El Parche's Return

Moments later, Jordan is back to telling funny stories about the early years on the road. If you're going to keep up with Steve Jordan, you can't dwell on anything he says or does. "I remember the first time I ever heard of acid, LSD. It was 1964, bro, and the stuff was legal," he says. "We had just finished playing--it was somewhere in California--and some dude asks the band if we want to do some acid. I said, 'Sure, I'll try anything,' and started rolling up my sleeve. But the dude said, 'You don't shoot it, you eat it.'" Jordan goes on to describe LSD hallucinations so horrifying that he says he swore off acid forever. "At one point, I asked my bass player, 'What's that funny-looking thing? What does it do?' and he said, 'That's your accordion, man.' That was it for me. When I couldn't recognize my accordion, that was way too fucked up."

These days, however, Jordan is more like Brian Wilson during his obsessive Smile days. During the past eight years, when he snipped his barfly wings and evolved into a studio parrot, Jordan has recorded more than 100 new tracks, stuff he says is 20 years ahead of its time. It's a heavily layered sound, with Jordan running his guitar notes through a pair of Roland synthesizers to create everything from cellos and violins to otherworldly horn sections. The music of Jordan's mind is full and offbeat. But despite its inherent trippiness, there's an unmistakable melodic thrust to the new material, which sounds like '60s soul one minute and a loco polka the next. "I've always been way ahead of everybody else, but this stuff is in a whole other galaxy, man." He doesn't trust a record company to put it out, just as he doesn't let managers, booking agents or anybody else in the music industry touch his art. He hasn't released a new album in 12 years.

"The big man upstairs is teaching me patience," Jordan says. "That's something I've never had before. Maybe the plan now is for me to lay low and let everybody else catch up a little. But I tell ya, I'm not slowing down, bro. I still kick ass every day."

Jordan gave up the bottle after he fell during his 53rd birthday party and broke his arm. When he turned 54, his friends chipped in and surprised him with a $2,000 synthesizer he'd been pining for. "They were gonna sign for it, and I was going to make the payments," Jordan says, "but then at the store they had a little meeting and decided against it. I was hurt, man. I had no idea that they had planned to surprise me with it a few days later." He gives five to Efraim Palacios, the head chipper-in who has stopped by to tell Jordan about a possible gig in Saginaw, Michigan, a city with a huge population of homesick Mexican and Texan migrant workers. Palacios, who sells business communication systems during the day and drops in on Jordan at night, is more a responsible friend than manager. "We created a monster," the preppily dressed Palacios says of the synthesizer that led to Jordan's single-minded compulsion to record. "I don't listen to anybody else," he says. "I don't listen to the radio. It's all crap, man." In the background is a Christmas song that Jordan recorded so he'd have something to listen to during the holidays.

Release schedules and concert dates, not to mention wives, only confuse the muse. Jordan says he'll know when the time is right to start putting out this new stuff on his own El Parche label. "I just want to get this shit on the streets, man. I wanna see everybody flip. Then I can die and head on to the next place."

But ex-wife Virginia Martinez, who says she supported Jordan and his sons for two years and spent $16,000 on equipment with the promise that she'll be repaid when the album comes out, doesn't think El Parche is in any hurry to release the fruits of his eight-year obsession. "That record's his lure," she says. "It's how he gets people to give him money."

By his own estimation, Steve Jordan is 125 years old. "When I was a little kid, I couldn't work in the fields. I couldn't pick cotton, so I stayed behind in the camp with all the people who were too old to work," he says. "When I was 7 years old, I was 70 in my mind."