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Talk about invisible: you would think from reading the histories that Mexican-Americans had no impact on American music between the time of rock ‘n’ roll founding father Ritchie Valens’ premature demise and the emergence of Los Lobos from East Los Angeles in the early 80s. The possible exception is Santana, although they’re usually seen less as a Chicano band than as a San Francisco psychedelic group that inspired little but a couple other S.F. spin-offs. Where’s the “school” of Chicano rock bands; where was a viable scene making music that could be specifically identified with Mexican-Americans?
That’s the mentality Chicano Soul counters, despite its abundance of typos and grammatical errors. As Ruben Molina’s lovingly-assembled coffee table book shows, the scenes were in East L.A. and the West Side of San Antonio, countless other California and Texas cities, as well as such points in between as Phoenix and Albuquerque. The East L.A. bands that hit the national charts were the Blendells (“La, La, La, La, La,” 1964), the Premiers (“Farmer John,” 1964) and Cannibal and the Headhunters and Thee Midniters (both with “Land of 1000 Dances” in 1965). Thee Midniters, the best of the bunch, also created “Whittier Boulevard,” which somehow failed to chart nationally even though it became an anthem. From San Antonio’s Westside came Sunny and the Sunglows (“Talk to Me,” 1964, followed by two more national hits by Sunny and the Sunliners and one more by the Sunglows sans Sunny Ozuna). This isn’t even counting Rosie and the Originals, a San Diego group whose 1960 “Angel Baby” is one of the most glorious one-hit wonders ever, or Mission, Texas’ Rene & Rene, who hit the charts twice in the 60s, or Chris Montez and Trini Lopez, who began with Chicano sounds but grew increasingly pop as they settled into the charts. Or Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, ? and the Mysterians, the Sir Douglas Quintet, El Chicano and Tierra. Or regional hitmakers like SoCal’s Little Julian Herrera, Chan Romero, the Salas Brothers, Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals and the Romancers, and Texas’s Rudy and the Reno Bops, Sonny Ace y los Twisters, The Dell-Kings, The Royal Jesters, the pre-country Freddy Fender and the various groups fronted by Little Joe Hernandez. Get the picture? There are zillions of them; we just never, in our ignorance, connected them up to make the forest as conspicuous as the trees. Only the kids in the barrio did.
And so does Molina. He’s been working up to it for quite a while, issuing compilation CD’s and previous, less ambitious, books available mainly through his web site www. mictlan.com. (This book is accompanied by a two-CD anthology of key records.) As a history, Chicano Soul is somewhat cursory, concentrating on the biggest acts without going into much detail; the East L.A. story is told more thoroughly, for example, in David Reyes and Tom Waldman’s Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ‘n’ Roll from Southern California. But the Texas/San Antonio story, as well as that of other scenes, has never been told before. The other thing that makes Chicano Soul so valuable is its emphasis on artwork. The reproductions of concert posters, album covers and 45 rpm record labels tell a vivid story, as do band promo glossies and, especially, the more journalistic photos: the Royal Jesters with Sunny and the Sunliners rocking Patio Anda Luz in S.A., or Cannibal and the Headhunters sprawled around the airport shuttle van they toured in. These bring home the true sabor, or flavor--the ambience, the threads and hair styles, the iconography--of the post-Zoot-suit generations.
Yet as Molina points out, all these scenes were happening with the participants of one having no real knowledge of the others. In San Antonio, the music had two main thrusts. One adapted the sounds of traditional conjunto to rock ‘n’ roll, with the Hammond organ playing accordion lines. The other was a more purist r&b sound inspired by local bandleader Spot Barnett, with full horn sections fairly common. Because so many of the S.A. musicians leaned that way, a surprising number of bands were mixed-race at a time when that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be happening. Many acts went back and forth between American and Mexican songs and styles, sung in English or Spanish. When their day in the pop spotlight ended, artists like Sunny Ozuna and Little Joe returned to the security of romantic ballads, rancheras and the brown-skinned audiences they started with (though Little Joe still maintains a significant profile with Texas Anglos, constantly sought after for political endorsements, appearing at Willie Nelson’s picnics, and sprinkling his sets with English-language songs). Despite Doug Sahm’s subsequent success with a biracial band rooted in Chicano sounds, the S.A. scene largely failed to evolve beyond its Mexican and 50s rock/r&b roots.
Meanwhile, perhaps because of their proximity to the larger music business, the Southern California acts were influenced first by local r&b (Chuck Higgins, Big Jay McNeely) and ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll, then British Invasion and garage bands, as well as jazz and big bands; they didn’t start out singing Mexican songs or singing in Spanish, and thus they didn’t go back to that. You could say that L.A. bands chased pop music trends more than their S.A. counterparts, or you could say that they were perhaps more diverse. The Premiers, with virtually no Mexican inflection, were easily mistaken for an Anglo garage band; Thee Midniters swore by the Rolling Stones, though their versatility took them in several other directions. The L.A. scene, going back as far as Ritchie Valens, was more guitar-oriented, with considerable interplay arising between Chicano and surf bands, but after the mid-60s heyday the sound evolved in jazzier directions. Eventually, there was also a much healthier dose of punk than in San Antonio.
But the scenes had more than a little music in common, too. Besides the affinity for regional r&b sounds, both boasted their fair share of stunning vocal groups, especially early on. The Texans were perhaps more doo-woppish, while the Californians tended to favor the crystal-clear, three-part harmonies of classic Mexican acts (the only strong south-of-the-border influence on the L.A. scene). Both were enamored with Motown groups, the higher the lead voice the better (in other words, Smokey and the Miracles ruled). At the turn of the decade, both were in synch with Brown Pride movements in the increasingly politicized barrios of the southwest.
The Chicano scenes all had powerful impacts regionally. The various record labels, clubs and dance halls, even clothing and auto parts stores, created and knit together local communities and mini-economies that thrived until torn apart by the Vietnam war, that great decimator of the ‘60s working class. But some of the musicians of that era are still stars in their local communities; former El Chicano lead singer Ersi Arvizu’s recent bilingual comeback album (produced by Ry Cooder) wins unanimous rave reviews in the Anglo and Chicano press alike. Most importantly, Mexican-American culture is increasingly recognized as, simply, American culture--with items like Chicano Soul functioning as both cause and effect. It’s about time.
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