East Los Angeles musician Ruben Guevara celebrates 50-year recording career

He's not a household name, but East L.A. singer/songwriter Ruben Guevara has been a key figure on the southern California music scene for 50 years. He's sung with Frank Zappa, composed film scores, and written about the Doo wop, R&B, and rock created by southern California's Latino musicians. He’s also been an important influence for many of those musicians. And Guevara recently marked his 50th anniversary in the music business with a new CD.

A talent scout spotted Guevara singing at a teen talent show at a Van Nuys coffee shop in and invited him to record at a studio near Sunset and La Brea. There, in 1961, Guevara and car club buddy Pablo Amarillas, as The Apollo Brothers, recorded “My Beloved One,” a standard doo-wop number about teenagers in love and who pledged to remain true to each other.

Guevara was young when he recorded the song but he wasn’t green. He’d played trumpet in junior high school and had traveled for classical music concerts with the California All Youth Symphony. The record “My Beloved One” opened very different doors for him.

"The Wink Martindale Show, he used to do a live broadcast from Pacific Ocean Park, this amusement park in Ocean Park in the 60s. We did a live performance there in front of a live audience, outdoors in bleachers," he said during a recent interview.

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"We played the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium, that was a bigger deal, Paul Anka was the headliner that night, he was like a big star then, 'Diana' was his big hit," Guevara said.

The record got him a lot of local gigs but not enough to drop his job in a machine shop.

Then, in 1965, his mother, a TV and film actress, got him the audition of a lifetime on "Shindig," a youth music show televised nationally and recorded at the ABC studios in Los Feliz. Producers offered him a regular spot on the condition that he use the stage name Jay P. Mobey.

"I didn’t want to give up my name, I’m Guevara. I’m a Guevara. I don’t want to go into an Anglicized name, that’s crazy. But I thought, 'Damn I’m going to be on the show twice a week and it could be the beginning of my career," he said.

Guevara said he learned later the producers had a conflict with singer PJ Probey and retaliated through him. USC music scholar Josh Kun says Guevara's "Shindig" performance was a seminal music moment.

"Here’s somebody who I and others now associate with Mexican-American rock culture, really, totally, organically, seamlessly flowing in an African-American R&B, doo wop zone on national TV," Kun said.

Tina Turner had top billing on that "Shindig" show. Guevara smiles when he remembers her praise of his singing.

"She said, ‘Ruben, how did you learn to sing like that? Where are you from?,'" Guevara said.

He also got to sing the program’s closing musical number with another guest star, Bo Diddley. Guevara shared a dressing room with a man he'd idolized in junior high school.

"He had a little bottle of gin, you know, we were loosening up a little bit. So I said, 'OK Bo we’re going to close the show, right? He says, yeah, we’re going to close it. Alright man, we’re going to close the show. OK Jay, let’s close the show,'" Guevara said.

Guevara let loose and dominated on the closing song, “Can Your Monkey Do the Dog?” The names of the show's performers rolled on the closing credits. "Jay P. Mobey" appeared in place of Ruben Guevara.

What Guevara didn’t know is that the show’s ratings were plummeting. Within months, "Shindig" was off the air, along with his hopes of national stardom. His next job was at the Chicken Delight restaurant on the Sunset Strip.

"I’ll never forget, I was back there battering chicken one time and one of the drivers came in and said, ‘Hey man, hey, hey, you look familiar. Weren’t you on 'Shindig' last month?’ What are you doing here?' [I said] What does it look like? I’m battering chicken, paying the rent," Guevara said.

His agent couldn’t market a Mexican-American who sang R&B like an African-American. Guevara went to college to study film scoring. He worked in experimental theater. He formed a doo-wop revival act with Frank Zappa, and started several rock-soul bands. He's proudest about producing independent label compilations of Chicano and Mexican rock in the 1980s and 1990s.

"In 2008 I decided to get back into music. I’d dropped out for about 30 years. I raised a family. The kids were grown and gone. Marriage had dissolved, too. And so I was hitting 60 and I thought, my God, my life is almost over. What am I going to do now? You know, what’s up?" he said.

That epiphany led to his current album, the "Tao of Funkahuatl," a mixture of the old styles and Buddhist philosophy. Music scholar Kun likes the album’s concept and musicianship.

"I think Ruben is one of these guys who really lives on the, kind of margins of mainstream histories of popular music in the United States. He’s one of hundreds of figures like this, these crucial figures who’ve played important roles in the development of various genres and styles," Kun said.