It’s tempting to call Austin, Texas country-rocker Alejandro Escovedo the Forrest Gump of indie rock, but he deserves to be associated with a much better movie. In 1978, his first band, San Francisco punkers The Nuns, opened the last-ever Sex Pistols show prior to the Pistols’ brief mid-90s reunion. He was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City when the Pistol’s’ Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen checked in; Spungen would soon die under mysterious circumstances. Escovedo’s new song “Chelsea” tells the tale, also the subject of Alex Cox’s 1986 film Sid & Nancy. There we go: Much, much better than Forrest Gump.

In the ’80s, Alejandro played guitar in the great post-punk outfit Rank and File. His first solo album, 1992’s Gravity, revealed a stunning lyrical gift that had not emerged previously though he was already in his 40s. The album and its follow-ups made an impression strong enough to get him named “Artist of the Decade” by the late alt-country mag No Depression in April 1998.

In 2003, Escovedo was hospitalized immediately after a performance. He’d been diagnosed with Hepatitis C years before, but ignored his illness, continuing to drink and smoke and keep rock-star hours. He began a course of treatment using Interferon, a natural protein. He described the harrowing experience of interferon to PopMatters‘ Matt Gonzalez in a 2006 interview: “[It] attacks everything in your immune system. My bone marrow was being eaten away. I had no white blood cells, I had no red blood cells. I was withering away. I had no muscle mass, and I had what would be called premature aging disease. Not to mention all the psychological and spiritual damage as a result of taking that stuff.”