Photograph by Mark Gilliland
For three days in late April 1996, the sun-soaked Hotel InterContinental in Miami was a magnet for hungry musicians and powerful industry players. They’d gathered there for the seventh annual Billboard International Latin Music Conference. Latin rhythms reverberated through the hotel, lingered in the party atmosphere, then drifted out toward Biscayne Bay.
Among the performers: a singer/songwriter named Javier Mendoza, 26, out of St. Louis. He had landed a spot at the acoustic “Writers in the Round” program and was to perform a few of his songs, including “En Busca De Ti” and “Sellé el Recuerdo.” The combination of his silky, expressive voice, contemplative lyrics, smooth acoustic sound and good looks made an immediate impression on the audience. In a post-conference write-up in Billboard, Shakira got a lot of ink, but she wasn’t the only one to earn praise. “And there was no finer music than at the ‘Writers in the Round’ acoustic program,” the article stated. “Four superb songwriters—Warner/Chappell’s Fernando Osorio, EMI Latin recording artist Pete Astudillo, peermusic’s Mary Lauret and unsigned Javier Mendoza—fascinated the appreciative audience with infectious, well-crafted tunes.”
Ellen Moraskie, the Latin division vice president at Warner/Chappell who had a reputation for nurturing and developing the careers of young Latin musicians, was among those captivated by Mendoza’s performance. She made him a deal: Join Warner/Chappell as a songwriter. Not only would he be paid for his writing talent, but he’d also be attached to a label that could help him advance his own singing career.
Before he boarded a plane back to St. Louis, Mendoza signed an exclusive contract with the company. A $30,000 advance would soon follow. The musician who had come to the conference in a cab left in a limousine.
On a fall evening more than 10 years later, a day after the St. Louis Cardinals clinched the 2006 World Series, Mendoza took the stage at the Lucas School House in Soulard, the headliner for a Halloween show complete with a costume contest—one he’d have to help judge. This was his second show of the day; the first was a backyard performance at a private birthday party.
Mendoza looked much as he did in Miami a decade earlier—time had been kind. The music business, however, had not been so gentle. Although superstardom had been elusive, Mendoza had built a following of hard-core fans ranging from college kids to middle-aged rockers, especially in and around his home base in St. Louis.
The crowd that night was thin, and the streets outside were empty. The city was still sleeping off a post–World Series hangover. But Mendoza wasn’t fazed. Onstage, he engaged the audience between songs with his dry sense of humor, giving a glimpse of his contrarian streak, softened with a sly grin. Musing about the Cardinals’ win, Mendoza, a soccer fan, asked the crowd whether a match-up of mostly United States teams really qualified as a world series.
usic was always a part of Mendoza’s life. Growing up in Madrid, he heard his father, Ricardo, playing the guitar and singing Mexican folk songs passed down from his father. (Ricardo’s job with a U.S. government agency meant the family moved frequently between the United States and Europe.) The family has other singers, too—Mendoza’s mother, Ana Cañas, and his two oldest siblings, Eugenio (Gene) and Ana-Maria. It was Gene who got most of the attention at family gatherings. “His biggest hit was ‘The Boxer’ by Simon & Garfunkel,” Mendoza recalls. “I would play the drums for him on my lap—trying to give a ‘band’ kind of sound.” Mendoza laughs, admitting his contributions weren’t always appreciated. “He’d tell me to shut up.”
Mendoza has also long loved soccer, another passion handed down from his father. The son played on a German semiprofessional team when he was 16 and 17—he lived in Germany during high school—and later played for Saint Louis University, from which he’d eventually graduate. When a knee injury put an end to Mendoza’s soccer dreams, he redirected that focus toward starting a career in music.
While this decision caused some father-son friction—“To me, it was not the most practical,” Ricardo admits—Mendoza pressed on. By 1993 he had a manager, Ken Hensley, the former keyboardist of the U.K. rock band Uriah Heep, who had moved to St. Louis in the early 1990s. Little happened during the first years of the partnership, but in the spring of 1996, Hensley scored Mendoza a spot on “Writers in the Round”; the limousine was purring just around the corner.
But tensions soon surfaced. For starters, there were disagreements about where Mendoza should live. Ellen Moraskie, the record-company VP, encouraged him to move to Miami, but Hensley advised him to stay put in St. Louis and fly to Florida when necessary. His image was also a source of strain. When he did visit Miami, photo shoots turned into mini-makeover sessions in an attempt to give Mendoza a pretty-boy appeal; he bristled. Even the songs themselves caused problems. “The information that was given to me by my manager was that Ellen went from loving every song to slowly rejecting them as ‘too cerebral,’” Mendoza says. Encouraged to collaborate with another artist recommended by Warner/Chappell, he did so; an unsatisfied Mendoza now calls the resulting songs “sappy.”
“I was a little idealistic, a little naive,” he admits, suggesting that perhaps a musician has to “sell out a little bit in order to do what you want later.”
At about the same time, Mendoza and Hensley started working on his first full-length CD, Tinta y Papel. The project began in 1997 and didn’t finish until 1999. “The album took forever,” Mendoza remembers. Costs soared.
Soon after it was completed, everything fell apart. In 2000 Mendoza and Warner/Chappell mutually agreed to end the exclusive deal. That September, unhappy with Hensley’s representation, Mendoza terminated the agency contract he had with his manager. Dueling lawsuits followed. Hensley claimed that he had invested a large sum of money in Tinta y Papel and that Mendoza had breached the agency contract; Hensley alleged he was entitled to reimbursement and a percentage of income generated by the album. Mendoza countersued Hensley, alleging that his former manager had breached his fiduciary duties to him. Mendoza also alleged Hensley had failed to account for all the income generated by his singing engagements and that his manager had billed him for services that weren’t performed.
For two years the lawsuit lingered in the courthouse. It was finally settled in 2002, with Hensley agreeing that Mendoza would own all the rights to Tinta y Papel. In return, Mendoza paid Hensley $15,000. (Hensley did not respond to attempts to contact him for this story.)
Looking back today, Mendoza calls this period early in the new century his bleakest: He was locked in a fight with his former manager, his record-label deal was disintegrating and his marriage—which he’d celebrated in 1993—was ending.
“In 2000 I was very angry,” Mendoza remembers. After one heated exchange with Hensley that year, Mendoza drowned his sorrows at Blueberry Hill. Too drunk to drive, he called a friend for a ride home. When she arrived, he was outside, sprawled on the sidewalk across Chuck Berry’s star. Once a solace, music was now a reminder of dreams that were slipping away. “I had a hard time listening to music,” he says of those days. As he looked at the success stories around him, he couldn’t help thinking, “Why are they there and I’m not?”
A personal turning point came when Mendoza met the upbeat and outgoing Julie Downey. Originally, it was Downey’s younger sister Jane who had a crush on Mendoza. Jane encouraged Julie, who had just returned to St. Louis after deciding a master’s program in speech pathology wasn’t for her, to meet Mendoza after Mass at Washington University’s Catholic Student Center. Julie and Mendoza started dating soon after; in 2003 they married. A former pharmaceutical representative, Julie eventually began handling promotions and publicity for her husband.
By that point, the music part of Mendoza’s life was also building significant momentum. The Javier Mendoza Band, which he formed in 2000, released three albums in four years. A handful of JMB songs made it onto various versions of MTV’s The Real World, the band opened for acts like Los Lobos and Chuck Berry, and their tunes earned radio airplay. Mendoza, who released a live solo album in 2003 and the solo album Asolas in 2005, was chosen as Budweiser’s “True Music Artist” in 2005. In 2006 he was nominated for best male vocalist at the International Online Music Awards.
In May of that year, Mendoza took a two-month sabbatical in Córdoba, Spain, his mother’s birthplace. While this was a largely positive time in his life—he and Julie decided to start a family on the trip—he returned feeling as if there was still one relationship he needed to set right. He wrote a letter to Ellen Moraskie, attempting to make amends for a relationship that ended badly. “I wanted to say hello, wanted to thank her and to apologize for the way things had ended between us,” Mendoza says. “I wanted to tell her I was thankful that she believed in me.”
In November Mendoza received a call from one of Moraskie’s former assistants. Moraskie had died in 2003, shortly after being diagnosed with cancer. When Moraskie went to the hospital, Mendoza learned, one of the CDs she’d asked for was Tinta y Papel.
“She believed in me,” Mendoza says, “but she never got to hear me say I was sorry.”
hen Mendoza returned to St. Louis from Spain, he brought with him the backbone of a new recording, his most personal yet and one he admits is dearest to his musician’s heart: a self-titled CD with flamenco flourishes and soul-baring lyrics. That November, he holed up at St. Louis’ Red Pill studio to complete the project, with help from his cousin and collaborator, David de las Heras.
To release Javier Mendoza in March 2007, Mendoza chose the Lucas School House. Unlike the post–World Series performance, this time the place was packed. The concert seating on the second floor was sold out and standing room only. Fans who waited to buy tickets the night of the performance had to settle for watching Mendoza on the first floor’s big screen.
The CD had generated some prerelease buzz. A few days earlier, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Kevin Johnson wrote, “It took seven CDs, but local music staple Javier Mendoza has found a project deserving of his name.” Johnson, who was in the audience that night, called Mendoza “one of the most consistently talented” musicians he has heard since he’s been in St. Louis.
Whether it was the packed house or the palpable anticipation, Julie Mendoza—then 9 months pregnant—beamed as she set up the merchandise table at the back of the concert hall. Front and center was the self-titled CD, a black-and-white picture of the musician on the front set against a red background, his gaze off into the distance.
Mendoza took the stage and told the story behind the CD—the work done in Spain and his cousin’s contributions. As he tuned his guitar, he pointed to Julie, telling the crowd that his wife was “with child.” The crowd clapped, and Mendoza added, with a devilish grin, “It is my child, right?”
During the concert, the energy never wavered, though an invisible divide rose up among the crowd. On one side, in the back of the venue, were a few revelers more interested in the party aspect of a CD release party than in the music. The overwhelming remainder of the audience was made up of Mendoza fans anxiously waiting to hear the new music and eager to experience the thrill of being pulled into the vibe Mendoza creates with his guitar, the flamenco beats and his storytelling.
Onstage, Mendoza poured all of his energy into the songs. During the first set, after the ominous, gospel-like tune “Blood in the Water,” the crowd whistled, got to its feet and clapped loudly. The second set’s highlight was the pop-rock song “Who Loves You Now,” which the audience met with a rousing ovation.
After the show, as waitresses gathered empty beer bottles, fans circled Mendoza, clamoring for an autograph. The world around this songwriter was changing yet again.
Two weeks after the CD release party, Gabriel David Mendoza was born. By August, baby seats and guitars rested comfortably next to each other in Mendoza’s south St. Louis home.
Mendoza was able to spend most of the summer performing in or around St. Louis, but as fall approached, so did the need to return to the road. He has long been popular on the college circuit, and school was just beginning—time for another promotional blitz. Mendoza spent more than 40 days on the road during September and October; November was scheduled to bring 11 more out-of-town performances, many on college campuses like LSU and Penn State. While the fall tour offered the chance to play in new venues to new audiences, it also meant spending time away from his wife and new son. “I was gone for a week performing last summer,” he says, “and I couldn’t believe how much he changed.”
This new life chapter also brings changes for Mendoza, particularly an awareness of what parenthood means. “I think more,” he says. “I’m not willing to take as many financial risks.” He admits that the stability of a nine-to-five job, including its steady paycheck, is appealing. But despite that certainty, he says, “I’m still committed to the whole music thing. I want to make it work.”
As Mendoza prepares for the close of another touring year and the beginning of a new one, he knows he’s in a business obsessed with youth. He is nearing the end of his thirties, without a manager or recording label, the worry of success falling mainly on his shoulders. And yet he has taken his musical career further than most. When young aspiring musicians ask for his advice, he says it’s all relative: Next to Prince, he says, he may not be that successful. But few musicians get to do what he does—get paid to play his own music, perform in concerts two or three times a week throughout the year and release CDs to sellout crowds.
It is, in the end, a matter of perspective—something this singer/songwriter has more of each year, with each new album, after each concert. As Mendoza looks back on all that’s happened since that first performance in Miami, he puts it simply and gratefully: “What a tremendous life journey.”
While Mendoza spent much of the fall touring the country, he’ll be capping the year here at home. For details on the five shows he’s scheduled for St. Louis this December, visit javiermendoza.com.
