©
Canned Heat's Story
Of Music, Drugs, Death, Sex and Survival
by
Fito de la Parra
with
T.W. and Marlane McGarry
LIVING THE BLUES
Canned Heat's Story of Music, Drugs, Death, Sex, and Survival
by Fito de la Parra
with T.W. & Marlene McGarry
CANNED HEAT MUSIC
www.facebook.com/CannedHeatOfficial
Copyright 2011 by Adolfo de la Parra
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0332-8
Third Edition. All Rights Reserved.
Except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in an Information retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, internet, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Fillmore Posters: Copyright © 2000 BGP
Steve LaVere's Photographs: Copyright ©1968, 2010 Delta Haze Corporation (unless otherwise noted)
Cover Photography Concept and cover photo by Walter de Paduwa AKA "Dr. Boogie"
Editing and Investigative Research by Brett G. Lemke
Layout, Book and Cover Production by Rooks Tower LLC (www.rookstower.com)
DEDICATION
Dedicated to my son, the loyal fans of Canned Heat,
the young, struggling musicians of the 21st Century,
and with grateful remembrance to
The Owl, The Bear and
The Sunflower
Christians by the grace of God
Gentlemen thanks to our Spanish descent
Noble lords from our Indian ancestry
Mexican by pride and tradition
And American by destiny
...Thus we are The Mexican-Americans
PREFACE
Afraid to admit you do remember the '60's? Or sorry you were born too late to have been there?
If you were part of the kaleidoscopic hippie days, here's everything you hoped your kids would never find out. If you weren't, here's everything your parents will never admit.
This Is the true story of Adolfo "Fito" de la Parra, a kid from Mexico City who fought his way into the ranks of top American rock and rollers and barely escaped with his life.
Enter his mind-boggling journey of four decades on the road with boogie-blues music legends Canned Heat, a saga of hit records, world tours, drugs, sex, outrageous behavior, and death.
If you were to meet Fito, a man of infinite charm, In a European hotel bar or some backwoods American bikers hangout - and that could happen if you get lucky - he might buy you a drink, light up a smoke and tell you how it happened. Through it all, he remembers everything, and the riveting tales flow smoothly. This book is a chance to do that, to sit down with Fito and a beer and listen to how it really was.
It is a story of survival through perseverance as the band reaches the heights of fame in the Woodstock era, and then plunges into decades of death and disaster.
An Intense, talented kid, his energy and disciplined determination brought hometown stardom as he grew up in the weirdly wonderful world of Mexico City rock 'n Roll. But Fito - one of the handful of top-flight rockers with a college degree - dreamed of making it big in the United States, in the homeland of the blues and rock music.
After a brutal apprenticeship In the honky-tonks of Tijuana, he actually smuggles a band of eager Mexican Teenagers over the border illegally and delights crowds at a chic Hollywood nightclub, but is caught by the Border Patrol and deported.
Making his way back, his dreams come true, his dreams come true when he signs on as drummer for Canned Heat, an L.A. band just about to explode out of Topanga Canyon onto stages all over the world.
But Canned Heat, which sold millions of records, was as cursed by bad luck and its own self-destructive manias as it was blessed with musical genius.
Committed from birth to a wildly chaotic lifestyle, Canned Heat took pride in its reputation as the outlaws of the rock world, the hardest living of them all.
Fito's tale Is also the story of the band's founders. Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson was one of the strangest characters in the history of rock 'n roll, a brilliant nerd, a sensitive genius obsessed with the fate of the earth and obscure recordings by brilliant black bluesmen of the 1930's and 1940's.
Pimply, smelly, forgetful, unfashionably dressed with broken Coke-bottle-lens glasses taped to his nose, he was obsessed with botany and the environment, convinced that and was destroying the earth. He slept outdoors whenever possible, curled up in the weeds outside motels on tour, boiling rice in a pot like a hobo while the others in the band groped groupies in luxury suites.
He was surely one of the few rock stars with a problem getting women. He wrote songs about that, but mostly he wrote about death, about going away ("On The Road Again," "Goin' Up The Country"). Even as the doors of wealth and fame opened to the band members, they spent much of their energy trying to keep him from killing himself.
Bob Hite, the other co-founder and lead singer, was Wilson's polar opposite, a Falstaffian giant of unbounded appetites who everyone called "the Bear." He would eat, drink, screw, play, sing, snort, or shoot anything.
He was in the music business so he could party for a living. He enjoyed getting people boogieing so much that he sang for hours, sometimes until most of the audience left out of sheer fatigue and he passed out on the floor.
Several of Canned Heat's best-known songs ("My Crime," "Highway 409") chronicle the band's own arrests or flights from the law. Rights to their hit records are sold for a pittance to provide bail money for the guys after an arrest. They are reduced to playing in cut-and-shoot backwoods biker bars in the 1980's.
Canned Heat blows one comeback attempt after another, descending into poverty.
The band becomes a front for criminal enterprises from dope smuggling to armed robbery, falling in with remnants of the Manson Family. A hells angel runs It for some years, making one of the first rock videos with outlaw motorcyclists writing and producing.
As the years pass, Fito comes into his own, assuming command and clawing his way back to where the band Is again putting out CDs regularly, touring Europe several times a year and again playing prestigious venues, both for devoted middle-aged