How Darondo got over

PHOTO by MORGAN HOWLAND

For 30 years Darondo had two identities, even though he never knew it. The first was William Daron Pulliam: 62 years old, a retired physical therapist and family man from Berkeley with a voice that immediately sets you at ease and a tendency to tell long, rambling stories about his first guitar or once being mistaken for Nat King Cole. The second: the mysterious soul singer who opened for James Brown and walked away. His three 45s became a scarce, treasured commodity, with values estimated as high as 600 dollars each. Stories about him turned to tall tales: his enormous white Rolls Royce―he’s since traded up for an Infiniti―with his name on the plate (true), flagrant displays of wealth (also true), and rumors that he was a pimp (untrue).

When Darondo the human being discovered Darondo the myth—thanks to a record dealer who tracked him down in 2005—he was immediately inspired to pick his guitar up again and set in motion his second coming: A full-length made up of his six lost songs and three unreleased tracks was released through Ubiquity in 2006. He’s been back in the game since December of 2007, with his first show at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. Today, William Daron Pulliam is a happily retired physical therapist who performs all over the USA. On stage, he moves like a man half his age: “I last did the splits like two or three months ago, but I’m still recovering from it!” And now he’s playing the Detroit Bar for Abstract Workshop’s tenth anniversary—his first time ever performing inside Orange County.

As a young man, he was industrious even before he moved into music: “I started my first job about 13 or 14 years old,” he says. “I was delivering papers. Ever since then I’ve been working.” He says he was the first-ever black electrician to work the Southern Pacific Railroad in Oakland: “My mother didn’t want me to work there,” he says. “I was loading the trains. I dealt with a lot of electricity. If one of them little volts hit you, then you’re burnt!” And in his free time he was a gambler—one skilled enough to earn his nick name “Darondo” from the reactions of friends and family at the enormous wads of cash he’d carry: “Daron got that dough . . . ”

He’d been playing music since high school and by the early ’70s, he was fronting his own band and playing regularly in the Bay Area. He wrote stripped-down soul tracks that wavered somewhere between Let’s Stay Together-style rhythm-and-blues and The Payback-era funk. He released three 45s—“How I Got Over,” “Didn’t I” and “Legs.” And then he opened for James Brown: “I did my little thing. He said to keep on with it. Said I had the beat, the style, the soul.”

But it wasn’t long after sharing a stage with the Godfather that Darondo decided he’d reached his apex and disappeared from music altogether. He gradually traded music career for a regular stint on a few Bay Area cable access shows, and the three 45s he put out were the only evidence his music ever existed. From there he took more odd jobs and landed in physical therapy, and during his term at the hospital Darondo explored music’s healing potential: “I was incorporating the music with the physical therapy. I had a class with maybe like 20 patients who weren’t participating. We’d sing and dance to ‘Old McDonald’s Farm’ and Elvis Presley. Music can make you move! When I got them in my group, they started doing the therapy they were supposed to.”

Today the rejuvenated Darondo joins other ahead-of-their-time players like Gary Wilson, the early ’80s bedroom noise-soul auteur dropped in Beck’s “Where It’s At,” and Vashti Bunyan, the British folksinger allegedly responsible for Devendra Banhart, as part of a new class of lately ascended artists.

“I always talk with my son,” says Darondo. “And he says, ‘Papa, you know what it is? This is the time that you were supposed to come out!’”

ABSTRACT WORKSHOP’S TENTH ANNIVERSARY WITH DARONDO, NINO MOSCHELLA AND THE PARK PLUS JUD NESTER RHETTMATIC AND DJS COCOE AND JOSH ONE DETROIT BAR | 845 W 19TH ST | COSTA MESA 92627 | 949.642.0600 | SAT 9PM | $10 | 21+ | DETROITBAR.COM | MYSPACE.COM/ABSTRACTWORKSHOPCLUB

Tags: abstract workshop, costa mesa, darondo, detroit bar, Music, soul, ubiquity records