Some of those nights, we were playing at a high level, and gave him a good run for his money. When we were new, Carlos really dug the band, and he used to take us on tour – even when people around the nation didn’t know us. “We’ve known him for years, back to when he was hired to play in Carlos Santana’s band as an extra guitarist. He credits their involvement to an old friend, Journey guitarist Neal Schon. In 2014, Tower of Power will be on the road – a lot – as a result of their tour with Journey and the Steve Miller Band. What’s it like to see yourself on TV? Again, it never gets old.” People ask what it feels like to hear your song on the radio. Musicians are some of the most self-centered people in the world. Every time we go to play, we’re playing music we love because we got to make it our way” The thrill of stepping on stage has never gone away, because as Castillo says, he loves the attention. We stay true to that, and that makes it easy to go to work on a daily basis. We noticed years ago that when we did that, the fans liked it. We’re not a smooth jazz band, or a retro band.we don’t follow trends, we just make our music exactly the way we want it to be. Castillo says their love of the stage is the same today as it was back in 1968. Bump City, their 1972 debut for the label, was a hit on both the Billboard 200 and the chart’s R&B Albums chart, and netted them the hits “You’re Still A Young Man” and “Down To The Nightclub.” The decade of the 1970s were a boom period for the group, who hit with radio classics like “So Very Hard To Go” and “What Is Hip?” and the band has continued to tour and record over the years with their latest project Hipper Than Hip being a live flash back to their 1974 tour. Their first record, East Bay Grease, helped to define the East Bay sound, and did well enough to warrant a recording contract with Warner Brothers. The collective ear of the Bay Area was ready for something soulful. Bands like Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead had been happening for about three years. Everyone had grown out of the whole psychedelic thing. He dug it.” I said ‘Who dug it?” He said ‘Bill Graham.’ As it turned out, Bill and David Rubinson – the producer for his new label, San Francisco Records - liked the band because we were soulful. “A couple of days later, Doc called me, and said ‘You’ve gotta come back. I told the guys that I was going to Detroit for the holidays to see my parents, and if nothing happened with this audition, I wasn’t coming back.”įortunately, he did have to make a return trip to the Bay Area. By the time November came around, we were at the end of our rope. We wrote the songs for the East Bay Grease record, and we practiced them every day. I was broke and hungry, and all I did was rehearse. My parents had moved to Detroit and I was on my own for the first time. We found ourselves with no work and no money. One night, the ABC came in, and caught the trumpet player drinking a screwdriver, and the next thing we knew, they put a notice out to all the clubs in the Bay Area that if they hired us again, they would lose their liquor license. We had been playing underage in nightclubs for years. “At the time, we had been playing nightclubs, and we had gotten busted for being underage. The gig at the Fillmore was a major goal for the band, which incidentally came along at just the right time. Our first song was ‘You’re Still A Young Man.” Doc then suggested to me that we should start writing our own songs. We grew our hair long, and started to be hippies, and changed our name. “We wanted to get into the Fillmore Auditorium and with a name like the Motowns, dressed in suits with razor cuts, we knew we’d never get in there. He came in the band, and we eventually changed our name to the Tower of Power.” The reason for the band name change was that they had a specific goal in mind. I met Doc Kupka at the Alameda County Fair over the Fourth of July weekend back in 1968, and gave him an audition. Rocco Prestia was the bass player, I was in there, and my brother was the drummer. “We were a Soul band called The Motowns.” he recalls. But, as group co-founder Emilio Castillo says, they could have had a much different name. "White Lightning", which later became a featured cut on Angel's third album, is included here with different lyrics and is interesting for its historical value.For well close to five decades, Tower of Power has delivered the best in Rhythm and Blues music. The album is an interesting affair blending hard rock and the standard boogie band approach with varied results. In 1976, however, when lead guitarist Punky Meadows and bassist Mickie Jones had success with their band Angel, Capitol tried to cash in and finally released We Come to Play. The album was originally recorded in 1973 but Capitol decided not to release it. We Come to Play was the first and only album released by BUX in 1976.
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