Alejandro Escovedo: A One-time Punk Pioneered Alt-Country

Chicago — When country-rocker Alejandro Escovedo speaks, it's in a low voice. He focuses intently from behind his black-rimmed glasses, and selects his words carefully, reflectively, whether he's recounting tales of his punk-rock past — about opening for the Sex Pistols in San Francisco and hanging out with gonzo rock critic Lester Bangs in Austin — or his return to the country sounds that he heard in his youth.

"A lot of the songs that I first wrote were songs based on stories that my father told me," Escovedo said, as he sat in his dressing room at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk following a sold-out Valentine's Day show. "And my father was a great storyteller, so I come kind of from a tradition of that."

Escovedo's latest work is "By the Hands of the Father," an ambitious theater piece that has also been released on CD. He's had a long, diverse musical career and helped pioneer the alt-country sound most recently popularized by the likes of Lucinda Williams and Ryan Adams. The 52-year-old artist comes from a legendary musical dynasty — brothers Pete and the late Coke, and Pete's daughter Sheila, better known as Sheila E., all percussionists, are noted for work with artists ranging from Santana to Prince. He first attracted international attention as the guitarist in the mid-to-late-'70s San Francisco punk combo The Nuns. By the early '80s he was playing in the punk-country group Rank & File before launching a solo career that has found him moving ever deeper into rootsy country sounds as a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter.

"To me, when I was growing up listening to music, the music that struck me as probably the strongest was music that seemed to be of someone actually whispering something in my ear late at night," he continued. "I always like the impression that I've learned something about that person when I listen to songs. And then growing up in Texas and coming back to Texas to learn about songwriting, there was the best in Butch Hancock and Townes Van Zandt and Jimmie Dale [Gilmore] ... who also come from that tradition."

Onstage, Escovedo shines, introducing his songs and four-piece band — including two cellists, a violin player and an acoustic guitarist — with humorous anecdotes. Feeding off the crowd's energy, and the stately atmosphere of the auditorium, Escovedo evinces a boisterousness absent from his offstage demeanor. Before performing "Deer Head on the Wall," dubbed a "kind of love song to taxidermy," and the second song from a rich hour-and-15-minute performance, Escovedo spoke about the intersection between his artistic life and his love life.

"I met a poet in Arizona named Kim Christophe," he told the audience. "I wanted to do an album of her poetry [set] to my music. Instead, we had a baby together."

Downstairs, surrounded by burgundy-upholstered straight-back chairs and museum-like glass cases of archaic banjos, Escovedo settles in a makeshift green-room area in the hall's resource room — a site not especially conducive to socializing. Making the best of it, Escovedo chats with friends from Bloodshot, the record label he now records for, and his bandmates, and then shifts his attention to his family. After changing his infant daughter in a classroom, and chatting briefly with Christophe, Escovedo settles, legs apart, in his chic black suit and cherry-colored shirt, buttoned tight to the top. He is ready to talk, he says. Ask away.

Music As Autobiography

As he gingerly holds his daughter, it is apparent that family is important to Escovedo; the autobiographical nature of songs from 2001's A Man Under the Influence allows fans to peer into his life, but they still are never less than universal. Similar themes inform 2002's "By the Hands of the Father."

"Initially I wasn't set to do a theatre piece," he said. "I was just trying to gather a group of songs together that told the story of my father in particular....The idea was to record all these songs and do an album with my family playing all the songs, and we were going to present it to my father as a 90th birthday present. And then my publicist at the time — she's now the producer of the play, but she's the one who got the idea that we could do something different with this group of songs. [She] introduced me to a theatre group called About Productions, and it was through them that I began this collaboration that became 'By the Hand of the Father.'"

Fans have embraced the show, which will be touring in Los Angeles and Tempe, Ariz., in March and April; after a stop in Monterrey, Mexico, it returns to the States for performances in Chicago, Madison, Wis., and Minneapolis beginning in September.

Though the play has been warmly received, the soundtrack has not been a hot seller. "I think a lot of the songs, [fans have] heard them before on other albums and there's a lot of dialogue on the album," he explained. "There aren't that many music lovers who want to hear that particular... I particularly love soundtracks. I love hearing that kind of thing, and I've always loved the idea of marrying the images with music to make kind of a movie with music."

Understanding The Creative Process

Songs like "Rosalie," performed in concert with a churning acoustic melody and wistful string accents, are also featured in the play. Escovedo explained it to the audience, saying the song was "about dreams and love and once again the art of writing letters" as it chronicles an epistolary love affair. The shambolic hee-haw of "Castanets," from A Man Under the Influence, profiles another long-distance romance. In concert, the strings add a satiny quality absent from the electric studio recording. Other, more personal love songs, including the tuneful "13 Years" — not in the play but performed as an elegiac show-closer about "a woman who has lived with a musician for 13 years and wakes up and wonders if it was worth it" — suggest that Escovedo does not stray too far from his personal life in his writing.

"I don't write songs every day. I really don't. I don't even try," he said. "When I do an album, I really kind of empty myself in some way, and try to get rid of whatever demons or thoughts that I have inside that just kind of come into these songs. And then I need to just live for a while and gather more information or experiences. And then I come up with another album."

Escovedo's creative process explains the four-year lapse between solo albums. Upcoming projects, including a tribute to Greek poet George Sefaris featuring Beth Orton, among others, and a tribute to Waylon Jennings, have occupied much of his creative energy.

Historically he's been a musical chameleon; Escovedo's nearly 30-year career has included stints in two pioneering bands, and many rock 'n' roll memories.

Punk, San Francisco And The Sex Pistols

As guitarist for San Francisco group The Nuns, Escovedo put his mark on the burgeoning punk scene. Fronted by singer Jennifer Miro, the band enjoyed a brief local popularity, but split after what Escovedo says was just personal disgust with the musical landscape.

"First of all, I was 24 years old when I finally picked up a guitar to play, and it was a great time — 1975 and '76 — where of course technical ability had nothing to do with what we were trying do," he said. "We were pissed off. We were really angry. We lived in a city that was dominated by [promoter] Bill Graham and all the clubs that he [booked], basically, so there was no place for kids to play.... Being 24, I had grown up collecting records since I was like 5 years old, right. And I really believed in the power of rock 'n' roll because I had lived through the '60s.... When I started to play I did it because it was a way to express something."

The Nuns were one of the highest-profile punk bands in San Francisco. When the Sex Pistols came to the U.S. for their first tour, The Nuns were one of the bands booked to open what would be the Pistols' final show before disbanding. For Escovedo, opening for the Pistols at Winterland in late 1977 was disillusioning.

"When I saw the Sex Pistols, I realized that it had nothing to do with music," he recalled. "To me that was really kind of disappointing.... It was a fiasco, basically. It was a carnival. It was like a sideshow. And it was also — you've gotta understand — it was the beginning of a change in punk rock. More suburban kids had come."

Many in the crowd were not punk fans at all. "There were 5,000 people there who were throwing things and gobbing because they had read about it," he said. "Gobbing's a ridiculous notion, anyway. It was dangerous onstage that night. And maybe in a way, [Sex Pistols manager] Malcolm McLaren did exactly what he wanted to do, because it was anarchy. Maybe that was the whole point. But to me, a lover of music and records, it didn't mean anything. It left me kind of empty, and I remember feeling like I just didn't want anything to do with it anymore.... It just kind of soured me for a while."

Punk Goes Western: The Beginning Of Rank & File

Yearning to play more rootsy music, including material by greats such as bluesman Muddy Waters and reggae singer Joe Higgs, Escovedo and some friends, former members of the political punk band The Dils, decided —insouciantly and almost accidentally — to try something new, and formed the band later called Rank & File.

"We started in San Francisco, and we started because we used to sit around and smoke pot and listen to reggae records and blues records and country records," Escovedo said. "When we first started, [it was] three of the members from The Nuns and two from The Dils.... We opened up for The Avengers [the San Francisco punk band that included singer Penelope Houston and bassist James Calvin Wilsey, who would go on to play guitar with Chris Isaak]. That was our first gig. We just did it because they were our friends and they let us do it. But it became a really powerful thing. It was supposed to be really loose."

After the gig, Escovedo returned to The Nuns for sundry shows in New York, where he lived in the famed Chelsea Hotel and played with Judy Nylon. But after The Dils broke up, Escovedo concentrated on the Rank & File project. The group, possibly the first former punk musicians to turn to country music, recorded a now-classic debut album (produced by David Kahn, who would go on to produce hits for The Bangles, Tony Bennett and numerous others), titled Sundown and released in 1982.

"[Rank & File] played around New York for a little while and then went on this tour that was seven dates in seven weeks," said Escovedo, recalling the tour that brought him to his future home: Austin, Texas. "It went from New York City to Vancouver, Canada. So, Austin was one of the shows. And we would spend, like, weeks at people's homes. We were the guests who would not leave."

While in Austin, Escovedo met up with rock critic Lester Bangs — a friend from New York — who recommended settling there as an alternative to the Big Apple. "He said, 'This is a great place, man, you've gotta check it out.' When we hobbled back to New York from Vancouver — this is after we had played a big show in San Francisco and were completely booed and thrown at and spit at for having turned our backs on punk rock as they saw it, because we were playing country music. So, we went back to New York and then decided we had to go somewhere to really learn about country music, and we went to Austin."

Rank & File's Aftermath: Going Solo

Critics labeled the music "cowpunk," a term Escovedo said is empty; he prefers not to tack genre labels onto his music. Still, the band pioneered the genre now referred to as alt-country, marrying a punky ethos with traditionally country arrangements. After a brief project with his brother Javier called the True Believers, Escovedo went solo. Now situated happily on the alt-country Bloodshot Records, Escovedo is somewhat of a musical godfather to his younger contemporaries on the label.

"I think being a later bloomer in a way kind of helps, because of a lot of my friends who started really young got burnt out really early in trying to survive as a musician," he said. "But I've been lucky. I've kept at it. But now it's all I ever do. It's all I can do. There's no turning back at this point after 25 years." — Brian Orloff [Monday, March 3, 2003]