Living the Blues. Adolfo de la
not just playing for beer and change; I wanted to be a respected musician in the land of rhythm and blues, the cradle of rock n' roll.
It was what my friends and I talked about late into the night over cigarettes and beer, while rain puddled the dark, empty streets outside the all-night cafes in Mexico
City. Except for Tony, the others who started out with me were gone now, lapping up teenage adulation or toughing it out in the border honky-tonks. But I was in love with an American girl. And I was going to show her I could take care of her in her own country.
The civil ceremony with my father, Sonja's Mother, family members
Our wedding day with my dear Grandmother Pilar's picture in the background
One night in a Long Beach beer joint, I got some encouragement. After a drum solo backing a rhythm and blues group called The Rivingtons, the lead guitar player turned to me and asked: "What the hell is a guy like you doing in a place like this?"
I didn't know enough English yet to recognize the question as an American cliché, something you say to the nicest girl in the whorehouse when you want to cheer her up. But I still think that guitarist meant it as a compliment.
Tony and I decided to team up with two guys from Tennessee named Larry Barnes and his buddy Jerry, along with Dewey, a saxophone player from Dallas. The band was called Larry Barnes and the Creations. Somehow the combination of white southerners and Mexicans came out sounding like a black band. We landed a six-night-a-week gig as the house band at the Tom Cat Club, a big, funky joint at 198th and Hawthorne in Torrance, south of L.A., which generally hired black musicians, even though the audience was mostly Anglo and Latino. Each Thursday was "Celebrity Night," which gave us the opportunity to back some of the greatest rhythm and blues artists of the times: The Coasters, Etta James, Jimmy Reed, Troy Walker, the Platters, the Rivingtons and the Shirelles, to name a few.
No more pretty boy bands. No more arguing for less pop and deeper soul. No more singers who want me to be one of Herman's goddamn Hermits. I'm home. I'm in America, playing rhythm and blues with the real article. I'm in the country legally and I'm in the musician's union. By Christmas of 1967, I had a new Pontiac Firebird and I'm in love with my wife. Life is cool. My American dream is coming true.
Like most immigrants' American dreams, they came with a price, a lot of work. I was in three bands at once. Although the Creations were my main gig, I also played in an excellent group called Bluesberry Jam, featuring a black singer named Al Walton and Ted Green, a virtuoso guitar player who went on to become a very famous teacher and jazz guitarist.
One sunny California day, Sonja mentioned that a friend of hers from Phoenix had called. She knew some musicians from Tucson who were new in town and needed a drummer. The group was called The Sot Weed Factor, which struck me as a real hippie kind of name. I was still pretty straight then and didn't have a clue as to what that world was like.
Sonja took me to an address in Hollywood, which turned out to be an old abandoned movie set built for Rudolf Valentino in the 20's. The band had rented it for living quarters. They were young, crazy and the incarnation of the hippie life style. Each band member had an odd-shaped room in a corner of the set. The place was always full of music, beautiful girls and reeked of pot. Between their constant pot smoking and dropping acid regularly, I couldn't understand how they could function, but they did. We recorded a single, "Bald Headed Woman" and "Say It's Not So," for Original Sound, an old Hollywood label. Jeff Addison, the lead guitar player, would eventually sit in with Canned Heat years later. We were regulars at The Sea Witch on Sunset Boulevard. Then we started playing as the house band at The Topanga Corral. So there I was, playing in the same place where Canned Heat was becoming a fixture.
Meanwhile, Canned Heat was having a problem with Cook. The other band members wanted someone with more of a rhythm and blues orientation rather than jazz, which Frank was into.
Alan and Bob started Canned Heat in late 1965. Both loved and collected old jazz and country blues records, two of the few things they had in common.
Alan was other-worldly, a fragile poet, a genius, and a shy nerd tortured by the demands for exhibitionism in the entertainment business. He was lovable to those of us who knew him well but very, very weird to most everyone else. His singing voice was high and delicate. He hungered for some kind of solitary, inner peace.
The Bear could not have been more different. He worked in record stores in the San Fernando Valley and West L.A. and was an encyclopedic resource for anyone interested in old blues music. He was large in body and soul, a mountain of appetites. He was Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, sex and theater. He would eat, smoke, drink or fuck anything he could get his arms around. He yearned to be on stage because that way he could start a party. He sang for money when he could get it but was perfectly willing to perform all night for free if there was anyone else awake to party with him. His singing voice was like gravel going down a steel chute. He hungered to be loved by everyone, or at least everyone who would have a drink or a joint with him.
Henry was another blues record collector and he introduced Bob to Alan, whose scholarly works on the blues in American music history were published in respected professional journals. As one reference book noted: Alan "was so accomplished a musician by age 20, that he was invited to play at Newport."
The friendship and common musical interests of the three became the nucleus of Canned Heat. At first, Alan and Bob had this idea to form a jug band, an eccentrically American combination that dates back to poor farm boys in the 19th century, making music with the odds and ends found around a barn. Some players blow across the tops of bottles or jugs--bigger ones producing deeper notes--while others scratch washboards with their nails or play an acoustic piano or guitar. Some included kazoos and Jew's harps. The jug band came and went quickly and was replaced by the idea of forming a blues band called Canned Heat.
Taken from a 1928 song by Tommy Johnson, "Canned Heat Blues", the name refers to a sort of jellied alcohol like Sterno that burns in its own small can when ignited; it's typically used for cooking on camping trips or to warm buffet dishes.
During Prohibition, when booze was illegal, many poor southern blacks bought the cheap canned fuel, dumped the jelly into a sock and wrung the liquid alcohol from it. This was mixed with Orange Crush or Coca Cola and the result was a strong potion that could put the drinker away for hours. It was also poisonous. No manufacturer ever put cognac in a fuel can. They used cheap industrial alcohol, which is chemically different from drinking alcohol. Many drinkers died or went blind from it.
That was a risk they often knew they were taking, making it the drink of the desperate. If you had to turn to canned heat for relief, you were deep in the blues.
According to Alan, the band held its first rehearsal on November 19, 1965. Two years later, he and Bob were the only original members left. The band went through two other drummers before Cook came in, two other bass players and two other lead guitars before bringing in Vestine, who The Bear knew was playing bar gigs in the San Fernando Valley.
Back in his record clerk days, Bob put together a list of rare records to be auctioned and Henry was one of the buyers. Although Henry's earliest claim to fame was getting bounced from Frank Zappa's famous "Mothers of Invention" for excessive drug use, he actually had acquired music research credentials that put him on common ground with Alan and The Bear. When he was 19, Henry set out on an expedition with acoustic guitar legend/scholar John Fahey and another young blues fanatic named Bill Barth to track down the legendary singer Skip James, who made a couple of records for Paramount in 1931 and later became a minister before disappearing.
They found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi and talked the 62-year-old James back into playing and recording the blues after a 30-year absence. In what was later called "one of the greatest triumphs for classical blues that Newport has ever seen," James appeared