El Parche's Return

His wicked perfectionist streak is such that he once hauled his own P.A. system to a taping of Austin City Limits. Although he flatly stated that he wouldn't go on without his own speakers, he finally relented when it was pointed out that the ACL system was set up for television taping and not some Tejano bar. Jordan has also been known to be brutal with club sound engineers. "I'm sorry, but white guys just can't mix Mexican music. They always want to put the emphasis on the beat," he says, imitating a bass drum. "But we like the up beat."

Jordan says reports that he can be a fiery bandleader are justified, but there's no problem with his current band. "They're like little pieces of me," he says of 17-year-old bassist Richard Jordan and the 19-year-old guitarist he calls Steve 3. "They've been playing only 11 months, and they get what I'm saying the first time."

The father didn't really know his sons when they were growing up. There were occasional Christmas visits and a fishing trip here and there, but for the most part he wasn't an active participant in their upbringing. He didn't get along with their mother, his second and, he vows, final wife. Then, one day about two years ago, she dropped them off with the near-stranger with the eye patch, saying she couldn't control them anymore.

At the time Jordan was without a band and therefore without an income (he says he's never received a penny in royalties from the nearly 50 albums he's released in his career). When a lucrative gig was offered in Houston, Steve said he'd take it. He had three weeks to teach his sons, who were more into sports and Nintendo than music, how to play 30 songs, but they did the show and have barely stopped playing since. "These boys, they keep me young," the proud father says. "They never complain. They never want to stop."

Steve suddenly stops talking and raises a hand for silence as his version of "Harlem Nocturne" plays in the background. The jazz standard, which Steve spent more than a week producing, starts with a lushly layered orchestra conjuring every shade of the night. "Can you dig it, man?" he asks when his accordion starts into the melancholy melody. "All that sound from this little brown box," he says, tapping an old Hohner on the floor with his foot. He touches his chest where the buttons would be, swaying his head as if he's lost in a dream.

"Man, what am I doing here, living in the back of some other dude's house, with my kids sleeping on the floor?" he asks, cutting into the ethereal moment. "Ask yourself that, bro. But this is why," he says, gesturing back to the speakers, where his accordion is flitting all around the melody like a bouquet of fireflies. "This," he says tapping the air. "This."

What a gift it is, the ability to blow your own mind. For Estéban "Steve" Jordan, that'll have to do for now.