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    Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe
    Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe
    Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe
    Ebook244 pages3 hours

    Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe

    By Marc Shapiro

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    About this ebook

    A definitive biography of Hector Lavoe's rise from Puerto Rico to stardom in New York that led to sold-out concerts and best-selling salsa albums, yet gave way to drug addiction, a strained marriage and tragedy.

    From the poverty-stricken streets of Ponce, Puerto Rico to the vibrant barrios of New York City, HECTOR LAVOE became the singer of all singers, and the driving-force behind the Salsa movement in the mid-1960s. His popularity rivaled that of his contemporaries, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco.

    Behind the music, Hector's life was filled with drugs, alcohol and women. An endless stream of tragedy plagued him, including a gun-related accident that killed his son, Hector's ninth floor jump from a hotel window, and his death in 1993 from AIDS.

    But Hector's pristine voice, one-of-a-kind stage performances, sold-out concerts and bestselling albums were what his fans remember most and what made him an international icon. His music brought joy to legions of people, and it continues today.

    Marc Shapiro's Passion and Pain is "A no-holds barred biography" (Uptown Magazine) of a fascinating life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 26, 2007
    ISBN9781429974462
    Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe
    Author

    Marc Shapiro

    Marc Shapiro is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography, J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter and Stephenie Meyer: The Unauthorized Biography of the Creator of the Twilight Saga. He has been a freelance entertainment journalist for more than twenty-five years, covering film, television and music for a number of national and international newspapers and magazines.

    Read more from Marc Shapiro

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    Passion and Pain - Marc Shapiro

    INTRODUCTION

    People Who

    Die

    Hector Lavoe was determined to live.

    He had said as much in a 1976 interview when, after reportedly kicking a potentially fatal drug habit and overcoming a series of professional gaffes that had threatened to cut short a legendary career well before its time, he assured a Latin New York interviewer, My life would not have a tragic ending.

    There was determination in those words, and honesty, which was pretty much Hector Lavoe’s stock in trade. For Hector was nothing if not sincere and honest—even if it was only while a tape recorder or television camera was rolling. But then you could say that about just about any performer with a checkered past who is attempting to put his or her best face forward. But there was a difference with Hector. He truly believed what he was saying and would swear on the life of his family and to any god that he was telling the truth. Even if it was only until the demons that had plagued him almost all his life returned to tempt him and ultimately made him out to be a liar.

    And so it was in the typical rules of engagement that Hector lived by that he admitted to the reporter, in no small measure of candor, how he had brought much of his problem on himself. As in other interviews he had done over the years, he was not about to gloss over his own culpability in his hard times. How he had succumbed to heroin addiction and alcoholism. How he was often late or, even worse, a no-show at countless numbers of sold-out performances. Hector was quick with the details, and some of them were quite graphic. He conceded that he had a weakness for spending money faster than he made it and that although he tried hard, he probably could have been a better father and husband.

    But in this interview, like in countless others he had given, he assured the interviewer that he was well on the road to recovery in all areas and that fans could look forward to his long and successful career.

    Hector Lavoe was deluding himself.

    For it was not long after that interview that the old habits returned and he was well back on a downward spiral of personal weaknesses, professional betrayals, and family tragedies that ended on June 29, 1993, when the now financially destitute, physically and emotionally broken singer was found near death in an AIDS hospice and rushed to St. Clare’s Hospital in Manhattan. He had reportedly suffered a heart attack brought on by the complications of AIDS and years of self-inflicted drug abuse. Abuse that was brought on by Lavoe’s misguided attempts to keep the aforementioned demons at bay.

    On the surface, Lavoe’s death was not unexpected and, unfortunately, was all too familiar.

    Celebrities often die by misadventure. Hemingway and Cobain by suicide. Morrison, Joplin, and Hendrix by myriad vices that stilled their hearts at an early age. Billie Holiday, Judy Garland. The list goes on and on. And for consumers of these pop culture tragedies, it has become a point of derision, gallows humor, and just plain boredom. Sadly, pity rarely enters into the picture these days. Be it suicide, decades of addiction, or myriad mental flaws that often go hand in hand with creativity, genius, and a striving for the spotlight, there is rarely anything wondrous about entertainers who crash and burn in the public eye. Which is why their obituaries are often top-loaded with tales of their downfall and only slight acknowledgment of their magnificent accomplishments.

    And then there is Hector Lavoe.

    The singer’s life and subsequent death met every criterion for a true, old-style Hollywood story. Poor boy from the country, determined to make it big, comes to the big city, becomes a star, succumbs to the temptation of celebrity and the spotlight, and pays the ultimate price. If this sounds a lot like West Side Story done up salsa style, that’s because it is. Hector had no stomach for the whole Jets and Sharks gang lifestyle as it played out in the Latin communities of New York in the sixties. But he was willing to play by many of the same rules in order to be a success with the music he embraced.

    But whereas most entertainers’ lives play out as just another cog in the star-making machine whose blandness and comings and goings are interchangeable with the next flavor of the moment, Lavoe’s life and death played out against a stark, urban, gritty reality. His life was the backdrop of a hot new musical form taking root in the streets of New York.

    Salsa was the new sound, the sound that personified the body and soul of people in many lands who had come up through hardscrabble times and had come to America to find a better life. Salsa became the out for a race and a generation that would otherwise have been doomed to a life of quiet desperation. If this were truly the American dream, then Hector Lavoe was clearly the personification of it. He had the cars, the houses, the women, and the money. And in the finest sense of accomplishment and triumph, Hector Lavoe had earned it.

    Hector Lavoe had the tools and the talent. His was the uncanny ability to evoke basic, unbending emotion through song and lyric. This young man from the poverty-stricken streets of Ponce, Puerto Rico, had, through timing, chance, and talent, leaped to the forefront as the poster child for the salsa movement—over such legendary performers as Johnny Pacheco, Willie Colón, and Tito Puente—Lavoe was a part of the pop music revolution that incorporated all things hot and sensual in the area of third-world music.

    In this brave new world, Lavoe raced toward stardom. He craved the spotlight and the strength of stardom and celebrity. He dressed the part, and he played the part of superstar to the hilt. He loved the women and the women loved him. Nobody was holding a gun to Lavoe’s head when he tried heroin for the first time. There was never a spotlight that he could not find, and in his own, laid-back way, he lived to be the center of attention.

    The world Hector Lavoe entered when he stepped off the plane in New York in the early sixties was full of emotion and a lack of subtlety. Decisions, good or bad, were made with the snap of a finger. People lived and died as a matter of course, and Hector was, like other creative types, willing to roll the dice with the best of them. All of this would make him susceptible to the temptations that would ultimately bring him down.

    But to those who were close enough to know the real Hector Lavoe, he was much more than the latest in an endless line of velvet-tongued crooners who loved the ladies who lined up to love him back. He was a religious man who, while not a regular churchgoer, was well versed in the Bible. He read poetry, and when he played the quiet intellectual, he was playing it for real. And when he played the shy, seemingly uneducated, and naive innocent, that was Hector as well.

    Hector Lavoe never left his roots behind. Even at the pinnacle of success, he would always refer to himself as a hick, a backward boy who liked things simple and basic. Although he would travel the world in luxury, he would often admit that some of his fondest memories were of growing up in the town of Ponce with his family and the familiar haunts. In a sense, this fondness for the past would compound his life in later years. The early death of his mother and older brother. The overprotectiveness of a father, which Hector equated as a lack of respect. Like so many, Hector Lavoe’s values were forged in the fires of home.

    His value system would often manifest itself in song. For every romantic ballad or commercially friendly salsa jump, one did not have to search far to find a song that rang out against injustice and the passion and the pain of the workingman. Given the tenor of the times, Lavoe, in his own quiet way, was plying the trade much the way Bob Dylan was.

    Hector was not classically trained in any aspect of the performing arts, especially not songwriting. But what served him well was an uncanny talent for improvisation that allowed him to play fast, loose, and creatively with a notion, a word, or a line. He could paint any lyrical picture at the drop of a hat and sing it with the purest of hearts.

    For all the talk about Hector Lavoe’s personal demons, there is a side of him that is rarely discussed. And that side is that the man was capable of immense generosity and much humanity. Many were the musicians, such as Ray Sepulveda and Gilberto Colón, who heard their first words of encouragement from the singer when they were new on the scene. And legendary bandleader Joe Cuba would regularly bend an ear with the story of how, when his singer failed to show up for a show headlined by Hector, the singer volunteered to sing a handful of songs with Cuba’s band. And lest we forget, there was the time Hector stuffed a handful of hundreds into the hand of one of his musicians whose mother had just died, to cover funeral expenses.

    But it was also the small moments. Lavoe was quick with a joke, often at his own expense. He would often be the first person to greet a new musician and welcome him to his world. For many, the real Hector Lavoe was the man with the simple kind word about nothing at all or the times on long plane rides when easy conversation about things other than business were the order of the day.

    There was that side of Hector Lavoe. And then there was the side that, sadly, we all know too well.

    So yes, at the end of the day Hector Lavoe died an almost expected, almost cliché Hollywood death. But it was the times between the pain, his inability to rid his soul of demons, and sadly, the loss of the will to live that are ultimately the telling points in a life marked by the passion as well as the pain. And so it was that the obituaries marking the passing of Hector Lavoe were inevitably as passionate as the subject of their mourning.

    In a moving 1993 obit on Descarga.com, writer George De Stefano acknowledged Lavoe’s tragedy and long suffering and, in the same breath, painted the picture of the singer as a gifted creative artist.

    Lavoe’s longtime friend and musical collaborator Willie Colón, in a piece that appeared in 1993 in both the Spanish-language newspaper Claridad and New York Newsday, cut to the chase, admonishing a long series of culprits, including himself, who had contributed to Hector Lavoe’s final demise. To Colon’s way of thinking there were many in Lavoe’s world who could have helped him but, by their own avoidance, allowed the singer to spiral down.

    Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe is not a salacious, exploitive book, the sort of book that would have been written within weeks of his death and been designed to cash in on his notoriety. Or it is such a book, with the renewed notoriety of his life finally coming to the big screen, that may be being written now. And no, this writer is no different. People who write celebrity biographies are stoking the fires of celebrity obsession. But rather than cop to the easy out of sex and drugs as the driving hook, some of us go for the big picture, revealing the small things that might not make the cover of the tabloids but that contribute mightily to a clear picture and an even clearer understanding.

    This book has the luxury of distance. Nearly fifteen years have passed. There has been time to revisit and reacquaint with the life and times of Hector Lavoe and the music and lifestyle that he helped lead the charge to acceptance and respectability. People who were not inclined to talk at the time now want to tell the truth about Hector Lavoe and his world. A lot of the rumors and half-truths have vanished in the dust of time, leaving only the rock-solid facts.

    This is a straightforward biography, told through the words of the late singer and those who knew him in his personal and professional worlds, and through the triumphs and tragedies that marked his days and his passing.

    But it has not been an easy book to write. Unlike profiling most modern celebrities, whose prefab careers have been managed to the point of banality, Hector’s career was much more complex. Writing this book has been a roller-coaster ride of bursts of success followed by long, lingering lows. Every time Hector Lavoe got clean, something inside me cheered. There was a god. When Hector Lavoe stumbled back into the arms of that devil horse, part of me wanted to cry. I’m a sucker for the underdog. I really wanted this guy to make it.

    And when a life and career are larger than life, facts can also be like mercury. I have interviewed several musicians who traveled with Hector over the years. On certain things, they are in agreement. On others, the memories of just what happened differ. When there are differing opinions, I have presented all sides not only to give them equal airing, but also to offer the most comprehensive portrait of Hector.

    When people have talked about him, it has not been in abject, glowing terms. Inevitably there are the tales of genius and of potential wasted. Of happiness for having known him and sadness for not having been able to help him despite their best efforts. Hector Lavoe’s career had people rooting for him and, in the same breath, bemoaning the personal trials and tribulations that ultimately brought him down.

    Hector Lavoe’s story is full of triumph and tragedy, passion and pain. It has all the elements of a classic Shakespearian play. And in the end, through it all, there are no real surprises. For better or worse, people who knew Hector Lavoe as a friend or as a professional all saw his fate coming.

    Everyone who bought an album or purchased a ticket to his show knew Hector was well on the way to burning out. The people closest to him knew he was killing himself and yet could not or would not lift a finger to help him. And even when they did, they also knew that it was too little and too late. Hell, even the enablers, the crooks, and the slick-minded hangers-on who would do anything for him in exchange for a moment in his world knew the score.

    That he died at such a young age was a tragedy. That he lived as long as he did was a miracle.

    Hector saw it as well. Hector did not have a death wish, although his actions over the years screamed otherwise. He was hell-bent on destruction, and in his mind, it was part of the job description.

    In conversations with his closest friends, he would inevitably remind them, Remember me when I’m gone. He would mouth those words when he was high and when he was stone-cold clean. In the beginning those words were a mantra, a part of the package that was talent, sensuality, and drive. In the end they were quite simply his epitaph, waiting for the stonecutter to chisel them into his tombstone.

    Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe is very simple and very basic. The way Hector Lavoe would no doubt have liked it.

    1

    Chasing the

    Legend

    1993-2006

    Larry Harlow does not go to too many

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