Sixto Sounds
Few men are up to the task of writing songs exclusively for heroes. Real heroes. Real motherfacking, black suit wearing, beat up your girlfriend while calling you names heroes. Real heroes... sonically described by one man, one way... Sixto Sounds.
I met this guy once and he beat me up just for fun. While he was playing Black Suit Beatdown in the background. But that's only a small part of the real absolute truth....
Down in Texas, as the saying goes, everything is bigger. The cars are bigger, the land is bigger, the drinks are bigger and the legends are bigger. Recently I had made my first trip to Texas so of course, I wanted to fit in. So after spending nearly 3 days tracking down a Hummer H1 with hydraulics, I rolled into the Big Balls bar in Forth Worth and took up four parking spaces. The first thing to catch my attention was the music. This wasn't the usual wuss rock or country, this was like someone had thrown a moog in my face, lit it on fire, and put it out by cracking me over the head with a Gibson SG. I had to know what this music was, and judging by the rigorous headbanging of a large, bearded man at the far end of the bar, I found just who I should be asking.
His name was Richard Menendez and his eyes lit up when I asked him who this music was by.
"What? Ain't you never heard of Sixto?"
I pretended I had, but asked him to "refresh my memory" anyway, which turned out to be a very large mistake. Everything's bigger in Texas, remember? See how I tied that in there? So he began recanting the life story of this Sixto musician, and I sighed and took a seat.
"It was November 13th, 1981, and I was sitting in this very bar when I heard a rumblin' in the distance. My drink tipped and the windows smashed, and we all ran outside to see what was going on. A white mist was rising out of the east, the ground felt like it was going to rip apart right under our feet, and I thought I could hear some Europe playing, you know, that Final Countdown song. It was weird that a song from 1986 would be playing, but we later learned that Sixto is basically the future of music."
"Does music work that way?" I asked him.
"What do I look like, Star Trek? Anyway, in the distance we could make out a woman on some sort of stone pillar, and she was having a baby. We could just make it out through the lasers."
"Lasers?"
"Yeah, a laser light show. The woman let out one hell of a scream and then from her belly burst a fully grown man with wild flowing hair, a double neck guitar, and wearing nothing but studded leather underpants. He played the solo from Eruption about seven times and flew into the night sky."
"Wow" was just about all I could say at the time. And he continued.
"About six years later he reappeared, playing the keyboard his dad had bought him on the side of the road near his house. He was terrible at it all right, but no one had the balls to tell him. He moved onto violin once he started school. The biggest kid in class. He had to sit on the floor and you know how kids are, they all made fun of him, calling him 'Sixbuttface' and throwing their eraser shavings at him. That all changed once he started bringing his guitar to school and rupturing the brains of the children with pinch harmonics."
"Their whole brain?"
"All of their brains! Then someone told him about Metallica and it all went to hell. Sixto turned the distortion up and never went back. Now, Sixto usually has a pretty bright glow around him, and that catches the eye of people. People and other things with eyes. So at 15, 15 of our normal human years at least, he did his first session work for a guitar tribute album to Yngwie Malmsteen, by Yngwie Malmsteen. Only, Yngwie was never into really going places or doing things, so Sixto was contracted to play everything on the album. The experience helped him win the high school talent show a few years later with an SRV song, and now Sixto knew he was finally accepted and finally loved."
"So everything was going good for him musically then, what next?"
"Oh he quit music and went to college for an art degree."
"He quit? Just like that?"
"Well he still hummed a bit. In the shower when no one was around. But he came to his senses and got back to guitaring it up and was a fulltime session dude at around 22. No one knows what he's up to now...he dissapeared soon after. Some say he's playing lots of videogames to get remix ideas from. Others say he's living in his house and going about life normally. I say he's dead, and drifts the earth as a vengeful guitar playing spirit, ruining everyones day in a comical fashion."
It was about then that I noticed the flyer tacked to the wall. "It says there he's in a band, and they played a show last Tuesday."
"It was just a theory."
I left the bar that night with a new sense of purpose in my life, to find this Sixto man and document his life for his personal website so others could share in the experience. Since my Hummer had been towed, however, it took about two years to finally catch up with him. My goals, however, are now finally achieved and I can rest peacefully, knowing the story has been passed down. From the mouths of drunkards to my supple young hands tapping away at my keyboard, to you. Enjoy the music.
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