On Next CD, Jose Feliciano Takes a Turn as Senor Amor

When Jose Feliciano’s album “Senor Bolero” arrives in September, it may not come with instructions. But the artist is happy to provide some.

“I recommend if you listen to it, listen with a chick that you like and a bottle of something nice,” said Feliciano, whose hybrid of folk, jazz, soul and Latin styles vaulted him to stardom 30 years ago. “The ethereal feeling is very romantic.”

That snuggly way of listening is something Feliciano could only dream about when he first fell under the spell of the bolero--a uniquely Latin form of torchy romantic ballad--as a teenager growing up in a poor Manhattan neighborhood.

“I wrote the title track thanking the bolero for always being a friend to me,” said Feliciano, a hearty talker who comes across with the husky-voiced gregariousness of an old-fashioned ward politician.

Returning from a European tour, Feliciano will be the headliner Sunday in Costa Mesa at the Orange County Fair, his second consecutive year playing the big summer event in the county he called home from 1968 to 1990.

“I didn’t have romances when I was in school,” Feliciano said in a recent interview from a hotel in Rome. “Girls didn’t want to go out with me because I was blind. I took refuge in the bolero.”

Feliciano, 52, said the bolero rhythm started out in Cuba and migrated to Mexico, New York and Puerto Rico, where he spent his early childhood before his parents moved to New York City when he was 5. “What really distinguishes it is its rhythm and its romantic quality. The subject matter is always romance and tragedy, things Latinos love the most. It was never about two people getting together. It was always about two people breaking up.”

Feliciano was an accomplished guitarist in high school, but whether he played sad or happy, he couldn’t woo the young ladies with music, the way it’s supposed to happen for teen troubadours.

“I think it motivated me,” he said. “It made me say to myself, ‘I can prove I can be successful [despite being blind from birth]. This is not such a setback.’ ”

There’s still a triumphant edge in Feliciano’s voice when he recalls the eventual moment of payoff: “When ‘Light My Fire’ came out in 1968, the same girls that said ‘no’ must have been kicking themselves in the teeth.”

Feliciano quit school at 17 to help support his large family (he is the second of eight surviving sons of Jose and Hortencia Feliciano; three boys died at a young age).

He learned his craft in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, the hub of the 1960s folk boom. By the mid-’60s he was recording for RCA Records, though without a breakthrough in the United States.

Feliciano’s travels brought him to the folk clubs of Southern California, including the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach. He liked the area, was sick of Northeastern winters and settled first in Newport Beach, then in Villa Park. He left 22 years later, for the opposite reason: His wife, Susan, had given birth to the first of their three children; she grew up in Michigan, missed the change of seasons and wanted their kids to experience them.

Hence a move in 1990 to the woodsy New York City suburb of Weston, Conn., where the Felicianos live in a converted 18th century inn. His home recording studio is in an outbuilding that was once a storage barn for onions.

Feliciano was struggling in the American market when he arrived in Orange County (though not for long--his distinctive take on the Doors’ “Light My Fire” soon catapulted him to fame). But he had already scored a big breakthrough in South America in 1966, thanks to the bolero.

“I was at a music festival in Argentina. RCA Records didn’t know what to do with me. I said, ‘There’s some boleros I’ve sung since I was a child; get me in the studio and we’ll do something.’ ”

The verdict came swiftly from the South American public: “It was bedlam. The girls were screaming. I became a teen idol. At the time, it embarrassed me.”

Feliciano’s core ambition remained unrealized: “I always wanted to be the first true Latino to break the American barrier, to be on the American charts. Ritchie Valens scratched the surface with ‘La Bamba,’ but they made him change his name [from Valenzuela] to be more accepted.

“RCA wanted me to change my name. They asked me around 1965, when they first signed me. They said, ‘Feliciano is too Latin.’ I said, ‘That’s who I am. I’m Jose Feliciano.’ They wanted me to change my name to Joe Phillips. I was proud to carry my father’s name.”

The elder Jose got to see his son’s name (and his own) in lights before he died in 1971. “Light My Fire,” a song Feliciano said he was initially reluctant to record because the Doors had scored with it just a year before, began as a B-side to his version of the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin.’ ” But disc jockeys flipped it over for the fresh Latin-soul-folk take on the Doors number.

“Light My Fire” began its run in the Billboard Hot 100 30 years ago this month. As it subsided on the charts, controversy erupted around Feliciano. Invited to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium for the fifth game of the World Series, Feliciano responded with a soul man’s take on the anthem--the first radical reworking of the staid warhorse. Many were outraged that this young rock star had tampered with tradition.

“Now everybody is doing it the way they want, but I was the first to take the big step,” Feliciano recalled. “Everybody else was singing it with no feeling--’Let’s get it over and done with.’ For once, somebody was trying to sing it with feeling and respect.”

Feliciano thinks the outcry spooked disc jockeys and limited airplay for his follow-up single, the R&B-flavored; “Hi-Heel Sneakers.” That song peaked at No. 25 (“Light My Fire” reached No. 3 and the album, “Feliciano!,” hit No. 2).

Feliciano hasn’t seen the Top 40 since, although he has carried on with a career of 25 albums in English and 23 in Spanish.

Feliciano said he never got another invitation to sing the national anthem at a public event, but it being the 30th anniversary of his groundbreaking performance, this avid baseball fan would be open to another World Series gig (the New York Yankees, shoo-ins for the playoffs, will be remiss if they don’t put their homeboy at home plate with a microphone).

Even if, as he contends, the anthem flap hurt his career, Feliciano reaped significant benefits from it: His future wife, Susan, then a 14-year-old Detroit schoolgirl, was inspired by the controversy to start a Jose Feliciano Fan Club; they were married 14 years later, after Feliciano’s previous marriage broke up.

He was further heartened by the reaction in Orange County, which one might have expected to be reactionary indeed given the community’s legendary rock-ribbed conservatism.

“You know, I didn’t hear any criticism there. Everybody in Orange County supported me. That community was nothing but good to me. I’m happy to be back.”

* Jose Feliciano plays Sunday at the Arlington Theater at the Orange County Fair, 88 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. 7 and 9 p.m. Free with regular fair admission of $6. (714) 708-3247.