This Time, It's Personal

Joe Ward—The Mile High City (1968 / Garage Rock)

Hello internet pals of music. This is a special edition, and it’s about dads.

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In about four hours from writing this, I’ll be having lunch with a man I haven’t seen in at least ten years.

He’s not my birth father, but he’s the only one I ever called Dad. I have a very complicated relationship with fathers, kinda like every woman I’ve ever been involved with. Hmm.

Fuckin’ dads, hey?

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Dad, as I call him, is not doing so well. At least that’s according to my sister, who relayed to me, “He’s gone”, after recently spending a family weekend with him that I ignobly bailed on in the most passive way—dragging my heels on any commitment to a plan until it was too late to make the proper accommodations, giving me the cover to say there were no available options for me to make it, I’m sorry, next time.

Shameful. Cowardly. Because he’s old, and might be showing signs of dementia, and because I have barely kept in touch with him over the majority of my adult life, I have no idea how to bridge that distance with him. And like the obvious reality that decades of smoking are ravaging my beautiful earthly temple, I just ignore the issue and keep doing what I’ve been doing, figuring it will all just somehow go away.

It’s a tale as old as time.

Anyway, that’s my Dad. For a minute here, I’m gonna bring up my father.

My father is the reason I have brown skin, why I have brown eyes, black hair. My father’s the reason I’m Mexican-American. Half, anyway. How does that even work? Down the middle? I was raised in a “white” family, whatever that means. This is why I can say race is a construct, and I’ll gladly offer myself as the argument. No one has any idea where to place me; in Europe someone asked me if I was Greek. White people have said awfully racist shit to me, thinking I was “one of them”, and native Spanish speakers have laughed and shaken their heads at me when I have to reply no habla, because there was no abuela in my home who insisted on never learning English.

Back to my father.

I’m certain the other thing he gave me besides all the endless baggage of race and identity is my natural ear for music. Because, my father was a musician. And the only thing he wanted more than being a famous musician was to be white.

He played drums (he was a timbalero early on), guitar and he sang. My mom saw his band in a nightclub when she was barely eighteen. He was in his thirties. They were married a few months later. I popped up soon after. Within a few years, we were gone; one of my first two memories of life is actually the moment we left—I recall the the little white rocks that lined the sidewalk up to the front door of the house, and my mom scooping up a handful and throwing them aimlessly towards him as he stood in the doorway.

My father, who was definitely Mexican-American but wanted to not be, had a few shots at making it. One was with his band Spanish Harlem (sidenote: for someone who didn’t want to be chicano, it’s pretty baffling that he led a band of chicanos called Spanish Harlem). He torpedoed that when he blew a meeting off with a producer who was involved with like, The Doobie Brothers or somebody, and was interested in the band.

¡Orale, it’s Spanish Harlem! That’s rico suave on the far left.

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His other brush with fame had come a few years earlier, when he put out a great little ode to his hometown, Denver. My mom said he’d been inspired by Glen Campbell’s hit “Galveston”, and since my father wanted to be white, all of this makes sense to me.

Seriously, who makes a song about Denver? People in Denver. Folks there liked it enough for it to briefly be a local radio hit. The best part of this to me, is that it was released on the Accent label, who also put out some Human Expression 45s (pointed out to me by the owner of my favourite record store in the world, Vancouver’s Dandelion Records & Emporium).

Oh, and it’s also kinda good. I’ve played it in deejay sets. Would I be as proud if he put out a crummy record, on a label with no hip cultural currency? When I was younger, he sent me another 45 of his, when he started going country. The only thing I liked about it was that it was pressed on blue vinyl, and I left it a friend’s house accidentally.

Anyway, he’s dead now.

So is stepfather #2, who I won’t even bother with here because this about music and you readers aren’t my therapist.

But today, in a matter of hours, I’ll go see my dad and it will of course be weird but will also feel like no big deal that we haven’t seen each other in ten years or that I’m Mexican-American even though I was raised in an all-white families, or that I have three different men who had a little part in making me who I am, even when they weren’t there.

No, in a matter of hours, I’ll just try and cherish the moment I get to spend with the guy. I’ll process the rest later.

Or won’t.

Fuckin’ dads, hey?

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