My Country Side
By Carli Muñoz
One truly memorable musical experience in Southern California was when I gigged for a couple of years playing Country Western Swing and Blue Grass music. It came to me like a sweep from the wind after leaving the Beach Boys and venturing out with various musical genres, especially coming from jazz. At the time, I was sort of going through an artistic vacuum, and the idea of stepping into a new musical genre tickled my curiosity. Fortunately, I joined the right players from the start. As a result, I became probably one of the first contemporary journeyman pianists in Southern California to gain notoriety within the Country Swing and Blue Grass circle. That's what they said!
I can still remember when I was sitting on the sidewalk in the front of my house in Hudson Drive Pasadena playing with my three toddlers when Frank Sullivan, my neighbor from across the street, approached me. Frank must have heard me playing or practicing from his house, so he already knew that I could probably tackle any musical challenge that he had to offer. He was straight to the point and offered me a gig with a band where he was the pedal-still player and band director—a local country swing band called Van and The Southland Country Band. The group was relatively large—it toggled between 7 and 8 pieces, and the musicianship level was excellent. The repertory was authentic and vintage for the most part, making it exciting and swinging; it was the real deal! The founder and lead vocalist was a former truck driver by the name of Van Ezell. His long hair, full beard, and overweight but solid body frame made the perfect constitution for the black leather outlaw cowboy garb he wore…. Waylon Jennings would have been proud! Big Rick, the drummer, was nearly 250 pounds and had a long thick mustache below his 10 gallon Stetson and all he needed was to wear a sheriff batch on his shirt—he was actually a sheriff!
That was the sheriff and the outlaw. The rest of us were somewhere in between; sinners and saints. Most everyone was from a different southern state. I was, of course, the southernmost.
The stage where we played was huge, and it didn't lack any of the pro amenities of a mainstream concert stage. Arrays of lights, large sound consoles with engineers, roadies, a master of ceremony, and a comfortable backstage area were the norm at the club where we performed as a house band for a least a year; it was called The Cowboy. There were at least 3 large bars, a huge dance floor, a mechanical bull, and a double back door from which the nightly brawlers would be vehemently escorted out by a battery of eager bouncers. I played a Yamaha Electric Grand piano I owned on stage with a pair of bullhorns on fur at the end of the tail. The front line from stage left was: bandleader Frank Sullivan on pedal steel and banjo; Brantley Kearns on fiddle, mandolin, lead, and bg vocals; Marty Gwen on vocals; Van Ezell on lead vocal and rhythm guitar; Mark Smith, Greg Humphrey or Bill Bryson on electric bass and vocals; John David on lead guitar, banjo and harmonica; and I flanked the right on piano. Sheriff Big Rick guarded the rear. Later on, I brought in my friend drummer extraordinaire Jim Cruce.
Something interesting in the country-western swing is that, as in jazz, all the lead players get to do several rounds of solos in every song, which is really cool for stretching out. Also, I had to keep up with the banjo's speed, the fiddle, pedal steel, and gel with the blues nature of the harmonica, the guitar, and the mandolin- it was really cool! I even became a part of a small bluegrass unit of the same band, which was even more challenging. One of the highlights was to open for Bill Monroe at an outdoor concert.
Frank and I began carpooling the endless and non-eventful hauls from Pasadena to Anaheim and back on the Santa Ana freeway. The ride was especially excruciating whenever I drove by myself, which fortunately wasn't most of the time. It's not easy being from the tropics and having to drive 20 miles of concrete with occasional views of track houses that looked the same in structure, but their colors blended with the rest of the gray sameness… six nights a week!
So, as much as the ride was tedious, I had the most fun riding with my new cowboy friends. When the band hired a new bass player, Bill Bryson from South Pasadena, an old friend of some of the guys in the group, I was to pick him up to ride with me on his first night with the band. After getting somewhat acquainted and just settling into the freeway, I said to Bill, jokingly but serious, not to worry that we were a little late (we really weren't) but that I was a high-speed driver. I doubt that Bill or too many Southern California people had ever experienced being next to a Puertorrican on the wheel dressed full gear as a cowboy! As I covertly observed the look on his face, I said that I didn't really have a license but not to worry because I could outrun the cops. By that time, he was so nervous that I had to let him know I was only kidding—we became great friends.
Frank and I had a lot of fun carpooling too. Sometimes the fiddle player, Brantley Kearns, also carpooled with us - that was just too much fun! Speaking of Brantley Kearns, what a fantastic player and character! I feel very fortunate to have spent a couple of years of my life with these guys. Unfortunately, since I've been back in Puerto Rico, distance has played the awful role of keeping us far apart. As I write these memoirs, I get the urge to contact my old friends and try to arrange a visit to the old West. Hmm, wouldn't mind gathering the old cowboys for a midnight session… "What the hell have I got to sit around here for?" As Joe Buck would say!
