David Rodriguez
The Rockzillaworld Interview
By Marianne Ebertowski
 Whatever happened
to David Rodriguez, some Texan music lovers may ask themselves,
especially those in the Houston and Austin areas. After all,
Rodriguez was elected Texan singer/song-writer of the year by
the magazine Music City Texas three times in a row in
the early nineties, after playing with the likes of Townes van
Zandt, Guy Clark and Lucinda Williams for years. Then he disappeared
from the face of the earth, at least from a Lone Star perspective.
A few years later his daughter Carrie emerged as a new rising
star on the Americana scene as fiddler and singer with veteran
Chip Taylor.
The first time I meet David Rodriguez is in the VIP room of
the Blue Highway Festival in Utrecht, Holland, in 2003. Only,
I don't know it's him, to tell the truth, I never heard of him.
I have cheated my way in to say hello to a couple of friends.
"So good David could make it," I hear Chip Taylor
say and I see Carrie talking to a very handsome guy in a wheel
chair. They look as if they don't want to be disturbed, and
I retire discretely to rejoin the rest of the crowd and listen
to the music.
One year later I meet David again. He is Carrie's dad and
you can see it. They not only look alike, they have the same
habit of screwing their eyes upwards and outwards when they need
some time to think and they have the same disarming smile.
David Rodriguez walks with a cane, a thing you forget immediately
once he sits down to play guitar and sing or just to chat. He
is a compelling performer, a great picker and a real charmer.
He speaks to the audience in a heart-warming mixture of Texan
and Dutch that he calls "Nedertex." He sings in Spanish,
English, American, Italian and Dutch. Rodriguez has written
a lot of new songs about the Netherlands and Dutch women
after all, he has lived there for almost ten years now. Just
stayed after a tour to Europe in 1995 and, since he has carried
a Dutch passport. Many Dutch people, like the van Zandts, left
Holland in earlier centuries and found refuge in Texas. David
Rodriguez, second generation Mexican from Houston, Texas has
found refuge in Dordrecht, Holland. That's a long story. We
start right from the very beginning, which was an unfortunate
one for the young David, he was stricken with polio, almost a
year before the vaccine became available.
DR: "A thing like that influences the way you
look at your surroundings. You always look at a way to be free
to compensate for the freedom that you lost because you can't
walk. So you just follow it in other ways. My parents saw, when
I was still very young, that I was sort of depressed about the
whole situation and they got me a guitar to get out of that,
to give me a way to interact with other people, something that
made me special. That was a good idea I'm very grateful
for it."
RZW: "Was your family as such musical?"
DR: "My aunt was Eva Garza, a singer who was born
in San Antonio, the oldest sister of my mother's family. She
had a chance to see the danseuse Sally Rand who had a touring
show in those days and came to San Antonio in the 1930's. They
needed some singers for her show and did auditions. My aunt showed
up and got the job. So she toured with Sally Rand for some years
and then later moved to New York where she got a recording contract
with the old Decca label that later became Columbia. She was
in her teens when she toured with Sally and she was in her twenties
when she recorded for Decca records. Later she moved to Mexico
City and from there to Buenos Aires."
RZW: "Was she an influence for you?"
DR: "O yeah! A very big influence! I remember
the night when she was touring through Houston, she stopped by
to say hello. She came to our house, stood in the living room
and sang a song for us, a capella. She just filled the whole
house with that beautiful resonant sound of her voice. I was
immediately inspired by her. That changed my life, really!"
RZW: "How old were you at the time?"
DR: "Eight, a year before I got my guitar. I fell
in love with the instrument. We had a babysitter whose husband
was a guitar player. When my mother found out about that, she
invited him to come to the house and he showed me some stuff.
He was an incredible man. He was an old honky-tonk blues player
- that was a beautiful way to start. He looked like Elvis. (laughs)
He played like the Stray Cats, he was really good. He was my
first teacher and I guess he was special because he didn't just
teach music, he talked about the delight of music, things he
did as a musician, the fun of playing, the joy of it. Silly
things like they would take a six-pack of beer and go to the
graveyard (laughs). I never forget those stories.
Anyway, I got this guitar and I just couldn't put it down.
I would take it to bed with me. I would play in the darkness!
Then I came to the point where I felt comfortable enough to take
it to school, elementary school. I remember the first time;
it was some sort of talent show. Not a real talent show, just
a class where you had to show what you could do in music, but
it was my first chance to stand in front of people. I was scared
to death, but it worked. And I just kept doing things like that,
like real talent shows. By the time I was 13, I was always with
a guitar. Teachers would say, bring your guitar in class. So
one day there was a guy in the older class who had a band and
asked me to play for him. That was the first band I was in.
They were called The Rebellers. My parents got a bit
worried about the fact that I liked playing the guitar more than
anything else. They actually made me quit and I was so upset
about that that I retired into self-imposed solitary confinement
I stayed in my room for a week playing my guitar and told
my parents: this is what I got to do, maybe you don't understand
it now, but you will understand it one day. Next day they decided
they let me play again, but I had to start my own band. (Laughs)
So that's what I did. I think they didn't like me being a "side-man."
I just loved music. We had a piano, but that was meant for
my younger brother, Noel, and within two weeks, I could play
the piano while Noel was still reading books trying to figure
it out. I started taking piano lessons as well. I just took
every chance to learn about music. In high school, you could
take music lessons, so when I reached the age of 18 - the age
I could go to university - I wanted to study music. Actually
I did not have the background for the formal training when I
started and guitar was not considered a real instrument like
around here, not in that country. That was in the South where
(laughs), well, they try to be cultured, but then they don't
know anything about culture, so they make it up themselves and
they make mistakes (laughs). And one of these mistakes was not
to have guitar as an instrument on the conservatory like they
have here. So, I had to do the audition on the piano on which
I didn't have the adequate training. What happened was, I went
to apply to the music conservatory, University of Texas in Austin,
and they said to me, you don't have the background to do an audition,
so we will let you study piano for half a year and you'll sit
in our theory courses and then you'll take another audition.
Well I did, so by the second semester I was accepted. But I
still had trouble, because I lacked the background. I was trying
to catch up as much as possible, but after the first year I flunked
out - I wasn't very good at it. Then by coincidence, on Sunday
afternoons there was a professor of linguistics who held soirees
at his house where he invited guitar players and folksingers.
I got invited and at one of these soirees, the head of the music
theory department where I was having trouble showed up. I sang
some of my own songs on that soiree when that teacher was there.
She knew that I was having this problem and she said to me, "anybody
who can write songs as good as that should not have problems
like that. You come back and I'll give you private lessons."
I did that and then I went on to composition, which was what
I really wanted to do. I studied under an avant-garde professor
who had studied in Darmstadt, Germany, a disciple of Karl-Heinz
Stockhausen. I don't know why we did take a liking to each other,
but at the end of the year, they gave me a scholarship because
they liked the compositions I'd done. So I went from not qualified
to getting a scholarship!
Well, short story is that after a couple of years of that
I got done with it. It was like I worked at something and once
I could do it, I got bored with it. Avant-garde is so abstract
and I always had this thing that everything had to connect back
to society in some sort of way. So I ended up leaving music
school to do something else and then I dropped out of university
all together to play guitar till I met Carrie's mother. We got
married and I went to law school trying to figure out where to
pay the bills from."
RZW: "In those days you became friends with Townes
van Zandt. Did he have an influence on your songwriting, on
your choice of career?"
DR: "Townes had a lot of influence on me. Townes
was a teacher in his own way. Sometimes you teach by positive
example, sometimes you teach by negative example. Townes did
a little bit of both, really. I think his strongest influence
was on my guitar playing. Guy Clark also was important. Guy
has a really special style, I spent hours playing with him.
My first gig as an acoustic singer was in a café in Houston
called Sand Mountain, that's where Townes played. Janis Joplin
used to sing there, Eric Taylor, and Nanci Griffith I will
never forget the first time I played there. I was nervous as
hell and I was in the dressing room practicing before the gig
and there was a guy sitting in the corner who said to me, "gimme
that guitar!" I said, "okay," and gave him my
guitar and he tuned it up, then gave it back to me. Later I
learned that that was Guy Clark. (laughs)
But then I moved away to Austin and hanging around there playing,
met a whole different group of people like Steven Fromholz, Michael
Murphy and Jerry Jeff Walker. I started opening for those guys
and that just developed my style more, I guess. Townes was still
away, that was the early seventies. Then one day - I was in university
all the time studying music or something else - one day I was
in a student bar and suddenly there was this voice of a girl
playing in the streets. She played all day long with her guitar
case on the sidewalk. Next day, there she was again, I think
for a year. One day I was at a student's party and she was there
as well and some guy introduced me to her. She wasn't a student
a lot of people came to Austin those daysand that was Lucinda,
Lucinda Williams! That must have been in '70/71.
I kept going back between Houston and Austin and when I was
in Houston I would see Townes, when I was in Austin I would see
Lucinda. Then there were years where they would all be in Houston
hanging around the Anderson Fair to sip beer. They had this
lunch line for musicians, lunch for one dollar and we'd all show
up there getting spaghetti for a dollar and have some wine with
it and salad (laughs).Crazy times!"
RZW: "But in the end you became a lawyer with a certain
concern for the rights of Mexican immigrants."
DR (hesitatingly): "Well, that's a whole different
story"
RZW: "But that's not what made you go to law school
in the first place?"
DR: "No. I went to law school because my father
in law told me to and I loved his daughter (who became Carrie's
mother, RZW)! (laughs). So I said, "okay!"
It was later that I saw the possibilities."
RZW: "In 1992, 1993 and 1994 you became Texan singer-
songwriter of the year. In 1995 you come to Holland and you stayed.
What happened?"
DR: "I came here, ran into a guy called Ad van
Meurs who plays in a band called The Watchman and he invited
me to stay and work on a new album, Proud Heart.
We recorded that album and it became my first Dutch album."
RZW: "And you got stuck in Holland?"
DR: "Well, I fell in loveI fell in love more
than once (laughs). I enjoyed the freedom that I could work with
music all day long. So many things happened in my life all of
a sudden, I'm in a beautiful country, and I have the support
of my colleagues, not only in terms of appreciation. What more
could you want? I had everything that I wanted! There's an appreciation
of a song in Holland. Also, in the States it's such a problem
with transportation for me. Here, I can go everywhere in Europe
with public transport. That's so wonderful!"
RZW: "Were you the one who turned your daughter Carrie
on to music?"
DR: (Long pause) "No, I was never there! I don't
know how to say this; we do the best we can do sometimes. If
I had been able to be a good father and have a family, I would
still be married. But I would never be able to do that."
RZW: "Still, do you think you had a certain influence
on Carrie's musical development?"
DR: "I hope not!"
RZW: "You hope not?"
DR: "Naw, I hope she's much better! (laughs)
I hope she will have better taste than I."
RZW: "But you are proud of her?"
DR: "Yeahhhhh!"
RZW: "What do you wish most for Carrie and her career?"
DR (grins): "That she makes loads of money!"
 RZW: "You are
working on a new album with songs which are all somehow related
to Holland?"
DR: "Yes, it's called Dutch Impressions.
I started that in the summer of 2003 with Ankie Keultjes, who
sings with Ad van Meurs in the Watchman and in her own band,
The Very Girls. It's a sort of making paintings. I have always
admired Dutch painters. Rembrandt, Jan Steen, van Gogh I even
know people who are related to them, which is so much fun (laughs).
They are like distant greatgreatgreatgrandnephews of these painters.
So, it's all around me all the time. I'm painting now myself,
I'm trying to paint things I see all around me. Both of my ex-wives
were painters, so I've been around it all my life and now I'm
trying to do it. And as far as music is concerned I'm trying
to paint with my songs. This spring we will go back into the
studio to finish this album. In the meantime, I released The
Lonesome Drover. I wrote the title track on the beach on
the island Crete. It's a sort spaghetti country album."
RZW: "Recently you also had your first exhibition
of paintings. How did that go down?
DR: "It was great. Kaz Lux (a Dutch cult hero
and former rock star, RZW) came and made some atmosphere
and I sold nine paintings. I was overjoyed."
RZW: "Could you imagine going back to Texas one day"
DR: "No, I don't think so. I'm in love and I'm
happy." (laughs)
No better reasons than that, and after all, David Rodriguez
is a Dutchman now. It's good to have him here among us!
Pretty Bregje don't be bashful
I won't lie or be untrue
I come all the way from Texas
Just to meet a girl like you
I ain't afraid of being lonesome
But when I seen you it was clear
All the highways of my homeland
Seem like a circle leading me here.
("Pretty Bregje" from the album Proud Heart)
www.davidrodriguez.nl
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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