Los Lonely Boys – Brothers in arms
The movie dealt with the difficult split between father and sons as performers. In the movie, Ringo Sr. explains it like this: “They were getting too fast and too good. They wanted to go where Daddy didn’t go.” A nice way of saying his kids wanted to rock.
But it wasn’t easy. JoJo is still uncomfortable with the episode. “Some people got the idea from the movie that we fired our dad,” he said. “We were still kids. We were under his wings. Basically, he made the choice because as you could see in the film, he said we were getting too fast and too loud. Those were our dad’s words. Obviously, he felt he should step over and see if we could fly on our own.
He paused. “To me, it’s hard talking about it, brother. We love our dad.”
I told JoJo I had approached Ringo Sr. at the party before the Mexic-Arte gig and told him that while he probably hears it all the time, it really is true that the Garza brothers would not be the Garza brothers without the old man’s guidance.
“He probably couldn’t hear that enough,” JoJo said. “It makes him feel that much better. And he couldn’t be happier.”
Before their regular lives disappeared again for a year or three with the release of Sacred, Henry, JoJo and Ringo were working hard at keeping it real. They were all hanging at the Texican Chop Shop, the auto body and paint shop that is their new joint venture, where the ‘tude is Low and Slow, Vato. Ringo’s father-in-law, Hector Garcia, runs the place, but it’s their garage, their designated retreat where the bros keep the new rides they’ve accumulated.
“Every now and then we like to stick our noses in, say hi to the guys, get ahold of the wrenches, sand some of the cars down,” JoJo explained. “We all find a relief in cars.”
No moving vehicle was safe from customizing. Ringo and Henry had driven brand new Harley-Davidson motorcycles back from Austin. At the moment, Henry’s ’04 pickup was being reconfigured into a Batman vehicle. Between at least three Cutlasses owned by Henry, JoJo’s Chevelles, and Ringo’s two GTOs, these Texicans have plenty of speed and style.
“For the last couple months, we’ve been off,” JoJo said. “The work in front of us was finishing the album. I’m trying to look back. I’ve got the records on my wall, the Grammys in the living room. I’m looking at it, but I still can’t believe it. There really isn’t time to talk about it just yet. There really isn’t.”
A lot of water had passed under the bridge since I first sat down with the Boys in the summer of 2003. We gathered around a patio table at Carlos & Charlie’s on Lake Travis west of Austin, where they were about to play a radio station’s promotional concert. Looking back, they were young and fresh and so new to all the attention, you could see the “They Like Us!” joy and exuberance in everything they said and every move they made.
Their record was being played on the radio. They were drawing bigger crowds every time they played. They were still months away from their single “Heaven” — a slice of upbeat optimism so wonderfully inscrutable and universally themed that you can read anything you want into the song and be right — crossing over from Triple A radio to CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio), adult contemporary, urban, country, Tejano, Latino, and contemporary Christian — nearly the whole spectrum of what’s legally out there on the airwaves. They opened for the Stones and Tim McGraw & Faith Hill.
I remember being struck when Ringo declared, “We’re in this together,” and without prompting, Henry and JoJo joined in, slapping hands together and shaking thumbs up in the middle of the table, All for one, one for all. Honest solidarity.
Los Lonely Boys were simultaneously blazing the finest contemporary Texas blues-rock in the great power-trio tradition of ZZ Top, Johnny Winter, and Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, and breaking new ground as a Chicano brother act whose harmonies were sweet enough for the Garzas to be regarded as soothing balladeers. That combo was hot enough for the Austin lake crowd to be eating out of their hands by the second song.
I saw JoJo and Henry again, a little more than a year ago, after they’d run the table with a string of successes every band dreams of — gold records, platinum records, crossovers, Grammys and other awards, tours in Europe and Australia. Fame and fortune had come at a price: Los Lonely Boys had hardly stopped to appreciate what they’d accomplished.
“This was the most exhausted band on the planet,” said Wommack, their manager. Bruises and scars earned on the road were beginning to show. Complaints were growing about burnout and the need for down time.
But here they were, back at Willie’s Pedernales Studios, with John Porter back working the controls and Lee Daniel, the cinematographer, roaming the premises with his camera.
Henry and JoJo were decked in finer threads than before. JoJo had dropped his greaser pompadour for a long ponytail. They were living well enough to send out roadies for Mexican Cokes instead of the domestic version. (Coca-Cola bottled in Mexico is still sweetened the old-fashioned way, with sugar, rather than corn syrup, the standard soft drink sweetener in the United States.)
But the process wasn’t going smoothly. An assistant engineer moaned he’d been holed up at Pedernales so long his wife and children no longer recognized him. Henry and JoJo huddled in a sound booth, trying get the harmonies down on a line they’d come up with for “I Never Met A Woman”, a song they were still working on.
Communication between the players and engineers was curt. Tempers had evidently grown short. They were more assertive in their dealings with Porter than before. It was hard to tell if it was an honest control issue or if success had swelled heads to the point of thinking the artist knows better, as happens in show business.