Growing up in Pueblo, Vicente Martinez was like his father’s shadow. He went everywhere with him, including places where he admits today, he probably should not have been. His old man, Palemon Martinez, who worked at a long ago Pueblo factory that made pistons, was a musician. As a result, some of the places young Vicente would find himself, including at times that might not have been good for a child, were in the bars that once lined Pueblo’s Union Avenue.
“My dad sang and played guitar,” said Martinez, who now makes his home in San Antonio, Texas. The Union Avenue bars were once favorite haunts where “you could go bar to bar” and play your music. Back then you didn’t need a booking to play Union. You just showed up. His dad played “at Billy’s Place,” a beer joint that today could be an antique store or an ice cream shop. Union has gone upscale. “That’s how I started playing.” Sometimes his dad would stand him on the bar, other times on an old fashion bar shuffleboard surface. There he was, a four-year-old kid belting out ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ or ‘Love Me Tender.’
After high school, Martinez worked the nine-to-five circuit “selling appliances and electronics.” Being a salesman was how he financed his true avocation, music. Today, with a hint of pride, Martinez says, “I’m a full-time musician,” playing the same circuit that his long-ago musical idols, “Little Joe,” and Sonny of “Sonny Ozuna and the Sunliners,” used to play.
In 1992 Martinez moved to Texas. The move was simply practical but also part of the journey. San Antonio is the ‘Mecca’ of the music he likes to play, Chicano and Tejano. Of course, he also mixes in a little rock and roll, and country. “But my heart is Tejano.” He’s also in Texas because it’s where he can get topflight music producers for fine tuning his music. Now as an older adult Martinez just released his first CD, ‘Alegria.’
The disc, said Martinez, is “pure joy, just like its name.” He describes it as a collection of “energetic music that makes you want to get out and dance.” The CD is his first, but he said he’s already at work on another. His second will be homage to mariachi.
In San Antonio, Martinez fronts an eleven-piece band. Like old time music directors, Martinez insists on choreographing everything, including how the band presents itself. The horn section dresses the way he chooses, same for guitars. He makes sure that when ‘the curtain opens’ people will know who they’re seeing. “I’m real strict,” he says. Nothing is left to chance.
“We come out with a little salsa,” he said, mimicking the sound. “Bompa, bompa…people really get into it. Then I have the horns move a certain way and then it’s ‘Vicente Martinez and his Orchestra!’”
Martinez deviates a bit in speaking about his father and his music, chuckling that looking the way he looked always made his mother jealous. “The women were always kissing him on the cheek.” His dad, Martinez said, was always well dressed. “He was real country, real rock and roll. He also dressed a little like Elvis.”
Martinez said that his music is played on radio in San Antonio. It’s also on-line. For that, Martinez asked that his producer be named. Rick Fuentes is the brainchild of Martinez CD.
The pair is already talking about a CD that will pay tribute to a handful of artists Martinez has sampled over his career. “I plan to do old country,” he said. “Merle Haggard, Roy Orbison, the old Hank Williams and Marty Robbins, too.”
As Martinez CDs are produced, he hopes it will showcase the eclectic variety of music in his repertoire while, at the same time, honor the artists, from the Chicano pantheon of Little Joe to Sonny Ozuna to Rueben Ramos to mainstream icons, Elvis to Orbison. “I’m versatile,” he said. “That’s what makes me so saleable.”
And coming from a career salesman who once made his living peddling big box items to now being a musical artist selling everything from rhythm and blues to Tejano, the man knows his craft.
