The Music Man..

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Angry Pope

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The Music Man
For Raiders executive John Herrera, football must compete with his other love: His tunes


By PHIL BARBER


When a guest entered the room, John Herrera walked over to his outdated console - receiver and turntable built into a sturdy wood cabinet - and lifted the needle from a Four Preps song. Standing upright on either side of the console, and in another corner of the room, were stacks of albums, perhaps 500 in total - Andre Segovia, Louis Jordan, Commander Cody, Miles Davis, Ry Cooder, Mose Allison, the Marshall Tucker Band and a grab bag of others.

It would be a modest collection in some contexts. But in a hotel room?

Herrera's music is never far from him. A longtime Raiders executive, Herrera stores the record player in the players' training-camp locker room, a shed behind the Napa Valley Marriott, for most of the year. When he arrives in Napa for camp, about a week before the team, he has it hauled to his room.

"It makes me feel at home," Herrera said, sitting in the room, halfway down the hall from the lobby. "It's my comfort zone."

At his home in Clayton, almost in the shadow of Mount Diablo, rests a much more formidable assortment - somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 separate recordings. There are LPs and CDs, 45s and 78s, cassettes and eight-track tapes that he can't even play anymore, all combining to fill a five-car garage and two rooms of his house to the bursting point. Herrera estimates he owns 160,000 LPs alone, stored under a system he refers to as "organized chaos."

"I don't golf, I'm not in a poker league, I don't go shopping for clothes, I'm not a drinker," he explained. "Whatever free time I have is devoted to music."

Herrera, 59, grew up in Oakland, near Chabot Golf Course, and some of his earliest memories are aural. He was 6 or 7 when he began to notice the songs humming from the older kids' transistor radios - Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. He remembers the first album he ever brought home, the eponymous Elvis Presley.

"My dad was just petrified," Herrera said. "He was a big band guy."

Of course, Herrera loves big band and swing, too. But he soon dived headfirst into rock 'n' roll. By the time he was at UC Davis, his was the dorm room where everybody converged to listen to Them or the Stones.

After college, Herrera found himself pulled in two directions, football on one side and music on the other. Football ultimately won the tug-of-war.

He is now in his third turn with the Raiders, his hometown team, not counting the summers he spent interning at training camp in Santa Rosa. His first real job was in 1968, when he assisted both the business manager and the PR director. The second stint came from 1978 to 1981, when he was a combination scout and PR director. He signed on for the third time in 1985 and never left. Herrera's title is senior executive, but he's one of those classic Raiders employees who does a little bit of everything, from smoothing out logistics in advance of away games to handling play-by-play in the press box.

Between his Raiders periods, Herrera worked for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Washington Redskins, and the Canadian Football League's British Columbia Lions and Saskatchewan Roughriders.

He also spent a six-year interlude as a record executive, first with United Artists, then with London Records. He worked with retailers, radio stations and artists, handling promotions and sales, and his record collection expanded like a virus.

"Everybody knew everybody. It was fun," Herrera said. "I'd take home 20 to 30 records a day. At London, we were in the same building as Columbia and Warner Bros. in San Francisco. I worked very hard, and I played hard, and I listened to everything I could."

That's when Herrera's tastes began to branch and splinter, to blues, jazz, folk, country-western, even classical. (He seems to go for just about anything outside of heavy metal, rap and punk.) But football never stopped whispering to him.

"Once I was back in football, I never wanted to leave," Herrera said. "In football, I always felt that if someone didn't like you, they'd look you in the eye and tell you. In the music business there was a lot of backstabbing."

Even after coming home to sports, though, Herrera never stopped dabbling in music. From 1978 to 1980, he hosted a weekly two-hour program on a Santa Rosa radio station called "Raiders' Jock Rock." He would invite a player - tackle Henry Lawrence and wide receiver Morris Bradshaw were regulars - and the two would pluck anything from the station's shelves that appealed to them.

And one of Herrera's proudest musical moments came as a Raider.

Through a saxophone player named Sam Butera, Herrera met Gia Maione, the second wife of legendary jazz composer and band leader Louis Prima. Prima was always one of Herrera's heroes. Working with professional engineers, he helped Maione get eight of Prima's hard-to-find recordings released as CDs.

Though his tastes are all over the map, Herrera leans toward the enduring classic rock subset - Van Morrison, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Chris Rea, Marianne Faithfull and their brethren. "More of the artists I have affinity for are the ones who have been around for 30 to 40 years," Herrera said. "They haven't been around for 30 years by accident. They're good."

Herrera's biggest problem these days is finding time to listen. Well, that and convincing his wife, Kathy, and nine children that he isn't insane. Asked if Kathy tolerates the obsession, Herrera smiled resignedly and said, "Not particularly. She wishes it would all go away - or at least to storage."

No chance of that, at least not in the forseeable future. Family might come first to Herrera, and football second. But the collection has taken on a life of its own.

"I always say no one could ever come up with what I have," Herrera said. "They might have an equivalent collection of music. But no one could have exactly what I have."
 
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