style="font-size:15px;"> He was in the music business so he could party for a living. He enjoyed getting people boogieing so much that he sang for hours, sometimes until most of the audience left out of sheer fatigue and he passed out on the floor.
Several of Canned Heat's best-known songs ("My Crime," "Highway 409") chronicle the band's own arrests or flights from the law. Rights to their hit records are sold for a pittance to provide bail money for the guys after an arrest. They are reduced to playing in cut-and-shoot backwoods biker bars in the 1980's.
Canned Heat blows one comeback attempt after another, descending into poverty.
The band becomes a front for criminal enterprises from dope smuggling to armed robbery, falling in with remnants of the Manson Family. A hells angel runs It for some years, making one of the first rock videos with outlaw motorcyclists writing and producing.
As the years pass, Fito comes into his own, assuming command and clawing his way back to where the band Is again putting out CDs regularly, touring Europe several times a year and again playing prestigious venues, both for devoted middle-aged fans and younger admirers who have just discovered them.
Canned Heat never disbanded they play on today,
From Woodstock to the band's resurgence in the '90s, here Is the real shit, no punches pulled, not even for me.
As Fito told me the day he was hired, he was "born to play with Canned Heat."
This book tells the story of an unconquerable spirit who never forgot to boogie. Fito will not surrender. Music, Canned Heat, the blues, these are his life.
He is "Living the Blues."
Skip Taylor
Manager, Producer, friend
1 - GOIN’ UP THE COUNTRY
Fuck Woodstock, leave me alone.
It was the dawn of the Age of Aquarius--literally--and I was damn well not going to get up to greet it. Screw the band's manager trying to pull me out of bed and the cocaine camel he rode in on.
If I weren't too exhausted to think about anything but sleep, I should have been one happy dude. I had made my boyhood dream come true. The little kid from Mexico City who idolized Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and John Lee Hooker, who used to beat out rock rhythms on cookie tins with sticks, had scuffled and pounded his way into a gig as drummer for Canned Heat, one of the legendary bands of rock's golden age. I was a rare non-English foreign recruit in the legion of an American art form that was bursting out with raw, powerful new growth every day. I had rave reviews, roadies, groupies and a rising mountain of dollars and dope.
I was also a 5-foot-7, 135-pound foreigner, who could manage only a little rudimentary English, plunked down in a brotherhood of mad geniuses boogieing down a long dark road to ruin, misery and death.
It was only about 6 A.M., maybe three hours after I went to bed. I was crying from exhaustion, begging.
"Leave me the fuck alone."
With my accent, it came out "dee fawk."
Our manager, Skip Taylor, wrapped his arms around my waist and dug in his heels, trying to break my grip on the bedpost in my room at the Warwick Hotel in New York.
"Please, Skip, please. Don't do this to me. Or fire me. I don't give a shit."
Skip pulled harder.
"Fito, listen to the radio for Christ's sake--there's half a million people out in this fucking field. There are thousands more showing up every hour. We had no idea this thing was going to be this big. There are people dying there. There are babies being born. It's all over every TV station in the country. The band has got to be part of this."
"It's so damn big the cops have closed all the highways. I sent the roadies up with the equipment truck after the gig last night. I've been up all night trying to find a plane or helicopter or something and if you don't get up right now we're screwed."
By now he's bending my thumbs back.
"I don't care what kind of troubles you guys have, you gotta play this one. This is going to be one of the most famous gigs ever."
I'm pulling on my Levis and a T-shirt, my head cracking with fatigue and despair. "Fuck this. I hate it."
Canned Heat's rocket is still rising fast but already there are flames shooting out the sides.
In the previous 34 hours, I played a devastating gig at the Fillmore West in San Francisco where the band's nuclear-pile cast started coming apart, then another at the Fillmore East in New York with a brand new lead guitarist we grabbed from the audience. The guy has an awesome amount of talent, but he has to use it to hide the fact that he has no idea what the rest of us are doing.
Oh, and another gig the same night, in New Jersey or Long Island or someplace on our way in from the airport. I had no idea where we'd been. Or where we were.
I had not been in an actual bed for a long time, until we got to this hotel at 3 A.M. Skip booked on the principle that we could make more money if we worked both sides of the continent and just slept on airplanes, racing in a limo from the airport to the gig and back to the airport.
Up on adrenaline, down on dope. Stewardess, bring me a pillow, slap me awake when you see that other ocean and good night.
Just a little sleep and I could love this life again. Being on the road with a top band, this is the payoff for the years of teen-age gigs in Mexico City rock hangouts and 14-hour nights in border-town Mexican honky-tonks. This is the pot of gold I dreamed of as a rock n' roll bracero, following the rhythm and blues harvest, slipping over the border illegally to play with here today-gone tomorrow American bands, living on food my gringa girlfriend stole for me from her college cafeteria.
And it was working. Canned Heat had had three top-selling singles--"Goin' Up The Country" was really big just then--and two of our albums had gone gold, "Boogie With Canned Heat" and "Living The Blues."
So okay, all right. We've got a lot of fans. And I wanted to be a great drummer. And Skip, who's a lot bigger than I am, is half carrying me out the door anyway. I'll play.
Skip has found a couple of small planes for charter at a little country airfield in New Jersey, where our bass guitarist Larry Taylor (no relation to Skip) tries to climb back in the limo, saying he'd quit rather than get in one of those things. Larry doesn't even like flying on big jets. In the back of every traveling rocker's mind are the ghosts of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, who died in a snow covered cornfield in Iowa in 1959 because they had to travel in little planes to keep to their schedule.
After we sort of kidnap Larry and wrestle him aboard one of the planes, we land at another little country airfield at Whitekill, New York, which was as close as you could get to the festival at Max Yasgur's farm. National Guard helicopters were the only way into the festival, and they were full of doctors and nurses, so by 10 A.M. we were stuck at the airfield with other bands and reporters.
I was zonked out on the cement floor of the hangar, trying to get back to sleep with my little gig-bag for a pillow; the little bag I always carry on stage with a clean
