In one life, a person can wear many hats and achieve stardom and the wisdom that goes with it. Gus Caveda is one of those rare instances where the heart of a musician, songwriter and producer finds true success, not just from the masses but from the strength of his family while keeping current with the trends of the industry.
SM: Let’s get right to it and start at the beginning. Where were you raised?
GC: I was born in Havana Cuba and came to the US at age 4 with my parents. After about 3 years living in Miami, we moved to L.A. where my grandmother, cousins and uncles were living, but my dad had a hard time keeping a job out there so we moved back to Miami. In 1972, my folks bought their first house in Carol City, which was a suburb in North Miami. That’s when I first got introduced to playing music.
SM: What was that first exposure to music?
GC: One day we had a door to door salesman come by to tell my dad about a new music academy that had just opened up and was accepting applications for guitar and accordion classes. My dad loved music, especially the older Cuban ballads from Los Panchos and Beny Moré. He signed me up to learn how to play guitar when I was 10 years old.
SM: When did the world of electric guitars enter the picture?
GC: About 3 months after I started the academy, they sold my dad into upgrading me to an electric guitar. It was a Gibson SG, which they sold together with a small 50 watt Gibson amp. The package was about $400, which was a lot of money back then, but I loved that SG and somehow my dad managed to finance it for me. I wish I still had that guitar!
I took classes there for about 2 years, but my dad could see I wasn’t improving much, so he hired me a private teacher named Lydia Villarao. Her father was a famous composer in Cuba and my dad met her through our church. I learned more with Lydia in 6 months than I did at the music academy in two years. I continued taking lessons with her for 5 years. She taught me some of the classics, but by the time I was in my early teens I only wanted to play rock and folk music. So she taught me a whole bunch of tunes and began bringing me to our church to play with the ministry. That gave me even more practice.
With "Erotic Exotic" (Far Left)
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