Written by Tanya Terry
Tower of Power will perform at FIM Capitol Theatre at 8 p.m. March 1 for their 55th anniversary tour.
The Courier had the opportunity to talk with Emilo Castillo, band leader of Tower of Power for 56 years!
Tower of Power came into being in 1968.
“I had a little soul band called the Motowns,” explained Castillo. “We started playing music a couple years before that. My mother told us if we were going to play soul music, we should call ourselves the Motowns because me and my b other are from Detroit.”
Eventually, Castillo saw the name Tower of Power on a list of “weird band names.”
“I saw the name Tower of Power,” Castillo said. “I said ‘what about Tower of Power?’ The guys in the band said: ‘yeah, that’s good.”’
Castillo describes the upcoming show as a “live energy show with high-energy, Tower of Power style soul music.”
“We have some beautiful love ballads we play,” he added. “There’s a lot of audience participation. It’s a great show! You should leave emotionally moved and physically sweating.”
Tower of Power’s “50 Years of Funk & Soul: Live at the Fox Theater” album was just recently released.
“We celebrated 50 years together in 2018. We did a big concert in our hometown of Oakland, California…with extra background singers and the violin section and some of the more well-known Tower of Power alumni. We played two nights there. It was a great celebration. The mayor of Oakland declared it Tower of Power Week. We recorded it and filmed it, and we have DVD-CD box set with a beautiful booklet. It was a great celebration package.”
Castillo explained that although he left Detroit at age 11, at a very young age he was exposed to singers like Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, The Platters and The Mills Brothers.
Castillo still visits Detroit a couple times a year and has cousins, aunts, uncles and other family members on the Mexican side of his family. Castillo told the Courier he is half Mexican and half Greek.
Tower of Power has numerous hit singles, and they have backed legendary artists like Otis Redding, Elton John, Santana, the Grateful Dead, John Lee Hooker, Aerosmith, Bonnie Raitt and countless others.
Tower of Power is a 10-piece band. One of the big attractions of the bands is it has a five-piece horn section. Castillo explained a lot of other bands have wanted to use their horn section. Carlos Santana was one of the first artists to use their horn section.
“Shortly after that, we did recordings with everybody from Neil Diamond to P. Diddy.”
Tower of Power just completed a Christmas album, which will come out at Christmas time in 2024. The title of the album is “Tower of Power: It’s Christmas.”
Regarding live performances, over Tower of Power’s 56-year career, the group has averaged about 200 days a year of being on the road every year outside of the pandemic.
“We’re touring the world and enjoying our career all these years later. We have fans everywhere we go, and they know our music really well. It’s a specialized kind of music, and there’s a unique set of people that dig it. And we’re very blessed to be doing what we do.”
For more information on Tower of Power’s March 1 performance at FIM Capitol Theatre, call the FIM Ticket Center box office at 810-237-7333. For tickets, visit Tickets.thefim.org.
