Issue 06
Daranado
By Justine Suzanne JonesPhotos By Dylan Maddux
Illustration By Damien Correll
Darondo sit sat the head of a long, lacquered mahogany table appointed with a series of goblets, a snow-white bearskin rug at his feet, the rest of the room suffused in cobalt blue, maroons, and greens. He wears a pale gold suit cut of raw silk, three enormous rings on his left hand, with his hair a perfectly Marcelled and conked pompadour. A white Cadillac sits in the driveway of his South Sacramento home, while his wife of more than 20 years hovers nearby. One of his two teenage children drops briefly into the scene, then soundlessly wanders back downstairs. Eminently stylish, without a trace of vanity, Darondo laughs easily as he recounts the origin of his nickname: “My name is William, but, uh, we was doin’ somethin’ and I had a whole stack of money in my hand s—it must have been $1,000 or somethin’—and, well,some of the girls started sayin’, ‘Now here comes that guy with the money, here he comes Daron-dough!’” he intones,switching quickly into mock-falsetto. “‘He’s got so much money! Come on Dar-on-do!’”
William Daron Pulliam was born in Berkeley, California, in 1946. He came up in a diverse West Berkeley neighborhood in the early ‘60s, fronting the largely white five-piece house band of the Lucky 13, a teenage nightclub in the center of neighboring Albany’s club strip. “We played every Friday and Saturday night, even made a little change out of it! It was set up just like a real nightclub, for the kids. Berkeley was an integrated type of a thing back in them day s—Chinese, black, white, Mexican—and we just went everywhere, cuttin’ up and carryin’ on.”
Covering rhythm ‘n’ blues hits and a few rock ‘n’ roll songs with the Lucky 13 crew, Darondo openly drafted his style from the immensely prolific bop guitarist Kenny Burrell, drawing particular influence from his1961 release Midnight Blue. “ I learned to play that whole LP backwards and forwards. That’s basically how I learned my style of guitar playing, then I mixed it up with the rock ‘n’ roll thing.”
Darondo spent the late ‘60sand early ‘70scatching club shows throughout the East Bay. He relates his ardor for The Ballads, The Pass ions, The Whispers, Johnny Talbot & De Thang, and other club acts of the era with seemingly greater enthusiasm than having opened for James Brown in the mid ‘7 0s. “ These groups, back when they was more localized, they used to always battle with each other, tryin’ to outdo one another, actin’ up and all. It was outta sight, you know, back in them days!”
Despite Darondo’s gently picaresque sense of humor and anecdotal manner of relating his experiences, he gives off the impress ion of being entirely blasé when it comes to his own curiously abbreviated, though remarkably intense, musical career. Releasing only three 45sthroughout the ‘70s, Darondo is hardly preoccupied with his own output; he’s much more interested in describing the sort of fast life offered by Oakland in the ‘70sthat would allow him to acquire a $75,000 “white on white in white” Rolls Royce, and his extensive travels abroad following his escape from the Bay in the mid ‘80s.
His sanguine approach may be due in no small part to the absolute facility with which he apparently wrote and executed each 7-inch.
“The 45swere just a thing, you know, like a hobby. If you been in the neighborhood, you know, you hear people you know on the radio, everyone singin’, always carryin’ on. If you playin’ the guitar, you want to make a record. ‘Oh, I’ve got to make a record! Oh, let me make a record!’ So I said, ‘Look, I ’m not gonna talk about it, I ’m gonna go down and put out a record.’” Darondo hooked up with the two well-regarded artists who appear on his recordings, Al Tanner and Eddie Foster, playing chess . Vinyl dealer, All Bay Productions boss , and Bay Area soul aficionado Justin Torres cites Foster as“one of the best guitarists out of the Bay – really amazing, really amazing guitarist. He plays bass on all the tracks.” Tanner, a legendary Bay Area jazz musician in his own right, co-wrote with Darondo and produced many of his tracks.
“It isn’t that Darondo is that good a singer, but he has so much soul it’s just incredible,” Torres says. “He really wrote lyrics coming from the heart. He was like five different musicians at once. I mean, his playing was really derived from Kenny Burrell, but voice-wise he’s like a countryish Al Green.”
Torres’s passion for Darondo’s sound led him on a half decade- long search for Darondo, one significantly impeded by
the fact that each 7-inch was press ed by a different company and alternately cited the artist as Darondo, Darondo Pulliam, and Dorando. Participants have long forgotten the dates and recording sites of any of the sessions, and when first contacted by Torres, Darondo had little memorabilia in his possession and no stable recollection of the trajectory of his output. “ I don’t have even one of my records– that should tell you something,” Darondo reveals with a laugh. “When Justin tells me he wants to come out and interview me, that I had an impact on the Bay Area . . . well, I didn’t know I had no impact on the Bay Area!”
Torres identifies the first 7-inch as“How I Got Over” and “I Want Your Love,” recorded with Eddie Foster on Leroy Smith’s Oakland based Okampo label. Andrew Jervis, A&R man and vice president of Ubiquity Records, the label behind the recent Darondo nine track reissue, figures this to be a 1969 or 1970 release. Darondo subsequently got picked up by the Music City label out of Berkeley, which released the second and third records, “Didn’t I” and “Listen to My Song,” followed sometime later by “Leg s” and “Let My People Go,” all of which were wildly, if only locally, popular.
Music City boss Ray Dobard brought Darondo into the studio, where he played through seven or eight songs in one straight shot. “When I went right through them, well, Ray couldn’t understand. But we was ready to go! I guess I kind of shocked him then.” Despite eventual legal entanglements, Darondo recalls his dealings with Dobard with affection. “I appreciated Ray because he’s the one that taught me the game about the record business , because if you don’t know the record business game you’re gonna get beat. Now, [Music City] made all the money, but I appreciate the man because he taught us a lot about the game, and ain’t nobody gonna teach you for free.”
Following his brief musical output, Darondo went on to style himself as the Merv Griffin of Oakland cable access from the late ‘70sthrough the early ‘80s. His productions included Doze Comedy Hour and Darondo’s Penthouse After Dark, the first of which he describes as having enthralled the youth of Oakland with its humorous take on East Bay living, while the latter was a late-night celebration of “glamorous women, champagne. You know, sittin’ around and laughin’, talkin’ fast, and fast-talkin’ people.” Both shows are replete with Darondo’s highly personal public service announcements tackling everything from drunk driving (“When your kids tell you not to, don’t!”) to Ethiopian relief efforts. All before the advent of MTV, he used his contacts at Motown, CBS, and Atlantic Records to place music videos of mostly black artists between sketches and live performances on his programs.
Darondo reserves special affection for Tapper the Rabbit, a public access children’s show he produced andstarred in: “I wasTapper the Rabbit. We also had the old lady doin’ the Muppet thing, the kids and all that. It was real nice.” And then there was Darondo’s Talent Exposure, a wholly nonjudgmental Star Search for the East Bayset that gave locals an opportunity to juggle machetes, line-dance, boogie in unitards to karaoke tracks, jam on their Casios as their mothers sang torch songs in full-spangled piano-bar regalia, and break dance for neighborhood cable subscribers. “We had a juggler, he was real good. We had a lady who was a belly dancer, and she could really belly dance. And we had ballroom dancers, and they could really ballroom dance,” he muses. “ But, you know, people think they’re talented. They’re not. It’s hard to tell somebody ‘You ain’t got it.’ So I’m just going to say it one more time: J-O-B.
Go get you some of that first, and some education. And travel.
And if you can’t travel, please open a book.”
Raucous laughter and a rapid-fire marathon of impersonations drawn from his repertoire of Bay Area characters punctuate his loose retelling of his television career. He enjoyed playing the emcee, evident as he relates the content of his prolific television output that spanned five shows and six years: “If you’ve ever seen me cuttin’ up, you’d think I was a black Fred Astaire. I am the black Fred Astaire. I’m serious, because that’s what I do.”
In the early ‘8 0s, Darondo dropped out of the East Bay scene after nearing what he describes as a nervous breakdown. “I hit London,stayed in Piccadilly Square. The Ivanhoe Hotel, I even remember the name,” he laughs. “ I just went to clubs, cut up a bit, played some guitar. Just handsome fun.”
After a few months in England, Darondo crossed the Channel and took the train down to Paris, where he pass ed nearly half a year playing in clubs between Montmartre and Montparnasse. “I was just runnin’ around, havin’ some fun. When it’s time to have some fun, it’s time to have some fun. I wanted to meet other people to see what was going on.”
He then, in a Charo-like turn, installed himself as a guitarist on the Princess Sun Cruise, where he island-hopped from the coast of Venezuela to the ABC Islands, Grenada, St. Thomas, and Trinidad (“The only place I stayed with the group. Voodoo, man? That time I wasn’t gonna be Indiana Jones; I’m gonna be cool”). With a predilection for getting lost and deep with the locals well outside tourist thoroughfares, he saved his ass more than a few times by passing out Coca-Colas and demonstrating his self-developing camera. In the Virgin Islands, after being chased down and fawned over by local jewelry dealers over his startling resemblance to Little Richard, Darondo happily acquired a “rare, rare, and I mean very rare” Goldstone ring from South Africa that he describes as“straight Excalibur, or even like in Caesar.”
Darondo returned to his penthouse in Oakland, and, at the encouragement of one his downstairs tenants, he returned to school. “I was always enthused by the way he was doing things. The way he carried himself, he was really cool,” Darondo smiles. “He said, ‘Darondo, you ought a try and check something out with this medical thing. You look like you might be able to do something, like you have a little heart in you!’” Darondo started out working at a head trauma rehabilitation center, then worked both as a physical therapist and speech pathologist while director of a recreational therapy program. Darondo relates his experiences with his patients, who by his telling benefited wildly from his offbeat therapeutic approach, with an affection and intensity registers above that which he brings to his other stories, from starting a house jug band made up of patients who had experienced serious head trauma to treating a young girl suffering from a spinal cord injury with such success thats he was able to perform, fully standing and dress ed as Madonna, at a Halloween party only months after she was declared untreatable by doctors at the center.
Darondo’s musical fluency lends to him breaking into renditions of everything from La Traviataariasto Stephen Jones standards to Wilson Pickett with charm and ease as he describes his medical career. His wife, still seated a few feet away, smiles and laughs with approbation and pride with each new anecdote, and he clearly enjoys playing to her above all else.
As for hiss stage performances, he only performed publicly as Darondo three times in the ‘7 0s: at the Berkeley Community Theater with James Brown,solo at Bimbo’s36 5 Club in San Francisco, and at a small club gig in Texas. When first contacted by Torres, then Jervis, he was bemused, but reticent at the prospect of jumping back into the music game. Jervis, who first heard Darondo’s track “Didn’t I” courtesy of British DJ Gilles Peterson’s radio show, finds Darondo’s lack of an impulse towards self-promotion in regards to his music fascinating, if frustrating at times. “Darondo’s an interesting guy, because despite having a unique voice and an obvious talent, he’s apparently not interested in the music business to the level you’d think. It’s interesting, confusing, and perhaps even frustrating . . . but this is also part of his charm.”
The reissue transpired when Darondo uncovered a long-forgotten reel of tracks that included demo versions of the 45sand a few unreleased tracks. “I rode around in Darondo’ scar as he played me a cassette copy (of the reel). It was clear that the tracks were good, but Darondo wanted them to sound better.”
Jervis brought Darondo into the studio with artist and producer Quinn Lamont Luke, the until-recently San Francisco-based soul singer who performs as Bing Ji Ling, to enhance the tracks and add missing background vocals and guitar and keyboard parts. “ Bing Ji Ling could reach some notes Darondo couldn’t,so Darondo asked him to fill in some of the gaps. By the end of the session Darondo was ribbing Bing Ji Ling that he was a missing Bee Gee brother,”says Jervis.
Ling, who famously passes out ice cream to his female audience members, agrees with Torres’s assessment that Darondo is a “born hustler, but one that always made out good; a money well.”
“If I’m passing out ice cream at my shows,” Ling says, “Darondo, he’d be passing out $100 bills forsure.”