Javier Batiz’s South-of-the-Border Blues

Being the lone bluesman in Mexico City sounds like a sure-fire ticket to obscurity, but singer-guitarist Javier Batiz can count on one influential friend: Carlos Santana.

Batiz, who performs with Borracho y Loco at the Belly Up in Solana Beach tonight and at the Palomino on Saturday, was invited by Santana to appear with the latter’s group on seven California dates last year. But the connection between the two stretches back to 30 years ago, when both were young musicians in Tijuana smitten by blues and rhythm & blues.

“I used to back up a black singer named Gene Ross at the Convoy Club in Tijuana, where the Woolworth’s store is now,” said Batiz, 44. “Then I started this band called the TJs and we used to play Sundays in the park for the people. Carlos’ mother heard me play, took the little boy over to my house and said, ‘Teach him.’ So I did.

“I did teach him to play guitar, but I put him on bass and I used to pull all these dirty tricks on him to learn faster. I used to hide the chords so he would have to follow me by ear as I played. He always got mad at me for doing that but then he realized it really developed his ear.”

(Through a spokeswoman, Santana said his father taught him to play guitar but readily acknowledged it was Batiz who inspired him to pick up electric guitar.)

The California swing with Santana last year produced the present collaboration with Borracho y Loco. Batiz’s singing and playing at a Universal Amphitheater date here impressed booker Kevin Morrow, who hooked Batiz up with the San Diego county-based group. Asked about the material they would perform, Batiz said only that the group had a “nice surprise” for him.

It didn’t take Batiz long to settle on a musical career. He began playing in Tijuana clubs when he was 12, selecting material for his groups from the B-sides of blues 78s and absorbing the instrumental sounds of such guitar influences as T-Bone Walker and Robert Johnson and vocal models like Bobby (Blue) Bland.

“Ray Robinson’s Record Rack was a radio program that used to come on about 12 o’clock at night and he used to play Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Elmore James, B.B. King and Robert Johnson,” he said. “I wanted to sing mariachi music but when I heard the blues--the guitar playing and harmonica and singing with such soul--it struck me, man. I didn’t choose it--it chose me.”

Batiz broke up his band in 1963, left Tijuana and headed for Mexico City. Then followed long years of paying dues as he introduced audiences accustomed to watered-down pop versions of rhythm & blues hits to the real thing. The process involved educating more than the audience.

“I’m the only blues singer here so it was very hard for me at first to get material, places to work and people to play with me. In Mexico, the musicians didn’t know how to play a 12-bar blues and that has cost me in my development a lot.

“I have to teach everybody the chords, the riffs and licks, the sound, tearing down the speakers and filling them with newspaper so they could sound like a fuzztone, all the stuff I got from playing with Gene Ross.”

Now Batiz is popular enough in Mexico that his traveling is largely confined to club or concert engagements in larger resort cities and government-sponsored benefits for the needy. “If you’re living off the people, you should give them something back and that’s one way to do it for me,” Batiz said.

Batiz, who sings most of his material in English, has recorded sporadically, including one album recorded here for Scepter Records that never came out when the label folded in 1970. He has released eight albums in Mexico, the last two in 1985, but alleged that most labels there are reluctant to sell a Mexican artist singing in English. Nor has he found much popularity in the hybrid culture along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I’m more of a black (blues) artist than a Chicano/Tex-Mex thing,” said Batiz. “I went through Dallas on a tour with Little Joe y La Familia but it didn’t work out too well because the Chicanos think that (I’m not one of them) and shouldn’t play for them.

“Mexico doesn’t have anything to do with the border towns. It’s three countries and three cultures--the American, the Mexican-American and the Mexican. The border towns have started a whole new thing to themselves--dances, music, a way of speaking, a way of moving, a way of life--and I don’t fit too well with those guys.”

Batiz is hoping for a better fit in the United States, whether through the Borracho y Loco connection or other projects that would enable him to work more frequently here. But the bottom line for him isn’t fame or potential fortune: just simple respect.

“A lot of people started from the roots, left them behind and then lost them altogether,” said Batiz. “Not me--there’s still the connection to the roots but now it has branches, flowers, the whole tree.

“I have contributed to making the music what it is even though nobody knows it. Most of all I would like to be recognized as a good musician so I can be playing with other good musicians--like Miles Davis, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Carlos and John Lee Hooker--and just work at that.”