Freddy Fender – The ballad of Baldemar Huerta
Three and half years later, Fender’s release was signed by Governor Jimmie Davis — coincidentally, also a well-known figure in country music history (most notably as co-writer of “You Are My Sunshine”). “I don’t think he wanted to pardon us,” he says. “I think he was under political pressure because they were very much against marijuana. I had five years. Out of that I had to do four years, one month and fifteen days. He barely signed the parole. The conditions, that I stay away from music, were written by the parole officer in my local area. Such is life. You got to go with it.”
Fender kicked around Louisiana for awhile but finally returned home to San Benito in 1969, where he found work as a mechanic and even considered studying sociology. He hadn’t given up on music, but it would be a few years before the Be Bop Kid truly came back.
The catalyst was Huey Meaux, whose Houston-based Crazy Cajun label released some of the most exciting and enduring Texas music ever recorded. Fender says he first became familiar with Meaux in Harlingen in 1963, but he didn’t hook up with him until nearly a decade later. “In 1971 I finally connected with him in Houston and I went in the office, and he said he was interested in recording me, and I said, ‘Hey man I’m ready.’ That was the beginning.”
In 1974, Crazy Cajun released a countrified Fender single called “Before The Next Teardrop Falls” that soon drew interest from ABC/Dot, which released an album of the same name featuring a fetching mix of country, Latin, and simple blues.
“I was reluctant to cut country at first,” Fender says. “But I was blown away by the way the songs went up the charts. I knew I was wrong. I just wanted to do rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm & blues. But with Huey, it was his way or no way at all. Since he started out with hits, I wasn’t going to argue.”
“Before The Next Teardrop Falls” reached #1 on both the country and pop charts in early-mid 1975; “Wasted Days And Wasted Nights” followed a few months later, also topping the country charts and hitting #8 pop. “Since I Met You Baby” and “Secret Love” also charted before the end of the year (the latter also going #1 country). In 1976, he scored with “The Wild Side Of Life”, “You’ll Lose A Good Thing”, “Vaya Con Dios” and “Living It Down”.
“The songs were picked by Huey Meaux,” Fender says. “We had the best musicians we could get at that time. Those recording sessions were a great pleasure. They all came out easy. We weren’t having trouble with any of the songs — you know how sometimes if you can’t get the chords or notes right. It wasn’t like that. It was just one after another. It was like a labor of love.”
Fender’s run continued, on a somewhat smaller scale, through the early ’80s, but by 1985, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin had come to dominate his life. “I was OK snorting, I was OK drinking — well, I wasn’t OK,” he admits. “Then somebody taught me how to shoot.” His wife Vangie, who now manages his career, intervened. Fender entered a clinic on August 26, 1985.
“I had a moment of clarity,” he says. “I had never been good at doing what I needed to do. I’ve been clean for almost 17 years now. At first, you start getting some common sense, some wisdom, but for the first three or four months of treatment, the physical addiction is still killing you. After a year or year and a half you stop shaking.
“You lose your self-esteem, and when you lose that, you’re just a lump of shit. You feel you have nothing to love. So how can you love yourself? Instead of warning us when we have too much, alcohol tells us to keep drinking, that things are getting better, which they’re not. There’s a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other.”
After Fender emerged from treatment, he opened a restaurant and club in Branson, Missouri, but it wasn’t exactly a recipe for restarting a career that once promised so much more. “We didn’t do too good,” he says. “I lost my mother and one of my sons there. I figured that wasn’t the place for me.”
In 1988, Fender was picked by Robert Redford for a role in The Milagro Beanfield War — which wasn’t totally out of the blue, as Fender had already appeared in films (including a convincing portrayal of Pancho Villa in She Came To The Valley in 1977). He returned to Corpus Christi, rented an apartment for his wife and children, and eventually purchased the home where he now lives. Fender had all but retired from music.
Enter Doug Sahm. In 1990, Sahm, who Fender had known in San Antonio as early as 1960 — “Doug would hang around me ’cause I was a few years older, and I would stay with him over at his grandmother’s house” — asked him to join the Texas Tornados. Fender had performed with Sahm, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez at a 1989 show in San Francisco, the first time all four had shared a stage together.
“The fact that Flaco was in the group threw me off, you know, with his accordion,” Fender says. “I thought I’m going back to what I didn’t like to begin with! But Doug asked me to join, and I said, OK man, I’ll do anything. I loved it. It was a new adventure. We played funky, heavy rock ‘n’ roll. I would play funky, Doug would play blues and English rock ‘n’ roll, Flaco would do his thing.”