TEX-MEX TRAVELING WILBURYS : Four Big Names Fuel the Texas Tornados’ Rootsy Sound

Returning to roots was a recurring theme in ‘80s pop.

First came the rockabilly revival, then the blues blossomed with renewed mass appeal. Cajun and Celtic music emerged as significant pop influences. In country music, the second half of the decade brought a stampede back to honky-tonk traditionalism. Even folk music made a comeback.

And now: Tex-Mex, anyone?

The Texas Tornados hope that once people hear their peppy, border-country hybrid of Mexican folk, country music, European polkas, rinky rock ‘n’ roll organ sounds and easy-rolling R&B;, the answer will be a resounding “si . “

With a lineup of four well-regarded, high-profile practitioners of the Tex-Mex style, the Tornados are a sort of super-group working in what has been a commercially minor form. Having found backing from a major label, the Nashville branch of Warner Bros., the Texas Tornados are hoping to make Tex-Mex the next strain of roots-music to grow on a mainstream audience.

Freddy Fender and Doug Sahm are the band’s marquee names. With his trembling tenor and bushy locks, Fender emerged as one of country music’s biggest sellers in the mid-’70s, but before that he was a wide-ranging performer, firmly grounded in Tex-Mex and rhythm and blues. Sahm, one of the most versatile and natural roots-rockers, is best known as leader of his ‘60s band, the Sir Douglas Quintet.

On songs like “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino,” Sahm and his ethnically diverse group introduced elements of Tex-Mex into the pop Top 40. Fellow Texans Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs (“Wooly Bully”) and the Detroit-based, Mexican-born band, ? and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”), were others who scored in the mid-’60s with garage-rock hits that bore a Tex-Mex stamp.

Another Tornado is Augie Meyers, Sahm’s old sidekick from the Sir Douglas Quintet. Inspired by what he heard from traditional Mexican folk musicians around his and Sahm’s mutual hometown of San Antonio, Meyers adopted their sprightly rhythms on his British-made Vox organ, forging the comically wheezy sound that became a trademark of Tex-Mex rock.

Rounding out the band, and anchoring it firmly in the folk heritage that underlies Tex-Mex music, is Flaco Jimenez. Also from San Antonio, Jimenez is a Grammy winner whose button-accordion style expands upon music handed down from his father, Santiago Jimenez Sr., a noted player regarded as one of the pioneers of conjunto music, a Tex-Mex precursor that conjoined German waltzes and polkas with Mexican folk. Pop audiences have heard Jimenez’ playing on records and tours with Ry Cooder, and on Dwight Yoakam’s hit, “Streets of Bakersfield.”

It was Sahm who got the idea that Tex-Mex might be the way to reach a wide audience while still dealing in music with a rootsy feel.

His 1989 album, “Juke Box Music,” was a wonderful romp through obscure old blues and R&B; nuggets, but Antone’s, a small label affiliated with the famous Austin, Tex., nightclub of the same name, didn’t have the clout to get Sahm much exposure beyond his existing cult following.

After spending much of the ‘80s in Canada and Scandinavia, where he enjoyed popularity, the 48-year-old Sahm was still thinking about finding his way back onto U.S. airwaves (that is, when he wasn’t thinking about baseball, a ruling passion that Sahm will readily discuss in a gravelly voice full of pine tar and resin).

Having a hit record again “is a big deal for me, (though) I can live without it,” Sahm said over the phone last week from Austin, where the Tornados were preparing to play one of their first shows. “But I’ve had my taste (of chart success), and you’ve got to have more.”

Sahm said he started approaching Nashville record companies and producers with the idea of doing a Tex-Mex project, figuring it had a chance to catch on with country listeners. “It’s not like what’s coming out these days, but it’s soulful, and it’s real,” Sahm said.

One person Sahm persuaded was Cameron Randle, who had worked for the company that manages such country stars as Yoakam and the Desert Rose Band. They put together a concert last December at a San Francisco nightclub, in which Sahm, Meyers, Jimenez and Fender played together for the first time. They wanted to feel out whether the players were compatible, and whether the combination could draw a crowd. The show was a sellout, and the musicians got on well.

“You’d have to be real turned off not to see the potential,” Sahm said. “I can spot a shortstop or an outfielder by the way they walk.” In the same way, the would-be baseball talent scout could sense that this Tex-Mex aggregate had a shot to make it in the majors.

Last spring, Randle took some demo recordings to Warner Bros.’ top country music scout, and the Tornados quickly were given a four-album contract to record in the big leagues.

Released less than a month ago, “Texas Tornados” has sold about 40,000 copies, Randle said last week--a good start. Sahm worries, however, that some country radio programmers are too formula-bound to play the album’s first single, the delightfully hang-dog “Who Were You Thinkin’ Of.”

“There were some who were dancing around the room (when they heard it), but they were saying, ‘We can’t play it,’ ” Sahm said.

But according to Randle, the Texas Tornados will try to blow into other segments of the pop marketplace. The Sir Douglas Quintet-flavored rocker, “Adios Mexico,” will be promoted among college and alternative rock stations, while “Soy de San Luis,” a composition by Flaco Jimenez’ father, has been released as a single on Spanish-language stations.

For Jimenez, 51, involvement in the Texas Tornados represents a step up to major-label status for a musician long hailed in traditionalist circles. (Jimenez has appeared before as a sideman on major releases, but never as a principal, as he is with the Tornados.)

For Jimenez, playing conjunto accordion music was a family affair that began with his grandfather, Patricio, around the turn of the century.

“He used to go to the German oom-pah-pah dances around San Antonio,” which had a substantial German community, Jimenez recalled over the phone from his home in San Antonio. “He’d check out their way of playing. He liked it very much, and he managed to buy an accordion so he could copy what they played.”

Jimenez’ father, Santiago, learned the accordion in his turn and became one of the originators of the conjunto style. Flaco’s younger brother, Santiago Jr., continues as a strict traditionalist, playing much as their father did in the 1930s and ‘40s. But in the early ‘70s, Flaco, who has played professionally since 1956, began to branch out, absorbing other roots forms in his playing. (The nickname Flaco means skinny in Spanish; Leonardo is Jimenez’ given name.)

The impetus for “jazzing up” his conjunto music, says Jimenez,

came in a phone call from Sahm in 1973.

Sahm was in New York, recording his “Doug Sahm and Band” album, a loose, off-handed work in which he and Meyers were joined by Bob Dylan and Dr. John, among others. Sahm asked Jimenez, who had never been to New York, to fly to the sessions and play accordion on some of the songs.

“I said, ‘Oh man, is this true or not?’ ” recalled Jimenez, whose touring at the time was confined to Chicano dance-hall crowds. “To go and record with those biggies! I didn’t have a clue what I was going to play. I didn’t have a tape, no homework. When I was on the plane, I was saying, ‘What am I going to record? It seemed real difficult, because I didn’t know the material.”

But the sessions went well, and Jimenez began to think about branching out.

“I knew I could do more with music,” he said. “Doug was the one who broke me in. That was my start on jazzing it up, and playing the rock ‘n’ roll scene.”

Jimenez subsequently became a touring and recording partner of Ry Cooder, the ace blues guitarist who has been a leading roots music exponent. “Ry introduced me to the international scene. It was a giant step,” said Jimenez, who has since been a fixture on the folk festival circuit.

His move into rock settings hasn’t set well among some strict conjunto traditionalists, Jimenez said. “Sometimes critics say, ‘Hey man, you’re leaving us behind, you’re forgetting your roots’--which is not true. I play the waltzes and polkas like my dad, but I think it’s best to play other kinds of music (as well). I consider music a bouquet of flowers. If it’s just one (kind), it’s not very colorful. But if you have different flowers, it’s like a rainbow, and the people can pick out their color.”

Jimenez, who has eight children, said that he leaped at the chance to join the Texas Tornados, and will follow up that involvement with a major-label solo release to be produced by Cooder and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, the versatile Los Angeles band whose blend of rock, blues and Mexican folk music is praised by all the Tornados.

“I’m satisfied with what I’ve done along the years. Now it’s getting better for me as far as exposing the music,” Jimenez said. The Tornados will give him his widest exposure yet. “Of course, we’re not that young, so it’s got to be now,” he added with a laugh.

Freddy Fender recalls the first time he played with Doug Sahm: it was 1959, and Fender, who had scored a local R&B; hit in Texas with the song, “Holy One,” was barnstorming in a fancy Cadillac.

“I came into San Antonio to promote the record, and I met this scrawny kid hanging around me,” the affable Fender said from Austin. Fender wound up playing a gig on top of the roof of the concession stand at a drive-in movie theater, and as he recalls it, Sahm’s band backed him up.

“He liked my blue suede shoes, and my long sideburns. He liked the idea of riding around in a white Cadillac with a red interior,” Fender said, recalling with a laugh that he and the teen-aged Sahm wound up spending the night drinking and sleeping it off at the home of one of Sahm’s relatives.

“He looked like the Mexican Elvis,” Sahm recalls. “Chicks were screaming.”

Fender, whose given name is Baldemar Huerta, had his rise blunted in 1960 when he was arrested in Baton Rouge, La. for possessing a tiny amount of marijuana. He served a three-year prison term.

His career momentum didn’t start gathering again until the early ‘70s, when Fender hooked up with Huey P. Meaux, the Texas record producer who had turned out the Sir Douglas Quintet’s early hits. Meaux guided Fender into country singing--and the result was “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” a No. 1 country and pop hit.

Fender said he has not put out an album of his own since 1981. His highest-profile work during the past few years has been a film role, the part of the mayor in “The Milagro Beanfield War.”

Still, when the Texas Tornados offer came up, Fender was leery.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t interested,” he said. “I’ve always liked to fend for myself. I never wanted to sing with anybody else. With me, it was reluctant participation until I saw that (Warner Bros.) was really getting into it. I would have hated to sacrifice good songs, good material on an independent label that wouldn’t get (the record) anywhere. It’s like putting a paper boat in the ocean and seeing if it will get to England.”

Fender said he is making the adjustment to working cooperatively instead of being the only singer in the spotlight. All four of the Tornados take lead vocal parts. On tour, they are backed by four other players drawn from Sahm’s and Jimenez’s bands.

“I’m so used to controlling, to talking a lot on stage, but Doug Sahm has a bigger mouth than I do,” Fender said with a laugh. “It’s an adjustment I’ll have to make. I think it’s going to be great.”

For Fender, playing in the Tornados means being able to go back to the R&B; and rock ‘n’ roll he was playing before his rise as a country singer.

“I didn’t play rock ‘n’ roll because of the fear of losing my country people,” he said. “They might say, ‘The heck with you.’ Now I’m playing my guitar and getting down with some B.B. King stuff.’

Is Fender hoping to use the Texas Tornados as a vehicle to jump-start his solo career?

“Is pork chops greasy? I guess we all want it,” he said.

But he also sees the band, which is being tagged as a sort of Tex-Mex Traveling Wilburys, as a group with a mission to introduce a wide audience to an overlooked sound.

“Our greatest asset is we’re not like everybody else,” Fender said. “We’re the messengers of a kind of music that’s been out of the mainstream so long it’s pitiful.”

Who

Texas Tornados and Kelly Willis & Radio Ranch.

When

Monday, Aug. 20, at 8 p.m.

Where

The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts

Interstate 5 to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Center.

Wherewithal

$19.50.

Where to call

(714) 496-8930.