It would be hard to say that New Mexico native Brian Garcia is a cop trapped in a musician’s body or a musician trapped in a cop’s. Whatever the case, Garcia’s found a way to balance these competing forces. He does his police job as a patrolman in Taos during the week and performs—weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and graduations—on the weekend and as often as he can.
The soft spoken Questa, New Mexico, native has been playing an instrument of one kind or another for most of his life. “I started out in middle school learning to play guitar,” he said. He still plays guitar with his band, The Most Wanted, but also plays drums and when necessary, picks up the saxophone. He’s mostly a saxman when he’s gigging with another band.
Garcia has no allusions about where his music will take him. But neither does he place limits on where his dreams will take him. “One of my dreams is to play The Grand Old Opry,” he said. People who’ve heard him—and that includes audiences in scores of the towns, big and little that dot New Mexico—believe he has the talent to punch his ticket for Nashville and ‘the Opry.’
Before he put on a badge, Garcia drove a truck on a route that took him through a lot of the same towns where he plays gigs today. His band plays mostly country, “about 80 percent,” he said, with Al Hurricane tunes, the man he calls ‘the godfather of New Mexico music,’ a good portion of the rest.
While he likes artists like country stars like George Strait and Chris Stapleton, Garcia does not see himself as a clone by any means. “I don’t think I sound like anyone. I think I have a unique voice.”
While he’s well known from east to west and north to south across the ‘Land of Enchantment,’ Garcia and The Most Wanted, have also played up and down the Front Range with periodic stops in Denver. And they’re ready with C&W, Top Forty, Doo Wop and, for good measure, cumbias and rancheras. They are, he said, a band for all seasons.
When the band’s hitting on all cylinders and the audience is cooking, he knows what’s coming next. “’Tennessee Whiskey’ is the biggest request we get,” he said. Other times it’s ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes,’ by Keith Whitley or Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues.’
There are four members in the band, including a younger brother, Kevin, who mans the skins—drums, for the uninitiated. And before COVID, Garcia said they were booked nearly every weekend of the month. Things are slowly returning to normal.
Garcia and his wife, Veronica, also his high school sweetheart, have two sons, ages eight and fourteen. He said his wife isn’t nearly as troubled about his being away on weekends performing as she is concerned about his job as a police officer. “It’s a little scary for my family,” he said, “but they’ve always been supportive.” Still, everyday when he puts on the uniform and leaves home, he makes sure to “tell them I love them.”
Garcia has found a way to balance his music with his other job and, in a way, he said, there’s a connection with the two. When he’s playing, he said he’s doing it to make people feel good. When he’s patrolling, he said, he looks for opportunities to help people out, to lend a hand. “It’s kind of nice being in Taos. It’s a smaller community and it’s nice to get out and know a lot of people,” he said. “You can take extra time to make sure that things get resolved satisfactorily.”
But there’s an emotional side of the job that, Garcia said, is heartbreaking. Opiates, a scourge that has ravaged small town America, have found their way into rural New Mexico. “It’s bad. A lot of good people have turned to that for comfort,” Garcia said. It’s a big challenge, he said, that makes the job more dangerous. “People can become unpredictable…the nature of crime is just more violent.”
While hitting the stage in Nashville is a dream tons of country singers harbor, Garcia won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t happen. Playing music, to him, is far more important than where he’ll play it. It would be nice to be on ‘the Opry’ stage, he said. But if it doesn’t happen, he’ll still be landing weekend gigs and performing with the same energy as if it were the big time. “I’ll be playing until I can’t play anymore,” said Garcia, “even if it’s not in a gig.” Even it means strum- ming the guitar alone in his studio.
News of where Garcia and The Most Wanted will be performing as the music season heats up is a work in progress. The band’s website is under construction. But he suggests visiting the New Mexico Hispano Music Association website. It posts the latest information on scores of the state’s performers and can be found at www.nmhma.org.
