Mario shot back that music was what he loved, what he was good at. The verbal tide washed back and forth until, at a crucial moment, Evangeline snapped. Mario describes her as the levelheaded member of the family, but this evening, she snatched his bajo, which was leaning against the wall, whipped it up and--with a roundhouse, Willie Mays cut--smashed it against a nearby standup piano.
"Man, bajos are big, like a cello," Mario says with a grin. "That thing just exploded. Yeah, that was the last time I ever played a bajo."
Somehow, though, Mario and Evangeline have made it work. "We've been around and around about my playing, my wife and I. She wants me to stay home, but she's also the one who told me to go for it. With any other woman, I'd probably be dead already."
A graduate of Carl Hayden High School, the 37-year-old Valley native is the singer-guitarist for the roots-rock trio Forbidden Pigs. Before joining the Pigs, Mario was a well-known member of two other local bands, a blues act called the Hoo-Doo Kings and a rockabilly trio called the Varmits.
The life of a club band like Forbidden Pigs is a doctoral dissertation in abnormal psychology. Being in a band that's always on the road and has no desire to play monster arenas takes a special mentality. You sleep during the day, eat when you can and work late for very little money. Along the way, there are slimy club owners, bedbugs and the occasional but irresistible nubile fan.
The worst part is trying to maintain your family relationships. Mates tend to get bent because they're home working and taking care of business while you're somewhere in Iowa strung out on the blacktop.
With the Pigs it's even more complicated. Instead of playing a mass-market music like hard rock, something that could lead them to fame and fortune, the Pigs tread a more esoteric musical back road known as roots rock. Dressed in vintage suits, starched shirts and wing-tip shoes, they play three-chord, 2/4-beat rock 'n' roll the way rock's Fifties creators like Chuck Berry meant it to be played. Due to their own hard work and a friendship with wild man Mojo Nixon, the Pigs' debut record Una Mas Cerveza has just been released. It's on the Triple Nixon label, a joint project of Mojo Nixon and California-based Triple X Records. To get the word out, the band will play a series of record-release parties and then embark on an extensive tour that will take it all the way to Boston and back. The Pigs will kick off the tour with this week's appearance at Chuy's.
Onstage, the Pigs are a gas to watch. Bassist Billy Bacon, the band's founder and gringo loco, is known for getting his ya-yas out by spinning, throwing and climbing all over his standup bass.
This party band's sense of humor also comes out in the songwriting. The record's title tune is a Billy Bacon original that spins a Corona-fueled tale based on the three words that a gringo says when cornered in a cantina by a pack of murderous banditos.
The band's original music is another area in which the Pigs' talents shine bright. On Una Mas Cerveza, Billy and Mario split the songwriting duties. Both contribute winners, like the hooky, Spanish-language rumba "Morenita Mia" by Mario and the band's unofficial theme song, Billy's rootsy "Jump for Jive." The two trade off on lead vocals and Mario even plays a little accordion.
Between the music and the stage show, the Pigs find it easy to believe in what they do. The problem is that the audience for roots rock will always be small. Fans of alternative or other kinds of "new" music inevitably view bands like Forbidden Pigs as traditionalists, or "oldies" acts.
The exception is when roots rock goes through one of its periodic fad phases. In the early Eighties, for example, the success of the Stray Cats made roots rock cool, even marketable, for a short time. The Pigs further complicate an already difficult audience equation by having wide-ranging tastes. Along with roots rock, they also write and perform jump blues, western swing, country honk and even a little Tex-Mex. This kind of variety satisfies the band members and makes the group something special to fans. But such variety also makes it tough for record labels and radio stations to fit the Pigs into the neat holes that musical success demands these days.
In the stubbed-out-cigarette-and-empty-gin-bottle life of every roots-rock band, there comes the dark night when it seriously considers trying to cross over to a wider audience--make some money, get on the radio. For the Pigs, that time has come and gone.
"Look at the T-Birds," Mario says, speaking of the Fabulous Thunderbirds and waving his hands for emphasis. "They tried to go mainstream and it ruined them. They're a bar band.
"This music and the whole style of presenting it started in the Forties and Fifties, when it meant more than just a dance mix. People come up all the time and ask us if we know any Stevie Ray [Vaughan] or any ZZ Top. Or they say, `Don't you guys know any new songs?' I always say, `No, after 1959 I didn't learn any new songs.'"
Mario is sitting and talking in the kitchen of his South Phoenix home on a Friday afternoon. He's wearing a white tee shirt and pleated, vintage trousers. He wears round, rimless glasses and keeps his hair trained in a not-too-high pompadour. It's the look that all roots rockers--white, Hispanic or otherwise--have to cultivate. Nearby sits his baby, a beautiful red '59 Gretsch Country Club guitar.
He looks and acts the part of the family man, reminding his oldest daughter Angela, 16, that she should call if she's going to be late and getting his youngest, 8-year-old Maria, a tumbler of iced tea. Teen sweethearts, Mario and Evangeline have been married for 17 years. Gabriel, their 13-year-old son, is playing in the street. Mario goes out to see what he's up to, and points to the '62 Chevy Impala lowrider he keeps in the driveway. The tires are flat and spider webs flecked with grass are strung from the bumpers. He says he had more time for the car before he went on the road.
This Friday marks a week that Mario's been home. He's got next week off, too. It's the longest stretch he's been in the Valley since last Christmas, a statistic that's made this home visit anything but relaxing.
"Man, today I've been working on the cooler. Yesterday, I spent all day working on the lawn mower," he says, shaking his head. "This morning, though, a guy came to fix the washing machine and he saw a post card of Buddy Holly that I had on the fridge. Turns out he went to high school with Buddy. It was pretty funny. This guy says, `You see this picture? This isn't how Buddy Holly looked. He was ugly and he had an ugly girlfriend.' It made my day."
Travel is something Mario and the Pigs are going to get sick of in the next few months. Instead of affording a band more free time, a new record means a new tour. The harder the band tours, the more records it sells, which convinces record labels to make a bigger record, after which the band has to tour harder. Unless a group reach sales superstardom, it can become a vicious cycle.
But being a road band has given the Pigs a sense of perspective that most hometown-hero groups lack. They knew when they went into the studio that Una Mas Cerveza wasn't going to race up the Billboard charts or swamp Tower Records' warehouse. They're viewing it as a start. Besides giving them a finished demo to send to large labels and a finished product to sell at their shows, Una Mas Cerveza has taught the Pigs a lot about the process of dealing with a label and making a record.
Born on Phoenix's west side, Mario says he was a "borderline moron" when he was a junior in high school. His lack of interest in academics landed him in vocational school, where he learned auto upholstery as a trade. Later he worked as a plasterer and for a while even helped his Navajo brother-in-law make Native American jewelry. Before he graduated from high school, however, Mario had begun to sit in with adult rock groups. Given a guitar at age 10 by his father--who also played the instrument--Mario got progressively better. One night in 1970, at a joint on Van Buren, the then-16-year-old Mario was asked to sit in.
"They snuck me in the back door and told me not to make eye contact with anybody. They'd pay me 25 bucks for the whole night. But between sets they'd bring me drinks. That was the first time I ever tasted a gin and tonic. And it was my downfall," he says with an evil grin. "The taste of gin, money and bars--and I never looked back. And here I am 20 years later still making $25 a night!"
Mario found his musical religion in 1982 when he bought a Johnny Burnette record. Best known for the hit "Train Kept a-Rollin'," Burnette was one of the first to fuse slappin' bass and twangin' guitar into the hybrid of country and rock 'n' roll that is rockabilly. Hustling over to the house of his friend Bruce Hamblin, now a member of the Cowbillys, Mario shared his newfound passion. Both agreed that rockabilly was what they wanted to play.
Not long after their fateful brush with Burnette, Mario and Bruce formed the Varmits. Although they changed drummers about as often as they changed socks, the rockabilly trio landed a steady Monday-night gig at Anderson's Fifth Estate and at Long Wong's on the weekend. They even went out and got a trademark on their misspelled name.
Working from a set list that was made up of 50 percent originals, they made it into the studio and cut some still-unreleased tracks. At the height of their popularity, they were one of the Valley's best local draws.
It was around 1987, when the Varmits were really happening, that Mario met bassist Billy Bacon. It happened the night Mario and Brian Fahey, the last drummer for the Varmits, drove to Casa Grande to see Bill Haley's Comets.
"Haley had been dead for years and none of the original members were left," Mario says with a smile spreading across his face as he remembers. "But some guy bought the name and put a band on the road. They were like a cheesy, Vegas lounge act. They all wore really, really bad blue tuxedos. Billy was playing bass."
Not long after their Casa Grande meeting, Billy quit the Comets, returned to his hometown of San Diego and founded Forbidden Pigs--the name referred to the fact that roots rock was unheard of in San Diego. Around that time, the Varmits called it quits. Mario and Fahey joined the local blues band the Hoo-Doo Kings. (The other members of that band were vocalist Dave Trippy and bassist Paul Thomas.)
For Mario, a guy still into rockabilly, it was a crash course in the blues. He stole licks from everywhere, and in the process learned where rock 'n' roll and rockabilly came from. Like the Varmits, the Hoo-Doo Kings was a band in which the drum stool never got warm. In 1989, Brian Fahey got a call from Dave Gonzalez, leader of L.A. roots trio the Paladins. Fahey quit the Kings and headed for the coast. Mario was also getting the itch. He was beginning to have thoughts about seeing new faces, touring outside the Valley and playing something other than straight blues. Then Billy Bacon called to tell him that the trio's guitar player, Mike "Lucky" Hebert, had quit. In June 1990, Mario officially became a Pig. Although there has been a change behind the drum kit since he joined--long tall Texan Esten Cooke is the current drummer--the Pigs line-up seems set. They have high hopes for Una Mas Cerveza, but they're also realistic about what a roots-rock record can do in 1991.
For Mario, it's a test to see if any of the seeds he's planted since leaving the Valley for the road have come to fruition. Just in case they haven't, he's keeping all his stringed instruments away from Evangeline. Next time it could be his head instead of the piano.
"We're never going to be a national act like Madonna. No one's going to pay to see my butt or even Billy's butt shakin'," he says with a laugh. "But if this record gets us to a better label and helps up the asking price for our live gigs, then we'll be happy."
Forbidden Pigs will perform at Chuy's with Terrance Simien and the Mallet Playboys on Thursday, September 12. Showtime is 6 p.m. (Forbidden Pigs play at 10). Dressed in vintage suits, starched shirts and wing-tip shoes, they play three-chord rock 'n' roll the way Chuck Berry meant it to be played. "They say, `Don't you guys know any new songs?' I always say, `No, after 1959 I didn't learn any new songs.'"
Mario shows off the '62 Chevy Impala lowrider he keeps in the driveway. The tires are flat and spider webs are strung from the bumpers.
"This guy says, `You see this picture? This isn't how Buddy Holly looked. He was ugly and he had an ugly girlfriend.' It made my day."
He learned auto upholstery as a trade. At other times he has worked as a plasterer and helped his Navajo brother-in-law make Native American jewelry. "We're never going to be a national act like Madonna. No one's going to pay to see my butt or even Billy's butt shakin'."
MAGNETIC POLES... v9-11-91
