Carlos Guitarlos Articles

by Bob Baker, Los Angeles Times front page
April 30, 2003

The hard living didn't kill Carlos Guitarlos or his passion for music. After years of playing on the streets, the rock is clean and on the rise.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The 53-year-old diabetic with a weakened heart, a white, unkempt beard and several missing front teeth awakens in his $35-a-day room the size of a jail cell, cradling his electric guitar. He gets dressed and shambles a couple hundred feet down the street to a seedy BART plaza in the Mission district. He sits on a battery-powered amplifier, plugs in the guitar, puts a cardboard donation box on the ground and begins to play and sing.

It might be Robert Johnson's "Dust My Broom" or an instrumental rendition of "Yesterday," or the haunting coda from "Layla," or "If I Only Had a Brain" from "The Wizard of Oz," or Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll." Or this ballad, one he wrote in a hospital a couple of years ago when he thought he might die:

Lord, help me, I've fallen again
Straight from the heart
You can hear my tear when you call in again
Help me make a new start...

The notes are fuzzy and occasionally halting, but the technique is unmistakenly sophisticated: chords and melody played simultaneously, the way Chet Atkins might have done. An old gravely blues voice, perfectly cracked, effortlessly in tune, pours from the slumped singer. The truthfulness of the voice commands you to listen, but it also commands you to wonder. Who is this? What is a guy with these chops doing here?

His name -- his stage name for 23 years -- is Carlos Guitarlos. Two decades ago, he was a member of a legendarily mercurial L.A. bar band, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs. The band, a collection of big, obstinate, blues-loving men who played and partied fiercely and disdained rehearsals, was at the epicenter of L.A.'s club scene during a brief era when the roots-rock and punk-music movements collided, forging groups like the Blasters, Los Lobos, X and Fear. These bands were fraternities of elemental musicians, contemptuous of stardom, seeming to long only for one transcendent moment on stage.

By the late '80s, that ferver was largely gone, along with the Rhythm Pigs. Guitarlos became another obscure name in the long list of musicians felled by drugs and booze, desperately following his ex-wife and infant daughter to San Francisco, living by playing on the streets and sometimes sleeping on theme, losing himself in cocaine.

Which is where most of these stories end. Everyone once in awhile, though, one of the fallen will rise and, as former Blasters guitarist and songwriter Dave Alvin puts it, "bear the symbolic cross for the others." And so it has come to pass that in this transit plaza, where commuters and drug dealers swirl in separate circles, paying little attention to him, Carlos Guitarlos is on the verge of resurrection, of making that new start.

'Because It's What I Do'

Tuesday, a new label started by Guitarlos' nephew released Straight From the Heart, a CD of 17 compositions, some written as far back as the 1970s. The CD -- rough in spots, delightful in others, bearing the influences of a blizzard of styles and sources (blues to Cajun to country to swing, Solomon Burke to Chuck Berry to Curtis Mayfield) -- is the first well-produced demonstration of Guitarlos' talents. Amoeba Music's and Tower Records' Hollywood stores have agreed to stock it, and Tower is hosting a free performance by Guitarlos and his band May 8. Gigs in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and Alhambra are scheduled later in May and in June. Guitarlos has separate bands of working musicians ready to back him in Southern and Northern California as more dates unfold.

This is a big deal for somebody who has spent the last dozen years singing for spare change, who opened his first bank account two weeks ago and whose most notable award was Best Street Musician in a 1994 San Francisco Bay Guardian survey. But Guitarlos isn't the kind of man who celebrates. He has lived most of his life in self-imposed isolation, communing with six strings. He has convinced himself there is as much validity playing at 16th and Mission as in any club. He has been clean for two years and proudly recites his daily routine: Get up at 7 and play on the street till 10. Go back to the room and write songs. Go back to the corner at 4 and play till 7. To back to the room at night and write songs.

It's a routine he'll stick with even if the CD leads to out-of-town clubdates. "I'll wake up the next day and play on the street there," he says in his hoarse, insistent voice as he sits in a coin-operated laundry, waiting for his clothes. "Because it's what I do." He is addicted to the purity of playing outdoors. "There's no captive audience, so I earn every penny. Every penny. They don't have to put in money. They don't have to stop to listen. But when they do, it means something. And I have the same thank you for the nickel from a wino as I do for a $10 bill from somebody on the way to work. I do it because that's what I do."

LIVING THE BLUES: Guitarlos plays at the same BART station in San Francisco that he mans every day with a cardboard donation box on the sidewalk beside him.
Even his old friends agree that as a Rhythm Pig, he was a genuinely mean guy, glad to pick you up and throw you aside. Time and illness seem to have washed that away, leaving a quirky, self-absorbed sense of humor. On this day, he's agitated about a Bay Area publication that alludes to him as "scraping by." "Look at this," he says, pulling a roll including seven $100 bills out of his jeans. He's been selling the new CD for 10 bucks a pop at the BART plaza. "Does this look like I'm scraping by?"

The musicians who play with him regard him the way basketball players at Venice Beach might regard a playground legend who would have made it to the NBA but for bad luck and bad judgment: a flawed savant, a muse, a profound talent who warrants extra patience.

They joke with him about the question they post to each other: "What's your CSP [Carlos Saturation Point] today?" They tell stories about how he carried around a guitar neck to fend off robbers, how he fashioned a cardboard guitar in jail (on a street-brawl rap he eventually beat) to stage a tutorial for his cellmates. They marvel not so much at the technical fluidity of his playing or singing, but the originality, the rawness, the sincerity. "He has an incredible heart," says Max Butler, a Bay Area guitarist who performed with Guitarlos earlier this month.

Adds Alvin, who sings and plays on one of the new CD's tracks and, like many, marvels that Guitarlos is still alive: "A lot of his songs have such a core of truth. He doesn't disguise his faults. He's not striking any poses. Carlos can't, really."

'A Story to Tell'

It's been one spit in the wind
Two strikes I can't win
You've been callin' me, callin' me, callin' me
Come back again
Lord, help me, I've fallen again
Straight from the heart

He wrote that song in a hospital after being treated for congestive heart failure in 2001. The timing was poignant. Two months earlier, at a wake for Top Jimmy (James Koneck), who'd died of liver failure at 46 in Las Vegas, Guitarlos had sworn off alcohol and drugs. He weighed 80 pounds less than the beefy 280 he'd carried as a Rhythm Pig, and had been struggling with diabetes for a decade. It was not surprising he wrote the song while hospitalized -- he writes them everywhere, claims to have penned 3,000 and can regale a listener wis scores of them at a time, including the year and place each was written. What was surprising was the commitment that followed.

Guitarlos' nephew, Damon Ayala of Alhambra, who worked for the Los Angeles DWP in materials management and booked blues bands on the side, had grown up idolizing Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs. But he wouldn't manage his uncle as long as he was using and unreliable. Now, in Carlos' hospital room, they talked about recording, and a month later Guitarlos wrote Ayala a letter laying out a session plan. it was Ayala thought, the first time he'd seen Guitarlos think about his future more than a few hours ahead. "It's going to be a hard-working, wonderful time," the letter promised. "My part will be that of a true leader... No drugs will be par... I feel good!"

Between them, Guitarlos and Ayala recruited Alvin; John Doe, formerly of X; Mike Watt, formerly of the Minutemen, to play on selected cuts. They lined up bassist Marc Doten to play on and produce the album at his home studio Tarzana. Doten had long wanted to record Guitarlos; he'd played with him a couple of years before, recording a song called "(I'll Stop Killing the Pain) When the Pain Stops Killing Me," haunting because Guitarlos' drug-weakened voice seemed to be coming from the grave. In two days at Doten's studio last year, Guitarlos and the musicians recorded two dozen of his songs, songs about drinking in a two-tavern town, pledges of love, recriminations, dancing, suicide.

Then Ayala, 35, a father of four, went to work, spending late hours at his home computer, combing the Internet for radio stations that might greet the CD sympathetically. He found a few, including WRVG, a public radio station near Lexington, Ky., where music director Jerry Gerard, who had never heard of Guitarlos, began playing a different track each hour. "Just one look at the [CD] cover and you know the guy has a story to tell," Gerard said. "Any decent-sized city probably has a dozen cats like Carlos... but this guy has delivered a wonderful record."

'Get Outta My Way'

"I'm a Cricket, not a Beatle. Write that down," Guitarlos barks gregariously. He is sitting on his unmade bed on the first floor of a single-room-occupancy hotel, reachable through two-remote-control-locked doors. He embarks on a looping lecture that seems to say: The Beatles, elegant as they were, as much as they swept him away when he was a teenager, took music to too cute a place. Buddy Holly and the Crickets remained real. They pointed Guitarlos in the direction he wished to head: blues-based music more focused on making you dance than making you think.

Back then he was Carlos Daniel Ayala. Growing up in the northeast Los Angeles community of Cypress Park, he admired the sound of his father singing in the shower. He talked his mother into buying him a guitar at 10, and learned the basics from an older brother. He had a good ear: "By the time I was 13 I could play anything I could hear -- jazz, classical, anything. I probably played the notes lame, but I played the right notes." He lovingly remembers radio stations that played it all -- black and white -- rather than segregating styles. He graduated from Marshall High, played in some undistinguished bands and spent most of his 20s living at home, writing songs and practicing, getting better, going nowhere.

In 1980, at age 30, he got a job as a doorman at the downtown Hong Kong Cafe, working with his guitar strapped around his neck. After hours one night, Top Jimmy walked in and started drinking each abandoned glass. A musician both men knew, Mark Frere, spontaneously introduced the doorman as "Carlos Guitarlos," and it stuck. Soon Jimmy's band broke up and he and Carlos began playing. The Rhythm Pigs evolved to a five-man core whose credo, Guitarlos says fondly, was "Get outta my way" -- overpowering the audience with furious cover versions culled from disparate artists.

Top Jimmy, when he wasn't falling-down drunk, could sing anything with majestic soul. The band segued from Merle Haggard's "Working Man's Blues" to an obscure rockabilly classic like "Ubangi Stomp" to the Doors' "Roadhouse Blues" to a Guitarlos original like "Dance With Your Baby," in which Top Jimmy demanded: "What's it gonna take to make you move?" When the band was in sync, it was frighteningly intense. Van Halen's David Lee Roth recorded a song extolling Top Jimmy on the band's album "1984."

"Jimmy," says Guitarlos, "was the greatest singer. So powerful. And with me there pushing him and our [even bigger] bass player [Gil T] -- it was like a bunch of animals." Guitarlos never sang back then. Why should I have? he demands. "Nobody could top Jimmy. Only singer I heard match Jimmy died last May." His voice turns sad. "Juliette Valentine, the greatest blues singer in San Francisco." She sang on the streets of the Financial District until she was murdered. "Soon as she opened her mouth there'd be a crowd. Her name is Juliette Valentine. And she's dead."

Every Monday night in their heyday, the Rhythm Pigs held court at the Cathay de Grande, a subterranean Hollywood nightspot. On one of those nights in 1983, Guitarlos spotted a clothing designer named Marilyn Pardee, stopped playing, walked over and planted a kiss on her. They kept running into each other, moved in together, married and had a daughter, but after a five-year relationship "things started getting out of hand," Pardee said, and she moved north. Determined not to lose contact with his daughter, Guitarlos followed.

Those times were "dicey," says Pardee, who still lives in San Francisco, but "I've always felt close to him even when I couldn't allow him to be physically close to us." They talk often. "They have a great divorce," says L.A. photographer Gary Leonard, who photographed the couple's wedding.

Two weeks ago, after picking up his laundry, Guitarlos caught a bus one block back to his hotel because his legs were swollen, a consequence of his circulatory problems. Getting off the bus, he spotted a little girl riding a mechanized pony and dropped a quarter in the slot. He crossed Mission Street to his hotel, mocking the drugtrade. "Northwest corner is Smackistan, the southwest corner, where I play, is Crackistan."

He demonstrated a game of identifying the players: "Dealer, buyer, runner, dealer, dealer, informant, undercover cop." A dealer overheard him and cursed. Guitarlos sat on a metal bench in the transit plaza next to a tired woman. He struck up a conversation and bought her an ice cream from a nearby cart. He shouted hello to workmen, cops, any face he recognized.

That night he rehearsed with his Northern California band at the East Bay home of bassist Billy MacBeath. He mocked himself when it was time for a third take of a song -- this was so unlike the old Carlos, who prized spontaneity over all else. He was dragging tonight, having trouble controlling his sugar level. MacBeath made him a smoothie and his energy came back.

After rehearsal, he stopped in at a nearby bar to watch a blues band. He was bored by its plodding style, and between songs offered to sing a number. The band agreed to back him. he spotted a local piano player and invited her up. "Dust My Broom," Guitarlos said. The band broke into the song with a new power. People drinking got up and danced. Guitarlos had admired the lead guitarist's instrument, and bought it from him for $400 cash during a break.

A few nights later, Marilyn and the couple's 16-year-old daughter, Eloise, drove to Guitarlos' hotel to bring him dinner and the ATM card for his new bank account. They found him resting in bed, cradling his new guitar.

<< back to the press page

by John O'Neill, San Francisco Bay Guardian
July 17-24, 2001

From L.A. legend to S.F. street musician, Carlos Guitarlos gets a shot at redemption with Mission Blues.

YOU CAN FIND Carlos Guitarlos most days at the 16th Street BART station in the Mission. Camped out at the entranceway with a battery-operated Crate amp and a red Fender Stratocaster strapped over his shoulder, Carlos runs through a songbook that comes to him as naturally as reciting a home phone number. Folks hustle by, stuck in the workaday tilt-a-whirl, although some stop long enough to toss change or a dollar bill into the tip jar. Every so often someone will recognize a riff and linger long enough to listen to what this guy with a gray beard and weathered skin has to offer - which is quite a bit.

This man - whom people might easily dismiss as a transient with a guitar - is actually a great student of American music. Hang around and listen to him play long enough, and you'll find yourself floored as he shifts effortlessly from Chuck Berry to Sonny Rollins to Howlin' Wolf to Tarheel Slim to the Beatles. Sometimes he'll play a familiar chart-topper; at others he deliver an arcane slice of roots past - all have the unique feel of a musician who is nothing less than a poet. Working on the bass and melody lines at the same time, Carlos bangs out one-string solos, jazzy chord progressions, and unorthodox end-run finger plucking that can only be self-taught.

"Most people think I'm some bum singing for a beer," cracks Carlos from his seat at Tommy's Joint. "I am." Missing in action from his usual perch due to a diabetic flare-up, he's laying low, close to his SRO home on Polk Street. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred people will pass by," he says, "but then that hundredth will recognize a Robert Johnson riff. Then another hundred will pass by. But people usually give me something. I'm out there all day. I mean, what else do I do? I wake up, see if it's working, jack off, then go out and play."

Smart-assed and self-deprecating when he isn't pumping up his playing ability, Carlos spins a good story for anyone willing to listen. Would-be hipsters who pass by him as if he were some bum would do well to pay him some respect. They should know about the work he's done on now classic albums in their collection like Tom Waits's Swordfishtrombones and the Breeders' Last Splash, or the contributions he's made to various local acts. They might recognize him as one of the city's vintage street performers, but few know that once upon a time, as a member of the legendary Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, he was one of the state's most admired guitarists and an integral part of the Los Angeles music underground.

Carlos, Top Jimmy, and the rest of the Pigs were big men who played large, lived large, and shot to the top of the heap before plunging down the other side like a freight train coming off its tracks. Now he's got a shot at redemption with his upcoming album, Mission Blues. There may well be a million stories in the naked city, but that of Carlos "Guitarlos" Ayala is something else again.

Once a Rhythm Pig ...
Coming up hard in L.A.'s Cyprus Park, by the time he was 13 Carlos Ayala was able to play any song he'd heard once. The prototypical neighborhood outcast, Ayala would hole up in his bedroom and spend his after-school time playing music. He joined his first band, Steamroller (whose lineup Peter Case would join five years later), and continued to absorb influences as he bounced restlessly around. He was interested only in the elements of music that spoke directly to him, which led him again and again to American roots music. After a self-imposed break from the club circuit to concentrate on writing, he returned to performing, although he still lacked direction. In the late '70s, he says, he was also able to start a small eight-track studio "after about eight years of being a total recluse." He smirks, adding, "I was a lot like Fred Neil, only I was fucking alive!"

An old neighborhood kid named Dave Drive (of early L.A. punks the Gears) got him out into the scene, and he was hired as a bouncer at the after-hours club Zero Zero, where he quickly became a fixture. He became Carlos Guitarlos, and cemented his name in the Los Angeles punk stratosphere, when he was tapped to play with Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs. Top Jimmy (a.k.a. James Koncek - he earned his moniker while slipping free food to grateful punks who hung around Top Taco) would go on to build a reputation as southern California's number-one blues shouter during the early and mid '80s, with Carlos as his right-hand man.

First-class musicians all, the band got their start playing Monday nights in the basement of the Cathay de Grande. It wasn't long before the word was out about the volatile blues demons who never practiced and who drank as hard as they played. Able to melt blues down to the purest element - transcending race and genre - the passion of Top Jimmy and his hellions was well suited to L.A.'s burgeoning punk scene. It didn't hurt that they were also a spectacle; the entire band was physically gigantic (Carlos being the lightest by 90 pounds at 260), and when they weren't ripping up the stage, they were in the audience ripping up the dance floor. Barnstorming clubs throughout California on a triple-threat bill that also included X and the Blasters, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs were recognized by both critics and fans as L.A.'s premiere live band. Their gigs were packed, and soon the band was working as much as seven nights a week, at a time when pay-to-play was beginning to come into vogue.

"We always made money," Carlos says. "We worked eight days a week and always had a packed room. X would play the Whiskey for three nights and would agree to not play for a hundred-mile radius for a week or two or something like that. We'd play three nights, then play down the block and pack it on a Monday, then get a call Tuesday to open for the Surf Punks 'cause they weren't selling tickets. It was a great time, and after a while everyone wanted to play with us or meet us, and I got to meet a lot of nice people."

Music and mayhem
While X and the Blasters went on to influence an entire generation of musicians, the Rhythm Pigs' closest brush with fame came via Van Halen's 1984 tribute "Top Jimmy." While they possessed an honest beauty and raw soul few performers have achieved, the band refused to be tempered and wouldn't be tamed. Their legend is littered with stories of mayhem and destruction: band members throwing bouncers down staircases, attempting to tomahawk record-label reps with a microphone stand, stopping shows to beat up punks who spit to show appreciation, packing up on the fly to avoid a bust, and enduring Herculean substance abuse.

Though they enjoyed phenomenal success in their own backyard, the band was little more than a rumor outside the state. The nonstop dance party continued, but even the greatest fighter can swing away for only so long; the Rhythm Pigs imploded in 1987 shortly after going into the studio. They would leave nothing behind to be remembered by except boozy memories of wild nights and the question "what if?"

"We were a bunch of belligerent assholes, and you know I wouldn't want to spend eight years with you either," Carlos says. "It's like getting married. It's like either I love you or I hate you ... well, I hate you. But there was love. Jimmy was my best friend. It was the real thing. Real punches. Real snorts. Real women. Most of all, it was real music. We did some bad shows, but on our worst day we were still better than anyone. You know, we never got a bad review, because we never followed any trends. We just made it up as we went along. They were good times, and they were crazy times."

The fallout from the crash of the Rhythm Pigs was severe. Jimmy, his health wrecked, moved to Las Vegas. Eventually he recorded a couple of albums (including the sessions cut before the band collapsed), but last May he finally succumbed, at age 47, to liver failure. Carlos, whose marriage fell apart in conjunction with the band's divorce, came north to San Francisco to be closer to his ex-wife and their infant daughter.

"I was at the end of my asshole days," he explains. "I tried to clean up and followed them up here. That [divorce] taught me my biggest lesson. I wrote a song called 'Where Is the Music?' about it. 'The Woman is love / The child is music / They both are the good times that came my way / Where is the music / Where is the laughter / The here ever after that once came my way.' I'll tell the whole world: I fucked that up. I still love [my wife], and I'd die if I couldn't see my daughter."

Though his name popped up occasionally on Bay Area music calendars, Carlos gave up the club circuit in 1991. Since then, most of his gigs have been on the streets (he started up in the Haight and over the years worked his way down to the Mission), plus occasional studio work with people who remember his reputation. And there are plenty of well-respected artists who still consider Carlos one of the best.

"Carlos is as good a guitarist as I've ever played with," former Blaster and Grammy winner Dave Alvin says. "He's a borderline genius. I've also seen a TV fall on his head and nothing happen to him, so I guess that says something about Carlos. It was a big wide-screen TV, too."

Honest living
This is where the story should end, leaving us to ponder the valuable lessons learned about the importance of life and love and happiness and knowing when to say enough. Except it turns out there's a new chapter. For all the twists and turns and crazy stories, it turns out that Carlos Guitarlos - once-proud hero, fallen angel, drunken doofus, whatever you want to call him - is a hell of a blues player. His upcoming CD, Mission Blues (Hemline), is an amazing document of one man's life. Recorded at 42nd Ave. Studios by area musician Dan Laks, the album's songs (11 original numbers and two cover tunes) were recorded and mixed down in one day.

"I wanted [the disc] to be simple, how it sounds when you see him on the street," Laks says. "Of course I couldn't do it on the street, but we pretty much got it. There are some overdubs, but Carlos had all these parts he heard [in his head], and they were great ideas. I couldn't say no. He laid 13 tracks in one day, which is amazing, but we could have gone on longer."

A few overdubs aside, Mission Blues sounds an awful lot like something that might have been caught by Alan Lomax on one of his field-recording jaunts. Carlos, all natural emotion and raw storytelling, brings a field-holler quality to his sound. While the guitar playing is deceptively simple, the overdubs and chord changes all feature his unique style of playing. Well-placed flourishes or strangely appealing string blitzes give his songs a character that's evident in his street performances.

Most important, the originals are completely honest. The title cut is a direct nod to the city's housing crunch from a guy who's seen neighborhoods eradicated at the street level. "Keep My Hot Tamales Warm" comes from pondering suicide and an imagined conversation with Robert Johnson, and "The Love I Want" is a thinly veiled message to his family. Top Jimmy gets nods on both "Drinking Again" (a staple of the Blasters' live show) and the searching-for-drugs vibe of "Poppin' and Bumpin'." The last cut "String Lament" is a dreamy, soft-focus instrumental as off-kilter as it is lovely; it's the type of tune a man might hear in his head right before falling asleep.

Mission Blues is a convincing album that might just be the highlight of a career already jammed with highlights. Redemption might seem like too strong of a word, but it works as well as any. In the meantime, Carlos (who's heard the disc just once or twice - he doesn't own a CD player) is looking to return to the street to make some money and get back to the love of his life, his guitar.

"On the street I earn every penny I make," he says proudly, "and these discs are like a gift. If I can sell two a day, I'll be able to get a room every night. When I was doing clubs, I knew how to control 'it.' The room, the music, the people - I knew the album was gonna be good because of 'it.' I got lots of 'it,' whatever 'it' is. I got enough to play out on the street and just let it all go.

<< back to the press page

by Biran J. Bowe, Creem Magazine
September 2003

Enigmatic California guitarist and songwriter Carlos Guitarlos compares his brilliant new long-player, Straight from the Heart, to a wall.

"It�s a wall of American music. It might not have all the bricks, but there aren�t any holes in it," said Guitarlos recently in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home.

A quick spin of Straight from the Heart proves what he�s talking about. The disc begins with the Cajun rocker "Damn Atchafalaya" before moving into the Soloman Burke-styled "The Love I Want." Bassist Mike Watt joins Guitarlos on the heavy Motown groove of "Ain�t That Lovin� You." The rest of the disc goes from Bakersfield country to Memphis soul to straight gut-wrenching Oakland blues. The record�s last cut, "When the Pain Stops Killing Me," is a gut-wrenching ballad that sounds ready-made for the Rolling Stones to cover.

But with all the genre bending, it all comes out as authentic Guitarlos. His voice is cracked and supple, like an old leather jacket. His guitar playing is fluid. His songs are real-life slices of life that discuss hard drinking, hard lovin� and hard livin�.

"It�s all different parts of my life. But they�re all true stories. I used to introduce my songs by saying �Here�s another true story from my miserable fucked-up life,�" Guitarlos said.

It�s easy to imagine why Guitarlos would call periods of his life miserable and fucked-up. After gaining a level of fame with the band Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, he fought substance abuse and he spent a lot of time living and playing on the streets of San Francisco. But now he�s clean and sober and supporting an album he likes.

"I�m not crazy and drunk anymore and all screwed up. I�m taking care of myself," Guitarlos said in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "I was talking to Caesar Rosas (from Los Lobos), and he said �You�re not a crazy asshole anymore! You�re just an asshole!� I said: �That�s good!�"

Guitarlos (born Carlos Ayala) began playing in 1960, when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 13 or 14, he says he could play just about anything he heard; by the time he was 17, he was writing songs. He has written more than 3,500 songs since then. Straight from the Heart is his third solo record, but it�s the first that he�s completely pleased with. He�s backed by a full band and horn section, and Dave Allan and John Doe make guest appearances along with Watt. The musicians who play with Guitarlos speak highly of him.

"He plays with a lot of heart. He�s got a huge vocabulary," said Mike Watt, who plays bass on one track on Straight From the Heart. "God, he�s got a knowledge of all these kinds of variations of blues and soul. He�s a trippy cat."

Watt said Guitarlos was an exacting bandleader on the cut he played on, "Ain�t That Loving You."

"First he had me play like a Led Zeppelin lick in unison, and then I think he got a different sense," said Watt, describing the part he ultimately played as a "chugging" part reminiscent of Motown genius James Jamerson.

Guitarlos remembers that session, too.

"He was starting to be Mike Watt, and I wanted him to be more straight, instead of wandering around." Guitarlos said. "I told him �Play like a fucking dummy��and he�s not, that�s why he�s able to grasp it."

Whenever he plays with other people, Guitarlos knows what he wants.

"When I write songs, I hear every note from the start. I hear what the bass does, every stroke of the drums, the timing, the tempo in my head. I know what the tempo�s going to be. I can write the parts down and check it against a metronome and it�s just right. I know every volume, everything. I don�t have a life," he said.

Vince Meghrouni, a harmonica and flute player in Guitarlos� band, says that knowledge exists at a gut level.

"It�s not contrivance. It�s not mining the Smithsonian for old forms and sprucing them up. It�s the real deal," said Meghrouni. "There�s no bull about it. It�s really rockin�."

All those years of hard street living taught Guitarlos a few things, like how to fill the space in a song with his guitar.

"It directs the band more precisely. It helps good players be centered, and great players just get free, within the context of what I�m doing. That�s the way you want to do it, really. I mean, democracy in the band? I don�t know. I just get players that know how to play and let them play with me, and I play with them," he said. "I can make good players sound great and great players transcend."

There are 17 songs still in the can from the Straight From the Heart sessions, and he�s been back in the studio and recorded 19 more songs with the hot-shit rhythm section of Don Heffington and Bob Glaub. Guitarlso says he�s enjoying the prolific recording.

"I�d like to put out two-a-fucking-year, because I�ve got so many songs," he said.

He�s not the only one who�d like to see that.

<< back to the press page

by Bliss, Pasadena Weekly
August 28, 2003

Carlos Guitarlos rocks Straight From the Heart at Old Towne Pub

Plenty of artists have been compelled to replace their beloved Guiness with O�Douls or other non-addictive substitutes, many of them as pissed-off about the loss of party time as they are grateful for survival. But Carlos Guitarlos, a beard-tugging, shuffle-strutting repository of LA rock history, has turned sobriety into a creative springboard into joy and newfound critical acclaim without sacrificing a rapscallion quality as sweet as it is sly.

Guitarlos� notoriety is built in equal parts on his hellraising days with Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs during LA�s 1980s punk and roots-rock heyday, and on mean, brawling misadventures in San Francisco, where he�s earned his living over the past decade playing for tips on street corners. When Jimmy�s health finally gave out two years ago, Guitarlos � aware that he himself was careening on the proverbial edge � swore off booze and drugs. He says he�s been sober since the morning after Jimmy�s wake.

�I didn�t want to be in a band with Jimmy right away,� he explains, �y�know what I mean? Everybody kept lookin� at me and whispering, �Carlos is next.� I looked like crap.�

A close call with congestive heart failure two months later only reinforced his resolve to stay clean. He wrote �Straight From the Heart,� which became the title track of his first solo album, a boisterous roots-rock platter of 17 stories inspired by his dizzyingly colorful life, with guest turns by old pals Dave Alvin, John Doe and Mike Watt; it was released earlier this year to enthusiastic reviews and some Hollywood interest.

Eschewing the brittle bitterness common to many ex-addicts, he cracks self-deprecating jokes and surrounds himself with supportive players for his live shows; locally, he relies on nimble-fingered guitarist David Black to fire his original sets of �American music.� Facing down mortality has seemingly emboldened Guitarlos� already fearless performances � at a recent House of Blues show, other musicians on the bill came away with more than a little respect for his chops and spirit. �He was awesome,� declares Mike Stinson.

As fun as Guitarlos� bawdy rockers are, it�s the uncharacteristically prayer-like �Straight From the Heart� that haunts: �Lord, won�t you help me, I�m falling again ... Help me make a new start/ It�s been years and years since we talked just as friends/ Straight from the heart...�

�It IS a prayer,� Guitarlos says, happy to be laughing. �I almost croaked.�

<< back to the press page

by Scoop Stevens, San Diego City Beat

Carlos Guitarlos on defying death, family and acid trips in Ojai

"Straight from the heart," says legendary blues guitarist Carlos Guitarlos with his world-weary voice. That sentiment is also the title track of his new album, and it almost became the last song Guitarlos ever wrote. "I came up with that on one of my many death beds," he says. "I whispered the words to my ex-wife Marilyn, and she wrote them down."

It has been a long, hard road for this gifted musician, with more twists and turns than might seem possible for one lifetime. Decades of hard drinking, drugs and carousing have taken their toll on his body, but certainly not his spirit.

"I have congestive heart failure, Class 4," he says. "I'm considered disabled. I'm not supposed to sing loud or do anything, but I can still sing over a band. I just decided I'm not going to die."

Guitarlos describes his sound as "a wall of American music," and on first listen to Straight from the Heart you know just what he's talking about. Careening stylistically from Cajun tunes to jump blues to Tin Pan Alley ballads, the album is a wonderful collection that chronicles the breadth of roots rock.

Guitarlos is probably best known for his long stint as guitarist with infamous Los Angeles band Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, who were part of the early '80s roots rock and punk scene that included The Blasters, X, Los Lobos and many others. With a boisterous blues base, the band was as famous for its hell-raising as it was for its music, and counted many of the day's biggest names as its fans. Van Halen immortalized the group on their 1984 album with the song, "Top Jimmy."

Born Carlos Ayala in 1950, he earned the name by which he is known because of the omnipresent guitar in his hands. It's a trait that's apparent as soon as he answers the phone at his Los Angeles home. Our entire conversation is punctuated with guitar riffs, unfinished songs and meditative strumming.

"I've been playing guitar since March 18, 1960," explains Guitarlos, whose reputation for thumbing his nose at authority was cemented by the time he graduated high school. "The day of the ceremony, I pulled up on a flat bed truck. We had a generator and when they called my name, we started playing �I'm So Glad,' the song by Skip James that Cream did."

School administrators were less than pleased.

"Everybody in the crowd dug it," Guitarlos claims, "but the school called the cops. Our bassist Danny was taken away laughing."

As for his diploma?

"I never picked it up," he dismissively chortles. "I didn't care about that. What do I need that for?"

By the early '80s, he was firmly in place with Top Jimmy.

"It was like a bunch of wild animals, roaming our range. We got away with everything," he says, not shy to sing his band's praises. "We were the best band to come out of L.A. for years. Even on our worst nights we were better than any thing you can imagine. It was a wonderful thing to hear."

Their popularity grew until it seemed that fame and fortune might be just around the corner. David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen even asked Guitarlos if they could record his song, "I've Been Drinking Again."

"But like an idiot," Guitarlos recalls, "we said we're going to do it with our own band. And then we ended up not doing it."

When asked if he laments the royalties that having a wildly successful band cover his material would have reaped, Guitarlos is pragmatic and almost sounds relieved:

"We would have all been dead. Everybody in the band would've bought too many things, and done them all, and died. I never would have had my beautiful daughter, never been married once, wouldn't have the friends I have now."

In the end, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs released only one album, 1987's brilliantly monikered Pigus Drunkus Maximus, and Guitarlos relocated to San Francisco to be closer to his daughter. There, his health began to deteriorate, but he also started an incredible second career busking, eventually being named "Best Street Musician" in 1994 by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

It was the passing of musical cohort Top Jimmy in 2001 that inspired Guitarlos to sober up.

"The morning after Top Jimmy's wake, I must have drank more than a case of beer, drank a bottle or two of this and that," he recalls. "I started playing music at 2 in the afternoon and 6 o'clock the next morning I was done. When I woke up later I decided that was it. There were so many drugs that night. I never paid for it all those years. I was a complete idiot."

With a new lease on life, Guitarlos has assembled a dream band, notably featuring "the great Marcy Levy," a vocalist known for her work with Eric Clapton and Aretha Franklin. He's clearly proud of the band, taking pains to make sure everybody's name is spelled right�drummer Joey Morales, bassist-vocalist Mark Doten and Vince Meghrouni on tenor sax.

Several of Guitarlos' longtime fans make an appearance on Straight from the Heart, including Mike Watt, John Doe and Dave Alvin.

"I appreciate it when people come up and say, �You've inspired me,'" he says. "Like when [Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist] Flea gave me a guitar, and I thanked him. He told me, �Carlos, what do you mean, thanks? I should be thanking you.' I used to slough that stuff off and think, What a bunch of idiots. But now I appreciate it, with all my heart."

As for upcoming projects, Guitarlos says a new album is in the can awaiting release. Perhaps more importantly, he and Levy have begun a fruitful songwriting career together, recently doing a demo of a track�"Singing the Blues"�for Clapton. On a personal level, a company called About Entertainment has optioned the story of Guitarlos' life for a feature film.

"Almost every single person says, �You've got to get this guy Benicio del Toro play you. Just get him to gain a little weight like he did in Fear and Loathing,'" Guitarlos laughs.

When I mention his set this Sunday at the Adams Avenue Street Fair, he recalls having played old San Diego venue The Bacchanal and The Rodeo in La Jolla, which we both remembered as antiseptic.

"A bunch of times in the '80s we played at The Rodeo, though they pronounced it [in a sarcastically uppity tone] �Row-Day-Oh,'" he recalls, laughing at his memories of the establishment. "[At one gig], our bassist Gil couldn't make it and we didn't know this, so Johnny Doe [of X ] shows up in his place. Now Gil is, like, 420 pounds, and Johnny is a little stick man. Johnny's wearing a pair of Gil's overalls, stuffed to the gills with newspaper, and he's pasted on a little soul patch and a goatee.

"He played the whole night while Jimmy was yelling at the audience, �What the fuck are you doing?! Get up and dance or go home and watch TV and stop bothering us! Somebody wants to hear �Freebird'? We're going to kick their fucking ass!'"

Guitarlos brightens when he recalls another semi-local experience, noting that this one is sure to be recreated in the upcoming film.

"[In 1971], we went down there to take some acid samples to Ojai. We took apart my guitar and taped them inside of something. You never would have found it. So we went up the coast like a bunch of damn hippies, and somehow we caused this riot to happen when this lifeguard was trying to strangle this guy out in the ocean because he was swimming naked. All of a sudden there's a line of police heading towards the ocean.

"We just somehow escaped. It was a fiasco, but then these girls screeched up in their car and took us to their house and made love to us."

He's even got a souvenir of the occasion.

"Somebody filmed the whole thing. Twenty years later we got a film of it! It was amazing, just hilarious. Things like that used to happen to me all the time�everyday. Just amazing stories you would never believe."

Things are a little less colorful these days, but Guitarlos is pleased just to be making music. And he's pretty damn prolific, claiming to have written 25 songs the week of our interview�some of which, he says, are uncomfortably revealing.

"Too many of my songs are like little gang members following me around," he explains. "They bug the shit out of me. They scare me to death. They're scary because they're telling things that I don't want to know about myself, telling things about other people, observations I didn't want to make. The songs brought me down for so many years, but now they're just hanging 'round and they're not so troublesome."

Then, he plays me a few more snippets of tunes he's just finished, and it's clear that Guitarlos is pleased with the attention his music has found.

"I've got Marcy, I've got a great band," he says with a veteran's sense of resigned pride. "People are showing up at the gigs.

"I'm not yelling at people any more or picking them up and throwing them. I'm not telling club owners to fuck off. I'm not doing drugs, I'm not drinking� and I'm not a drunken asshole anymore."

He pauses for just a moment, strumming his beloved guitar.

"They usually introduce my songs with, �Here's another true story of my miserable, fucked-up life.'

"But it's not so miserable now."

<< back to the press page

Santa Monica Mirror
July 9-15, 2003

Carlos Guitarlos at The Bigfoot Lodge, 7/16. During the heydey of the LA punk scene in the 80s, The Rhythm Pigs were notorious for raucous beer-soaked shows. You never knew who would show up to squeeze into the packed Cathay De Grande, including Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, members of X, The Blasters, and Van Halen. Carlos Guitarlos and Top Jimmy were front and center, and both have now vaulted into icon status. We�ve lost Top Jimmy (yes, the same one whom Van Halen wrote the song about), but we�ve still got Guitarlos, who recently survived not only the streets of San Francisco (as a street performer) but also a congestive heart failure. His new album �Straight From the Heart� (written from his hospital bed) features guests like Dave Alvin, Mike Watt and John Doe. He recently got an LA Council salute for being one of Los Angeles� �homegrown treasures.�

<< back to the press page