The Beat of My Own Drum

by Sheila E.

  Once I was settled on my stool, the band asked me to join them in a Santana number.

  “Sure. No problem.”

  Luckily I knew all of Santana’s songs because Pops rehearsed so regularly with Carlos at our house. Once the rest of the band started playing, I just listened and felt my way and played what I thought sounded right.

  Whatever I did must have worked, because the guys kept nodding and looking at each other with broad grins. By the end of the first song, I’d been offered the job.

  I said yes, again not thinking about what that might mean. The challenge excited me. I couldn’t wait to test my skills, which had barely been warmed up playing in the little Mexican band.

  I guess I just knew that if I wanted something bad enough, I’d be able to do it.

  No problem.

  Through music, sports, and my family, I’d developed a tough inner drive. I was prepared to step through any door that opened to me and make decisions that gave me control over my own outcomes.

  Nobody else would ever control me again.

  I think of this overwhelming confidence as the blessing that came from a curse.

  10. Quarter Note

  A note played for one-fourth the length of a full note

  We will go to the moon. We will go to the moon and do other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY

  Joining Grito was a major step up from my first band, but it didn’t have its own PA system (a hot commodity), which was a disadvantage. When a new drummer arrived in town with his own system, Joe suggested we ask him to join us, as we’d get more gigs.

  Without flinching, I made the switch to playing percussion alongside the other conga player, an original band member whose name was Tam.

  The interesting difference for me by then was that when I sat down to play the congas I realized that, as a young woman (and not a kid standing on a stool), I had to sit sideways or wear pants to keep my dignity. I also found it hard to play in high heels, but I adapted my posture to accommodate them rather than kick them off.

  All of my chosen instruments were extremely demanding physically. I played with all four limbs, and I often sang at the same time. With the congas you have to use your legs to hold the drums in place, and when I play my arms and hands are in constant motion.

  I used to look down at them and think they moved as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.

  Playing congas involves passion and power. You’re the timekeeper of the band, and you can’t let sore hands or an aching back slow you down.

  Although I was young and still at school, I started playing clubs with Grito two or three nights a week. We were managed by one of my mother’s brothers, Uncle Harold, who owned a nightclub called Garderes International with two other uncles, Kookababy and Lulu. These men were all professional gamblers and pool players who worked in a meat market too—a sideline that permanently infused their clothes with the smell of bacon.

  Legally, I was too young to be allowed into clubs (except Garderes, where nobody minded how old I was). Uncle Harold would persuade the owners to let me sit in a back room or at the side of the stage until it was time for me to play.

  “My father’s been taking me to places like this since I was a baby!” I protested, but I still had to do as Uncle Harold said.

  As Grito got more exposure, we were booked for several parties in the East Bay area, as well as gigs at venues like the Eagles hall on Thirty-fifth Avenue.

  Aside from the hassle I sometimes got from the club owners, I also began to attract a different kind of attention for being the only female in the band. I didn’t want to overshadow any of my fellow musicians, but Grito was definitely getting a buzz, and a lot of it was because of me. Knowing that made me proud and secretly brought back the exhilarating feeling I’d enjoyed beating boys at track meets.

  Not only was I doing what any male musician could do, but I was doing it as well—or even better.

  Grito entered several battle-of-the-bands contests, where instead of trophies the winners earned bragging rights. The great Latin bands around inspired a lot of the local bands at the time, such as Malo or Sapo. Sometimes our band won, and other times bands like Secate won. Being highly competitive, we kept tabs on who we felt were the best musicians and constantly tried to learn from them, hoping one day we could reach their caliber.

  There is a Bay Area expression—hecka or hella, which is another way of saying “really” or “extremely.” We’d say of a great musician, “That brotha is hecka bad!” or “He’s hecka fine!” It became a kind of band slang, and we used it all the time.

  My brothers liked what we were doing in Grito, but they favored the percussive chops of bands whose members included Dale Villavicencio, from a sizzling Latin salsa band, or Arthur Wong—a funky Asian drummer—who was in a Tower of Power knockoff band. Scott Roberts was another hecka good player and was in the hottest band around, Salsa de Berkeley.

  In the mid-1970s, there was a real divide in terms of sound between bands from Berkeley and Oakland, despite the fact that the geographical distance was minimal. To us it seemed like the Berkeley bands, which grew from jam sessions on the UC Berkeley campus, were more influenced by the hippie scene. They used a lot of African percussion, steel drums, and shekeres, whereas Oakland music had more of an R&B feel, with a focus on bass and drums.

  Whatever the difference, Oakland definitely had something in the water. In the seventies alone there must have been at least a hundred bands that originated from the Bay Area. We would excitedly talk about the Grateful Dead, the Pointer Sisters, Graham Central Station, Tower of Power, Cold Blood, and, of course, Santana, as well as Jefferson Starship, Journey, the Sons of Champlin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sylvester, and Sly and the Family Stone.

  I was determined to see as many of these great new artists as I could so that I could absorb their individual sounds. I couldn’t afford tickets, and I was underage for the clubs anyway, but I wasn’t my mother’s daughter if I was going to let that stand in my way.

  Sneaking into a venue was easy. I learned early on to just act the part. If I avoided eye contact with security and strutted my stuff like I was somebody and knew where I was going, then I was rarely questioned. If anyone quizzed my age or my right to be there, I’d lie and tell them I was on the guest list or flash them my fake ID.

  “I’m Sheila Escovedo . . . what do you mean my name’s not there? You guys forgot to put it down again? Well, that’s your problem.” If that didn’t work, I’d deliver my trump card: “I’m Pete Escovedo’s daughter. You know who he is, don’t you? He plays with Santana!”

  I sure was bold, but a Gardere gets what a Gardere wants.

  Once allowed in, I’d saunter over to the side of the stage—and by that I mean the curtained-off area of floor in the middle of the room. If I could, I’d get right on the side of the stage, or better still, onstage.

  There I’d stand proudly with my Afro (I’d long since stopped straightening my hair, because everyone had a ’fro), my face dusted with a little blush, and my lips coated in my favorite gloss—baby oil. I’d wear bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and a halter top—no bra. I modeled myself after my mother, who never wore a bra, either. It wasn’t in homage to the women’s-lib burn-the-bra movement—it was just what we did. My image was influenced by a mix of pop fashion, seventies music, and counterculture. I must have looked such a product of the times: soul sister, hippie, conguera, and Bay Area fashionista.

  Sometimes when the band started playing I’d stick a platformed boot a few inches past the curtained boundary. That way I felt like I was actually on the stage, even if nobody else knew it. In my mind, my foot (and therefore the rest of me) was performing with some musical greats. I longed to get all of me onto that forum, preferably behind the congas.

  I’d stare, wide-eyed, at one of the musicians, telepathically urging him to turn and recognize me as Pete Escovedo’s daughter and invite me to join them. Sometimes I wa
s less subtle. I’d wave to one of the guys I knew and plead, “Hey! Let me on! I could play the cowbell! How about the congas? Just one solo, guys?” But they rarely let me join them.

  If I was lucky I might see Raul Rekow, one of the baddest congueros at the time and a man who really inspired me to play in a particular way. When he sat down to play the congas I especially took note, because he used his belt from his pants to hold the drum in place. He sat high and slanted the drum toward the audience, which allowed him to use his wrist to play fast—a method that called to me. He’s the reason I play that way. It gives me a much better grip, which allows my wrists to have more power and speed. Since I was small in stature, this also helped me to pick up the drum with my legs to get a different tone, in the way that a lot of musicians from New York did.

  One day I heard the news that Larry Graham (from Sly and the Family Stone) and his Graham Central Station band were rehearsing somewhere in the Fifty-first Street neighborhood, so I took a bus to try to find them. I wandered around several blocks, listening hard, until I heard some great music coming out of one of the buildings. It had to be them—it was all bass and drums and sounded funky.

  I banged on the door and tried to get inside so I could see them rehearse up close, but they weren’t allowing visitors. Undeterred, I bought some chips and soda from the corner store, sat on the sidewalk, and let the music in—a rapt audience of one.

  Crystals of a dream were forming.

  I was still enjoying playing in Grito and being part of a team. There was an added attraction, too—Tam, whom I’d started dating and who was my first love. He was a year younger than me, with long beautiful hair, and he played congas better than me. My parents knew and liked him, which only made me love him more.

  I am thankful to this day that the first boy I loved after my horrible childhood experiences was kind, gracious, and gentle. He could really have messed me up even more, but he didn’t.

  Bless you for that, Tam.

  Music was instilled in everything Tam and I did together—rehearsing, jamming, playing, hanging out, listening to records, and sharing our musical experiences. I was always jumping up to join in. I listened closely to what and how everyone else played and tried to add something a little different each time. As my passion increased, I began experimenting with new rhythms I didn’t even realize I knew.

  Tam had much more experience than me, so he’d tell me what to do. I’d begin just as he suggested, but would always work something cool into it. Afterward, he’d say, “Hey, I didn’t teach you that! Where did you learn that?”

  I’d shrug and shake my head. “Pops, I guess.”

  In all those years of watching my father play, I’d been like a little sponge soaking up his rhythms. Now that I was expressing myself freely whenever I lost myself to the music, all those different sounds and techniques began to seep out of me. After a while, I started looking at our band differently. I realized that I was moving forward musically, but they were standing still. It was weird—they even started sounding a little immature to me.

  A big part of the problem was that everyone was getting high all the time, which was never my scene. I did try weed and cigarettes, but both made me cough, and that scared me. I’d grown up in a musicians’ house in the 1960s, so I was familiar with pot, but I also knew I didn’t care for it. I didn’t like the smell, I didn’t like the taste, and it only ever made me paranoid. A lot of my friends embraced it wholeheartedly, though, and were often in such a funk that they couldn’t play a note, which only made me increasingly frustrated. Once they started smoking weed, we could forget about how we were supposed to sound. They thought we were just like Santana, but that was the dope talking.

  I, on the other hand, wanted to get up and do something.

  “Let’s learn some new songs or shoot some pool!” I’d encourage, but they’d lie around red-eyed and giggling. They never knew I was faking taking hits off a joint; I never wanted to let them know how much I hated getting high. Frustrated and feeling peer pressure, I’d tell them, “Hey, this is our time, guys. We’re crazy if we miss out on it!”

  Around that time my father was out on the road a lot with Uncle Coke in either Santana or Azteca, which had grown into an eighteen-piece band and included several Santana musicians. I missed being able to talk to him about how I felt, and I began to feel lonely musically, as if I wasn’t in the right place.

  I didn’t know how to broach my restlessness with Tam; all I knew was that I was ready for a change. I had no idea how that might happen—I just wanted more. Tam didn’t sense my unease until I was wooed by a couple of other bands and accepted some offers for session work.

  “You and I need to stick together,” he insisted.

  I said okay, but I remember thinking: “No, that’s not right. Nobody else is gonna want two conga players.” Plus I knew it was time for me to leave. There was no space for me to grow.

  A few more bands approached me, asking me to “enhance” their sound. What they didn’t say was that they also wanted my marketability. “Sheila’s really starting to make a name for herself,” people kept telling Pops and Uncle Harold. “It’s so rare to see a young woman play percussion and do it so well.”

  It surprised me that people were surprised. Once I looked into it, I discovered that in ancient cultures most of the drummers were women, as proved by archaeologists working in Egypt and the Mediterranean. It was a tradition passed from mother to daughter—they were handing on the spiritual heartbeat of life. But that ritual died out over the centuries, and men took over.

  By the time I started slapping my hands on the skin of a drum as a little girl in the 1960s, female drummers were few and far between. The ones who were around were often derided and struggled to be taken seriously, including the wholesome Karen Carpenter and a lady named Moe Tucker from the Velvet Underground, who played standing up.

  In my family I’d never experienced any of the prejudices of being in a “man’s world” playing a “man’s instrument.” It was only when people started commenting that I realized there could even be a gender attached to any musical instrument. What makes drums more male than a piano or a guitar, for example? I didn’t understand the logic. In my house the instruments were for everyone to play—boys, girls, children, parents, great-grandparents, men, women. Nobody cared as long as you could keep time (or have a good time).

  Once I discovered that I was considered unusual, though, I became even more committed to the instrument I’d chosen as a teenager. I’d never set out to be a pioneer, but the indomitable Gardere spirit kicked in the minute I realized I was doing something out of the ordinary.

  I suffered such agonies over what to do about Grito, though. I dearly wanted to remain loyal to my band and was anxious that they’d think badly of me if I abandoned them after they’d given me such a great start. I was also worried about what leaving might do to my relationship with Tam, whom I really cared for, but music was eclipsing the affection I had for him.

  Deep down, I knew I had to honor my burning desire to go further, do better, and expand my horizons. My path to the future was set.

  I didn’t fully understand it back then, but music was to become the one true love of my life.

  11. Shuffle

  A rhythmic motif based on a shuffle dance step

  If you feel it moving

  Deep inside your soul

  Don’t stop that rhythm

  It’s gonna make you dance

  “IT’S GONNA MAKE YOU DANCE”

  THE E FAMILY

  The opportunity to move on came far sooner than I expected. Azteca was doing very well and had been opening for Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and Earth, Wind & Fire. The new lineup had also been signed by Columbia/CBS Records and was touring to promote its debut album, Azteca, which was released in 1972.

  As part of that world tour, they were booked to perform at San Francisco’s Civic Center at a huge rally, but a few days before the gig Azteca’s conga player, Victor Panto
ja, fell sick and had to drop out.

  Pops was freaking out. Azteca had been the first band of its kind to blend different genres of music in an orchestral setting with a strong undertone of Latin music. In what became known as “brown sound,” it had some of the best Latin jazz, rock, and soul musicians from the Bay Area, including drummers, vocalists, guitarists, horn players, keyboard players, and percussionists. There was Paul Jackson on bass and Lenny White on drums, Uncle Coke, of course, and Santana guitarist Neal Schon, along with many other gifted musicians.

  Even if Pops could have found a replacement player on such short notice, he wouldn’t know the music.

  I, however, did.

  I’d heard that band rehearse so often at home and had jammed with them almost every time. I knew every one of their songs by heart.

  “Let me sit in for Victor.” I pleaded, but Pops laughed at me.

  “This is a really important gig,” he told me, shaking his head. “Besides, you’re just a kid.”

  “I’m fifteen!” I protested. (I look at my nieces and nephews now who are the same age and I think I must have been crazy).

  Pops laughed again. “You’re fifteen years old and you don’t know anything!”

  “I know all the songs!”

  “There’ll be three thousand people in the audience.”

  That made me even more determined.

  “Great,” I said with a grin. “I can do it.”

  No matter how much I begged, Pops insisted that I was too young and inexperienced. Realizing he wasn’t going to change his mind, I went to work on Moms. “You always taught me that I can do anything I want,” I reminded her. “Well, I really want this and you know I can do it. Please talk to Pops?”

  I nagged and nagged until I wore her down. My father didn’t stand a chance once Moms was on my side. She and I sat Pops down, and together we convinced him to give me a shot. Since he couldn’t see any other options, he allowed me to audition for him in our living room. He’d seen a few of my gigs, but none lately, so he wasn’t really aware of how much I had grown musically.