During his illustrious music career, San Antonio West Side Sound singer and guitarist Danny Escobedo, better known as Dan Michael, has opened shows for rock ’n’ roll and pop stars including The Rolling Stones, Wayne Newton and Tom Jones.
But those decades of touring and performing on stages under blazing spotlights are long past. These days, Escobedo puts his musical talents on display for a select group: seniors at nursing homes and community centers around San Antonio.
“It’s been an adventure, I’ve enjoyed every moment,” Escobedo said of his performing career. “Now it’s time to give back.”
An extensive songbook
Giving back for Escobedo means gathering his songbook of more than 200 handwritten pages of lyrics to popular songs such as the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her” and “Before The Next Teardrop Falls,” made famous by Freddy Fender. Escobedo sings along in his still resonant baritone voice, with such stylistic grace and suavity that audiences sometimes can’t distinguish between recorded music and his live vocals.
Between those pop songs, he DJs from an extensive playlist of Tejano and regional Mexican hits he knows his audiences at the Normoyle Community Center, St. Paul Community Center, Morningside at The Meadows Health Care and other facilities will clamor for.
“Cielito Lindo,” “Amor Eterno” and “Anhelo” are all on the list, the latter queued up upon the request of Angelita Ramirez, who got up to dance with a gaggle of other seniors at the Normoyle Community Center’s annual holiday party on Dec. 15.
Ramirez requested the ballad of heartfelt longing because her husband now lives in a nursing home and couldn’t be at the party with her. They married when she was 14 and he was 16, and Ramirez will soon turn 86. “Dancing keeps you young,” she said as she swayed to the accordion melody.
She first heard Escobedo perform at Wurzbach Nursing and Rehabilitation, the nursing home where her husband resides. Escobedo “brings so much joy to the people when they have these events,” Ramirez said, holding a hand to her heart.
Taking requests
Escobedo’s willingness to fulfill frequent audience requests is what sets him apart from other DJs, said his wife, Dora Escobedo, stationed next to him at the DJ table studiously noting each selection he plays and sings.
“That’s what they like about him. If he can find it, he’ll play it for them,” she said. His selections are popular enough that people rushed to the table for free copies of compact discs Escobedo offered, collections of his playlists and the songs he frequently reworks and records. Those performances are regularly posted on his “Dan Michael” Facebook page.
The Anglicized name is a relic of his past, when he performed guitar with popular Latin soul band Danny and the Dreamers as a young “Mexican Indian” teenager, drawing scorn and suspicion from white promoters and venue owners during the segregated 1960s.
Danny and the Dreamers scored a hit with “Baby Something’s Wrong,” a ruminative song Escobedo penned in 1964 at age 14, put out as a single by his father Guadalupe Salamon Escobedo on their Dreamer Records label. The song will be released this spring on Pecos Records, a new label dedicated to unearthing and rereleasing San Antonio songs of the West Side Sound days.
Pecos Records founder Rae Cabello said he searched far and wide for an original copy of Escobedo’s hit song and its B side “(I Couldn’t) Come Back To You.” Last year, he finally located a copy of suitable quality for remastering to make the new single.
Though the hardscrabble life of a musician has not necessarily been kind to Escobedo and his colleagues of the 1960s, “Danny has a very fond [view] of music and what it’s done for his life,” Cabello said.
Now at age 73, Escobedo seems content generating moments of happiness for audiences only slightly older than himself.
“At my age, it’s time to give back, and this is part of it right here,” he said, gesturing to the crowd of 200 seniors dancing and singing along to his songs. “I love making them happy. That’s the key.”
