Texas Troubadour Mines Glam-Punk Past

On April 14th, singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo was driving with his wife, Kim, from their home in Austin to a Bruce Springsteen show in Houston when he got a text message: "Bruce wants to do 'Always a Friend' tonight. Can you be here in 45 minutes for soundcheck?" Escovedo thought he was just going to see the gig and have a meal with his new managers, Springsteen's longtime team, Jon Landau and Barbara Carr. "We're late, of course," Escovedo recalls with a soft laugh. "We're still two hours away."

But that night, after a fast backstage run-through, Escovedo came out for the encore, singing the opening track on his new album, Real Animal, "with this phenomenal band in front of 18,000 people in my home state," he says in a still-awed sigh a few weeks later in a New York restaurant. "Those four minutes were probably more important than all the years."

Escovedo, 57, is referring to his three decades on the eternal-struggle margins of rock stardom: playing guitar in revered cult band the Nuns (San Francisco punks who opened for the Sex Pistols in 1978), alt-country pioneers Rank and File, and Austin twang army the True Believers; touring bars, riding in vans and writing sharp, poignant songs about the price of that life on albums like 1992's Gravity and 1998's aptly titled More Miles Than Money. "But I couldn't have gotten to that moment," he says of that night with Springsteen, "without those years."

Real Animal is poised to be Escovedo's most successful album. It hit Billboard's album chart in its first week out, just shy of the Top 100 (a personal best), and in June, Escovedo and his great band — guitarist David Pulkingham, bassist Josh Gravelin, longtime drummer Hector Muñoz, cellist Brian Standefer and violinist Susan Voelz — played to some of their biggest crowds ever, opening for the Dave Matthews Band.

Real Animal is also the best album Escovedo has ever made. He returns to his favorite subject — playing music not just for a living or the perks (sex, drugs, applause) but because you can't and won't do anything else — in 13 songs of garage-rock surge and acoustic swoon, co-written with his friend, guitarist Chuck Prophet, and produced by Tony Visconti, who worked on Escovedo's favorite Seventies records by David Bowie and T. Rex's Marc Bolan. This time, Escovedo names names, citing real people and wild times from his rock odyssey in "Nuns Song," "Chip N' Tony" (named after his bandmates in Rank and File) and "Real as an Animal," a flashback to great Seventies shows he saw by Iggy Pop and the Stooges.