Wasted Days, Wasted Nights? (Not When You’re Freddy Fender Making Hay)

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(Originally published in Country Music, March 1976)

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The Statler Brothers were leaned up against a fence on Greg Garrison’s opulent Hidden Valley Horse Ranch, waiting camera call for the Dean Martin Christmas Special Garrison was making, when Freddy Fender finished his burrito breakfast and ambled over. Freddy faced them, leaning himself on his upended Fender guitar case. Country music was lightly discussed, “I didn’t even know what it was a year ago,” he said to the Statler Brothers, with only the slightest trace of a smile.

 

​“Well, you sure wrung hell out of it,” one of the Statlers replied.​

 

With Freddy’s first ABC album now approaching the one-million sales mark, his numerous TV appearances, and his criss-crossing the country almost every day for the concerts, which have largely replaced lower-paying club dates, the Statler was right enough.

 

​I doubt if the Statler took what Freddy said about his new-found knowledge of country seriously, but in fact Freddy has no country bone to pick – as is obvious from the material he records. Freddy’s producer and general all around mentor, Huey Meaux, told me that Freddy hated “Before The Next Teardrop Falls” at first and refused to record it. Then there was “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” which has never been anything but a South Texas rock and roll song. Rock and roll – at least Freddy’s brand of rhythm and blues/rockabilly rock – has its roots planted firmly in country soil, though; and the night after he finished the Dean Martin filming, Freddy got himself to Alabama and laid down a purely country show to a packed house of decidedly non-progressive country fans at the brand new Ozark Civic Center – where he appeared on the grand-opening show. Backed by Mel Tillis’s band, he did his hits and a set of standard country that the crowd knew well and had no trouble recognizing.​

 

The place determines the show, which might range from mostly Chicano material in Chicano situations, to classic rock in Austin, to Ozark, Alabama’s straight country. But whatever it is, Freddy can do it all. He’s packed a lot of all of it into his thirty-odd years, and he’s still going. Consider, for example, his schedule for the four days beginning early in the morning of Wednesday, November 26th, 1975, and ending at a similar dark hour during the night of Saturday, November 29th.​

 

I found him in a strange little Hollywood photo studio just after midnight as the 26th began. He’d spend the day at the Dean Martin set, and he was waiting for the Country Music cover photo session. There had been some mix-up on the time, and Freddy, suffering from a cold, had been waiting three hours – not exactly patiently, perhaps, but persevering nonetheless. The session was accomplished, and Freddy left at some ungodly hour in the early morning.​

 

Daylight found him at Garrison’s ranch, finishing the Dean Martin sessions all day.​

 

That evening found Freddy Fender waiting – this time more patiently, talking to a Spanish-speaking doorman – at New York’s Kennedy Airport while Sam Herro, his road manager, tried to straighten out the numerous complications that day-to-day jet travel imposes on ticket procedures.​

 

The following morning found Freddy Fender riding a rocking horse in a downpour in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.​

 

That evening, Freddy played his country concert in Ozark.

 

​The next night, Freddy played the Ector County Coliseum in Odessa, Texas. He also played half the country night clubs in town.​

 

The following night, Houston’s Latin World – a Chicano club – was treated to a performance by the one and only Freddy Fender.​

 

This is the kind of pace that reduces most people who become stars to show business zombie. It is indeed strange to lose most of your normal touchstones to reality, the familiar environments that let you know who you are, and after four days of keeping Freddy Fender’s schedule, I was more or less non-existent. That day at Garrison’s ranch, I’d begun to realize what I was in for, and I started wondering about Freddy. I knew his biography well enough – his South Texas Chicano background, the early rock & roll success, the Penitentiary in Louisiana, the years of playing as a sideman while trying to make a living in the Chicano market, and finally, with seldom-seen suddenness, his rise to national and international stardom – but who was he? Had he lost himself in his schedule? It was Sam Herro, Freddy’s road manager, who supplied the answer, plus something more about the reasons behind Freddy’s appeal. “He hasn’t changed at all,” Sam said, “and that’s why people like him.”​

 

Sam is right about Freddy’s reaction to star status. That morning at Greg Garrison’s ranch, Nick Donovan, who was coordinating Freddy’s visit, asked me to look after Freddy’s guitar while he went on some errand. Freddy decided to walk off somewhere while we were talking, and I picked up the guitar case. Freddy stopped and took it from me. “Let’s get started off the right way,” he said, “you don’t have to carry stuff for me.”​

 

Greg Garrison is Dean Martin’s partner in production and he directs most of Martin’s projects. He has a great fancy for putting singers outside, miles from the nearest musician, and having them mouth their hits while taking part in some outdoorsy activity. He did Music Country U.S.A. a few years ago wherein Tom T. Hall and a lot of other country stars leaned on probably every fence at that ranch – and there are a lot of fences. He had Freddy leading a big white horse down the road singing “Secret Love,” and had him sit in a tree for one segment – while Ted Baxter’s TV girl friend (from the Mary Tyler Moore Show) sat backwards on a horse underneath. “And this guy,” I kept thinking, “is a genuine Texas rock & roll legend.” Of course, legendary status is rarely more than a pain in the ass to maintain – but I suspect that sitting in trees for national TV ain’t too much fun either. Freddy took it all with perfect grace. He did what he was told; he kept his cool – which is considerable. “He is a long-suffering man,” I said to Nick.​

 

The next day, while he was still suffering from a by-now-worsening cold, the TV people and Macy’s put him on this giant, ridiculous rocking horse and sent him down Broadway in a pouring rain for the Thanksgiving Day parade. Dick Howard (his booking agency’s TV man) and I watched on a monitor inside an NBC trailer. Dick is a genuinely good human being (a rarity in agent-types, I expect) – an endless supply of good humor and concern. He paced and fretted about the rain, and finally walked a considerable distance in it to get Freddy an umbrella. He came back shaking his head. “The man is freezing uncontrollably on that horse.”

 

​Freddy, completely soaked, was still shivering in the limousine on the way back to the hotel. “Everything happens to Freddy Fender,” he said, “and they ask me why I look so experienced.” He was smiling and laughing, in a good mood after going through what I’d figure to be one of the worst experiences possible.​

 

When he fell through a hole in the stage at the Latin World, he found that funny too – part of the job – and kept singing while somebody lifted him out.

 

On the plane out of New York, bound for Ozark, he told me, “I just take things as they come.”

 

​Later, while he slept, I leaned back in the jet seat to wonder if maybe he wasn’t taking things too much as they came – not defending his stance quite enough form the middle-of-the-road pop image that seems to be falling around him.​

 

The next night, by the time he went on stage in Odessa, we’d already been drinking for hours. He’d broken a three-week wagon-ride, first because of his cold – and then just for the fun of it – and he was well enough along on stage to really get into his South Texas Elvis act (or maybe I was well enough along to see it). He rocked, gestured and crooned. I stood in the upper rows above stage and watched, drinking tequila out of a paper cup. Freddy was great and I began to formulate (drunkenly, I must confess) a piece of advice I planned to give him on parting at Houston. “Don’t let them make you too middle of the road,” I was going to say, “or too country. Keep that South Texas flash.” But that was before we spent the rest of the night getting drunker and wandering around Odessa – and before I really took the time to sort all those jet-fast impressions.

 

​“Have you ever been to a Chicano dance?” Freddy wanted to know while we waited for the elevator at the Holiday Inn, on our way to the Latin World.

 

​“Sure,” I said, and he wanted to know where.

 

​“Texas. New Mexico. Southern Colorado,” I told him.​

 

While gringos and Chicanos in all those places have lived separate lives (side by side), the cultural interchange is actually much greater than politicos on both sides sometimes choose to admit. Where I grew up in West Texas, Mexicans (a word both gringos and Chicanos used – and a word Freddy uses still, merely as a cultural and racial designation, not as any kind of political statement) and gringos went to school together, worked together, dated, and sometimes married each other. In New Mexico, social interchange has always been even more pronounced.​

 

Music has crossed the gringo/Mexican line freely. A great portion of Mexican popular music was and is based on gringo-German polka. “Rancho Grande,” which Freddy performs on his first ABC album and as part of his show, was a favorite at gringo dances of the 30s and 40s. Both Mexican and gringo kids loved rock and roll when I was in high school, and in fact great coolness was owned by the gringo kid who spent a good portion of his time at Mexican rock and roll dances.​

 

The Latin World was typical of a certain kind of Chicano dance hall – big, colorful, given to flashing lights. Slim Summers – who is the Freddy Fender concessionaire, marketing t-shirts, records, photos for autographs – delivered us to the front door where security guards escorted Freddy inside. Sometimes, Freddy told me, Chicano dances get a little weird for him; the crowds might hassle him for being a country star instead of a Latin music star. Rodriguez, Freddy said, won’t work Chicano places at all for that reason; nor will he speak Spanish around gringos. Two Chicanos speaking Spanish tend to make the gringo nervous in his ignorance of what they might be saying. Freddy thought that was probably a good enough idea, but nevertheless, he carried on Spanish conversations with anyone who spoke to him in Spanish. And in fact where Johnny Rodriguez is a Chicano who has become a country star, Freddy has become a Chicano country star. He said Puerto Ricans gave him clenched fist power salutes from the Macy’s parade audience.​

 

I had expected a lot of Spanish-language material from Freddy at the Latin World. Instead, the pickup band was a gringo country band which made several onstage jokes (either from amazement that they were really there, I guess, or nervousness about the fact that Freddy did a country show). He spoke English from the bandstand. The crowd loved him. Girls actually rushed the dressing room door. One young man, who’d been turned away at the door three or four times, sawed his way through the ceiling.

 

​Freddy is a compact, handsome young man whose looks in person seem to explain the kind of reaction he gets from young and not-so-young women, much better than do most of his published photos. He is younger-looking than his photos seem to portray him, and sleeker. Following his show, women wait in crowds for his autograph. They manage to get backstage and clump at the dressing room door. At the Latin Room, they grabbed at him and tore the buttons from the rhinestone and studded shirt-suits which have replaced his oft-photographed leisure-suit look. Sometimes he has to check into hotels under assumed names, and rarely can he have a barroom conversation uninterrupted. In Odessa, while a group of sweet young things shouted at the closed dressing room door, Freddy sat inside teasing the promoter’s mother – who must be about seventy – calling her “honey” and giving her light kisses on the cheek she’ll likely never forget.

 

Huey Meaux sat beside me in the dressing room while a crowd clustered around Freddy across the room. A nine-year-old Chicano kid sat a ways back, staring at Freddy. “Freddy will never stop doing Chicano places,” Huey said. “He owes them too much.” Huey motioned toward the kid. “And the kids, you know, need people to look up to.”​Huey is probably even more legendary in Texas than Freddy. He’s produced a number of big-time hits and he’s been responsible for most of the music that’s made the South Texas sound famous. He’s done B.J. Thomas, and he presented Doug Sahm with the only major success that Doug’s yet had. Freddy told me that Huey picked the material he records. Thinking still of my Odessa tequila revelations, I asked Huey about his choice of material. Huey told me in that incredible, musical, Cajun accent of his, “I like the funkier stuff, but you have to do what sells.”​

 

By explanation, he said he preferred his own label’s Latin and rock version of Freddy to the smoothed-down ABC version. But that was only his personal taste – and Freddy’s as well. The next album would be funkier – a return to funk after the MOR of the Are You Ready For Freddy? album. And there were plans for a live duet album with Doug Sahm.​

 

“You should see the magic of those two together on stage,” Huey said. “They been brothers so long.”​

 

It was, I think, the fact that Doug dedicated his recording of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” to Freddy which began the whole new interest in Freddy. “You know what’s ironic,” Freddy told me, “People in Texas have been hearing my voice on the radio for twenty years and suddenly all this.”​

 

“We helped each other, brother,” Huey said. Freddy came to him a few years ago. “Man, I couldn’t believe it. I’d heard that voice on the radio for years. I’d just got out of the penitentiary and I was bitter. Freddy, he didn’t have anything going. Man, all we had was each other.”​

 

Huey and I watched Freddy smile for a series of Instamatic and Polaroid shots, usually with his arm around a broadly smiling woman. “That’s what’s so good about him,” Huey said. “He’s been through so much, man, he’s practical, you know? He knows how to get the job done.”​

 

Freddy talked to me about drinking. He told me about a couple of times when he got so drunk he fell down on stage – and kept playing while they hauled him away. He laughed, then he grew more serious. “That was when I was playing for nothing. Now I have to be more responsible,” he said.

 

 

 

After the show in Odessa, Freddy, Sam and I made it from one club featuring awful bands to another; Sam drinking his Cutty and water, Freddy and I drinking tequila. At each place, Freddy was duly called to sit in, and at each place he duly did, giving them a show each time; each time he shook hands and signed autographs (he must have signed hundreds of them during those four days). After the bars closed, Sam went to sleep at the hotel, but Freddy and I went to a little hole in the wall afterhours place where Freddy once again climbed on stage at the band’s call. That night, with a pre-dawn flight to Houston scheduled, we roared until pre-dawn.​

 

After an hour’s sleep, I was awakened by a pounding on my door. It was Freddy, looking about like I felt but still, amazingly, on the ball.​

 

“It’s not my idea, brother,” he said – meaning that such an early departure after such a late night was Sam’s doing, not his.

 

Now Sam Herro is a good man – a club owner from Corpus Christi who booked Freddy before Freddy made it, and is, like Huey and the other people around Freddy, a vastly intelligent man. Freddy’s ironic success after twenty years is owed in no small part to Huey and Sam and the rest of them. But it was, after all, Freddy who went to Huey and Freddy who fired Sam.​

 

Both Freddy and I got drunk again in Houston, ending up at nearly dawn again – this time in the Holiday Inn coffee shop, since nothing else was open. I overslept, missing my plane home, but, by some miracle of standby on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, got one a little later. Hung over again, I thought about Freddy that morning in Odessa and realized that was the only time he didn’t tell me the complete truth – and in my pain that morning, I forgave him out of our mutual pain of that previous morning. Freddy’s not about to miss any flights (travelwise or otherwise) that he has to make. He hasn’t lost any flash at all; he’s just gained enough experience to know what he wants.