David Garza has a lot of people who love him. As a musician and as a person he is as real as it gets, commanding the respect of colleagues, the admiration of fans and the affection of friends. He is a powerful force on and off the stage. Ask him about it (I did) and he'll tell you that it's because he gets out of the way, that removing himself, somehow paradoxically, allows him to be fully present in the moment.

I first heard David play at a private party where the many musicians present took turns performing. His highly original rendition of Mother Nature's Son (he is a big Beatles fan) charmed the room. Or maybe I first heard David play, at Shelter Theater's open mic, tenderly strumming and crooning an original composition about a woman swimming in the moonlight. Then again, it might have been fronting for Vudu Chile, just howling the blues. Between songs he continues to entertain, telling stories, educating, doing comedy improv, drawing laughter from the crowd mostly at his own expense.

David Garza has his own religion and magic and he encourages you to have yours too. His music transports you beyond yourself, fully into the present. He tells us that that is the role of the shaman, and backs up his assertion with his broad study and experience, recounting over and again the extraordinary synchronicities that have led him on his way. Like the Blues Brothers, he is on a mission from God. Like Jake and Elwood, he may be a little nun-shy, but he just can't fail.

- Dr Dave (Fialkoff)

In 2002 I came to San Miguel for 6 days, I got hired at the hostel I was staying at because I made friends with the two girls making pancakes and they hired me. I ended up staying for 10 months and managing the hostel. My future friend Julian, the guitar player in Vudu Chile, had a club with his wife called Charar on the corner of Sollano and Correo. I went and inquired for work there. He asked me to play a couple song on my guitar during a break. I played 3 or 4 songs and he said, I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got it, and hired me. I played once a week, opening for the Mexican rock bands. Then I started an open mic and a song writer showcase. I'd get two mexicanos that wrote original songs and two gringos. I’d be the host. We had a good turnout. I'd write articles in the Atencion about it, back when Atencion needed help from people in town. We did a couple ensembles just for fun. They turned out really good.

Then I went back to Texas for 6 months and I came back 6 months later and we formed Vudu Chile. That was 2004. We played every Thursday night. Within 6 weeks we were the most popular band in town, us and Pila Seca. We played and played and played and people danced like crazy. I felt like I was a shaman because I was helping people get back to their original childlike joy. I wanted us to groove good enough so people would forget about us. It’s a lot of pressure when people are watching you, but when they are participating with you then they’re joining in with you. Our greatest moments were when people forgot about us and just started dancing. That was the only prerequisite I laid out for the band; we had to groove so well that people would have to dance; they couldn’t fight it. So we’d have fun too. And we accomplished that.

The drummer has been sponsored by Yamaha to teach in the country of Mexico. He’s one of the best I’ve ever seen if not the best. His name is Carlos de Aguinaga or Charlie. Julian Arcos is one of the best guitar players. Aaron Romo was the originally bassist, so then Julian’s brother Javier played bass. It was pure vocals in that band. We started out doing blues and soul. Then we evolved and we started doing funk and reggae and rock and disco and now we do jazz as well. We do a lot of songs our own way. And we have a lot of fun. The Mexicans and gringos like our turn on these kinds of songs.

The closest things to shamans in the modern world are artists because they follow their own path and they bring joy and introspection and clarity to other people. In the Artist's Way it says, your job is to learn how to get out of the way. What I found was that I was a channel. I resented at first when the author said that, because I didn’t want to get out of the way. I was trying to figure out who I was and what I was. But I'd reached a point where just focusing on myself wasn’t helping me learn any more about myself.

I knew that when I sang and played guitar I got into a zone, like a channel. I felt connected to myself, god and people. So at that point I didn’t really have a choice; I had already tried it my way and I didn’t work, so I just got out of the way. I felt a lot of joy. I was channeling. I am a channeler of god. I can feel what I think most shamans feel. "Shaman" is a loose word, but I think it's much more accurate. In modern organized religion it's about control. There is a lot of fear of the mystical and there is a lot of fear of letting go. In the shaman world a lot of it is about getting out of the way and letting go of control so that the shaman world can actually do something through you.

Maybe it's ego that’s in the way, so then you surrender your ego so you can be more full. In the Artist's Way it says we're putting on the brakes for our creative flow and we’ve been told a lot of myths about our creativity. There's a list of those myths in the beginning of the book and she asks you to read them and see if any of them apply to you, common myths about artists. They say things like: if I become and artist I'll be poor, if I become an artist I'll be an alcoholic if I become and artist I'll do drugs, if I'm straight I'll be gay, if I'm gay I'll become straight, I'll lose my friends, my family will disown me. Getting out of the way sounds harsh, but it's really just going with the flow, jumping in the river. The author says, she thinks that most psychological problems, insanity, come from people trying to stem the flow and not believing they can handle the flow. Really it's easier to go with the flow. It's like letting the river flow. It's going to rise up on the banks sometimes and it's going to ease down, but it's much more alive than a river that’s all damned up.

One time after my divorce I was playing a lot of melancholy songs. When I got done with a set there were these big biker dudes with bandanas and big muscles, who were playing pool in the back of the place. I passed by on my way to the bathroom and one of them yelled at me and I thought they’d criticize me. One says, man I really dig your shit, and the other guy says, yah man keep it up man that’s some really good stuff. So I realized then that the people I had in mind who I thought would like it often didn't, and those who I didn’t think would like it really did. We live in a unique society where we’re the first generation that’s purely a product of advertising. We’re confined to ideals of beauty that are really narrow and that has become ugly in itself. What we need as opposed to what we want, what we consider luxury items as opposed to things that are feeding our souls, we get confused on those things. For me, being in that zone and singing I feel connected and I can't get enough of it. It's really helped me to see what's essential and what's not. I've noticed this about a lot of musicians, if music is really important to them, being in that sacred space, that actually feeds them enough, then they can let go of anything that gets in the way of their calling, their vocation.

There's a scripture where Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He says, you pour over the scriptures with a fine tooth comb and every time god or the universe sends you someone to tell you about the way you kill them, you stone them or crucify them. There's a common thread; David, Moses the Prophets, they all went out to nature and got reconnected with the synchronicity. They saw magic actually manifesting itself in real life. They said, wow this is real; this is better than these rules; and these people aren’t living connected to this anymore so let me go talk to them and tell them what they need to do and stop doing. And they’re always rejected.

Amazing Grace is one of the favorite songs of Christians and non-Christians alike. If you read the author's story, he ran a slave ship and he was having sex with all the slave women. Then he fell in love with this very virtuous woman. She said, if you want to be with me you have to change your ways. What helped him? He had a deep awareness of life, and he noticed that things kept happening to keep him from dying. He’d be standing somewhere and something would fall and kill the guy right next to him. He’d be in these situations where he knew he should have died. He started recognizing that there was a benevolent force that was looking out for him. "Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me." It's not that he was a sinful guy. It was that he was pitiful because he wasn’t living connected. He felt that disconnect. He said, through many dangers toils and snares I have already come. It's been grace that’s led me safe this far and grace will lead me home. Grace is just another word for the universe's benevolent magic that is trying to help us. It's trying to show us a better connected way to live. But we’ve been homogenized and we’ve been sold a really horrible set of goods.

During the break I told the guys in the band that I had had an epiphany. I said, there's this book called Outliers and the author says that to get really good at anything people have to put about 10,000 hours into it. That’s why the Beatles were so good, because they got theirs in Hamburg, Germany when they played for 8 hours every night, 6 nights a week, for a year or two. They got in their hours. What in modern society have people done more than anything else? They’ve watched TV. They've become master TV-watchers. They've reach the highest level of TV watching. They’re actually better at that than any other skill they have, whether it's riding horses, writing, sometimes more than sleeping. There's a world filled with expert TV-watchers. They’re virtuosos. Every tiny little bit they process in one second. So I said, how can we beat that, when they train themselves 30 hours a week for 20 years to pay attention to what's coming out of that box? Even if we were having the best set of our lives we couldn’t compete, because they weren't trained to listen to music for 30 hours a week, they were trained to watch an image come out of the box. It's sad. That’s why some people don’t watch TV, because they know deep down they’re addicts. The content of the show doesn’t matter. It takes away the will to live, the will to thrive, and the will to see real beauty in the world.

Audio Interview/Continuation