Tower of Power.

Tower’s back intact

Tower of Power’s all together again
and ready for action

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By John Berger
jberger@starbulletin.com

Who knew when Tom Moffatt announced that he'd be presenting Tower of Power in concert that the show would be such a milestone for the band and its fans alike?

Original bassist Francis "Rocco" Prestia is back in the lineup!

"He just had his first gig back with us Friday night in Los Angeles and sounds fabulous," Emilio Castillo, leader and co-founder of East Bay's own TOP, reported when he called this past Monday.

"When we almost lost him, it was a really difficult time, so fans all over the world are just so happy that he's alive and doing well and back with the band."

Prestia was terminally ill and anxiously awaiting a liver transplant when he finally had to stop playing with the group almost a year ago. It was then that TOP fans around the world -- some of them well-known entertainers -- got involved. A medical fund was set up to help pay for the operation, and things came together in the nick of time.

"He got (the transplant) literally a day before death. The doctor said he would not have lived another day," Castillo said. "He got the liver in late August, and he looks like he drank from the Fountain of Youth."

The band is looking pretty good, too. Although some would say TOP peaked in the early 1970s and then became less visible thereafter, Castillo's reply is that group has never disbanded and always been working.

"We've always played live. Even when we didn't have a record contract, we've always had an audience. We have die-hard fans, so we were always able to play live and make pretty decent money. Then, in the '90s, we were signed by Sony and it's been uphill ever since."

Tower of Power Where: Hawaii Ballroom, Sheraton-Waikiki Hotel When: 8 p.m. tomorrow Tickets: $35 and $45 Call: 526-4400

He says TOP plays about 120 shows a year and spends about 150 days a year on tour; the schedule this year includes two European tours and at least one trip to Japan. The TOP Web site, www.bumpcity.com, also lists 27 albums, including greatest-hits anthologies and a couple of foreign releases.

The group's 28th album, "Oakland's Own, Tower of Power in the Oakland Zone," is scheduled for release in April.

"I just finished it Sunday, so I still gotta do some edits and sequencing," he said, explaining that, as the producer of the new album, he's been busy working on things like overdubs and mixing long after the other band members' work was done.

The album will be on a new record label, Or Music.

"Our record executive left Sony, but he has a really great working relationship with them, so he started his own record label and they're distributing the new label," Castillo said.

The album will mark the debut of Larry Braggs as the group's lead singer and also the return of powerhouse drummer David Garibaldi, truly one of the best in the biz.

"He's one of the most famous members of the band ever, and him and Rocco playing together was always like the most magical thing about Tower of Power. (Larry) is probably the strongest singer we've had since Lenny Williams, that kind of range and even better stage vitality and a live audience interaction thing going on. Everybody talks about him whenever we play."

TOWER of Power returns to Honolulu as arguably Hawaii's most popular horn band of the 1970s. While fans of Chicago can point to that band's tremendous list of hits during that same period, even that band couldn't match TOP when it came to blending rock, soul and funk on such songs as the classic and enigmatic "You're Still a Young Man," "You Strike My Main Nerve" and "Clean Slate."

"There's no question that soul music was happening in Oakland and in the East Bay at the time -- and it still is. I was just up there last week working on my record, and it just amazes me how much more soulful the radio is there than in, say, Los Angeles," Castillo said of the cosmopolitan milieu that helped define the sound and the ethos of the band.

He was 11 when his family left Detroit for the Bay Area, and 17 when he formed the Motowns, a band that specialized in playing obscure soul music. Castillo met baritone saxophonist Stephen "Funky Doctor" Kupka soon afterward, and they became the nucleus of the band that would become Tower of Power.

The first song they wrote -- although not their first hit in Oakland -- was "You're Still a Young Man." It became the band's first national hit in 1972.

"When we first started coming up, we just decided that we didn't really hang out in San Francisco -- we always were in Oakland -- and we decided we were gonna claim Oakland as our home and our sound was going to be the Oakland Sound."

With Castillo and Kupka at the helm, TOP connected with rhythmically aggressive songs like "What Is Hip?" and "You've Got to Funkifize," love songs ("This Time It's Real" and "What Happened to the World That Day?" to name two) and party songs like the Hawaii favorite "Down to the Nightclub."

One of the songs relatively few people remember is the one Castillo expected to be one of the group's biggest hits. Check out "Only So Much Oil in the Ground" from the 1975 album "Urban Renewal."

"I remember raving to my manager that I had written the most perfect song and made the most perfect record ever to be. The lyrics had a great message and were sung beautifully by Lenny Williams, the rhythm track was just burnin', the sax solo was burnin' ... I thought it was going to be a huge hit. It didn't even make a dent on the charts!"

Castillo and his family now live in Arizona, but he makes it clear that Oakland is still TOP's city by the bay, and its vaunted pro football team, playing in some little game called the Super Bowl on Sunday, is one they'll rabidly root for.

"We're huge Raiders fans -- we just played the national anthem for them two weeks ago in that game in the rain when they beat Kansas City really bad," Castillo said, anticipating there'll be a Super Bowl XXXVII party going on somewhere in Honolulu that day.

And, as for the new album, he promises there'll be no surprises.

"One of the main questions I get asked all the time is, What new direction are you going in with this album? It's a moot point for me 'cause we never go in a new direction. You're not going to hear the new rap record from Tower of Power. You're not going to hear the new reggae or alternative record. We play a certain type of music, and it's all our own. Nobody else plays our kind of music, and we stay true to that."

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