You saw my picture in the Corpus Christi Tribune. Underneath it, it said, "A man with no alibi."
-- Bob Dylan
I'm just a popular singer.
-- Freddy Fender
El Be Bop Kid is not a kid anymore. "Shit, I'm almost 65," he says, walking toward the Corpus Christi beach on a mid-January afternoon for another round of photos. His snakeskin boots sink into the shells and sand, he looks out on the white caps and green water, and pronounces the day beautiful. He faces the sun and takes off his leather jacket, waving it above him like a flag of truce. His frizzed mop of hair blows back around his face, which, though slender and wrinkled and without the cherubic plumpness of his salad days, is still stately, still handsome. And he still has the be bop in his smile.
Five days later, Freddy Fender will be in San Antonio, the city where he made the best records of his career, and where a trio of musicians laid down the sparkling guitar parts for his newest and most traditional album, La Musica De Baldemar Huerta. He'll be asleep, as a surgeon takes a kidney from his 21-year-old daughter Marla and gives it to him.
"The operation has a 100% success rate," Fender says. "Marla approached Vangie [Fender's wife], not me. She wanted to know why she wasn't included as a possible donor. But she's a girl and I'm a man. It wasn't always that easy to relate to her as I relate to my sons. You can cuss each other and then hug each other. Since going through this, I've just come to love her."
The operation, which took place January 24, was indeed a success. Doctors expect a full recovery, and in fact Fender was making plans to travel to Los Angeles in late February for the Grammy Awards, where La Musica De Baldemar Huerta is nominated for Best Latin Pop Album. Furthermore, he's scheduled to perform at an Americana Music Association showcase during the South By Southwest Festival in Austin in mid-March.
Back at the surfside hotel room, Fender rolls up a shirt sleeve to show a gaunt, brown arm riddled with small swells and holes from the fistula. "That's where they take the water out," he says.
Fender has been on dialysis since November 2000; he is diabetic, his kidneys are failing, and his liver has barely sustained decades of drinking. He has continued to perform, to "keep a little change" in his pocket, but mostly because all his life he's only really wanted to sing, even if his life has, as often as not, foiled that desire. "I'm gonna keep on singing till I drop on the stage," he says. "It's been getting kinda close to that lately." He laughs, but the laughter doesn't dispel the truth.
Freddy Fender is one of the great singers and most original stylists in all of American popular music. That his name doesn't come up more in such discussions owes, perhaps, to the frustrating fits and starts of his career, but also to his inimitability and originality. He is not more influential, not because his music hasn't been immensely popular or widely known, but rather because no one could sing like him if they tried.
A sonic analog might be heard in fellow Texan Roy Orbison. Both had an instinct for the high drama of pathos, for an uncanny mixture of fear in the heart and fearlessness in phrasing. But Fender's deeply personal way of drawing on rhythm & blues, doo wop, Latin music, and first-generation rock 'n' roll, that carefree hipster soul, and that chilling yet cathartic falsetto, will always be his alone.
No matter what happens, Fender will be known as the first great Mexican-American country star, and the voice behind one of the monster jukebox hits of all time, "Wasted Days And Wasted Nights". As well he should be. "It has stayed as fresh as a tonic even now," he says. Why that song, like nearly every song he has sung, has remained so fresh is a secret with a story, and that story begins at the border.
San Benito, Texas, is a small Rio Grande Valley town, just a few miles north of the border. The wide river, La Resaca de Los Fresnos, divides the city and irrigates an otherwise desolate land frocked with mesquite, ebony, and cactus. The town was once named after President Diaz of Mexico, and was home to few white settlers until the turn of the century. To the east, the Gulf brings fresh winds and clement weather. To the west and south, Mexico brings a steady stream of friends, relatives, and workers across the international bridge. Every other street is named for a hero, a patron, or, in the case of San Benito's most famous son, a singer.
Baldemar Huerta -- Fender's given name -- was born June 4, 1937, to a family of campesinos (agricultural workers) in the barrio El Jardin. In his mind's eye, the town of his youth may be summed up by one word: pobreza. "Poor agricultural workers," he says. "My grandfather was a widow, my mother and her sister and her husband lived together in a small house with my grandfather. That was at the time my mother met my father, Serapio Huerta, who worked in the fields. For ten dollars, a midwife oversaw my birth. From the time I was a infant, my mother taught me the Spanish language, how to read and write it. By the time I was five or six, and was in grade school, I had to speak English, because if you spoke Spanish, they would hit you in the mouth."
The sound of Freddy Fender's voice is the sound of loss and loneliness, of abandonment and poverty, raised to a sweet and tender nostalgia. "I grew up an orphan," he says. "My father died in January 1945 from tuberculosis. My mother raised us as best she could. We were one of the first families in the town who received welfare -- $24 a month, maybe a bit of powdered eggs and butter. I shined shoes, and stole a bit, hubcaps and things, with the gang. Two years after my father died, I was given a beat-up guitar, with a hat inside a ring on the front. It had only three strings. A few months later, in the middle of 1947, I won a talent contest, a first prize of a tub of food. I sang 'Paloma Querida'."
Without a pause, he remembers the words, and sings them sweetly:
Por el dia que llegaste a mi vida,
Paloma Querida, me puse a brindar,
Y al sentirme un poquito tomado
Pensando en tus labios, me dio por cantar.
"And that year I began singing on radio stations," he continues. "And so began my grand career!"
Only, that's not quite right. The young Baldemar Huerta spent most of his childhood on the road, as most of the families of San Benito would do. When he was 10, his family left for Michigan, a destination for many Mexican-Americans who survived by following the trail of fruit and vegetables. Together they worked in the beets and bean fields, picking cherries in Traverse City, peaches and apples in Hart, cucumbers in Indiana, cotton in Arkansas. "We wouldn't get back till December," Fender says, "two months late for school. That was the migration."
In 1953, when he was 16, Fender joined the Marine Crops. "I think I saw the Sands Of Iwo Jima," he says, "John Wayne lifting a .50-caliber all by himself. I thought I could do that too." A new migration began, from San Diego, to Pendleton, to Fuji, and back to San Francisco, where he was dishonorably discharged after two and half years, much of which was spent in and out of the brig for his trouble with drinking. "Some time ago I received a letter from the Navy, saying they admitted the injustice of the discharge, recognizing that my problem was alcoholism," he says. "They gave me a general discharge."
Were it not for his voice, Fender likely wouldn't have lasted in the Marines as long as he did. "In boot camp, I would pacify the drill instructor; he was Hispanic. I would sing 'Tu Solo Tu'. He loved that song. When everyone would sleep, he would send someone to wake me up. I'd go to the headquarters and play guitar for him."
"I should say," he continues, "that a turning point came in my life in Okinawa, in the brig. There were a bunch of prisoners, other Marines, cutting the grass outside the barracks. Somebody was playing the radio in the barracks. It was a song called 'Ain't That A Shame', a guy named Fats Domino. The year was 1955. I said, 'Damn, who's that?' Coming back on the ship, they had us down in the lowest level of the ship, with all the prisoners coming back stateside. They'd take us up to the deck only for chow. One of the times we went up top side, I heard this song, 'See You Later Alligator', with Bill Haley. God, I fell in love with rock 'n' roll."
In 1956, Fender returned to Texas, picked up a guitar, greased back his hair, and "started kicking some ass." He sang Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Elvis Presley, and Gene Vincent. "I grew my sideburns, put 50 pounds of wax on my hair, got me my pachuco-looking zoot suit, and I thought I was Elvis Presley. That lasted several years. I was nothing but rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll."
Falling under the spell of rock 'n' roll during that heady year might now seem inevitable, but for a young, working-class Mexican-American, it wasn't. Conjunto and traditional Mexican ballads remained the rage with his friends at a time when Hispanic pride, especially amongst young men, was beginning to take the shape of a cultural movement.
While Fender would never reject his heritage, he felt passionate about the English language. "I remember even as far back as the first grade," he says, "I remember how hard I wanted to speak English. It was some instinct. I always emphasized myself to the English language; my friends didn't. They were happy speaking Spanish. When I was in Michigan, I was the interpreter for my family. Then when rock 'n' roll came out in English, well, that was my main guacamole.
"My singing style," he continues, "really came from my effort to pronounce words right. In English and in Spanish. It's like I'm trying to pronounce a word in my mind and hold the word through the melody."
Fender's first break came in the winter of 1956, when he was 19. "I was playing a local dance. These guys from Falcon Records heard about me. The producer, Rafael Ramirez, liked to do new things. He had an idea that he'd found the Mexican Elvis Presley. My first two songs came out in January or February 1957. They were 'Don't Be Cruel', which I sung in Spanish, and a song I had written called 'Holy One'. Ramirez named it 'Ay Amor'. It cleared a path that I followed in doing songs that were translations from English to Spanish.
"A lot of people claim they were the first Hispanic rock 'n' roller. But I am. My record came out in early '57. It came out a little bit before Ritchie Valens. But to some people, it's like I never existed in those years."
And in those years, a record contract meant little more than $25 and the joy of hearing your song on the radio. For Fender, that was enough. "It was 1957 and I was full of baloney," he says. Still, "Don't Be Cruel" was a #1 hit on the Latin American charts, and the biggest hit rock 'n' roll had ever seen south of the border. North of the border, though, Fender and his band were still getting kicked out of clubs and restaurants for being Mexican.
In Harlingen, Texas, Fender met club owner Wayne Duncan, and re-recorded 'Holy One' in English for Duncan's fledgling record label. When Imperial picked up the song, he wound up with a major regional hit on the same label as his hero, Fats Domino. "I went to see Lou Chud, who was running things then, and he was concerned about my sideburns and my hair. He said, 'Do you have to have your hair like that? They're gonna be able to tell you're Mexican.' I said, 'Well, I am!'" Nevertheless, in 1959, Baldemar Huerta changed his look, and took a new last name from the headstock of a rock 'n' roll guitar.
For Fender, country music was still a decade away, but the first seed was planted in 1960, through a song with a title that told more truth than a 23-year-old could have known. "I wrote 'Wasted Days And Wasted Nights' in the restroom where I was staying at the Starlite Club. The Starlite was in Harlingen on Van Buren street; it was Wayne Duncan's place. I had a room in the club, not really a room. They had converted a restroom into a space for me, and the only place to sit was the commode. I had another title, 'Lonely Days Or Lonely Nights' or something, but I didn't like it. I knew it was something special from the start."
But the single, a thrilling slice of brown-eyed rhythm & blues, never had a chance. On May 13, in a club in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Fender and his bass player were arrested for marijuana possession, and in 1960, that meant hard time, especially for a couple of Mexican-American rockers. "One of the guys we were hanging around would turn somebody in when the cops would put pressure on him, 'cause he was on probation," Fender remembers. "We didn't have much left, just a bunch of seeds. But before they busted us, they had a warrant for us at the club. I thought it was a request written on a piece of paper!
"We got five years each in Angola," he continues. "I adapted to it, but I'm not very good at doing time. I get a real phobia. I couldn't never say I enjoyed it. There are a lot of people who keep going back. I don't want to go back. I was fortunate enough to have been transferred from Angola to DeQuincy, which was for first offenders, and I got me a job at the warehouse with a man named John Puerta, the manager. He gave me an opportunity so that I could record in the warehouse under supervision. I got to record right there on Lake Charles. That was in 1961. The songs were mostly in Spanish."
Three and half years later, Fender's release was signed by Governor Jimmie Davis -- coincidentally, also a well-known figure in country music history (most notably as co-writer of "You Are My Sunshine"). "I don't think he wanted to pardon us," he says. "I think he was under political pressure because they were very much against marijuana. I had five years. Out of that I had to do four years, one month and fifteen days. He barely signed the parole. The conditions, that I stay away from music, were written by the parole officer in my local area. Such is life. You got to go with it."
Fender kicked around Louisiana for awhile but finally returned home to San Benito in 1969, where he found work as a mechanic and even considered studying sociology. He hadn't given up on music, but it would be a few years before the Be Bop Kid truly came back.
The catalyst was Huey Meaux, whose Houston-based Crazy Cajun label released some of the most exciting and enduring Texas music ever recorded. Fender says he first became familiar with Meaux in Harlingen in 1963, but he didn't hook up with him until nearly a decade later. "In 1971 I finally connected with him in Houston and I went in the office, and he said he was interested in recording me, and I said, 'Hey man I'm ready.' That was the beginning."
In 1974, Crazy Cajun released a countrified Fender single called "Before The Next Teardrop Falls" that soon drew interest from ABC/Dot, which released an album of the same name featuring a fetching mix of country, Latin, and simple blues.
"I was reluctant to cut country at first," Fender says. "But I was blown away by the way the songs went up the charts. I knew I was wrong. I just wanted to do rock 'n' roll and rhythm & blues. But with Huey, it was his way or no way at all. Since he started out with hits, I wasn't going to argue."
"Before The Next Teardrop Falls" reached #1 on both the country and pop charts in early-mid 1975; "Wasted Days And Wasted Nights" followed a few months later, also topping the country charts and hitting #8 pop. "Since I Met You Baby" and "Secret Love" also charted before the end of the year (the latter also going #1 country). In 1976, he scored with "The Wild Side Of Life", "You'll Lose A Good Thing", "Vaya Con Dios" and "Living It Down".
"The songs were picked by Huey Meaux," Fender says. "We had the best musicians we could get at that time. Those recording sessions were a great pleasure. They all came out easy. We weren't having trouble with any of the songs -- you know how sometimes if you can't get the chords or notes right. It wasn't like that. It was just one after another. It was like a labor of love."
Fender's run continued, on a somewhat smaller scale, through the early '80s, but by 1985, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin had come to dominate his life. "I was OK snorting, I was OK drinking -- well, I wasn't OK," he admits. "Then somebody taught me how to shoot." His wife Vangie, who now manages his career, intervened. Fender entered a clinic on August 26, 1985.
"I had a moment of clarity," he says. "I had never been good at doing what I needed to do. I've been clean for almost 17 years now. At first, you start getting some common sense, some wisdom, but for the first three or four months of treatment, the physical addiction is still killing you. After a year or year and a half you stop shaking.
"You lose your self-esteem, and when you lose that, you're just a lump of shit. You feel you have nothing to love. So how can you love yourself? Instead of warning us when we have too much, alcohol tells us to keep drinking, that things are getting better, which they're not. There's a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other."
After Fender emerged from treatment, he opened a restaurant and club in Branson, Missouri, but it wasn't exactly a recipe for restarting a career that once promised so much more. "We didn't do too good," he says. "I lost my mother and one of my sons there. I figured that wasn't the place for me."
In 1988, Fender was picked by Robert Redford for a role in The Milagro Beanfield War -- which wasn't totally out of the blue, as Fender had already appeared in films (including a convincing portrayal of Pancho Villa in She Came To The Valley in 1977). He returned to Corpus Christi, rented an apartment for his wife and children, and eventually purchased the home where he now lives. Fender had all but retired from music.
Enter Doug Sahm. In 1990, Sahm, who Fender had known in San Antonio as early as 1960 -- "Doug would hang around me 'cause I was a few years older, and I would stay with him over at his grandmother's house" -- asked him to join the Texas Tornados. Fender had performed with Sahm, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez at a 1989 show in San Francisco, the first time all four had shared a stage together.
"The fact that Flaco was in the group threw me off, you know, with his accordion," Fender says. "I thought I'm going back to what I didn't like to begin with! But Doug asked me to join, and I said, OK man, I'll do anything. I loved it. It was a new adventure. We played funky, heavy rock 'n' roll. I would play funky, Doug would play blues and English rock 'n' roll, Flaco would do his thing."
The Tornados released three albums on Reprise -- their self-titled 1990 debut, 1991's Zone Of Our Own, and 1992's Hangin' On By A Thread -- before calling it quits. "The reason we split up is that we couldn't stand each other," Fender says, flatly. Even so, they regrouped in 1996 for Four Aces, their most underrated record, and a final live album in 1999, the year of Doug Sahm's death.
"It hit Augie harder than anybody else," Fender says. "It was like an arrow right through his heart. I always thought I'd be the first one to go. I was sick all the time. And Doug was just a bundle of energy. I loved him."
Taking a cue from the Texas Tornados' supergroup approach was Los Super Seven, which expanded the lineup and steered the sound more toward Mexican-American styles. The group's self-titled debut on RCA in 1998 included Fender and Jimenez from the Tornados; Los Lobos' David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas; Texas songwriters/bandleaders Joe Ely, Rick Trevino and Ruben Ramos; and accordionist Joel Jose Guzman.
Fender was not part of the altered Los Super Seven lineup that released Canto last year, instead directing his attention toward La Musica De Baldemar Huerta, his first full exploration of traditional Mexican songs, sung in Spanish. Originally issued independently last year, it caught the attention of Back Porch/Virgin, which gave the disc a broader release on February 12.
La Musica De Baldemar Huerta features songs Fender remembered from his childhood, songs that would have been shared in the border town cantinas and at youthful fiestas in San Benito. The sound alternates from the spartan trio format of rhythm guitar, requinto and guitarron, to florid, string-graced ballads that sound like the most romantic, albeit fading, dreams of youth.
"This younger generation is taking the older generation and throwing it into oblivion," Fender says. "In terms of Hispanic music, they don't have much to dig from for the real stuff to come out. But the traditional style can still relate to music from 100 or 200 years ago. It's not a fad; it's a continuation of what was.
"But sometimes," he pauses, "I think I'm the one that's out of groove."
The album was produced by brothers Mike and Ron Morales, neither of whom had ever worked on traditional Mexican music before. "We had talked for a number years with a partner of ours of doing a back-to-the-roots album of indigenous music." Mike says. "We thought we could do a great record if we had the time, the money, and the voice. When we had a chance to work with Freddy, we knew we had the voice."
"Freddy's voice hasn't changed much," Ron says. "He sounds as good today as he did all those years ago. When we had the initial song meetings, we went through some tunes; some of it was nice, some Americana tunes. But at the end of the meeting, Freddy started singing these songs he used to sing in the cantinas. We were taken aback. That was the exact sound we wanted. In about 10 minutes, he started running through 15 of those songs. He said, 'If you like that, wait till you hear this.'"
As any longtime resident of San Antonio will tell you, some of the finest traditional music can be heard in the Mexican restaurants, played by trios, many of whom have attained quasi-legendary status. For the basic tracks, the Morales brothers tapped Juan Aguilar, Pancho Perez, and an astonishing lead guitarist and requinto player, Chepe Solis.
"They probably know 2,000 songs," Ron says. "They're very talented and versatile. There was a restaurant I was eating at, and they were gigging there. We asked if they'd come into the studio and they did." In early 2001, Fender met with the musicians to work out arrangements; then, because of his failing health, he returned to Corpus, where he cut the vocal tracks in the back of a music store.
One of the most moving tracks, "Adios Muchachos", is at times a farewell letter to close friends, at times a farewell to life itself. "In the '30s, there was Carlos Gardel; he was the greatest in Argentina of the tango singers," Fender explains. "That song was translated into English and recorded in the U.S. as the song 'I Get Ideas'. But in reality it's the song 'Adios Muchachos'. In the original, it says that God was so jealous that he took my girlfriend away. In a way the singer is saying he's a little teed off at God. But I changed the wording; it sounded sacrilegious to me."
The album closes with a couple "bonus tracks" -- two of Fender's biggest hits from the '70s, "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" and "Secret Love". As much as any single project could, La Musica De Baldemar Huerta provides a glimpse into the soul of a singer and tells, through simple songs of love and loss, the story of a life.
"I never thought of becoming a great singer," Fender says. "For years it was just having fun. Later on I just got high, doing dope, enjoying my singing. I thought I was serious, but I was just laughing throughout the whole thing. Now I look back, and it's like a good boxer who hasn't gotten all the good fights. I just want a little respect after I'm gone. I want to be remembered as somebody with a heart."
ND contributing editor Roy Kasten lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri. He has probably spent enough quarters on "Wasted Days And Wasted Nights" to buy all the jukeboxes in Harlingen.
Comments ()