The Avocado Story
When I first moved to New Mexico in 1990 I landed a happy hour gig playing solo at a Mexican food restaurant called 505’s; that’s our area code in New Mexico. I started out playing on Fridays and gradually over a few months I was playing happy hour there five nights a week, Monday through Friday. I was having a great time and apparently so were a lot of other folks. My good friend, multi-media consultant Doug Stewart, suggested I needed a handle, a title, a gimmick of sorts. Since I was playing in a Mexican food restaurant, where they served great guacamole and lots of it, he came up with the handle, King of Avocado Rock. In case you didn’t know, Rex is a Latin word meaning King.
So Doug created a new musical genre of which I would be the self proclaimed King. Guacamole of course is made from Avocados, and of course Avocado Rock is a brand of country- rock or rocking country with a distinctive Southwest flavor. As Tom Petty says, “it’s good being King”. For a number of years around the Albuquerque area people would come up to me and say things like; “ hey aren’t you’re the Guacamole King” or the “Avocado King? “After about six or eight months that gig went away. The bar which was in the middle of the restaurant got so loud and rowdy it began to bother the patrons eating dinner. It seems they really wanted to eat, not join us singing Margaritaville. So the gig went away but the handle stuck; even the restaurant went away, it’s now a strip club. Being given the name Rex by my father I now had to live up to the meaning of the word.
Being King is good but it’s tough as well. I grew irritated that folks couldn’t remember my name, Rex, so I stopped calling myself “The King” and just went with the Latin Rex.
So when I started my own publishing company I decided to call it Avocado Rock Music, and naturally when I needed a name for my record company, Avocado Records had to be the name. No one really wants to be labeled or pigeon-holed but the world at large screams for us to categorize, and homogenize ourselves. So world–at-large, there’s a label for you, and if you insist I’ll still answer to King.
