Alejandro Escovedo

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

Joined San Francisco Punk Scene

Professional and Family Crises

Solos Spawned New Collaborations

Selected discography

Sources

From his origins in the arts community of San Francisco in the 1970s, where he was influenced by such grungy art rockers as Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground, Alejandro Escovedo has forged a “cow-punk” style that is part earthy hard rock and part country and western. Currently, in his artistic maturity, he has taken his moody and powerful music in a new and artful direction by working with a string quartet and creating folk chamber music. Although he has been recording since 1978 and has six albums to his credit, commercial success largely eluded Escovedo until the release of With These Hands (1996). This recent work has sold well and garnered positive critical response from such leading publications as Rolling Stone, Billboard, and the New York Times. As his career approaches the 20-year mark, Escovedo’s style has ranged from crude punk rock, pioneering cowpunk, and hard-edged searing guitar rocker to an experimental fusion of chamber orchestra, rock ballad, and Latin styles. His later work is edgy without being juvenile and mature without being sentimental. In an era of world music, he stands on the edge of commercial success with a musical style that crosses the boundary between art and pop, with clear cross-cultural appeal.

Alejandro Escovedo was born in 1946 (although he has claimed to be up to five years younger) in San Antonio, Texas. He was the seventh of 12 children. His father Pedro, who had come to Texas at the age of 12 years from the northern Mexican town of Saltillo, was an amateur mariachi performer in the 1940s and 1950s. When Alejandro was in his teens, his family moved to Huntington Beach, California. His older brothers Pete and Coke became successful percussionists who played with Santana in the 1960s. Alejandro thereby gained an interest in making music; he hung around Hollywood’s glam-rock scene and listened to music such as The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, although he didn’t start playing until he was 24 years old.

Joined San Francisco Punk Scene

Escovedo moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, when he was briefly married. As a college film student, he began making a film about a punk band that couldn’t play, and wound up forming his first band with schoolmate Jeff Olener, vocalist Jennifer Miro, and Richie Dietrich. The film was never completed, but the group became the Nuns, a punk rock band that developed a large cult following in the area and performed as the opening act for the Sex Pistols’ final gig at Winterland. The Nuns released one single, Savage, in 1978. By then, however, the musician had grown dissatisfied with the group and decided to leave The Nuns, moving with his new wife, Bobbie Levie, to New York City. Critical of the band’s subsequent work, Escovedo later described it as “trying to beat a very dead horse” to Jason Ferguson in Magnet magazine.

Escovedo soon teamed up with Los Angeles-based punk rockers Chip and Tony Kinman to form the influential cowpunk group Rank and File. The band released the album Sundown in 1982. He and Bobbie had their first child, Maya, in that same year. In 1986 Escovedo again sought a new direction in music and formed the True Believers with his younger brother Javier. The band was more of a pure rock act, geared toward live performance, and featured a three-guitar climax. They put out one critically well received album, True Believers (1986) and recorded another that was not released. The group was dropped by EMI and subsequently dissolved.

Professional and Family Crises

Disenchanted with the music business and concerned that the rock musician’s lifestyle was hard on his wife, Escovedo took a job as a record clerk at Austin’s Waterloo Records. He soon had a reputation for being the hippest record store clerk in the city. When one of his older brothers died in 1987, Escovedo cautiously returned to music with solo performances and, in late 1988, began performing with an informal improvisation-al group, the Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra. Hardcore

For the Record…

Born in 1946 (some sources say 1951), in San Antonio, TX; son of Pedro (an amateur mariachi player and plumber) Escovedo; brief marriage in early 1970s; married Bobbie Levie, 1978 (committed suicide, 1991); married Dana Smith (a musician with the three-woman garage rock group, Pork), 1994; children: (With Levie) Maya, (with Smith) Paloma, Paris.

Formed punk rock group The Nuns with Jeff Olener, Jennifer Miro, and Richie Dietrich, 1987; formed country-punk band Rank and File with Chip and Tony Kin-man, 1982; with brother Javier, created the True Believers, 1986-87; began solo career in 1988, performing with the Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra; also performed in rock quartet Buick MacKane and with Walter Salas-Humara and Michael Hall as The Setters.

Addresses: Home —Austin, Texas. Record company —Rykodisc, Shetland Park, 27 Congress Street, Salem, MA 01970.

fans who relished Alejandro’s earlier hard-driving guitar work were surprised to hear that he was working with a string section. Nevertheless, the musician’s utilization of a chamber music quartet was utterly in keeping with the avant-garde background of his youth.

Escovedo’s second daughter, Paloma, was born in 1991—a time when his 13-year marriage to his wife, Bobbie, was already troubled. Following a six-month separation, Bobbie committed suicide. Escovedo directed his mourning into songs that would make up his first solo album, Gravity, in 1992. His next album, Thirteen Years, was released in 1993. The title song was about his marriage to Bobbie; full of grief and guilt, it also voiced themes of survival and recovery. Escovedo toured to support the release of Thirteen Years and made several critics’ best-of-the-year lists for 1993 and 1994. In 1994 Escovedo won several Austin Music Awards as well.

Solos Spawned New Collaborations

Escovedo’s professional and personal catharsis was followed by a series of collaborations with new musical colleagues and old. He entered into a musical collective with Walter Salas-Humara (The Silos) and Michael Hall (The Wild Seeds), releasing an album as the Setters. And, in a counterpoint to his orchestra, Escovedo also performed as part of Buick MacKane, a noisy, beer-rock, tongue-in-cheek ensemble. At the Waterloo Record shop, Escovedo developed a relationship with Jim Bradt, who worked in Rykodisc’s marketing department. This led to the 1994 Rykodisc issue of Hard Road, which contains the original True Believers LP plus the unreleased second album. Escovedo’s personal life also featured a new “collaboration” in 1994, when Escovedo married long-time friend and fellow rocker, Dana Lee Smith. The couple had a son, Paris, the same year.

Escovedo’s third solo album, With These Hands, was released in 1996. Although still brooding and thoughtful, it emphasized a cautious optimism and family themes. While working on the album, Escovedo discovered that his brother Peter was in the same building, working on another record. As a result, Peter played on Alejandro’s album, as did Peter’s wife, Juanita, his son Peter Michael, and daughter Sheila E—the spirited percussionist who had previously worked with pop star Prince. Alejandro’s brother, Javier, also joined in, as well as daughters Maya and Paloma. Alejandro’s father, Pedro, then 89 years-old, served as the inspiration for the title song, “With These Hands.” Willie Nelson also performs on the album; although they had never previously met, Nelson was a fan of an old Rank and File video. Escovedo explained to Tim Stegall of the The Austin Chronicle, “It was this Village People western…. I’d heard that Willie and his boys would get out there to his country club, smoke beaucoups amounts of ganja… They’d have it on auto-rewind, just so they could watch it over and over and over again, and laugh and laugh.”

With These Hands synthesizes a diverse range of influences, including Latin percussion, country and western, hard rock, and the avant-garde. The avant-garde element is most obvious in the song “Tugboat,” a tribute to Escovedo’s friend, the late English professor Sterling Morrison, who played guitar for the Velvet Underground. In Request, Tristram Lozaw described Escovedo’s work on the album as balancing “delicate melody with rock ‘n’ roll animalism, the harrowing with the uplifting.” Lozaw concluded, “While Escovedo’s increasingly sanguine outlook may signal that the dull ache of his emotional baggage has lifted in favor of loving contentment, his piercing insights into heartache remain.”

Selected discography

(With the Nuns) “Savage” (single), 415, 1978.

(With Rank And File) Sundown, Slash, 1982.

(With True Believers) True Believers, Rounder/EMI, 1986.

Gravity, Watermelon, 1992.

Thirteen Years, Watermelon, 1993.

The End (EP), Watermelon, 1994.

Hard Road (contains an unreleased second album recorded in 1987 for EMI), Rykodisc, 1994.

(With Walter: Salas-Humara and Michael Hall) The Setters, The Setters, Watermelon, 1994.

Broadcast Vol. 2 (compilation album), KGSR, 1995.

With These Hands, Rykodisc, 1996.

Sources

Austin Chronicle, April 12, 1996.

Billboard, February 10, 1996.

Huh, March 1996.

Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1996.

Magnet, April/May 1996; February/March 1996.

New York Times, April 9, 1996.

Request, April 1996.

Rolling Stone, April 18, 1996; May 2, 1996.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from Rykodisc press materials, 1996.

—Link Yaco