The Homeboy Boogie

In the late 1940s, Edmundo Martinez Tostado, a.k.a. Don Tosti, recorded “Pachuco Boogie,” the unofficial anthem for those Mexican American cultural outsiders. The song started a musical craze that made Tosti the king of zoot-suit cool. A much-in-demand bass player, Tosti was a fixture in the early Palm Springs nightclub scene, and he moved there in the 1960s. In the summer of 2003, I visited him for an article I was writing about my Jewish grandparents, who also lived in Palm Springs. Tosti died there last August at the age of 81. This was one of his final interviews.

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Walking through what’s left of the Biltmore Hotel in Palm Springs is like walking through the ruins of a lost civilization. Walls are crumbling. Fallen stop signs and clipped wire fences block driveways covered in shrubs and broken glass. They lead only to empty lots dotted with anemic palm trees where luxury suites and crowded cocktail bars used to be. The marquee is still there, though--its colors faded, its VACANCY sign missing part of its second C, inviting visitors to imagine what used to be.

Built by Robert Levin in 1948, the Biltmore was once one of the desert’s most popular resorts. Don Tosti used to play the upright bass and vibes with his trio in the dining room during “the season,” that holy period of tourism and vacation bustle that ran from early fall to late spring. For 10 years starting in the late 1950s, Tosti’s trio banged out Latin jazz and swing for the Biltmore crowd seven nights a week.

“The biggest change is that Palm Springs has become main street,” Tosti laments. “Look at what’s happened to downtown. They got souvenir shops!” The most notorious casualty was Irwin Schuman’s Chi Chi, a legendary nightspot on the Palm Springs strip where groups such as The Caballeros kept Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner entertained with Latin favorites.

Tosti lives around the corner from the Biltmore in the house he bought in 1961 for his wife, Ruthe. He rarely drives anymore, but his white van, emblazoned with “Music by Tosti” on its side panels, still sits out front. Inside, his house is an intimate museum--portraits of Tosti and Ruthe, photos of Tosti’s most beloved icon, Tito Puente, and shelves overflowing with Mexican artifacts.

On this humid morning in July, Tosti is sitting on a white leather couch, dressed all in white--shorts that bunch at his waist and a sleeveless mesh beach shirt. His spectacles are in thick Gucci frames and a gold pendant hangs around his neck. The stereo is playing Tosti’s recordings from the zoot-suit days when he was the king of “pachuco boogie”--a snappy hybrid of African American jazz and jump blues, Mexican boleros and corridos, and Mexican American street style. Tosti’s fame as a solo bassist and composer, and his stints with the orchestras of Jack Teagarden, Charlie Barnet and Jimmy Dorsey, made him an attractive draw for Palm Springs’ growing nightclub scene.

“I became a country club icon,” says Tosti. “I could play Latin. I could play jazz. Whatever they wanted.”

Tosti was born in El Paso, and he became famous for translating his hometown’s pachuco slang, known as calo, into a pop music urban dialect on songs such as “Pachuco Boogie” and “El Tirili.” When he plays his beautiful, icy cool “Guisa Guaina,” he can’t help but gloat. “That’s me on bass!” he howls. “If you can’t feel that, you got problems, baby!”

Tosti punctuates most of his sentences with “baby,” but his English is peppered with bits of jazzy, hipster Yiddish that he learned from Ruthe, an Austrian Jew from West L.A. whom he met at the Riviera Hotel. They were introduced by Bobby Ramos, a veteran of Ciro’s and the Mocambo in L.A., who opened the Riviera--another Irwin Schuman property. Tosti goes out of his way to mention that many of the musicians he worked with were “Jewish guys.” There is a menorah in his living room, sandwiched between a mirror in the shape of a Chai (the Hebrew symbol for life) and a shelf that holds his wife’s ashes in a wooden box fastened with a silver Star of David.

“I went to Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights,” he says. “Boyle Heights was over 60% Jewish. We got along with the Jewish kids. But we had what we call schnooks and schmucks. The schnooks were good to me. If someone tried to jump them they had to beat me up to get to them. You understand? But some of them were schmucks. They were [jerks]. So if someone jumped them, forget it, I wouldn’t help them.”

The stereo plays a 1949 recording of his song “Loco.” It’s a bluesy bolero that begins with Tosti’s longtime vocalist Raul Diaz singing “Ich bin meshuga” before he switches to Spanish: “Loco, todos dicen que soy loco.”

“Meshuga,” Tosti cackles, “that’s ‘crazy’ in English! I wrote that!”

Since Ruthe died in 1995, Tosti has been living alone with his beloved Chihuahua, Cacahuatita (“Little Peanut”). But he is surrounded by a past he is determined not to forget. There was the time when he was touring with Jimmy Dorsey and a bartender at a San Bernardino hotel refused to serve him because he was Mexican. Or when his band shared a bill with black band leader Louis Jordan at the Sands in Vegas and Jordan had to stay in the back room on breaks. Or how he met Charles Mingus at the post office across from Olvera Street, and they learned bass from the same teacher.

Tosti shows off his music room, where he sits at the baby grand and introduces the song that his old friend and fellow musician Lalo Guerrero sang at Ruthe’s funeral--a parody of “It’s Impossible.” Tosti performs like it’s a full house at the Biltmore:

You’re impossible, all day long you nag and nag, you’re just impossible

Can I hold you closer to me and not feel your bones go through me?

I can’t stop you from rushing to the store, you’re just impossible

And tomorrow, should you ask me for the moon, somehow I’d send you.

And to NASA, I would gladly recommend you . . . .

“That was Ruthe’s favorite song,” Tosti sighs. He looks down at the keys, and for the first time all morning, he doesn’t say a word.