Larry Schwartz
DON’T talk to Jose Feliciano about his heyday. At least, not if you’re thinking about past glories.
More than three decades have passed since he hit the top of the charts with a slow and jazzy version of The Doors’ Light My Fire and went on to break attendance records at concerts. But while he may not be a household name these days, he’ll tell you the spark still flares.
“Well, every day that I can go onstage and perform is a heyday for me,” says the Puerto Rican-born entertainer who notes that his latest album, Senor Bolero, was a “tremendous smash” in the Latin market and was nominated for a Grammy in 1998. “I’m still selling quite a few records.”
In 1968, the year he hit the big time with Fire, he also enjoyed big hits in Latin America with La Copa Rota and Amor Gitana. He still plays to two distinct markets.
“Well, for me it’s always been that way because of the fact that the music is different,” he says. ” “I’ve always felt that when you’re doing a Latin album, it’s a Latin album and when you’re doing an English album, its an English album. A lot of Latin artists, if they do an English album, they’ll
translate it into Spanish or vice versa. I’ve never done that.”
Feliciano has high hopes for a forthcoming English-language release, Renaissance Man, due out in June. He attributes his endurance in a fickle industry to a willingness to extend his range. The 54-year-old acoustic guitar dazzler, who plays in Melbourne this week (he’s been here so often
he’s lost count) rates Savage Garden and `N Sync among his current favorites.
“I made it a point to listen to all kinds of music,” he says.”I always felt, for example, that certain artists died out too early in their careers and the reason was they didn’t go beyond their scope.”
The second of eight boys, Feliciano was born in Larez, Puerto Rico. “Dad worked on a farm,” he says. “He used to farm coffee, oranges, bananas. Mainly fruit and vegetables.” The family migrated to the US when he was just five.
Feliciano is a victim of congenital glaucoma and has been blind since birth. He dismisses the popular misconception that blindness necessarily enhances musical ability.
“I do think that in certain respects maybe it helps in so far as concentration. I think, for example, people who are sighted and might want to get into music but also like sports then get confused and do not concentrate on something that they’re really good at and thus wind up doing nothing.”
Feliciano had no such difficulty in finding his focus. Within a year of arriving in America, he was learning to play the concertina. At nine, he performed live for the first time, at New York’s El Teatro Puerto Rico. “My mother put me in a talent contest,” he recalls. “The prize was performance
at that theatre.”
Though he’s played other instruments including the ukelele over the years, it was the guitar that finally captivated Feliciano. “I always loved the sound of the guitar,” he says. “At the age of nine, a friend of mine got me my first guitar. I began practising. I would say by the age of 14 or 15 years
old, I was playing as good as any 30 year-old.”
Still at high school, he’d do the rounds of coffeehouses, guitar in a brown paper bag, volunteering to play. He cites Sam Cooke and Ray Charles as early influences. “I think the African-American performers, really. The great singers, like Otis Redding and people like that. And of course, in the
’50s I used to listen to people like Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, Elvis Presley.”
But it was as part of the emerging folk scene in and around Greenwich Village that he first came to the attention of the likes of New York Times critic Robert Shelton, who had “discovered” Bob Dylan a few years earlier. Seeing Feliciano live, Shelton hailed the arrival of “a ten-fingered wizard
who romps, runs, rolls, picks and reverberates his six strings in an incomparable fashion”.
“It was a good time,” Feliciano recalls. “It was a time when we thought we could do things to help the world. The civil rights movement was very big in America then and I was a part of that because I believe in equality for all. I always have.
“And the people that I was involved with – Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, all of those people, Peter, Paul and Mary – we all had the same beliefs. So it was a great time.”
RCA Victor released his first solo album in 1965. He never did get to meet Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison, who died in Paris in July, 1971. But he says others in the band have indicated their approval for his slower Light My Fire, complete with flute, congas and strings.
“I think that I standardised it for them,” he says. “Making it into a standard, which I don’t know if it would have been with their version.”
In hindsight, it’s hard to believe the fuss in the US after his controversial late 1960s bluesy performance of Star-Spangled Banner before a crowd of 53,000 spectators at the World Series in Detroit – particularly in view of what Jimi Hendrix made of
it at Woodstock the following year. But there was indeed an outcry.
“Well, it was so silly,” Feliciano says. “But in 1968 it was a big thing. I sang the national anthem with feeling and because of that people misunderstood and we were banned from radio for a while.”
Feliciano went on to write and record the title song for the popular television series, Chico And The Man. He has remained prominent in the Latin pop scene. We’ve caught glimpses of him, as in the Coen brothers 1996 film Fargo. “I played myself,” he says, “and I did a song called Let’s Find
Each Other Tonight. That was the extent of it.”
A steady demand for his work over the years has so far yielded 40 gold and platinum albums. So don’t say he’s back. Jose Feliciano never really went away.
The Sunday Age, 20th of February 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 