“I was born to play the drums,” Beto tells me amid the steam screaming from the espresso machines at Cartel’s in Tempe, Arizona. In between sips of tea, he smiles immensely, gesticulating, dropping his fingers, lifting the digits, and then dropping them again and again against the table’s surface to, of all songs, The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy,” which is blasting from the speakers somewhere overhead.

“I can play rhythm and blues too,” he says, “but I prefer funk.”

I’ve met Beto to learn the story of a Mexican musical legend, a man who made his living banging drums for 50 years, and how he ended up here. He does not disappoint. He begins by describing how he was influenced early on by drummer David Garibaldi of Tower of Power. “Garibaldi is one of the best drummers of funk music. Exactly what he was doing with his right and his left hand I listened to the record and learned.”

Beto learned this way because he didn’t know how to read music. He didn’t need to. “It was just by feeling. And the sound the sound the sound,” he says, simultaneously drumming on the table. “But I used to practice a lot.”

When I asked Alberto about other musicians in his family, he told me there were none. Alberto’s father was a jeweler. His mother helped his grandmother, a glass blower, make vidrio soplado—colorful glass bowls and cups. (The phrase sounds nicer in Spanish). His parents were artists in their own right. For Alberto, the rhythms life created sent him down his own path.

Behind tinted glasses, the smile in his eyes reveals more than words about his love of music: a gratitude toward the thing that saved his life.

“When I was 15 years old, I used to get drunk, lie on the street unable to walk, throwing up and everything. The drums kept me away. I didn’t even think of a drink. When on the other hand, many musicians, they wanna play so that can they drink, so they could do drugs. Not me. That helped me stay away.”

Beto formed the group, Los Monstruos when he was just 18. “We got together playing Beatles songs. Top 40,” he says. They played in local cafes and eventually were asked to appear on a local Guadalajara TV show called Muevanse Todos. “We were doing the most popular songs, but in English. Not in Spanish because rock and roll was played in English.”

In 1964, after recording an album with the label Son-Art, Beto moved to Tijuana. If you were a band trying to make it, Tijuana was the place to be. “In Tijuana a band could play every day because there were, there still are, many nightclubs with live musicians playing like in New Orleans or like in San Francisco” for locals and for tourists.

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