Carli Muñoz

One truly memorable musical experience in Southern California was when I gigged for a couple of years playing Country Western Swing and Blue Grass music. It came to me like a sweep from the wind sometime after having left the Beach Boys and venturing out with various musical genres; especially coming from jazz. At the time I was sort of going through a musical vacuum and the idea of stepping into a new musical genre tickled my curiosity. Fortunately I joined the right players from the start and became probably one of the first contemporary journeyman pianist in Southern California to gain notoriety within the Country Swing and Blue Grass circle,  at least that ’s what they said!

I can still remember the day when I was sitting on the sidewalk in the front of my house in Hudson Drive Pasadena playing with my three toddlers when Frank Sullivan, my neighbor from across the street, approached me. Frank must have heard me playing or practicing from his house so he already knew that I could probably tackle any musical challenge that he had to offer. He was straight to the point and offered me a gig with a band where he was the pedal still player and musical director—a local country swing band by the name of Van and The Southland Country Band.

The band was fairly large—it toggled between 7 and 8 pieces and the level of musicianship was excellent. The repertory was authentic and vintage on the most part, which made it interesting and swinging; it was the real deal! The founder and lead vocalist was a former truck driver by the name of Van Ezell. His long hair and full beard along with his overweighed but solid body frame made the perfect constitution for the black leather outlaw cowboy garb he wore….Waylon Jennings would have been proud! The drummer Big Rick, was nearly 250 pounds and had a long thick mustache below his 10 gallon Stetson and all he needed was to wear a sheriff batch on his shirt—he was actually a sheriff!

That was the sheriff and the outlaw. The rest of us were somewhere in between; sinners and saints. Most everyone was from a different southern state. I was, of course, the southernmost.

The stage where we played at was very large and it didn’t lack any of the pro amenities of a main stream concert stage. Arrays of lights, large sound consoles with engineers, roadies, a master of ceremony and a comfortable backstage area was the norm at the club where we performed as house band for a least a year; it was called The Cowboy. There were at least 3 large bars, a huge dance floor, a mechanical bull and a wide back door from which the nightly brawlers would be vehemently exited by a battery of eager bouncers. On stage I played a Yamaha Electric Grand piano I owned with a pair of bull horns on fur at the end of the tail. The front line from stage left was: band leader Frank Sullivan on pedal steel and banjo; Brantley Kearns on fiddle, mandolin, lead and bg vocals; Marty Gwen on vocals; Van Ezell on lead vocal and rhythm guitar; Mark Smith, Greg Humphrey or Bill Bryson on electric bass and vocals; John David on lead guitar, banjo and harmonica; and I flanked the right on piano. Sheriff Big Rick, guarded the rear. Later on i brought in my friend drummer extraordinare Jim Cruce.

Something really interesting in country western swing is that as in jazz, all the lead players get to do several rounds of solos in every song which it’s really cool for stretching out. I had to keep up with the speed of the banjo, the fiddle and pedal steel and gel with the blues nature of the harmonica, the guitar and the mandolin- it was really cool! I even became a part of a small bluegrass unit of the same band and that was even more challenging. One of the highlights was to open for Bill Monroe at an outdoors concert.

Soon enough me and Frank were car pooling the endless and non-eventful hauls from Pasadena to Anaheim and back on the Santa Ana freeway. The ride was specially excruciating whenever I drove by myself, which fortunately wasn’t most of the time. It’s not easy being from the tropics and having to drive 20 miles of concrete with occasional views of track houses that not only looked the same in structure, but their colors blended with the rest of the gray sameness….six night a week!

So, as much as the ride was at times boring, I had the must fun riding with my new cowboy friends. I remember one time when the band hired a new bass player, Bill Bryson from South Pasadena, who was an old friend of some of the guys in the band and I was to pick him up to ride with me on his first night with the band. After getting somewhat acquainted and just settling into the freeway I (jokingly but serious) said to Bill not to worry that we were a little late (we really weren’t) cause I was a real fast driver (I don’t think that Bill or too many people in Southern California had ever experienced being next a Puertorrican on the wheel dressed full gear as a cowboy!). As I covertly observe the look on his face I went on and said to him that I didn’t really have a license but not to worry because I could outrun the cops. By that time he was so nervous that I had to let him know I was only kidding—we became great friends.

Frank and I had a lot of fun car pooling too. Sometimes the fiddle player, Brantley Kearns, also car pooled with us and that was just too much fun. Speaking of Brantley Kearns; what a fantastic player and personality! I feel very fortunate to have spent a couple of years of my life with these guys. Unfortunately distance, since I’ve been back in Puerto Rico, has played an awful role on keeping us far apart, but as I write these memoirs I get the urge to contact my old friends and try to arrange a visit to the old west….hmmm, wouldn’t mind gathering the old cowboys for a midnight session….. “What the hell have I got to sit around here for?” As Joe Buck would say!

Some time ago during the mid 70’s I was doing a gig with my jazz fusion group “Your Own Space” at a club in North Hollywood, I think it was Dante’s. The room was delightfully populated by musicians such as Freddy Hubbard, Al Jarreau, the cats from MJQ, from the rock band Chicago and other great musicians. During the first brake I got a note from one of the waitresses saying: “Jimmy Smith wants to see you”. Being as overwhelmed and busy as one can be by getting the best enjoyment out of such company and being engaged on a conversation where both Jarreau and Hubbard were asking me to join their respective touring band, I quickly dismissed the note. I figured that it had come from no one I knew or from a guitar player who used to hang around the band a lot and his name was Jimmy Smith.

The brake was over and we played another set. As we were leaving the stage the waitress came back with another note: JIMMY SMITH WANTS TO SEE YOU! This time the waitress pointed across the dark room. The first thing I see is a mouthful of teeth floating about 6 feet in the air that looked pretty darn familiar and in an matter of split seconds it brought to me the memories of some of the most transcendental and gravity defying keyboard playing I’ve ever heard! As if on a quantum leap I find myself being grabbed by this towering figure and lifted off the ground - my sense of joy would just be inexplicable. Still holding me he says to me: “Who do you like, man…Herbie or McCoy?” I was a little thrown off by the question because I like them both very much. I answered: “Well…I…a…I like them both, but…Mc Coy…” He says “Ohhhh noooo man…there is a sudden ambiguous pause and he says intensely looking straight at my eyes: Yeahhh…that’s the one… man… that’s the one!!!!

Once we got thorough that unusual and exhilarating first encounter we just hung out all night talking about music. This man ONLY talked about music; this man IS music. That same evening he invited me to go with him to his supper club in San Fernando Valley. I remember his club as cozy and dark and if there was a bar or tables I will never know because my focus and attention as I walked in went straight to a little stage straight ahead and slightly above the ground that cradled the Hammond organ that has brought so much joy to a whole generation of jazz music. There was probably a set of drums next to the organ but I don’t distinctly remember seeing that either.

Jimmy took me straight to the back of the stage where he had an old spinet piano facing the back of the stage. He sat and played the piano and there we just carried on for the rest of the evening just having fun and sharing music ideas.

As if it wasn’t enough to have been touched by Jimmy Smith’s music throughout my formative jazz years, this most special event sealed the man in my soul.

Long live the king!

He is an advocate of bigotry.

He shows no sense of compassion or concept of general human equality and his views are not broad, but extremely narrow. He stocked his foot in a deep hole and now he doesn’t know how to get it out.

Maybe if he joined Ann Coulter they could try to make one decent human between the two, although I doubt that’d be possible—the two of them don’t make one!

of course…Lou Dobbs

CARIBBEAN SUNSHINE
A psychedelic adventure in the Caribbean waters

One of the most memorable and transcendental music experiences that I ever had was on a tiny island located just north of St. Thomas , called Jost Van Dyke. This happened during the mid 60’s when we (my alma mater rock group The Living End aka: Space) were creating havoc during a summer in St. Thomas. Towards the end of our sojourn in St. Thomas , some local friends invited us (the group) to go to Jost Van Dyke (we had never heard of it!), as a personal invitation from the “governor”. Of course without hesitation and animated with such adventurous spirit we accepted. Soon enough an old fisherman with his small outboard fishing boat boarded us and took us on the probably around 10 mile stretch from the north end of St. Thomas to JVD. The small vessel didn’t make it to shore due to motor failure just short of about 3/4 mile from the bay. I had a lady friend with me and a matchbox with some 3 or 4 tabs of Owsley Orange Sunshine in my pocket. I didn’t want to wait for another fishing boat to come and tow us (true to the spirit of adventure), So, I took two tabs, gave my friend the other two, and off we went into pristine emerald blue waters of the Caribbean Sea.

Needless to say that by the time we arrived (swimming) to shore, the perception of being there defied any common sense or normality. The island then was inhabited by 40 native of African descend subjects of the British Crown, fishermen on the most part. In addition to the fishermen there was a tax collector and a “governor” by the name of Foxy. As far as structures the only concrete structures were the remains of a small one room jail and the façade of an equally small chapel. The other structures consisted of Foxy’s house, a dearly cozy wooden shack where Foxy kindly lodged my friend and I during an unexpected storm that night, and some other sparse small wood and palm shacks inhabited by the other natives. As it turned out, my friend and I were the only ones who took the dive. A couple of hours after our wet arrival the others arrived at shore towed by other fishermen. That means that some of the other Sunshine had also arrived on land dry and safely. As for myself, I can say that the core of the intensity of being there was to observe how an ordinary day in the life of the Van Dykians would turn into the most dynamic, intense, extremely colorful, and aggressively prosaic but cleverly poetic form of RAW calypso extravaganza - the kind of calypso I never knew existed! It all started with a visitors (our own humble) offering of the only treasure that we possessed (besides our green adolescence) to share; Orange Sunshine, and of course, a little weed for chaser.

The prelude to the music was a game of dominoes between Foxy and his closest competitors on a makeshift wood and driftwood table under some dry palm leaf which served as a catapult to effects of the Sunshine experience. While the Sunshine was covertly performing its breach on the lock of the ultra senses, the game took on an energy level of its own. It became strangely aggressive with overtones of a struggle for live and death. Amidst the heavy sweat pouring out of the charcoal black skin the Sunshine evoked such levels of adrenaline and tension that the half naked gladiators proceeded to take arms. Fortunately the choice of weapons was musical instruments - most of them homemade. The only classic instrument was a guitar with a few strings missing that Foxy played. Other instruments were a broom stick on a wash tub with a string and a homemade tambo and some other homemade percussion.

The aggressiveness that had started during the domino game morphed into their form of calypso. As they picked up their instruments with vengeance they started playing what it seemed to be an 8 and possibly 9 bar cadence reminiscent more of jíbaro (mountain) music from Puerto Rico (not textually), than calypso. The intensity though was in the textual improvisation that each combatant engaged on. One would utter verses to the other about “how good I fucked your mamma”, or how “your wife moaned louder with me”, etc, etc. How I wish I had a Sony Walkman Recorder then, although it was the intensity of the moment and the sweeping expressions what added to that singular and priceless event! What troubles me must is not remembering the structure of the music. I remember being highly impressed by it - it wasn’t like any calypso I’ve ever heard. Unfortunately Jost Van Dyke is not the same as it was then 40 years ago, but Foxy is still there, playing and singing his music, not quite as prosaic as before, but nevetheless profound- I can take you there… come rain or come shine.

-Carli