San Antonio’s prodigal son and cosmic cowboy Garrett T. Capps is well known for proclaiming his love of San Antonio in song. But his new album is his most puro yet.
As a spiritual — if not chronological — followup to his Texas Tornados-influenced anthem “I Like Austin, but I Love San Antone,” Capps’ latest release, I Still Love San Antone, is composed of 15 tracks about San Antonio characters and history, endeavoring to “bottle the 210 both lyrically and sonically.”
Capps plans to celebrate its release with a free “ultra fiesta” at The Lonesome Rose on Saturday, May 9, joined by local Tex-Mex royalty Santiago Jimenez, Jr. and Los Enmascarados, a conjunto band clad in luchador masks.
The album was co-written with and produced by fellow Texas DIY oddball musician Bill Baird (Sound Team, Sunset, Heavy Meddo). Full disclosure: Baird also writes for the Current.
“Bill and I bonded over our underdog mentality about San Antonio,” Capps said. “I was like, ‘We should make the most far-out, extreme San Antonio album of all time.’ We had to do this because no one else would. That was the spirit of the album.”
“Garrett and I are just naturally attracted to the cool stuff — the stuff that doesn’t suck. The real people,” Baird said in a phone interview.
As such, the album is loaded with local luminaries including Joe “King” Carrasco, Santiago Jiménez Jr., Rosie Flores, Butthole Surfers guitarist Paul Leary and late Texas Tornados and Sir Douglas Quintet organist Augie Meyers.
This illustrious gathering is documented on the release’s back cover, a Sgt. Pepper-esque menagerie by Matt Adams. The front is by another San Antonio artist, Angela Fox.
Available now on all streaming platforms, I Still Love San Antone marks Capps’ first release on California label Nudie Records.
Capps’ latest ode to the 2-1-0 presents itself as “offbeat regional storytelling.” The album is laden with local lore that vacillates between inside jokes and something akin to historical preservation.
Nowhere on earth is quite like San Antone, after all.
Around these parts, when there’s talk about “preserving the history,” it usually conjures up the Alamo, Santa Anna, Bowie knives, cannonades, Davy Crockett and the like. But with this album, Baird and Capps focused on another kind of local history that might not end up with plaques and parades.
The release chronicles San Antonio’s freaks, quirks, idiosyncrasies, anecdotes, beauty marks and blemishes. The city’s funky side — often ignored by ivory tower eggheads and amateur historians — is the main character here, thanks to two more certifiable characters in its pantheon of peculiarities, Baird and Capps.
Indeed, much like ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Baird collected field recordings to add local color to the album. Lomax traversed the South to preserve American roots music in amber. Baird held a microphone up at a crosswalk to capture the uncanny valley vocalization “De Zavala” for the song of the same title, which also happens to be the most psychedelic track on what Capps calls “the most psychedelic Tex-Mex album of all time.”
Capps and Little Mazarn multi-instrumentalist Lindsey Verrill, who also contributed as part of the album’s core band, came up with the tune, which started as something of a zen mantra while driving on the suburban boulevard of hypnotically repetitive strip malls and Vietnamese restaurants.
Local touchstones on the album also include Fiesta, H-E-B, Loop 1604, the much-maligned Alamodome, SeaWorld and the Alamo’s perpetual percussionist — the late, great Bongo Joe. But the San Antonio history documented on the album also goes deep, delving into its Indigenous beginnings with the track “Yanaguana.”
The overall effect of the release is something like a block-by-block ode to every inch of San Antonio, as if Willie Nelson took Texas In My Soul and zoomed all the way in to study an ant and a discarded cascarone.
Naturally, the album features a cover of Western Swing king Bob Wills’ “Home in San Antone.” However, Capps’ rendition of the oft-covered Texas Playboys standard lends it a psychedelic reimagining, with Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary on guitar and vocoder. (Leary also mixed the album and produced a couple of the tracks.)
Capps also couldn’t resist tweaking the lyrics slightly to give a nod to the Lonesome Rose, his honky tonk on the St. Mary’s Strip and a modern magnet for San Antonio’s weirdos.
Grammy-winning bluegrass multi-instrumentalist Peter Rowan, who’s played with the likes of Bill Monroe and the Grateful Dead, contributes mandolin on the track “Breakfast Tacos with Satan.”
The song, which also features Augie Meyers in one of his final studio recordings before his passing, depicts a Faustian bargain that’s totally understandable in San Antone alone. Your soul for some breakfast tacos.
Austin tacos? Nah. But San Antonio’s tacos will make you weigh your soul in the balance and at least consider it for un momento.
The album also incorporates a nod to the city’s heavy metal legacy with an interlude of taste-making radio jock Joe Anthony, which Baird describes as “tuning in to the San Antonio frequency.”
Anthony’s interlude segues into the track “¡Viva Metal!” — an ode to San Antonio’s title as the “Heavy Metal Capital of the World.” Hilariously, it’s the least metal song about metal ever made.
However, it also might be the most metal non-metal song ever, thanks to experimental artist Thor Harris (Swans, soundcult). Baird asked the fellow Wizard Rodeo alum to contribute ambient noise to the track but only with objects made out of metal (as in, the alloy).
Will anyone notice this? Who knows. But by all accounts, the album was a blast to make.
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had making a record,” Capps said of I Still Love San Antone. “And anytime I’ve released San Antonio music, it’s taken me to far away places.”
Free, 8 p.m. Saturday, May 9, The Lonesome Rose, 2114 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 455-0233, thelonesomerose.com.
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