Album benefits injured bassist
Back in January, Peter Michael Escovedo, his father Pete, sister Sheila E., singer Tony Lindsay and many other good musicians played a benefit at Yoshi’s for Marc van Wageningen, the bassist who’d been struck by a train in front of the Oakland club 10 days earlier, along with drummer David Garibaldi, as they crossed the street to perform with Tower of Power.
At 9 a.m. the next day, all the musicians who’d played the benefit the night before — among them guitarist Ray Obiedo, saxophonists Dave Koz and Marc Russo, and percussionist John Santos — were cutting tracks at Oakland’s 25th Street Recording for “Raise the Marc,” an album set to be released July 14 that raises money for van Wageningen, who’s still recuperating at home in Albany, and his family.
Koz had to catch a plane in 90 minutes, so he, percussionist-producer Escovedo, Obiedo, pianist Peter Horvath and bassist Raymond McKinley immediately cooked up “MarcandDave,” a greasy East Bay number in honor of the grooving duo who survived that freak accident with Amtrak.
“It’s got a little bit of a Tower feel,” says Escovedo, who produced the concert and this VW All-Stars record to aid his badly injured friend, with whom he’s played for 30 years.
“Our kids played together. Marc and his brother Paul (the late drummer) were family,” says Escovedo, on the phone from his Thousand Oaks (Ventura County) home. “When something like this happens, it’s like it happened to a brother. The need was there, so I had to jump on that.”
In addition to a new bossa nova version of “Heaven,” a tune he wrote for a Sheila E. record featuring van Wageningen, Escovedo composed this record’s closer, the gospel-like ballad “Wherever You Go I’ll Go.”
“It speaks about God and the struggles we have at times,” says Escovedo, who included a track on the album that features van Wageningen (“Oakland in Da House,” from an earlier live Sheila E. recording).
The bassist, he reports, is in good spirits and itching to play again. “He’s starting to sit down and hold his bass a little bit. He’s inching his way back to health.”
For more information, go to www.peteescovedo.com.