In the entertainment business, being readily identified by just one name signifies uniqueness, a sense of accomplishment. Think Sting, Elton...Brooooooooce. Say the name "Hugo" to just about any Trop Rock fan and they will immediately know who you're talking about. I caught up with the one and only Hugo Duarte, who took time out from the road to answer some questions....
Let’s start way back in the beginning. Cuban, Chinese, and Scotts-Irish from the Blue Ridge Mountains. That sounds like an interesting mix. Tell me about the early days of Hugo Duarte?
I grew up in Tigerville, South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In that environment, of course, I was exposed to bluegrass and country music. I used to sit up with my Grandfather and listen to The Grand Ole Opry on WSM on Saturday nights. I also grew up singing in the church choir from a very early age, so we had that genre as well. My first record was Walter Brennan doing "Old Rivers" and "Wolverton Mountain".
According to your web site, you then got turned on to the “classic rock” bands of the late 60’s/early 70’s. How did that happen – was it what you were hearing on the radio?
A lot of my friends were listening to the early rock in the 60s, especially the Beatles. We all begin to pay attention once we saw the Beatles on the Sullivan show. From there, it was an easy transition to begin to seek out interesting music. When FM radio started up, it became very easy to discover new music that we liked. I was listening to the Allman Brothers a lot. The Marshall Tucker band was from right down the road in Spartanburg and used to play in Charlotte, North Carolina all the time. That led us to bands like the Outlaws, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Three Dog Night, Crosby Stills & Nash, and so on. I was also a big John Denver fan. So, I was listening to a lot of different kinds of music in those days. Of course, when Woodstock happened, it changed all our lives. That brought in Santana and a lot of the other bands that we were not familiar with up to that point.
But, along with the usual rock names – Hendrix, The Eagles, CSN - you also say you were into classical music and composers like Copeland and John Philip Sousa?
My Dad loved John Philip Sousa, so there was a lot of that playing in the house. My Mom liked Hank Williams, Mitch Miller, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Lawrence Welk, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, and many others, so we had a wide variety of music all the time. I discovered Aaron Copland somehow, and I really enjoyed his music. My parents really enjoyed concerts, theater, movies, plays, and other forms of entertainment, and they insisted that my sister and I attend. We also had the school band at the college where my parents were both professors, so I had that form of music to listen to as well. My mom says that I had shown a natural love of music of all types from a very early age, so it was no great leap to move in any direction musically speaking.
You’re a teenager, now living in North Carolina, and a friend loans you a guitar. Tell me about that…
My friend’s name was Darrell Stafford. We used to spend all of our time together when we were in middle school, either at his house or at mine. I was playing trumpet in the school band, so I was already involved in music as an active participant. There was an old Stella guitar in a case in his closet and one day I asked if I could see it. He handed it to me and I was instantly in love with it. Over the next few days, I would come back to his house and fool around with that guitar. Eventually, I asked if I could borrow it and he said “sure!”. So I took it home and did my best to learn how to play it, but it was really difficult to play because the neck had warped over the years. Several months went by and my Mom noticed my dedication to the instrument and took me to the music store and bought me my first “real” guitar. It was a Vox electric guitar and I had a small amplifier that came from Sears. Every day after school, I would sit in my room and play along to records until dinner time. After dinner, I would go back up to my room and play until my Mom forced me to do my homework.
What was the first song you remember being able to play all the way through?
That is an easy one! It was “The House Of The Rising Sun”
You wrote your first song around this time, too, correct? What prompted you to want to start writing your own material?
I started writing poetry when I was about six years old, so writing songs, to me, was simply an extension of that same process. When I was 15, there was a girl at my school that I was seriously infatuated with and she was a serious ballet student. I had her on a very high pedestal, but desperately wanted her to be my girlfriend, which was never going to happen. Needless to say, the first song I wrote was a tragic love song called "Dance For Me". After that first experience of putting lyrics to music, I fell in love with the process of writing songs and have never looked back.
We have something in common – we both spent some time in Charlotte, NC. I was in radio – met my wife there – you were in college. What were you studying and what were your career plans at that time?
I was a Chemistry major, with an eye towards going into medicine.
It sounds like the draw of playing live music got in the way of college. Tell me more about that…
Of course, I took my guitar with me to college and would play all the time around the dorm. A lot of the kids I went to school with would sit around and listen to me play. One time, we had a major power outage at the school and the local newspaper came to do a story about how we were coping. For some reason, the reporter ended up in our dorm, where I was playing guitar and singing with a bunch of my friends sitting around me. The story morphed from being about how the students were coping without power to basically a story about me and my music. It was kind of strange that that could happen. It also provided me with my first taste of negativity, in the sense that some of the other students felt that I had stolen the story that should have been about them. All I did was answer the questions that were asked of me.
How did the trail take you to Key West?
My Dad moved to the United States from Cuba in 1949. The first place he lived in the US was Key West, Florida, where he still had many friends. When I was 15, we took a family trip there and it was the first time that I was able to drive the family car on the interstate. I had my drivers permit at the time and my parents allowed me to do a good deal of the driving to Key West. I still remember what it felt like to go over the old Seven Mile Bridge with a Winnebago coming at you from the other direction and nothing but a guardrail on the right side. I can still feel the tension of thinking that my side view mirror was going to touch! Once I left college to pursue a life in music – this was around 1977 - a booking agent got me and a friend, another guitarist named Robert, a job in Islamorada, Florida for a six-week stint at "Whale Harbor". A bartender friend of mine really liked our music and insisted that I go with her to check out the music scene in Key West. I was thrilled, intimidated, excited, and unsure of how I might be able to break in to that market. We kept being invited back to Islamorada to play over the next couple of years and each time I would go down to Key West and hang out. Two friends of mine purchased Rick’s on Duval Street and eventually hired us to play there. That was my very first gig in Key West.
You spent some time with Jimmy Buffett? Tell me how that friendship developed…
Once we started playing at Ricks, it was not very long before Sloppy Joe's hired us. Then, around 1978-’79, we got a gig on the beach at the Pier House Hotel, which was a pretty heady resort in those days, particularly catering to European tourists. We played there for the next couple of years, on and off, and eventually were promoted up to the Havana Docks Bar upstairs above the main restaurant. It was a beautiful venue overlooking the water. One night, a large party came in and sat at a table right in front of the stage. Jimmy Buffett was in that crowd, and I recognized him immediately. Needless to say, it may me very nervous - to have him sitting in the front row. Somehow, we finished the set and went to the bar to get a shot of tequila to calm the nerves. Bobby Lieberman was Jimmy's road manager back then. Bobby walked up to the bar and told us that Jimmy would like for us to join them, and that he wanted to buy us a drink. How could we resist? So we sat down with the group and had little chat. We were doing a lot of his music in those days. Jimmy asks if we would mind if he sat in for a little while. The answer to that was a no-brainer. After 10 minutes or so of his being on stage with us, the bar was packed and we were rocking the house. The management noticed that something special was going on and came to me when we took a break to ask if there was anything they could do for us to keep this going. I asked for an office backstage to use as a dressing room and requested that they bring beer, water, towels, ice, and glasses to us as a courtesy to Jimmy. He ended up playing with us for the rest of the night. After that, whenever he was in town he would come in to wherever we were playing and sit in. At the time, we were going back and forth – playing in Key West for 6-8 weeks at a time, then going back to North Carolina for a few weeks before heading back down. Eventually, around 1984, I moved down there. We got a gig in a bar called "Del Rio’s” and played there until the owners went bust. That bar eventually became "Margaritaville". We were the house band at Margaritaville for a while until we were hired away by the “Hog's Breath Saloon". We did a few shows with Jimmy in Key West and other places after that and I considered us friends at that point. My favorite shows we did with Jimmy were a benefit to keep the city of Key West from granting licenses to people who wanted to build condos in the area where the salt marshes were. The other one was on New Year's Eve in the late 80’s when we played with Jimmy, Steve Winwood, and Steve Cropper, who was the guitarist on all those great Motown records and also the guitarist for the Blues Brothers.
Cut to today – we’ll talk about the Frozen Gringos tour you’re currently on in a minute – where do you call home these days?
I live in Wilmington, North Carolina when I'm not out on the road.
How much time do you spend on the road?
The road life varies more or less, according to season, but I have to say, that I am traveling more than ever these days. I really love it and I love to get to new places and meet new people. It is always a treat to be able to share my music with folks for the first time. I do try to get home as often as possible to recharge, write, record, and live a normal life.
You’re out on the road with my old friend, Jeff Pike, whom I have interviewed before on this blog – the Frozen Gringos Tour. How did that collaboration come about?
Jeff and I did a cruise together, although we didn't really know each other well at the time. He tells the story on stage of our first meeting, which is hilarious. I won't repeat it here. We'll just let folks that are interested come out and see the live show and hear for themselves. We did another cruise a year later and ended up playing at the hotel where we were both staying before and after getting on the ship. It was just for fun, but we drew a fairly good audience who filled a hat with money to keep us playing. Jeff looked at me and said, "Maybe we should think about doing this for real?" We talked about it for about five years, then, finally, the opportunity was presented for us to actually be able to get out here and do some shows together. So far, everything has gone way better than we had ever dreamed and we're having a wonderful time doing music that we each typically do, but, we are also doing music that neither of us have ever done either individually or together. We share the same musical interests and many of the same musical influences, so getting on the road together was an easy decision.
What stops have you made – and where is the FG tour going to take you two?
So far, we've played in Kentucky, St. Louis, Iowa for four shows, Minnesota for two shows…Next stop is Chicago, maybe Nashville after that and then to North Carolina for a couple of shows. Eventually, we will be back to Atlanta for a show there.
Any good road stories you can tell from this tour – that I can share in a public forum?? Lol
Every trip has great stories that accompany it. We made a couple of cool stops along the way, either to see something historical or to honor one of our heroes that is no longer with us. We had to stop in Peoria, Illinois, to see the memorial to our friend, Dan Fogelberg, and we also stopped in Clarion, Minnesota, to honor one of Jeff's heroes, Glen Buxton, who was Alice Cooper's guitarist and is buried in Clarion. We also stopped in Northfield, Minnesota, the site of the James’ Gang’s last bank robbery. The history surrounding this place makes a great story for anyone who is interested in the history of the old West.
Every year you host a party for your fans at MOTM, how did that come about?
I've been fortunate, over the years, to gain a lot of fans who have for the most part also become friends. I decided that the best way for me to be able to thank as many of them as possible for their loyalty was to have a party, during which I could take the time to say thank you to every single one of them who came through the door. I used to play at the party, but then decided that it would be a good idea to turn my friends on to people that I admire musically by asking other artists to come in and play for all of us so that I could maximize the time I get to spend with each individual guest. Over the years the attendance has quadrupled. We send out over 1000 invitations each year for the Fan Appreciation Party and that is exactly what it is; my chance to say “thank you”. “I appreciate you.”
How has social media changed things for an artist like yourself?
I'm not sure that we can really see a tangible result attributable to social media, although my personal feeling is that it is a much more desirable form of getting our names out there than advertising or spamming people with a bunch of newsletters, event notices, and other communications that fill up people's inboxes. It does give us the ability to communicate with our fans on a more personal level and on an everyday basis. For that reason, I do think that social media has changed the way we interact with people in a positive way.
What’s next for Hugo in 2012?
Well, who knows? I do know that I will be doing some of the things that I typically do each year, like my West Coast tour in the summer and our Hog’s Breath Saloon appearance at Meeting of the Minds in November. I am off of my typical schedule a little bit in that I am usually in the Pacific Northwest at this time of the year. Jeff and I have been invited to perform at the New England Parrot Head Convention in March and I'm doing Flipperstock in St. Louis in April. I may end up taking Jeff Pike with me on that deal, but we’re not sure just yet. We will be doing more House Concerts this year than ever before and I really like that. For the rest of it, you'll have to stay tuned - just like me!
Since this blog is called Beaches, Bands and Bars, I like to ask musicians I interview about some of their favorites in those categories: If you could be on any beach in the world, where would it be and why? What about other bands you listen to, including “non Trop Rock”, what is on Hugo’s Ipod? And how about your favorite watering holes at home – where could we find Hugo at Happy Hour?
I love the beach on St. Croix and on St. Maarten, both of which I got to visit this past fall. They are both beautiful, the water is incredible, and it is easy to be comfortable in either of those places. I have a lot of interests musically that do not fall into the category of Trop Rock and that is what I listen to mostly. However, I do listen to Rob Mehl because I love him, Kelly McGuire, Sunny Jim White, and Mark Mulligan. I respect all of those people as songwriters and performers. I listened to a lot of Billy Joel, Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor, the Eagles, a lot of country artists too numerous to name, Don Conoscenti, an old friend from Key West, Marc Barardo from New York, and my new favorite, Calman Hart from San Diego. I think the last question would have to be defined as “where is home really?” I really don't go out to bars when I'm at my house except to hear music and, as a rule, I don't drink when I'm doing that. If I were to be found sitting at a bar, it would be at the "After Deck" at Louie’s Backyard. That is my favorite bar.
Thanks for taking the time, Hugo... I look forward to seeing you and Jeff when the Frozen Gringos come through Atlanta!
