The Ballad of Carlos Guitarlos

It might be Robert Johnson's "Dust My Broom" or an instrumental rendition of "Yesterday," or the haunting coda from "Layla," or "If I Only Had a Brain" from "The Wizard of Oz," or Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll." Or this ballad, one he wrote in a hospital a couple of years ago when he thought he might die:

Lord, help me, I've fallen again

Straight from the heart

You can hear my tear when you

call in again

Help me make a new start

The notes are fuzzy and occasionally halting, but the technique is unmistakably sophisticated: chords and melody played simultaneously, the way Chet Atkins might have done. An old gravelly blues voice, perfectly cracked, effortlessly in tune, pours from the slumped singer. The truthfulness of the voice commands you to listen, but it also commands you to wonder: Who is this? What is a guy with these chops doing here?

His name -- his stage name for 23 years -- is Carlos Guitarlos. Two decades ago, he was a member of a famously mercurial Los Angeles bar band, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs. The band, a collection of big, obstinate, blues-loving men who played and partied fiercely and disdained rehearsals, was at the epicenter of Los Angeles' club scene during a brief era when the roots-rock and punk-music movements collided, forging groups like the Blasters, Los Lobos, X and Fear. These bands were fraternities of elemental musicians, contemptuous of stardom, seeming to long only for one transcendent moment on stage.

By the late 1980s, that fervor was largely gone, along with the Rhythm Pigs. Guitarlos became another obscure name in the long list of musicians felled by drugs and booze, desperately following his ex-wife and infant daughter to San Francisco, living by playing on the streets and sometimes sleeping on them, losing himself in cocaine.