People who haven't traveled in Latin America tend to think of Mexicans as a mass of poor, uneducated wetbacks.
They don't realize that Mexico City was a thriving, sophisticated city two centuries before the Algonquins sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24. In 1864, when Austrian-born Maximillian was emperor and French-born Carlota was the empress, they brought over the same architect, who designed the famous boulevards of Paris, to build Chapultepec Castle and lay out the city's avenues, patterning them on those in the French capitol.
My great-grand uncle, by the way, donated the caballito, the statue of Spanish King Carlos IV on a horse that's one of the main landmarks on the Reforma, the main boulevard of Mexico City.
My father's father was born in Spain and my paternal grandmother, Catalina Luccioto, from Palermo, Sicily, was an opera singer with beautiful green eyes and a heavenly smile. She married Gonzalo de la Parra, a blue-eyed intellectual publisher with the looks of a movie star and the soul of an adventurer. By the time my mother and my father married, his parents Gonzalo and Catalina were already divorced.
Even though my grandfather Gonzalo was very much the free-spirited playboy, while Adolfo was very Catholic and conservative, the two got along well. Both were powerful and wealthy but honest. They neither stole nor killed--rare restraint in an oligarchy.
He was exiled from the country two or three times between the late 1920s and the 1950s for his anti-government rhetoric. He even spent three months hiding in a friend's cellar because the police were hunting for him due to his writings. He also became a well-known adviser to two presidents, a good example of the volatile nature of Mexican political life.
My father was a lot like his father. When he met my mother in church and fell in love with her, he was already married "outside the Church" and had a daughter named Laura. Later he had another daughter out of wedlock, Maria Eugenia, who a few years later would have a big influence on me and my musical upbringing.
For the first eight years of my life I was the only child of my parents' church-sanctified union and my grandparents idolized me. I was a spoiled little kid who went to private school and had all the money in the world because both families were still together, with money and power. Our lifestyle was very much in the tradition of European aristocracy. Grandfather Adolfo's mahogany-shelved library was floor to ceiling with books in three different languages and the centerpiece of the mansion's main salon was a concert-size grand piano where grandmother Pilar would entertain us with the works of Chopin and other classical composers. She was also a talented artist and many of her paintings hang my in house in Nipomo. She was close to 100 when she died in 1993, a remarkable woman.
Unlike car-hating grandfather Adolfo, Grandfather Gonzalo would trade in his black Cadillac for a new one each year. In a brief fling with show business, he brought the beautiful Faure sisters from Spain to Mexico to try to turn them into stars. Although the sisters never became great entertainers, they did become famous and the Secretary of the Treasury fell so madly in love with Isabel, he put her face on a five peso bill. Latins really know how to honor women.
Tragically, Gonzalo's death triggered a family feud, which resulted in the beginning of the end of our comfortable life-style and also the end of my family life due to the divorce of my parents. The memory of my father coming to see me at my grandfather's house is still very vivid to me. When I asked him where he had been, all he could do was hold me very, very tightly and cry. And he cried and cried and cried. The strange part was I didn't know why he was crying.
I didn't see my father again for another year. Now, I know it was because of the divorce. He had moved to Tijuana where he was in charge of the local office of the national lottery, a good-paying job. At the time, lotteries were against the law in the United States and Americans would pour into Baja California to buy lottery tickets and otherwise enjoy the openness of a border town.
When I was about six, Pilar bought me my first drum set. I loved playing them but had no idea I was going to become a drummer. I didn't take lessons; I just thumped away. I loved the apparatus. I loved being able to beat on something to make a sound. In fact, I must have been terribly noisy because one day I woke up and the drum set had disappeared. (Most likely Adolfo decided that they were too noisy and hence, verboten.) It didn't really matter. I'd had my fun with it and now I had other interests like cowboys and Indians and my toy soldiers.
After my parents divorce, my mother and I had a very stable home with her parents, Adolfo and Pilar, and my Aunt Rosita. By now, my grandfather was in his 80s but my grandmother was still a young woman. My mother was also very young and not at all happy to be a single mother. But for me, it was great. I was eight years old, growing up with three women who showered me with love and affection.
Because of my parents' breakup, my family decided I should become a live-in student at the same all-boys Catholic school I'd been attending. It was very painful, but I was only in third grade, with no choice. I would cry when my mother took me back to the boarding school after the weekend, but she was also burdened with her tragedies: the loss of Gonzalo, the divorce.
Although I hated the Internado Mexico (it was run by the Marist Brothers, great educators like the Jesuits), I developed a strong sense of order and discipline. No detail was too small for the brothers' rules: how to brush your teeth, how to shower with cold water, how to fold clothes, how to make a bed. The one bright spot on my otherwise bleak horizon was being picked for the choir out of the hundreds of kids that tried out.
In retrospect, I think every kid should have a year in boarding school. I think the survival instincts and discipline I learned there saved me from the excesses of the rock n' roll life years later, from the lack of self-discipline that destroyed so many people I knew in that world. God knows, even with the brothers' training, I developed enough of a taste for some excesses when I grew up.
The Marist Brothers were also skilled at giving young boys a solid academic background. My classical education has stayed with me and enabled me to view the world through more than one prism, something a lot of musicians can't do. And they gave me my passion for history, especially military history--for which I have been frequently cursed by other members of Canned Heat when I've dragged them out of bed during European tours for sightseeing trips to famous battlefields. I once ignored a whole busload of musicians screaming in protest as we made a two-hour detour on the road to Paris to see Verdun, the scene of a famous battle in World War One.
A few years after the divorce, my father decided to move back to Mexico City, marry Maria Eugenia's mother and give the little girl his name. Once I found out he was returning, I started working on my mother to get me out of the boarding school I hated.
I loved my mother and my grandmother (Adolfo had died), but my mother had married again and I wanted to be with my father. He was a very intelligent, cosmopolitan man with a great sense of humor and an aura that I loved. My stepfather Flavio was not a bad man; he treated me well. He was also an excellent guitar player and singer, which would eventually be a musical influence on me, but he didn't have the charisma of my father.
Meanwhile, the death of Adolfo and the division of his estate among my grandmother Pilar, my Aunt Rosita and my mother, caused a marked change in our life style. Overnight I went from an upper class nino bien to a middle class kid. But I didn't care. I was reunited with my father.
Even though he never took lessons, my father was very musical and played piano by ear--everything from ragtime to jazz, anything with a great rhythm. I remember him taking me to one of his favorite movies, "Orchestra Wives," featuring the original Glenn Miller Band. In Mexico, it was called Las Viudas del Jazz, "The Widows of Jazz," because the wives dress in black and go into mourning when the band breaks up. A few years later, we went to see another favorite, "The Benny Goodman Story." Somehow all those messages started going through my subconscious. I'm sure he never thought I would become a professional musician; he wanted me to become a dentist or a doctor.
My father's wife Alicia accepted me immediately and I became very close to my half sister Maria Eugenia, who was five years older. Because