Tornados Whippin’ It Up : The Tex-Mex Rockers, Who’ll Blow Into O.C., Are a Hot Ticket

The four members of the Texas Tornados are living proof that there’s life beyond 40. Top 40, that is.

The musical marriage that spawned last year’s “Texas Tornados” album and tour hasn’t pushed M.C. Hammer or Madonna off the radio waves or the top rungs of Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. The Grammy-winning album has, however, spent a respectable 44 weeks on the magazine’s country chart and was re-released in a Spanish-language version this year for extra mileage in Latino markets.

“It has now sold 250,000 copies,” said Neal Spielberg, national sales director for Warner Bros. Records in Nashville, “and it’s all been done with mirrors”--without significant radio airplay, a hit single or MTV exposure.

Consequently, what originally was expected to be little more than a one-shot romp for Tex-Mex rockers Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, country star Freddy Fender and Mexican conjunto legend Flaco Jimenez will have a sequel come September.

“It kinda makes you wonder,” said Meyers, 51, during a phone interview earlier this week from his son’s home in Toluca Lake, where he was resting up for Tornados shows tonight at the Del Mar Fairgrounds and Friday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano (because the Coach House date sold out quickly, the club has booked the band for a return gig Sept. 7).

“We did one (promotional appearance at a record industry) convention in Sacramento, and M.C. Hammer and his whole crew opened the show,” Meyers said in his bred-in-Texas twang. “While he was playing, we went walking up the aisle to find our seats and people started cheering--and it wasn’t for Hammer. They were roaring and whispering and hollering, ‘Hey, there’s the Tornados!’ Yes, it’s strange to a point.

“I get scared thinking what would happen if we ever got into mainstream radio.”

Meyers, whose association with Sahm dates back to the mid-1960s when they formed the Sir Douglas Quintet, could be considered “the quiet Tornado.” Not that he doesn’t make his share of raucous noise with the group: Between his instrumental work on his signature Vox roller-rink-quality organ, his piano accordion and other keyboards, and such wacky songwriting efforts as “Hey Baby Que Paso” and “If You Got the Dinero,” Meyers solidly anchors the Southwest corner on the Tornados’ compass.

(Sahm, to continue the analogy, brings the music north with his rock, blues and R&B; background; Fender swings things east toward Nashville, and Jimenez pulls the sound south again with his dazzling button-accordion work on such songs as “Soy de San Luis,” which was written by his father and which won the Tornados this year’s Grammy for Best Mexican-American performance.)

But because Sahm, Fender and Jimenez all are better known for their own careers, most of the attention on the Tornados has focused on them. That’s fine with Meyers, who has spent most of his professional life on the fringes rather than at center stage.

Continuing to perform and record periodically with the Sir Douglas Quintet (which during its ‘60s heyday toured with the likes of the Rolling Stones), Meyers also has his own on-again off-again group, Western Headband. When the Tornados take a break in August, he and Fender will do two weeks at a Reno casino. Meyers hopes sometime later this year to wrap up another album of his own, with a little help from his rock drummer son, Clay.

Augie’s last album, “My Main Squeeze” for his own Superbeet Records label, was picked up by Atlantic Records and landed him a minor country hit in 1988 with the single “Kep Pas So,” which he resurrected for the Tornados as “Hey Baby Que Paso.”

“I write funny songs,” he conceded, reflecting over such titles as “Velma From Selma” from one of the SD5’s mid-’80s albums, and “La Ronda On My Honda,” one of two Meyers tunes slated for the next Tornados album.

“But they’re all true experiences,” he said. He recalled a parking-lot encounter with “four dudes who were sitting around wishing they had money to buy gas and some beer and get out of town. They drove off in a Camaro, and that’s where I got ‘If You Got the Dinero.’ I love to sing ‘em.”

The challenge for the Tornados, who tour with a band that includes longtime Sir Douglas guitarist Louis Ortega and Jimenez’s bajo sexto player Oscar Tellez, is to keep the fun quotient high. That’s not always easy after a solid year of touring behind the same 10 songs from the one album, supplemented by such Fender hits as “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” and “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” as well as the Sir Douglas chestnuts.

According to Meyers, there are two schools of thought among the Tornados: “Freddy likes to keep to the set list, but Doug likes to go off into left field--about two miles. In the dark. That’s fun, and I’m used to doing that.

“I’m just having a ball,” he continued, citing performances everywhere from industry conventions and small clubs to stops last week at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and next month at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. “I always like to quote a saying: ‘My greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time I do.’ I live by little things like that.”

Such a motto takes on literal significance for a kid who had polio and didn’t walk until he was 9. None of the other members of his family were especially musical, but Meyers has no trouble pinpointing how he got the bug to spend his life playing music:

“I used to lie in bed and look out my window, and every Saturday afternoon, I’d see this country band--I’d love to know its name--and the guys would be having a beer and singing, and they’d get on an old bus and drive off somewhere. Then they’d get back at 2 in the morning and get off the bus, still drinking and singing. And I always thought that’s what I’d like to do. I always flash back to that.”

Did things turn out the way he imagined?

“Yeah, I guess so. Everything I ever done, I’ve dreamt about it and I’ve done it. . . . I never had a lot of money, but then I never dreamed about having a lot of money. I have a friend that all he seems to think about is making money, money, money. I thought about writing songs and making music.”

* The Texas Tornados play at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Grandstand Stage, Del Mar Fairgrounds, Del Mar. Tickets: free with admission to the fair, $6 for adults. Information: (619) 259-1355. Also Friday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: SOLD OUT. The Tornados return to the Coach House on Sept. 7. Information: (714) 496-8930.