'Hey Baby Kep Pa So'
"Before I met Sara, I was in New York, staying at my son's, sleeping on the couch. I was playing accordion, and this woman [I was seeing] said, 'Why you always playing that Mexican music?' I said, 'I like it.'
"She said, 'I don't,' so I said, 'There's the door, sweetheart.'
"So she got up and left.
"I didn't hear from her for three weeks. So I wrote: 'Hey baby, que paso? I thought I was your only vato.' I wrote the song and recorded it. About six months later, it was getting some radio play and she calls to say: 'All my friends' kids love that song. They've all got that record and I tried to get a copy of it ....'
"I said, 'You can buy it at Wal-Mart.' She hung up on me.
"When I was living in Stockholm, Sweden, in the early Eighties, we did a lot of TV. I'd ask them how to say, 'Hey, how you doing out there in Stockholm?,' so I could write it down. Well, you know 'que' in Spanish has the 'Q,' but over there a lot of people can't understand it, so I wrote 'que paso' as 'k-e-p p-a s-o.' I paraphrased it like that. Sometimes people will say, 'That's not the Spanish way,' and I'll say: 'That's the street way. On the Westside, that's the way they talk.'"
'Dinero'
"I was in a Mobil station one time, putting gas in my car. This guy drives up in his Camaro convertible with two nice ladies, a cooler of beer in back, and no money.
"'Hey, vato man, you spare a couple of dollars, man?' 'What for?' I ask him.
"'I'm outta gas and got two chicks. You want a beer, man? We're just looking for a party, man.' 'Yeah, I'll take a beer,' I said, and took one and gave him a couple bucks.
"And as he drove off, I looked at him and said: 'If you got the dinero, I got the Camaro. Flash some cash and buy some gas and off we go.' I went home and wrote the song."
'Velma From Selma'
"I was at the bank, and the girl says, 'I hear you write songs.' I said yeah. She said, 'No one ever wrote a song about me.' I said, 'Sweetheart, I'll write a song about you – what's your name?' She said, 'Velma.'
"Oh, Lord. What rhymes with Velma? Then on the bus to Dallas, the bus driver says, 'Hey, did you hear they busted the whorehouse in Selma?' So before we got to Dallas, I'd written, 'You used to be my lover/We did it undercover,' 'Velma From Selma.'
"I went back to the bank to say, 'I wrote a song about you,' and they'd fired her."
