that’s about love, but is also about the broken pieces of love. Like my new relationship, it was something I never saw coming. Sometimes you just have to hold on.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 148 (July 2010)
