Glenn Symmonds on the 70’s Bay Area, playing drums and touring with Coke Escovedo
© Jim McCarthy August 2009

Glenn Symmonds was originally a native of and went to High School in Spokane Washington, his mother originated from the city of Liverpool (home of The Beatles) and he toured in later years in the UK with a band called The Untouchables, (a second wave ska band) supporting well-known chart toppers, the Birmingham based band UB40.

One early influence was to have a direct and overwhelming influence on Symmonds’ life, “Tower of Power used to travel through the border of Washington and Idaho, on the state line. There was a place where you get in to the bars there, so we’d all go to catch the groups coming through. Tower, Elvin Bishop, Cold Blood, lots of the Bay Area bands. I was drawn to the Bay Area from listening to David Garibaldi’s playing with Tower of Power. We became friends and he invited me over to listen to him practice in his hotel room and go over the stuff he was studying with his teacher Chuck Brown. I knew then that the minute I graduated, I wanted to take lessons with Chuck Brown. That was my goal!”

He was true to his word, Symmonds graduated and leaving Spokane at seventeen years old….. “ I knocked on Chuck Brown’s door, I had a U-haul trailer filled with my stuff out on the street and I’m knocking on his door. He opened the door and introduced myself, I said I’ve driven 1300 miles to take lessons from him and he says, my teaching schedule Is pretty full for the next year (laughs!) I didn’t even have place to live, all my stuff is in the van outside and the motor’s running. I said to him, I came here to study with you and I shamed Chuck Brown into giving me drum lessons.”

Chuck Brown as well as mentoring hundreds of drummers also taught significantly Michael Shrieve as well as Terry Bozzio (who played with Azteca) and of course Garibaldi.

Symmonds plugged into the Bay Area scene fairly quickly, he attended his first audition and remembers, “ My first audition was going down to a club in Berkeley and Linda Tillery and The Loading Zone were playing and I was friendly with Bill Meeker. He was drummer with Elvin Bishop. Coincidentally I had met him before at the state line when Elvin had come thru, so I asked him
If I could sit in, as drummers do! They were a very cool soul and R&B type band with great vocals, Vince Denim on saxophone, (who went onto play with Elvis) they had a great groove, they also had Dougie Rauch on bass with them. Bill was a phenomenal drummer, they turned round and said “ Do you know What Is Hip”. I had worn out the grooves on my vinyl record, learning that song. I wore that vinyl white, I just knew it inside and out. I had to put a coin on top of the needle to get it to stay down while playing the record, I’d played it so much. I used to slow the tracks down to 16 rpm, it was like W-O-O-O-AAAHHHHHH, very low sounding and demonic (laughs). That’s how I learned those Tower tunes. They didn’t know that I knew that song like the back of my wife’s ass!
So I had practiced them also with my friend Dave Garibaldi, studied ’em further with Chuck Brown and David had written out those parts too. First nite in Oakland and they call off What Is Hip and I nailed it. They turned around and grinned at me – just look at that kid play! It was a great entrée into that world. In the audience were some people that offered me a job with Frank Byner and The Night Shift who wrote songs for Tower Of Power. A bass player that came up to me also that night was David Margen. He was also playing with Frank. So I was playing with them now as well.”

His expansive personality and expressive drum chops, made his entry into the Bay Area more established, “I also was playing with a guy called Gideon and in his band he had a guy called Melvin Seals. He was the leader of The Jerry Garcia Band. Melvin was groomed in the church and could make the Hammond B3 sing man! They had a high-energy gospel-rock vibe. All those bands played the same kinda’ clubs, The Keystone Korner, LaValles, The Long Branch, they were three of the top ones. Also during that intern, I met Eddie Money and played with him. He knocked on my door, saying ‘ I hear you’re a drummer, my drummer didn’t show, so I want you to play with me tonight, I did one song and he says, “That’s it, I want you in the band. He said, “My name’s Eddie Money and I want to be a rock and roll star by 25, I don’t have a lotta’ time!“ Just like that! So I was gigging with everybody.”

Gigs for the young Symmonds were plentiful, “I was in a fourth band too, called Grayson Street. They had a phenomenal harmonica player called Ricky Kellog, who ended up in Canned Heat. Grayson Street was mostly original R&B style East Bay grease and very funky – James Brown orientated1”
The East Bay, particularly Oakland was a breeding ground for the funk and Symmonds went on to discuss one of Tower of Power’s greatest vocalists, the redoubtable but also controversial Rick Stevens. “Rick had a cover band, they were doing Tower songs and he was the best of all the Tower singers in my opinion. I saw Tower with Lenny Williams mostly at the time I saw them.”

His connection with Coke Escovedo was fairly straightforward, “ I was on a bill with Coke, There was Grayson Street and Coke was checking me out from the side of the stage. I knew something was up and he came over and asked me to join his band! He already had very talented musicians, he had a guy on drums apart from Harvey Mason on his first album and I came in after that. I knew of him from the Third Santana album, with the dedication to him on there. We started rehearsing and every Monday night in Oakland we would play at a club called King Richards. That was in Jack London Square, we would hold court there and a lot of great jazz and other musicians would show up unexpectedly, you never knew who – it could be Malo’s singer, it could be brother Pete or Sheila would sit in and play congas. Abel Zarate was in the band too, another guy there was Ray Obiedo, he was very popular.”

The line up didn’t have a regular conga player, Coke simply invited his family down. “ Frank was on keyboards, (later on it would be Herman Eberitsch ) Erroll Knowles was singing and also another girl was Lynn Mabry, who later became a Bride Of Funkenstein (an off-shoot of Parliament) and later became a back up singer in George Michael’s show. Everybody in the East Bay could play- everybody was really good. My parents were very supportive and I got well schooled- I could play mallets, for zylophone, vibraphone, marimba and Coke let me used that talent on the Comin’ At Ya’ album- he let me play vibes on there on the Jose Feliciano song, “Stay With Me.”

“Playing with Coke was my first recorded album and he let me play and recorded three of my songs as well. He took all the credit for the first one- a guaganco groove and he had everybody singing “Coke Escovedo play the guaguanco, Coke Escovedo play the guaguanco” and he put his name on that (laughs). I don’t even remember what I was getting paid. He had a three-album contract with Mercury Records- and considering he was sideman and not a singer- it’s great he got a record deal!

Coke certainly had hit a home run in the recording stakes for awhile, and apparently was an outgoing individual; Glenn describes Coke thus. “ He had a gentle heart, a lovely guy, with a lot of talent, he loved to be the centre of attention. He was great to me, showed me how to play drums with him, he kept his distance too, with the employees, he had a dark side to him that I was to become aware of. His eyes would get really glassy at times. He would get very wasted and spaced out on cocaine, I know sometimes he would get so high, he didn’t want to be standing up there with his timbales. So, he would come to the back of the stage and kick me off the drums and get me to play timbales.
He told me to go play ‘em, he would play drums- he was a terrible drummer (laughs).

I asked Glenn about the slew of outstanding timbale players in the Bay Area at that time. “Well – Jose “Chepito”Areas absolutely, Chepito was so strong he didn’t play with those thin little dowelling timbale sticks, and they’d cut them in half. Chepito played with brutal hardness, using thick drumsticks and was intensely talented. They’re as no rivalry at all in Coke. I remember we played Madison Square Garden and Tito Puente came down. Backstage Tito treated Coke like a long lost son, he was very gracious and invited us to his nightclub after we were done. We got there and a table was set, he wined us and dined us, we came into this Latin club, there’s a ten- piece band playing and Tito really took care of us. He was very grateful that Coke had brought “Para Los Rumberos” to the Third Santana album sessions and got that song Tito wrote included on the Third album.

Symmonds’ path crossed most of the Bay Area percussion luminaries. “Mingo was a hugely talented and strong and powerful conga player- a triple Sagittarius, like I said. He was very intense, very crazy and wild! He was involved in the Chick Corea Electric band when they had Steve Gadd- the very first incarnation of that, before Al Di Meola and Lenny White. Mingo would sit in at King Richards club. He asked me also to play with him, and he also had an album deal with CBS and was putting together a batch of his songs. He had hand picked musicians , we would rehearse seven days a week and I had gigs at night too, playing with all these other bands, so I could not give Mingo the commitment he wanted. I took from him all the lessons he showed me, he showed me the conga, timbale techniques, applied to the drum set, when there isn’t a conga player or a timbale player, what do you do?? How do you simulate those sounds and rhythms, he’d also showed Steve Gadd the same type of stuff. Gadd and Mingo were very tight. At that time he was not maybe been even twenty-one year old – nor was I for that matter.

Glenn’s time with Coke was curtailed by the encroaching drug related aspects of those day in the music business and later on in the USA as coke and heroin spread thru out US society rapidly. “ Coke’s band was a great band playing locally, so musicians who didn’t play on a Monday night, it was a great place to hang but with the hang came the drugs too. When we were on the road we were opening for Parliament and Funkadelic. We were opening for The Johnson Brothers. There were some characters hanging around – they were in the van with us. In the hotels with us, on the stage with us! I didn’t know who they were but I got to know why they were there. To some degree they kept me isolated, I was a nineteen-year-old kid at that time. Erroll Knowles and Coke were much older and I was a younger guy and I was mostly friends with Abel Zarate in the band, A very sweet guitar player. But I started to find out, one night Coke told us to get onstage and I had to go back to the dressing room, I’d forgotten my drumsticks and the bag. I rushed offstage and get to the dressing room and there’s Coke, with a needle in his arm. He yelled, “Get the fuck outta’ here!”

One character in particular was to hasten Glenn’s departure from the group, “Big Ronnie was one of those guys hanging around, he came out from the side of the stage and he poked me in the ribs one night, during the first song, told me to “Shut the fuck up, that I was playing too loud”. I turned around and bashed him on the head and on the shoulders with my sticks- told him to get the fuck away from me.
He crawled off the stage with his purple pimp hat (with a big feather in it) his purple pimp jacket and his platform shoes. (laughs) He was total pimp man; it was the seventies. When we walked offstage, you can imagine the audience is roaring out a standing ovation – and everybody is patting themselves down with towels, congratulating each other and Big Ronnie is grabbing me with two hands round my neck and I am down in the curtains. I am down man. He is choking me, “I’m gonna’ kill you motherfucker”, he’s going for broke and the band realise and pulled him off me. I swore that was it, I did one more show and then the tour was over. I never played again with Coke Escovedo. I totally lost touch.

He described the adverse effect cocaine had on his drumming abilities, “I only did cocaine a couple of times but I experienced the same feeling, my back was very tensed up and it also made me very gun-shy. It inhibited my playing a lot. I think maybe the first hit can be great. But if you’re in concert and you’re revved and do you do a line of coke, you’re only going to feel that for five minutes and then you’re going to crash while your playing. Then you feel terrible, you are thinking those people are looking at me.
My hands hurt and you start to feel achy and you can’t wait to get off stage and get another hit. It was always counterproductive for me – I wasn’t addicted but I think Coke was, he wasn’t as sharp; he became less focused than he was.”

Glenn went on to along and varied drumming career with among others, Automatic Man, John Klemmer, Dave Mason, Elvin Bishop, Etta James and a long association with Eddie Money.

Look out for further revealing stories and tales from the rock and roll merry-go-round;
Glenn Symmonds
is part of a upcoming VOICES interviews feature on Automatic Man – The Greatest Group You Never Heard!!

© Jim McCarthy July 2009

Tags: Abel Zarate, Automatic Man, Azteca, Carlos Santana, cocaine, Coke Escovedo, Cold Blood, Dougie Rauch, Eddie Money, Glenn Symmonds, Jerry Garcia, Jose (Chepito) Areas, Linda Tillery, Mingo Lewis, Pete Escovedo, Santana Third album, Sheila E, The Loading Zone, Tower Of Power, Voices of Latin Rock

David Rubien
San Francisco Chronicle
E-mail David Rubien
Original article here
Sunday, January 18, 2009

Sometimes the good things in life don’t last long enough. Azteca, a big band spawned in 1972 by members of Santana and filled with the best rock, jazz and Latin jazz musicians in the Bay Area, lasted less than two years but set a “brown sound” watermark that’s rarely been topped.

Pete Escovedo, who has resurrected his 1970s Latin jazz b…Coke Escovedo (left), Tito Puente (center) and Pete Escov…The Latin jazz band Azteca in 1973. View More Images

“I really think we could have made a lot more music,” says Pete Escovedo, the Latin percussion master who formed Azteca with his brother, Coke. “Listening to the stuff we recorded, it still sounds great. It still holds up all these years.”

A crowd will get a chance to see if Azteca still can deliver the goods when Escovedo revives it Saturday at the Warfield Theatre to play a Voices of Latin Rock benefit for Autism Awareness, part of a bill that includes War, Los Cenzontles and the Voices of Latin Rock Revue.

After flying up to San Francisco recently from Los Angeles, where he’s lived for nine years, Escovedo, 73, is talking with The Chronicle about growing up in West Oakland, playing in Santana, forming Azteca and other subjects. Dressed in a gray sports jacket and matching tie, with his gray hair slicked back, he looks a bit like a Mafioso. But there’s nothing menacing about the man, unless you’re intimidated by the idea that he can play the fastest timbales in the West – and you should be.

Actually, Escovedo’s daughter, Sheila E., may play the fastest timbales in the West, but the audience Saturday won’t get to experience that because she’ll be anchoring Azteca behind the trap drum kit. Anyone who knows her work with Prince in the ’80s will vouch for her genius as a drummer.

Escovedo was born in Pittsburg and moved to Oakland when he was 4. His father, Pedro Escovedo, an immigrant from Saltillo, Mexico, was a pipe-fitter at Oakland’s Army base during World War II.

“My dad was a wannabe singer,” Escovedo says. “He would throw us all in the car and drive down to one of the ballrooms in Oakland – there was Sweet’s, the Ali Baba, the Sands – because a lot of the concerts were on Sunday afternoons. My mom made him take us so we’d be sure he’d come home. My dad was a rolling stone.

“We’d just sit in the car listening to this great music coming out of the ballroom. The Dorsey brothers, Basie, Latin bands like Machito, Perez Prado. We grew up listening to all this stuff.”

Dad’s first marriage produced seven kids, including Pete and Coke (born Joseph Thomas Escovedo), and his second yielded six more, including Alejandro, a pioneer of West Coast punk and alt-country. Many of Escovedo’s siblings are professional musicians.

As a student at McClymonds High School, Escovedo played saxophone, but he moved to percussion when an older friend from New York played him records by greats such as Tito Puente and Chico O’Farrill.

“Man, I just fell in love with that music,” he says. “It was great to play jazz and have Latin rhythms with it.”

When Escovedo was 18, he and Coke met Puente.

“He was playing at a club called the Macumba on Grant Avenue, upstairs in Chinatown. We went there every night. We became great friends with Tito. … We were lucky because we got a chance to meet a lot of the great Cuban drummers at that time: Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo. We’d go to the Blackhawk and see Armando Peraza, Cal Tjader, all the great players. We made friends with all of them and hung out together.”

In the late ’50s, Escovedo put together the Escovedo Brothers Sextet, with Coke on timbales and another brother, Phil, on bass. The group burned through practically every club in Northern California for years.

“We were playing in this place where the Broadway Tunnel is,” Escovedo says, unable to recall the name. “That’s when Carlos (Santana) and Chepitó (José Chepitó Areas) came in. They were listening to us play, then said, ‘Man, we’re rehearsing in this garage on Mission Street. Come on over after you guys get off.’ They would rehearse 24 hours a day. So we went, and that was the original Santana band. We started hanging out with them and playing all night. Who knew these guys were going to become famous and make so much money?”

First Coke was hired on timbales as a replacement for Chepitó, then Pete Escovedo joined on congas.

“We had a chance to travel the world,” Escovedo says. “What was really cool for me was we were playing for a lot of white people. There we were, doing our thing, and it was amazing because I think a lot of the people were hypnotized by the sound of the Latin percussion. A lot of people had never heard that stuff before, and Carlos was able to break that barrier.”

But Santana kept shuffling personnel, leading to discontent in the band. It was Coke, Escovedo says, who decided to start a new group, and Azteca was born. With top rhythm players such as Paul Jackson on bass and Lenny White on drums and a large roster of horns and percussion, the group sounded something like a combination of Santana, Earth Wind and Fire, Tower of Power and the Tito Puente Orchestra.

“It was Coke’s vision,” Escovedo says. “Azteca was a mixture of a lot of different styles of music. All the Latin rhythms were very strong and prominent. At the same time, a lot of the guys came from a jazz background, so we incorporated a lot of jazz harmonies and jazz melodies. At the same time, because we were in the Latin rock era, we incorporated that and a little R&B.”

The groups recorded two magnificent albums for Columbia, “Azteca” and “Pyramid of the Moon,” and toured with the Temptations and Stevie Wonder. Columbia dropped the group after Clive Davis – who had signed Azteca – was ousted in a payola scandal. Mainly, though, it was the size of the group that did it in – 16 players at minimum, often augmented by many more.

“It was crazy,” Escovedo says. “There were times when we left a gig with no money and had to sneak out of the hotel at night. … We started having internal problems in the band because we weren’t making any money. Our bank account ran out, and a lot of guys began to jump ship. The ship was slowly sinking.”

The death knell came when Coke left the group for a solo career. He released three albums for Mercury, then was in high demand as a percussionist for artists such as Wonder and Herbie Hancock.

Coke died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1986.

“He passed away in L.A.,” Escovedo says. “We were in that era of doing some crazy things. Some of us were smart enough to get out of it, and some of us were not. And he was one of the ones who could not get out of it. And it eventually was his downfall. … It was too bad. He was a great musician.”

Compounding the anguish, Coke died on July 13, Escovedo’s birthday.

“It was a tough thing to get over,” he says. “Every time my birthday would come up, it’s kind of like, ‘Do I celebrate, or do I feel bad?’ ”

Escovedo’s career as a bandleader and percussionist – for artists ranging from Woody Herman to Hancock to Stephen Stills to Barry White to Puente – has been nothing but successful. Less so have been his ventures into owning nightclubs.

The resurrection of Azteca began in the summer of 2007, when filmmaker Daniel Meza approached Escovedo and other original members about getting back together and recording a DVD. The group performed at Hollywood’s Key Club on Sept. 15, 2007, featuring surviving members Lenny White, Jackson, Victor Pantoja on congas, Wendy Haas and Errol Knowles on vocals, Bill Courtial on guitar, Jules Rowell on trombone and Escovedo.

The DVD, “La Piedra del Sol” (“Stone of the Sun”), will be available from Internet vendors beginning Tuesday.

For Saturday’s show, the personnel is the same, except Sheila E. is on drums and Curtis Olson replaces Jackson on bass – and there’ll be plenty of guest horn players and percussionists on hand.

A new era for Azteca?

“It remains to the seen,” Escovedo says. “You never know what situations the good Lord puts us in. … I look at all these things as a blessing. We’ll see what happens.”

VOICES OF LATIN ROCK: Azteca, War, Los Cenzontles, Voices of Latin Rock Revue. 7 p.m. Sat. Warfield Theatre, 982 Market St., San Francisco. Tickets $45-$75. Call (415) 421-8497 or go to www.ticketmaster.com.

E-mail David Rubien drubien@sfchronicle.com.

Tags: Azteca, Pete Escovedo, Santana, Sheila E, The Warfield Theater