Born and raised in Mexico, Fito grew up listening to jazz in the 1940s. By the late 1950s he’d become immersed in rock’n’roll after attending multiple screenings of the seminal rock’n’roll film Rock Around the Clock. By the early 1960s, Fito was playing drums in Mexico City and was introduced to the rhythm and blue genre that bands such as Canned Heat would explore and exploit in the mid-to-late 1960s.
By 1967 Fito had married an American woman and moved to the United States. In 1965 Bob Hite and Alan Wilson had formed the first line up Canned Heat, the band taking its name from an old Tommy Johnson song. When the drummer’s position became vacant in late 1967, Fito was invited to audition for Canned Heat, joining the band shortly after it played at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
Along with Hite, Wilson, guitarists Harry Vestine and Harvey Mandel and bass player Larry Taylor, Fito formed the ‘classic’ lineup of Canned Heat, and the lineup that performed Going Up to the Country and On the Road Again at the 1969 Woodstock Festival in upstate New York. “What made Woodstock unique was that they didn’t expect it to be successful, but they got 500,000 people, and also that despite all of the anarchy, it was very peaceful,” Fito says. “It was so well put together, in an anarchic way. Everyone was overwhelmed, but everyone looked after each other.”
But after the highs of Woodstock, and Canned Heat’s commercial popularity came the lows. The gifted harmonica player and singer Alan ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson, who’d struggled with mental illness for a few years, died from an overdose of barbiturates in 1970. “We knew Alan was going through deep depression, and we were trying to help him as much as we could, but we were very young and struggling to deal with becoming famous,” Fito says. “Alan was very interested in the environment, and he became very concerned that we were killing the Earth. And that made him even more depressed.”
Canned Heat struggled on through the 1970s, enduring the turmoil of fading popularity and financial drama – the band was forced to sell its publishing rights to pay outstanding debts – while also facing drug and alcohol abuse. “The mid ’70s was terrible for Canned Heat,” Fito says. “It was the advent of disco music, and it was also the end of innocence as far as drugs were concerned. It was no longer just smoking a little grass or taking some psychedelics. There was heavy drugs, and death. And the music was terrible for us because disco music meant that clubs were hiring DJs and they didn’t want to have bands anymore.”
Despite its frustrations, internal turmoil and personal tragedy – in 1981 guitarist Bob Hite succumbed to a heroin overdose at the age of 38, while Henry Vestine died in 1997 – Canned Heat have continued to tour and record through to the modern day. Larry Taylor and Harvey Mandel re-joined the band in 2010 and, despite periodic moments of internal friction, ensured continuity with Canned Heat’s ‘classic’ late 1960s lineup. While Fito admits to tiring of touring, he says Canned Heat remain as committed as ever to its music, and connecting with its audience around the world. “I have an expression that I say to people: musicians don’t retire, they die.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
