Sound Taste

Review: Zeros @ Southpaw

"Hello, we're the Zeros from Chula Vista."

Called the "Mexican Ramones" though they developed parallel to the Forest Hills foursome, the Zeros were one of the wellsprings of American punk. Rock revisionism disguising a loving traditionalism (like the Ramones, the Zeros were acolytes of the affect of girl groups and the derangement of surf psychedelia), they played punk as attitude and approach, not style.

When I first came across the band, it just confirmed my suspicion that punk somehow expressed the Latin condition. After all, the first time I came across a record by my fellow Queens misfits in torn jeans I pronounced their name "Rah-MOH-ness."

I never saw the Zeros in its heyday -- the band was broken up by 1980 and I had little clue of punk history outside NY until I lived out West -- and age-wise, most of 50-60 people at Southpaw couldn't have either.

There were a lot of canas on us bopping to "Don't Push Me Around," but not all of us were paunchy middle-aged punks. There was a gaggle of shellac'd garage mods, their shags, striped shirts and pointy Beatle boots the same I remember in Cavestomp in the 80s. There were also a few cholo-billies barely old enough to get in the club, too sweet in their bangs and skinny black vest. And of course the usual Brooklyn crew of gringos on cool safari.

And on the stage, four men in black pushing 50 playing teen rebellion music, songs they'd written in high school. Was it ridiculous? Actually, no. I think sometimes it takes the accommodations and disappointments of adulthood to really appreciate the bustout energy of youth.

Individually, the Zeros have remained active as musicians. Javier Escovedo (brother to Alejandro and a uncle to Sheila E.) has been in True Believers and Rank and File. Hector Peñalosa played in paisley underground band Flying Color in the 80s. And Robert Lopez is, of course, El Vez.

On stage, Javier had a little of the lineless yet hard living look of Johnny Cash, but seems to miss his role as lead singer just a little too much. He indulged in ax god clichés -- two or three times stepping to the lip of the stage and grinding on the guitar, all the better positioned for photo-snapping fans.

Robert, on the other hand, treated the whole affair like a serious goof. His trademark pencil-thin mustache, black suit, crisp white shirt and roach killer shoes giving him the look of a 50s Mexican movie star, he spent much of the show with an impish grin on his face, tossing out disarming patter that on a teen would have been amateurish, but he wore with grace.

"I've run out of things to say," he said around song #4. And in a shoutout to Mario Escovedo, Javier's younger brother and the concessioneer in back, Lopez said he "saw us practice in Javier's bedroom when he was 12. That's not true, Javier was never 12, he is... ageless."

As is the rush of the electric guitar.

[blurry photos by moi]

RIP Michael Jackson

Lots of us are thinking about this watershed, and I doubt I have the most intelligent, insightful things to say about the King of Pop. I'm waiting to hear from several of my music writer colleagues who've spent more time thinking about the post-Black, post-sexual global star (who was nonetheless irreducibly Black and irreducibly thought of in terms of his sexuality).

It was hard to pick just one video. Jackson 5 classics? Jackson 5 cartoon? Any one of the songs from my personal favorite Off the Wall? Iconic dance/song moments? Iconic MTV-distributed visuals? What a friend called a "Fanonian masterpiece"? A riveting crowd spectacle/homage? I settled on one that showcased the brilliance and weirdness of Michael, his ode to a murderous rat.

In this rendition, the chorus is annoying as heck, but the oufit is mesmerizing, even by Jackson 5 standards. And the lyrics now seem to be about our own ambivalence to Michael. "Ben, most people would turn you away / I don't listen to a word they say / They don't see you as I do / I wish they would try to."

Pedro Pietri wishes you Happy National Poetry Month

No fooling, today is the start of National Poetry Month. Me, I think we need poetry 24/7/365.

Siddhartha Mitter's radio piece today about Yusef Komunyakaa made me think of one of my favorite poets whose work was also deeply shaped by the Vietnam War: Pedro Pietri, the Lower East Side's holy fool.

 You can hear him here and here. And thinking about archives, I pulled up an old issue of The Portable Lower East Side, a long-gone and very missed magazine from the 1980s, and found this:

Rumors about Blank Walls and World War
(excerpt)

I swear to god the english I speak
Was learned in a week late at night
I write in perfect Spanish BUT SINCE
The typewriter was manufcatured in
The U.S.A. it never comes out that way
So don't get on my case or try to erase
My poetry off the face of the earth
Because on my birth certificate it says
I wasn't born here or there or anywhere
Within walking distance from times square
Location of United Nations wet dreams
And it seems there is a romance going on
Between the living & the dead are ahead!

It was really too much cheap alcohol
That ended the dinosaurs career in show
Business during the silent movie generation
At war with every country but Skid Road
To keep the General Public's mind off para
Psychology--the only subject I didn't fail
In elementary school where they teach you
The price of rice in Afghanistan and beans
In Alaska & snowSuits in tropical psycho wards!
This can be true or false or false & true
It has nothing at al to do with history OR
Hypnosis--If your liver doesn't like you
Drinking water can also give you cirrhosis!

***
Pull out your favorite poet and read some out loud. It'll make your day better, I promise.

[Out-of-focus 2000 Senate campaign poster via El Puerto Rican Embassy]

RIP Joe Cuba

Juan Flores, still one of the few people to write about the ecstatic utopian music form called bugalú/Latin boogaloo, reconstructs a conversation between Jimmy Sabater and Joe Cuba before the first time the band played "Bang Bang" at a "Black" dance at the club that would become the Cheetah:

"It was a black dance, the morenos, morenos americanos de Harlem and stuff, you know, they had black dances one night a week there and at some of the other spots. So that night we were playing selections from our new album We Must Be Doing Something Right that had just come out, the one with 'El Pito' on it, you know, 'I'll Never Go Back to Georgia, I'll Never Go Back...' The place was packed, but when we were playing all those mambos and cha chas, nobody was dancing. So at the end of the first set, I went over to Joe Cuba and said, look, Sonny (that's his nickname), I have an idea for a tune that I think might get them up. And Joe says, no, no, no, we got to keep on playing the charts from the new album. Then toward the end of the second set, I went on begging him, and said, look, if I'm wrong, we'll stop and I'll buy you a double. so finally he said o.k., and I went over to the piano, and told Nick Jimenez, play this... Before I even got back to the timbal, the people were out on the floor, going, 'bi-bi hah! bi-bi hah!' I mean mobbed."

I have a special love for bugalú, born the same year I was, 1966. The songs are not as melodically or rhythmically sophisticated as salsa or soul, but they cook! They always sound like you've walked into the middle of a party -- a really great party. As much a dance as a song, it's infectious; passive listening is near impossible.

Joe's band, the Joe Cuba Sextet, was radical, stripping down the lush mambo orchestra to conga, timbal, piano, vibraphone and bass, where even the melodic instruments have a share in carrying the beat, the beat, the beat. And the vocals, erupting from every corner, "corn bread, hog maw and chitlins" "cuchifritos, lechón, lechón, lechón." Cheo Feliciano soneando. Heaven.

I bet the tickets for Joe's first afterlife gig are already sold out.

UPDATE: Joe Cuba will be viewed at the R&G Ortiz Funeral Home located at 204 E. 116th Street, NYC 10029 between 3rd & 2nd Avenues. 212.722.3512 on Wednesday & Thursday, February 18th & 19th from 2 to 10 p.m.

A funeral mass service will be held Friday morning at 11 a.m. at St. Paul's Church located @ 213 E. 117th Street, between Park & Lexington.

(h/t to Clemson and David G. for the info)

Review: Grupo Folklórico y Experimental Nuevayorkquino @ Hostos

Hearing the rooted Puerto Rican and Cuban songs recorded by this cult band in the mid-70s in these two releases, the folklórico part was clear. But seeing the experimental took a little more thought.

But if there was any doubt that the band looked forward as much as backward, you only had to hear the rendition of "Perdón" toward the end of the second set at Hostos.

Jerry González, likely the heppest cat left in all of Latin musicdom, steps to the mike with his trumpet (up to then he'd been on percussion only). The rest of the band watches and waits. Through the mute, the notes are clear as a knife edge, unhurried. All the lessons of bop mellowed but still biting.

He steps away from the mike, fidgets, moves over to another mike, but clearly in control of time and space, molding it with an insinuating melody that remains intelligible even as it's unspun and reconstituted at the molecular level.

We all hold our breath. Brother Andy, Jerry's oldest collaborator and leader of the band, watches too. Until it's time for the band to come in, a guaguancó heavy on the percussion, Andy's bass the heartbeat, Oscar Hernández's piano the circulation. Abraham Rodríguez and young turk Pedrito Martínez sing Trío Los Panchos overlapping harmonies over the rolling drums.

And then, when Jerry hesitates between mikes, Pedrito leaves him his mike, moves up front and begins a rumba that moves the song from celestial to grounded, out of the coco and into the body.  The mind-body dialectic not as opposition, but as call and response, a metaphysics of Ochún (pace Víctor Hernandez Cruz).

And that is where you hear what the Fort Apache Band jazzheads Andy & Jerry heard back as smartass teens in their Bronx basement: that New World Africans in the Caribbean (whether Black or jincho or jabao) knew how to construct fractals of sound, break the false modernity of cement and welfare, played in the key of life. That folklore is a myth; descargas are not past, but multiplying universes.

The salsa hardcore was there in the sold-out hall. A group of musicians drove all day after a late gig in Columbus, Ohio, to be in the audience. Others came from D.C. and other corners of the second Boricua diaspora away from the Barrio homeland. People you'd never see in one spot anywhere else anymore.

And thinking back to the Buena Vista tsunami, I knew why some roots do better in the market than others. That moving, steadfast supergroup appealed to the imperial nostalgia the U.S. has for Cuba. A group like GF&EN is a kick-in-the-face reminder that colonized boricuas, at least then (hopefully still), took all their traumas and rewired them into software for enduring.

[fuzzy G Phone photo by Roberto Lovato]

Friday Chowí

God bless obsessive fans. It's the only reason that YouTube has as many Latin musical performances as it does.

Variety shows never went out of style in Latin America, so lots of groups performed on TV, providing a great visual archive of music and performers. That is, if the TV stations kept archives.

When I was trying to work on a doc on a Dominican musician a few years ago, we found out that it was nearly impossible to get archival footage, because tapes had either fallen apart, been re-used or simply damaged by heat and humidity.

But there are lots of VHS tapes taken off the air signal, lovingly dubbed and re-dubbed, and now on YouTube. I've actually become a connoisseur of sorts of the textures produced by various grades of decay.

I would date this video of "Pájaro Chowí" performed by Wilfrido Vargas y sus Beduinos to the late 70s by the width of the shirt collars and the circumference of the afros. This is the band almost at the height of its powers (which I think was 1980-1981), and a great example of all the lessons Vargas learned from salsa bands and dominicanized. Hard on the horns and letting the piano montuno anchor.

Vargas here is a great trumpet, backup voice and arranger (an informant just put Wilfrido's trumpeting in doubt). He didn't feel the need to take the central spotlight (a mistake he made later, just as Willie Colón did). Sandy Reyes' much sweeter voice does justice to the song.

My favorite part comes about 2:35, when "Yo estoy cantando" slows down the song and everything drops out except for a percolating piano, and discreet tambora and güira. And then the horns explode again. (Alas, the song cuts off).

Friday Clash at Shea

Coinciding with the end of Shea Stadium (and yet another Mets season), there's one shiny memory bit that's surfaced. This week, Epic released "The Clash: Live at Shea Stadium," the recordings of the 1982 concert where they opened for the Who.

In this AP story, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon recall their meetup with the headliners slightly differently:

Clash bassist Paul Simonon recalled the Who's Pete Townshend coming into the dressing room to kick a soccer ball around, but Roger Daltrey "wouldn't talk to us."

Jones is more gracious in his memory, saying he "adored" the Who and was honored to play on the same bill.

"There was a certain element of passing on the baton," he said. "They were on one of their farewell tours and we were an up-and-coming group. We came from the same area of London so we felt there was some kind of a bond. That was probably why we were asked to do it."

One speculation about why the show was recorded in the first place is that the band was filming the video for "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" (for the record, one of my least favorite Clash songs).

Doesn't make a lot of sense, but while I wait to get the record (even in these peanut-butter-and-tortilla times) here is the video in question, with footage of the band arriving in the grotty parking lot and a live version of the song. Ah, Queens. Ah, Shea.

Monday Oscar D'León

So many things to love about this vintage mid-1970s video of Oscar de León performing Beny More's "Mata Siguaraya."

This performance falls well within my argument that U.S. critics completely misread salsa as retro, a return to tradition, when it was more a move in two directions at once -- into the past for some repertoire, for individual musical skills (the drums, the drums), and into the future with the stagecraft, the arrangements, absorbing the funk lessons of everyone's choreographer James Brown and the rock excess of Jimi or The Who.

Watch the hypnotic swinging fringe, which recalls vintage Tina, the "modern" (electric) but "traditional" (stand-up) bass, the early "cadenú"/bling aesthetic (the better to see the shine in the back of the arena), the "voz de vieja" chorus, the drawn-out scatting verses, trombone- and trumpet-driven montuno superimposed with those crazy moves (again, for the benefit of the back of the room).

Thanks to Xuxi for the link.

Not sweet, just sticky

So Madonna stopped being culturally relevant some time around the Iran-Contra hearings.

But I noticed a couple of days ago that she may be headed to the DR for the first time ever. If she gets there, let's hope she doesn't do a repeat of her turn in a 1993 concert in San Juan, where she used the Boricua flag as a chocha wipe. Not that I'm a fan of nation-state symbols, but that was just gross.

And then there's her faux-shocking move of equating McCain to Hitler and Kim Jong Il. Paris did it better, to be honest. You can juice up the paddles all you want, Madge, but that carcass just ain't coming back to life.

Seems she's handling this tour the way a 70s rock dinosaur or metal band would: hit all the secondary and tertiary markets where there are fans still keeping an unironic flame alive.

But Madge's put-on decadence doesn't come across as aspirational to everyone. For example, Montenegro customs officials seized the singer's 300 designer towels at the border. According to London's Sun:

The customs people had never come across that kind of volume of towels for personal use before, or the cost given for them. People in Montenegro just aren't used to spending that much on a towel.

For a reminder of why Madonna ever mattered at all, here is the video for "Into the Groove" with scenes from "Desperately Seeking Susan" and the Sonic Youth cover, under their Ciccone Youth alias, "Into the Groovey," back from the first go-around of when it was OK for rock experimenters to play with dance pop.

Revisiting "Crossover Dreams"

I've always thought Crossover Dreams (1985) was one of the best Latin NY movies and one of my fave glimpses of the New York that was, the living, unslick city.

This story of a struggling salsa musician especially grabbed me with its low-key realism. This, and El Super (1979), are director León Ichaso's great movies. When he's returned time and again to the same milieu, with more money, he's screwed it up. (In a way, he's re-enacting the problem of his Crossover Dreams protagonist: how quickly one loses vision when money enters the picture).

But a musician/filmmaker friend had asked me to take another look, said that I had perhaps overvalued the movie. Was he right? Not sure. But I did notice some things I hadn't before.

If you have not seen the movie, check the synopsis here. Basically, it plays out the ol' art v. commerce, "ethnic" v. mainstream dilemma. The dialectic between "Latin" and "American" is too starkly drawn and really misreads what was happening in the New York Latin music scene in the late 70s and early 80s.

Our hero Rudy Veloz either sticks to the cuchifrito circuit, making $40 of crotch-sweaty money per gig, or he makes smooth jazz with a Latin "flava" (leave in the congas, sub in a sax for the trumpet). There is no other option, since the story is resolved when he "returns" to his roots.

Check this scene, in which Rudy's mentor Cheo Babalú (played by Virgilio Martí) tell him that the funky bass, Beatles melodies and calypso-ish guitar of his "crossover" song "es una mierda." He instead tells him to stick to songs like "Todos Vuelven," an unreconstructed guaguancó that is key to the plot, repeated three times in the narrative.

The song, which twice is performed just with voice and a clave (in the scene above, the claves are pencils) circumvents all the innovations that salsa groups were making, which you can see in all the scenes with Rudy's band, basically a variation of Manny Oquendo's Conjunto Libre, with Jerry and Andy González and Yomo Toro, among others.

Here's Rudy's second performance of it, as mourning:

I do love this scene for its vistas of East Harlem buildingscapes and birds. In Nuyorican lit/film/pop culture, the roof is the space of escape, of transcendence, of release. The acting, by Blades, Shawn Elliott's Orlando and a few other minor characters, keeps this ship from running aground.

I had forgotten that when Virgilio facilitates Rudy's contact with the "American" record producer from beyond the grave, that producer is shown as trafficking mostly in post-punk and new wave. In the scenes where you see his other acts and a club that must be a stand-in for Danceteria or the Mudd Club, I saw the potential for what could have been a really radical link. Where was the band that crossed post-punk and salsa?

The movie assumes that the uptown "Latin" space and the downtown "mainstream/white" space never cross, but I know that wasn't true. There were Latinos downtown -- in Danceteria, in the Mudd Club, at CBGBs, at the Pyramid Club, at Paradise Garage. Some glimpses of this are in Downtown 81, in Arnaldo Cruz Malave's book about Juanito Xtravaganza, in conversations I've had with people who lived it.