To celebrate its Golden Jubilee, Tower of Power, America’s preeminent soul-funk-R&B horn band for half a century, held a gala in June 2018 on their home turf of Oakland, California. Billed as 50 Years of Funk & Soul: Live at the Fox Theater, the concert had the current incarnation of the band, featuring alumni guests,
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Emilio Castillo (Photo: Courtesy the artist)[/caption]
JAZZIZ: I'm an old fan of yours. I'll tell you how old I am. I first saw you at the Milwaukee Auditorium opening for Santana in 1971.
Emilio Castillo: Ooh, I remember that gig real clearly! That's where he met this lady named Benedetta. Her father was like a mafia guy in Milwaukee. Boy, he was serious.
The Milwaukee Auditorium was the same place where the year before I saw Jimi Hendrix on May 1, 1970. And I know you guys opened for Jimi on May 30, 1970, in Berkeley, right?
Yeah, it was at the Berkeley Community Theater. He made us open in front of the curtains with the lights on as the people were walking in. Yeah, he wasn't too gracious to Tower of Power.
I think the first time I saw you in Milwaukee, Rufus Miller was your lead singer.
I'm not sure that he did that tour with Santana. It might’ve been Rick Stevens [an early ToP lead singer who was later convicted of killing three men in a drug-addicted haze and served 36 years in prison]. When we toured with Santana, I remember we were with this cocaine dealer/manager. And we got with that guy because of Rick Stevens. There were a lot of cocaine dealer/managers back then.
And we're still here, you and I.
And lived to tell about it.
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Members of Tower of Power, circa 1975[/caption]
That concert you did at the Fox Theater in 2018 celebrated 50 years for the band. That’s incredible longevity. And you and drummer Dave Garibaldi and bari saxophonist Stephen “Doc” Kupka are all charter members of the band.
It’s amazing. We can’t even believe it, man. Don’t ask me, “Did you have any idea when you started the band that it would last this long?” When I started the band, I was 17 years old and had very limited vision. My idols were a local band called The Spyders. They were the most soulful in the East Bay and I wanted to be like them. They got a gig in Sacramento at a topless bar, and I thought, “Man, if I could just get to Sacramento, I will have made it,” You know? That was my vision at the time.
That’s the heights, man, playing in a titty bar in Sacramento.
You dig?
You play so many of your hits in that 50th-anniversary concert, but one of the pieces that seems so autobiographical is “Diggin’ on James Brown,” where you handle lead vehicles and tell the story about how affected you were by James Brown as a kid and how what he means to you. You sing: The more things change/the more they stay the same/It may be a different age/But I’m on the same page/‘Cause one thing that I’ve found/I’ll still be diggin’ on James Brown. And then you go through a medley of his “It’s a New Day/Mother Popcorn/I Got the Feeling.” He must have been a profound influence on you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwpp2hjD0dM
Of course. Well, he was an influence on pretty much everybody. But for Tower of Power his influence was humungous. Rhythmically and from an entertainment aspect, the live show, how he just murdered the crowd and just wrung them out like a rag, we wanted all that stuff in our our show. And we were fortunate. We we opened for him maybe 10 times over the years.
And you also do that great segue from “What Is Hip?” into a jam on James’ “Soul Power.”
Yeah, that was something that just sort of morphed in it one night. We were extending the ride out and had gone on this solo for a while and all of a sudden we find ourselves doing “Soul Power.” We got off stage and said, “That was cool. Let’s keep doing that!”
While you are so identified with Oakland, you actually grew up in Detroit.
Yeah, I lived there until I was 11 and then my dad moved to the Bay Area. We all went out there. I still have a lot of relatives in Detroit. I love going back there.
Just think what would’ve happened if you had stayed in Detroit. Maybe you would’ve gone into more of a Motown vein.
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. But there’s just something about the Bay Area, man. You know, I was put there at the right time because the whole music industry was looking at the Bay Area right then because of the Fillmore and Bill Graham and all that stuff. We were lucky. We got signed by Bill and came up at the Fillmore West. It was a great time to be in the Bay.
Is there any characteristic about the East Bay that makes it unique from the rest of the Bay Area?
East Bay, and Oakland in particular, is very much like Detroit. Growing up in Detroit as a kid, my dad was a bartender and it was an urban city. And although San Francisco also is a very urban city, because of the whole hippie thing and the flower children and the psychedelic music thing the mindset over in Oakland and the East Bay — Hayward, San Leandro, Fremont, Richmond Vallejo, all those cities — it was very blue-collar and very much into soul music then. Sly Stone was a deejay on radio station KSOL. This is before he ever had his band or even made a record. And everybody listened to him. He was very popular, very funny and he did all this weird stuff. And then he went to KDIA, the other soul station in the Bay Area. So it was all about soul music there. And at a young age, I saw this group The Spyders. And after seeing them, that’s all I wanted to do was play soul music.
Tell me about your early bands before you actually formed Tower of Power. There was one called The Gotham City Crime Fighters.
Yeah, we were just a bunch of kids. Our first band was The Roadrunners. We didn’t even know how to play then but pretty soon my dad had gotten us teachers and we were starting to learn how to be a band. Then we named ourselves The Extension Five. And there was this place we played, it was actually a topless bar in Sunnyvale that had teen club dances on Sunday afternoons. We wanted to get in there so we went down there and auditioned. And this was right when the Batman TV show came out with Adam West. It was hyped as the biggest thing happening and it was very exciting. Superman had been gone off the air for a long time [the original Superman TV show with George Reeves ended in 1958] and here comes this new show in color, Batman. And we were all like, “This is going to be so cool.”
It turned out to be kind of hokey once it finally came. But before it actually aired, it was a big deal. So we’re auditioning to get a spot on the Sunday afternoon teen dances and there was these two shucksters there, Sidney Dobbs and Jerry Ralston, who went to my mother, who was our manager time, and they said, “We have an idea.” And, you know, back then the bands used to wear outfits, like Paul Revere and the Raiders. We had our own Paul Revere & the Raiders in the Bay Area called William Penn & his Pals. We had another group called Peter Wheat and the Breadmen out of Fremont. They all wore aprons and had chefs' hats on. And there was also The Dutch Masters. They’d dress like those guys on the old cigar box [which was patterned after a Rembrandt painting].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZMlHNhTHk4
And so these two guys said, “You guys are going to be Batman & The Robins,” and my mother's like, “Yeah, great idea. We’ll do it.” And they immediately sent a letter to the Batman TV show saying: “Excited about the new show about to air. You must have the premier rock band in the world, Batman & The Robins, appear on the show.” And they promptly sent a letter back saying” “Cease and desist or we will sue you for everything you've got.” These guys didn’t miss a beat. I mean, within three seconds of receiving that cease and desist letter, they went, “Fine, you’ll be the Gotham City Crime Fighters. They can’t sue us for that.” And they advertised us as having this $15,000 light show. Mind you, this is 1965, early '66. That was a lot of money then. But really all it was, we made these boxes out of wood, we put perforated plastic glass in front and Christmas lights inside and it looked pretty neat. We put one in front of the organ and one by the guitar. This was no $15,000 light show but they hyped it that way on the radio. And our very first gig sold out. And it was like that for about six months. We played all the venues in the Bay Area and were number one. We even recorded a single [“Who Stole the Batmobile?”]. And then the Batman show tanked and we tanked and we changed our name. And that was it.
So did that band morph into The Motowns?
No, I had a little interim period where I had a band with my brother Jack, who was a drummer. We were called The Black Orpheus. And at some point we were like, “I don't know if this name is working.” So my mother suggested, “If you’re gonna play soul music and you’re both from Detroit, you should call your band The Motowns.” And so that’s what we became. And that’s what we were when I met Doc and gave him an audition.
And you were still like teenagers at that point?
Yeah, when I heard Doc I was 17. Doc was the first hippie that we had ever met and he came in and we all started growing our hair long and dressing like the hippie thing. We were still playing soul music but we wanted to get into the Fillmore West because everybody was trying to get in there. There was a band called Cold Blood and they put out a record on Bill Graham’s new label, San Francisco Records. And we wanted to get signed to that label, so we submitted tapes and we got on one of the Tuesday night auditions that they had at the Fillmore.
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Tower of Power founding member and baritone saxophonist Doc Kupka (Photo: Courtesy the artist)[/caption]
By the time we auditioned, we had gotten busted for being underage. They caught us drinking at 6:00 in the morning at the after-hours show we played at. And they sent out a letter that if any of these places hired us again they were going to lose their liquor license. So we had no gigs. And all the other high schools didn’t want to hire us for dances because we had been playing clubs for so long that they didn’t know who we were. And so we hadn’t worked for a while.
So we did the audition in November and by then we were at our wit's end and I told the band, “I’m flying to Detroit to go see my folks for the holidays. And unless something happens from the audition, I’m not coming back.” And I didn’t expect anything to happen. So I went to Detroit and after a few days Doc called and said, “You gotta come back here. He dug it!” And I go, “Who dug it?” And he goes, “Bill Graham! He wants to sign us!” And I remember I had this Vox organ that I hated playing by that point because I was so used to the Hammond B3 organ at the nightclub. And so I told Doc, “Take the Vox organ and hock it, and send me a plane ticket.” And I flew back out and the next thing I know we were signed to San Francisco Records and did East Bay Grease.
Was Garibaldi in that band then?
Yeah. What happened was, after we got signed, the producer didn’t like the way my brother played drums. And there was a lot of infighting going on in the band about it. Some of the guys were afraid that we were going to lose the contract because of my brother and the guitar player, Jody Lopez. And so I told them, “Listen, I’ll take my brother and Rocco and myself and Jody and I’ll start a new band. You guys can have the contract.” But then my brother came to me and said, “I don’t think you should leave the band. They’re like a chicken with their head cut off without you there. It’s a great opportunity and I think mom and dad need one of us to go back there. So I’m going to go back to Detroit. You stay out here and lead the band. Just fire those two guys that were making it hard for me.” And so I told the band I was staying and that we’re getting Dave Garibaldi and Willy Porter in the band. I had heard him subbing at this place in Jack London Square in downtown Oakland called the On Broadway and recommended him. And as soon as the rest of the guys heard Garibaldi and Willy play together , there was no question from anyone that they were going to be in the band.
Garibaldi is really coming out of that James Brown/Clyde Stubblefield feel. But he put a whole new spin on it that maybe helped define that Oakland sound.
Yeah, he had a unique way of cutting up the beat. When my brother was the drummer he didn’t have the technical facility that Dave had. But he grooved and he did whatever I told him, basically. I was always making up weird beats. I didn’t like to do stuff all the other bands were doing so I would change the beat around, change the horn section, change the background singing. That’s why Doc came to me originally and said, “What you’re doing with these cover songs is so great, why are we doing this to other people’s songs? Why don’t we write our own songs?” And that’s how we started writing. I hadn’t even thought of that. I was happy doing what I was doing. But I was always changing beats around and making these little sort of percolator beats and teaching them to my brother and then making up basslines for Rocco and showing Jody on guitar how to play in and out of the bass line and the drum part. And when Garibaldi came into the group, I was like the first guy he met who said, “Yeah, let’s change it up.” He was into doing that and he could take it to a whole other level. And the two of us just fed off of each other. So that took that whole James Brown groove thing to new heights, where we just started really messing with the groove and these weird basslines that were just really syncopated.
Who came up with the name Tower of Power?
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Tower of Power's debut album, East Bay Grease, released in 1970[/caption]
It’s kind of a weird story. We were doing a little bit of recording at this studio in Hayward, California, called Bay Town Records. We were on a break and I was in the guy’s office, the owner of the studio, and there was like a three- or four-page list of all these weird names for psychedelic bands, like Frumious Bandersnatch, Lothar and the Hand People and Strawberry Alarm Clock...all those weird names that were coming out at the time. And I’m reading through the list because we’re looking for a name like that so we can get into the Fillmore, because we know that we’re never getting in with a name like The Motowns. So I’m looking through the list and I saw the name Tower of Power, and I went out to the guys, “Hey, what about Tower of Power?” And they went, “Yeah, that describes us.” And that was it. We chose that name.
Over 50 years there’s been a lot of personnel changes in Tower of Power. It must have been a struggle to hold it together all these years.
I mean, we’ve had our share. You know, my dad was always a big influence on me. He’s actually the one that made me become a bandleader. My brother was ten months older than me so, of course, he was the bandleader. We started the band together, he’s the older brother, he’s the bandleader, right?. But my dad came to me after about six months of playing together because he recognized the fact that I was the one that was more musically inclined. And he said, “You have to be the leader.” And I was like, “What? I don’t want to be the leader. Jack’s the leader.”
He’s like, “No, you need to be the leader. You’re the one that’s telling them all what to play and how to make it sound good.” And so he made me be the bandleader. And I started watching the way he was treated at his work. I would go to see him at work and people would say, “Oh, you Mr. C’s son? Oh man, he’s the coolest!” His employees always revered him. And I guess what I learned from him is that you want to make your people want to do good for you. So I took that to heart. In the case of any disputes in the band, I would hear everybody’s side and I’d just kind of be the one that resolves the issue. I was the filter and the intervener. But we definitely had our share of hard times and a lot of squabbling and drug problems and alcohol problems. I got sober in ’88, Doc got sober in ’89 and things took off from there. We were kind of destroying our career for a while, but God had a bigger plan than we did.
And now you’ve got the struggle of this pandemic. I’m sure you had to cancel whole tours.
We lost tons of gigs. We normally tour 200 days a year but last year we had one gig since March. We did one of those drive-in gigs in Ventura in September. We did two shows, us and Los Lobos. And we sold out both shows. In fact, the guy booked two more gigs immediately in Phoenix and at the Del Mar Fairgrounds just above San Diego. And three days before the gigs he canceled them.
Now when we get together and do our Zoom meetings with our new manager, the first thing he says is, “I need you guys to know something: You’re booked. As soon as this thing lifts, you have gigs. And all the gigs that were canceled, they’re all being re-booked. You’re booked solid all over the world. So just know that. Any sort of gigging that starts happening, you’re hitting it hard.”
Well, hopefully by the summer you’ll be back on track.
Yeah, I'm thinking probably more like Fall.
Hope to see you out there at some point down the road.
Thanks, I can’t wait.