You may never have heard of Alejandro Escovedo - but George Bush has

Twelve years ago, if you’d asked me whether I’d like to listen to an LP comprised of songs from a theatre production examining the agonies of post-war Mexican immigrants to the United States, I would have replied: “No, thank you. I would rather boil my testicles.”

But around that time I was getting interested in Americana, a musical genre which mixes country with punk, rock, folk and rockabilly to form the latest version of what Gram Parsons called “Cosmic American Music”. 

To be honest, an endless diet of often crudely-produced numbers about boozers, losers, sluts, criminals, dope-fiends and bikers gets old very quickly. If they’re so depressed, you begin wondering, why don’t they buy a suit and get a proper job? And if you want your life to have some purpose, ingesting two bottles of bourbon, an acre of cannabis sativa  and a fistful of crystal meth every day probably isn’t going to help that much. And if you’re female and you  want to find true love, getting sozzled and shagging every leather-clad, tattoo-ridden, monosyllabic wastrel you meet in a bar may not be the most obvious method. I’m just saying.

But two acts stood out as distinctly original. The first was that weird and wonderful duo, The Handsome Family. The second was a Mexican-American punk rocker-turned-alt-country singer, guitar-player and song-writer called Alejandro Escovedo. I heard “Ballad of the Sun and the Moon” on an Americana sampler and absolutely loved it: it told an intriguingly dramatic story (soldiers kidnap the poor chap’s sister), you can almost feel the heat of Mexican sun beating down on you, it had a wistful Tex-Mex quality to it, a lovely melody, and the female echoing the words of the singer, only in Spanish, was the self-styled “Rockabilly Filly”, Rosie Flores, who I was fond of. That, and The Handsome Family’s splendidly bizarre “Weightless Again” (also on the sampler) were on heavy rotation round these parts for many months.

I was sufficiently intrigued to buy the album on which “Ballad” originally appeared – even though the cover described its contents as a “theatrework”. By the Hand of the Father (all of which is available on Spotify) should be insufferable, and, on first hearing, it did make me wonder why, if the migrants didn’t wish to experience racial prejudice, they’d left Mexico in the first place - after all, no one forced them to sneak across the border illegally. And why, if money was so tight, they were so determined to pop out new babies every few minutes. (Maybe because soldiers kept kidnapping their sisters - who knows?)

But, damn it, the whole enterprise just works – the spoken exchanges, the snippets of family history, the mixture of rockier tracks (“Hard Road”), traditional Mexican music (“Mexico Americano” and “Did You Tell Me?”) and latin-tinged country ballads (“Rosalie”). Apart from the superb “Ballad of the Sun and the Moon”, my favourite track is the meltingly poignant“Wave”, about migrants waving goodbye to the people left behind (of whom there can’t be many left by now, surely, what with the drug wars and migration and whatnot).  

I’m not a great Theatre person, but I really wouldn’t have minded seeing it on stage (I expect I’d look like a big sonafabitch US Border Patrol official to the average wetback, so I’d probably have had to attend in some sort of liberal disguise).

Last time I read about Escovedo, he was on the verge of dying of Hepatitis C (the BBC Health website suggests that using condoms and not sharing needles are a good way of not getting it in the first place, but he may, of course, just have been unlucky - he’d had it for years). Being a wild, roister-doister, bohemian musician type, Escovedo didn’t have any medical insurance to pay for treatment when he became critically ill in 2003, but friends and enthusiasts provided the wherewithal, and, by 2005, he was cured.

Most of his stuff is listenable, and his latest LP, Street Songs of Love, which appeared last year, isn’t bad – but By the Hand of the Father is his masterpiece.

I’d always thought of Escovedo as a fabulously obscure artist, but Wikipedia claims that “Castanets”  was to be found on George Bush’s iPod playlist in 2005, which may explain why he was so soft on Hispanic illegals.