After losing their frontman Raul Malo last December, The Mavericks have found a way to keep the music going with The Mavericks & Friends: The Music Lives On tour. The tour will stop in Houston on Friday, September 18 at the House of Blues Houston.
“It’s been everything that you can imagine,” says longtime guitarist Eddie Perez about the group’s decision to move forward and their latest string of dates together this summer.
He describes a blend of joy and warmth with the ever-present feeling of loss as they recall their friend and bandleader nightly on and offstage. “He’s in everything we do and it’s always going to be that way from here forward. Whatever iteration this band goes through, he is still the driving force behind it.”
Mavericks & Friends sees the band’s longtime members with Perez on guitar, Paul Deakin on drums, Jerry Dale McFadden on keyboard and returning co-founding member Robert Reynolds on bass and guitar. The band also features their signature horn and accordion section with Percy Cardona and Max Abrams.
The band added longtime friends and collaborators James Otto and Emily West on vocals with Perez describing how both approached the band to help them figure out how to move forward following the tragedy of Malo’s passing.
“It’s been a lot of things but above all, it’s starting to feel like now it’s been a very healing and cathartic experience, not only for us but I feel like for the fans too. Our fan base has always been very dedicated and involved and over the years I think that we’ve had a habit of being very accessible to our fans. People have a sense that they really know us quite well and I would say that’s pretty accurate so everybody’s felt everything that we are all feeling too.”
The group’s decision to move forward began as a discussion including Malo himself. Perez remembers sitting with his friend a couple of months before he passed as Malo suggested ways to keep the band going by releasing unreleased projects.
He chuckles remembering how Malo told him that how the band decided to continue was up to them now and wished them luck. “Typical Raul,” laughs Perez. “Some of us in the band were skeptical of how to do it. How do you change your mindset of playing this music and doing it a certain way and all of a sudden that’s not there anymore?”
It was their annual two-night run at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville that really cemented the band’s desire and mission to keep going.
“We had a ton of friends join us onstage to lend their voices in tribute to Raul, not only Raul but to the mighty work this band created together and so it was through the success of that and camaraderie and beautiful outpouring of support from those two shows that we decided that if we can wrap our minds this whole thing in a different way, we could do this.”
Perez and the band knew the new direction of The Mavericks could never be to replace Malo but rather to celebrate and honor his talent and life’s work. “That would be the biggest compliment to his life and quite honestly in doing that, his spirit is on stage with us even now. There’s no escaping that and it feels good to know that and to me that’s a very comforting feeling.”
Malo was a force on stage, not only with his unmistakable voice but as a bandleader, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. His ability to blend genres and always add an unexpected touch of Latin flair and joy to his songs is what made The Mavericks an impossible to categorize phenomenon.
“Let’s just face it, in my lifetime I don’t think I’ll ever play with anybody that was as musically gifted as he was,” says Perez. “I tell people all the time, to us he was our Freddie Mercury so to lose that it’s absolutely devastating on many levels.”
Perez and Malo met in the late ’90s when Perez was playing regularly with James Intveld and heavily involved in the rockabilly scene of his native California. Perez was on a stop in Nashville and was invited to watch The Mavericks do their soundcheck.
“As soon as we met we started talking and instantly bonded,” says Perez. “Sometimes when you meet people, you skip the getting-acquainted phase and it’s almost like you know each other and it was instantly like that for me and him. We became friends.”
About five years later, Perez moved to Nashville to play with country singer Gary Allan and reconnected with Malo. “In those days we were going downtown having fun, going to the clubs, listening to music, just hanging out. Eventually he asked me if I’d be interested in doing some solo dates with him right about the time they were thinking about getting The Mavericks together again in 2003.”
Perez says two weeks later they were making a record together and then just two months later, they went on tour cementing their professional and creative partnership. Perez describes how Malo’s pride in his Cuban heritage helped him to feel prouder as well.
“I felt like my meeting him helped me to move past all those stereotypes that my generation had placed upon me. Experiencing racism in southern California, that’s a very real thing and I always thought that my ethnicity would keep me on the outside of opportunity but when I met Raul he totally changed everything for me in terms of how I see myself. I realized that the thing that I thought was going to keep me outside of it was the very thing that helped me stand out. It’s the very thing that helped me to be in a band like The Mavericks.”
Being a large band that does not fit neatly in a box was always a blessing and curse, something Malo admitted himself in previous interviews, but the strength of their diversity is what has made their impact even stronger.
“When people used to ask me in interviews how would you categorize the band, I stopped using all of those genre monikers,’ says Perez. “If anything, we make joyous music. That’s what we do and that’s why people come to see us because what we do together collectively as a band, that’s a lot of beautiful love and joyous energy that comes from every single one of us on stage. I think that’s palpable and that’s the magic that Raul helped spearhead and we continue that.”
The Mavericks & Friends will perform on Friday, September 18 at 7 p.m. at House of Blues Houston, 1204 Caroline. For more information, visit themavericksband.com. $54-97.
