Category Archives: Culture

June 22, 2012 · 10:33 am

MIGRANTS: Hernan Hernandez, Los Tigres del Norte

Today is the birthday of Hernan Hernandez, bass player and singer for Los Tigres del Norte.

I toured several times with the band to shows around Mexico, seeing parts of the country that I’d never have seen had it not been for their great generosity. I was already a huge fan by the time I met them, and knew the words to many of their songs.

They remain, I think, the best band out of Mexico — The  Only Band That Matters, isn’t that what they used to say about The Clash. Same with Los Tigres. Great chroniclers, amazing reps of migrant Mexico, too. Here’s a story I did from those years on Los Tigres for LA Times Magazine. Always wanted to write a book about the band….

Anyway, one night, Hernan was sick from, I think, food poisoning. They took him to a doctor.I think he got some intravenous fluids, but was still sick.

They went to the show, in a town in Puebla. Got there late. The crowd was rowdy, throwing rocks. But then the band went on and played for four hours or so. Just an amazing show.

Hernan played the whole show, sweating, sick, faint, barely hanging on. Reminded me of Michael Jordan during that playoff game years ago. Never forget that night. A real pro….Happy Birthday, Hernan!

 

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May 30, 2012 · 6:11 pm

STORYTELLING: C.M. Mayo’s blog

One thing I’ve learned is that you can always count on something hip at the blog written by C.M. Mayo.

Here, she talks about writing an essay on the legends surrounding Maximilian, the Austrian emperor that Mexico imported to rule it for a few years in the 1800s — which has to be itself one of the weirdest chapters in the history of any country.

Then they set him before a firing squad and that was that. Except that his body was embalmed and put on display for a while. His wife, Carlotta, died many decades later.

I’m hoping C.M. writes that essay, since in the duel between legend and fact, legend is usually more interesting. In another life, she was an economist who wrote a lot about informal methods of savings/finance. Now she does other stuff.

Meanwhile, check out the C.M. Mayo blog.

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May 19, 2012 · 5:50 pm

LOS ANGELES: Westlake street

This is on a street in Westlake, just west of downtown L.A.

 

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May 18, 2012 · 7:25 am

LOS ANGELES: Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately at MacArthur Park.

So the sad passing at 63 of Donna Summer sent me scurrying to her version of “MacArthur Park” (youtube version) — with its classic “cake out in the rain” lyric, wondering what that lyric was all about, as I’d spent my life never really considering the question.

I know I’m not alone.

Did not know that Jimmy Webb, the song’s composer, wrote it as a metaphor for a breakup of a relationship — with Susan Ronstadt, cousin of American singing icon Linda Ronstadt. Apparently, the couple used to frequent the park — this coming, I presume, in the days before the park was run by the Columbia Lil Cycos clique of 18th Street.

Moreover, the cake/rain reference is why the song has been deemed the “worst” and the “oddest” ever written. (Waylon Jennings also did a version, so it couldn’t have been that bad.) However, later in the song there’s this pressed pants metaphor for the affair that makes you imagine that Webb must have been pretty overwrought at the breakup, his imagination running into high gear: “We were pressed, in love’s hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants.”

Apparently the relationship also inspired Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

That must have been some love affair!

Webb’s quoted as saying, “I see it as a relatively simple love song with some very sad imagery and about things passing away and never being the same again.”And then in another interview: “Those lyrics were all very real to me; there was nothing psychedelic about it to me. The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties. But people have very strong reactions to the song. There’s been a lot of intellectual venom.”

Sammy Cahn called the song a “major piece of work” and compared it to Rhapsody in Blue. It was in the Top Ten twice — once in 1968, with Richard Harris’s version, then a decade later for the late Miss Summer.

Shouldn’t surprise anyone that there’s a blog, Someone Left the Cake out in the Rain.

Or a Pinterest photo collection. Or a Mardi Gras float.

Urban Dictionary says “a cake out in the rain” has come to mean an eccentric person.

So, because I know that by now you want it, here are the lyrics in full to  Jim Webb’s …

MACARTHUR PARK

Spring was never waiting for us till
it ran one step ahead
as we followed in the dance.

Between the parted pages
we were pressed,
in love’s hot, fevered iron
like a striped pair of pants.

Mac Arthur’s Park is melting in the dark
all the sweet green icing flowing down
someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
’cause it took so long to bake it
and I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, nooo!

I recall the yellow cotton dress
foaming like a wave
on the ground beneath your knees
birds like tender babies in your hands
and the old men playing
Chinese checkers
by the trees

Mac Arthur Park’s is melting in the dark
all the sweet green icing flowing down
someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
’cause it took so long to bake it
and I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, nooo!

There’ll be another song for me
and I will sing it
there’ll be another dream for me
someone will bring it
I will drink the wine while it is warn
and never let you catch me
looking at the sun, oh yeah
and after all the loves of my life
after all loves in my life
you’ll be the one

I will take my life into my hands
and I will use it
I will win the worship in their eyes
and I will lose it
I will have the things that I desire
and my passion flow
like rivers through the sky
oh and after all the loves in my life
after all the loves in my life
you’ll still be the one
and I’ll ask myself why.

Mac Arthur’s Park is melting in the dark
all the sweet green icing flowing down
someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
’cause it took so long to bake it
and I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, nooo!

 

 

 

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May 16, 2012 · 7:51 am

LOS ANGELES: R.I.P. Chalino Sanchez

Perhaps the most influential musical figure to emerge out of Los Angeles in a generation was Chalino Sanchez, who was found shot to death 20 years ago today outside Culiacan, the capital city of his native state of Sinaloa, Mexico.

An unlettered immigrant who spoke no English, he virtually singlehandedly created the narcocorrido genre of music, with songs he composed himself that act today as an oral history of the lawless ranchos — villages — of Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua and other northwest Mexican states, where impunity and drug trafficking were rife.

On May 15, 1992, he’d given a show in Culiacan and gone out afterwards with friends. A group of men dressed as policemen stopped the caravan of cars and took Chalino. His body was found in a field the next day with two bullets in his head.

Sanchez was already an underground star in LA by then. His death confirmed his street cred and he became a phenomenon. He is today a legend and well known to kids who weren’t even born when he was alive.

Chalino also did the impossible by making tubas, accordions and clarinets hip and cool instruments, so much so that young Latino kids would blast tuba- and accordion-based polkas from their trucks as they drove down the streets of towns in southeast LA County. Still do.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of LA-born kids followed him, becoming narcocorrido singers and sounding and looking just like the master.

I’ve always felt, though, that they imitated the wrong part of Chalino — his dress, his raw style of singing. Instead, the point of Chalino’s life, I’ve always thought, was to follow your own vision, your own way of doing things. People would tell him to shut up, that he couldn’t sing. “I don’t sing; I bark,” he said, fully aware of his own musical shortcomings. But he kept on, trusting his own experience and ability. he wrote corridos from the people he met in LA; recorded them in small studios, then sold the cassettes of these songs at Mexican bakeries, butcher shops and at swap meets.

DIY — that’s how great things are accomplished.

The narcocorrido scene he fathered in LA was one of the great DIY musical movements to come out of LA. First was punk, in Hollywood. Then gangster rap out of Compton. Then narcocorridos out of Huntington Park, Paramount, and other southeast LA County cities.

You can read more about him in my first book, True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.

There’s a concert in his honor on Friday at the Gibson Amphitheater, which should be great, and a tour coming out of that later this year.

A great punkrock spirit. RIP Chalino Sanchez.

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May 15, 2012 · 4:58 pm

MEXICO: Carlos Fuentes dies

Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has died. He was 83.

One of the country’s foremost literary voices from Mexico in the 20th Century, Fuentes spent years living abroad and explaining the country to those who were not Mexican. He was mentioned often as a candidate for a Nobel Prize, but never won it.

He also feuded famously with Mexico’s other 20th Century literary giant, Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, who gave a speech criticizing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Paz had criticized the Sandinistas for their undemocratic methods after they came to power. The speech caused effigies of Paz to be burned in Mexico.

Fuentes supported the Sandinistas and was critical of Paz. A magazine Paz directed published an article attacking Fuentes, which the novelist took as an attack from Paz.

The two men, who’d once been friends, never spoke after the dispute.

“Lamento profundamente el fallecimiento de nuestro querido y admirado Carlos Fuentes, escritor y mexicano universal. Descanse en paz,” tweeted President Felipe Calderon today upon learning the news.

 

 

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April 1, 2012 · 3:01 pm

LOS ANGELES: Paartaaay!!!

This party story in Holmby Hills, near Westwood, reminds me of high school a bit — just on steroids.

Five hundred people showing up in half an hour, outside your home. Cell phones like cigarette lighters.

I love the woman, Ms. Newman — who overnight becomes my armchair tech philosopher.

 

 

 

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March 29, 2012 · 6:41 am

CULTURE: Earl Scruggs, RIP

Earl Scruggs, great banjo player and musical spirit, has died at the age 88, the LA Times reports.

Apart from being a monster instrumentalist, he also was a guy who looked to play with all types of musicians, not just bluegrass folks. King Curtis, Elton John, etc. I remember being stunned as a kid at a guy who spoke with his deep Southern accent yet sought out hippies and black people with whom to play.

This was a rare thing, then.

For a few years there, he was almost a hippie, at least by bluegrass standards, with his hair down just about to his collar.

Here’s a video of Flatt & Scruggs on the Grand Ole Opry.

RIP Earl Scruggs.

 

 

 

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March 6, 2012 · 10:02 am

LOS ANGELES: Spit Stix and 82-year-old Mama

Check out this great story on Youtube about Spit Stix, former drummer from the LA punk band FEAR, now caring for an 82-year-old woman with dementia that he calls, Mama.

How very punkrock of him!

Love this kind of storytelling. This is how all old punkrockers should end up.

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February 28, 2012 · 9:11 pm

VIRGIN: Virgin of the Razor Wire, “Pray for Us”

Virgin of the Razor Wire, Highland Park, Los Angeles

In a back alley in Highland Park, northeast Los Angeles.

 

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February 27, 2012 · 5:29 pm

BUSINESS: An upholsterer’s revolutionary roots – Benjamin Argumedo IV

 

Gritaba Francisco Villa: ¿dónde te hallas Argumedo?
ven párate aquí adelante tú que nunca tienes miedo.

 

Today, looking for someone else, I happened upon Benjamin Argumedo IV — great-grandson of the famed Mexican revolutionary of the same name.

The original Argumedo has a famous corrido written about him and figured also in the classic song, Carabina 30-30, which Los Lobos covered a while back (quoted above). There was also a movie about him, starring ranchero singer Antonio Aguilar: La Persecucion y Muerte de Benjamin Argumedo.

As with most revolutionaries back then, his was a romantic and complicated history. An illiterate saddlemaker who rose to revolutionary fame by leading peasants to claim land they said was theirs, he later switched sides and supported the counter-revolution of Victoriano Huerta. When that failed, the new government of Venustiano Carranza sent troops after him, captured him in Durango, where the Lion of Coahuila and the Tiger of The Laguna, both of which were his nicknames, was shot by a firing squad in 1916.

His great-grandson owns a custom upholstery shop in Highland Park, where he puts life back into old sofas and easy chairs — something he learned from his late father, Benjamin Argumedo III, who started the business, Golden B.A.,  at another location. Golden being for the Golden Gate Bridge.

Ben – as IV is known –  opened his own shop three years ago and called it Golden B.A. IV. (Don’t know about you, but I see a resemblance to his great-grandfather.)

Ben’s father moved the family here in the 1950s, he told me, probably looking for a better life than they were going to find in Coahuila. They landed in  Highland Park (a neighborhood in northeast LA) in the late 1950s, when it was mostly populated by Italians and Jews. “We were the only Hispanic family around,” he told me.

Argumedo IV grew up there as Highland Park became the Latino neighborhood it is today, and has returned only occasionally to Mexico, and not at all recently due to the drug violence down there.

So many immigrants have these stunning stories tucked away in their family histories. (I’ve also met a sister of a former first lady of Cambodia and a former first lady of South Vietnam — both in the suburbs of L.A.)

You can hear the Corrido of Benjamin Argumedo here.

 

 

 

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February 16, 2012 · 4:53 pm

CULTURE: Tijuana Opera’s upcoming season

The Opera de Tijuana has announced the first of its events for this upcoming season.

They include Madame Butterfly on May 18 and 20.

Also thrilled to see that the company will continue with what has become one of the truly fabulous arts events in Mexico: the Opera Street Festival.

It takes place on July 7 on Calle 5 in Colonia Libertad, likely the world’s most unexpected place to hear opera. (I wrote about this in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream. There’s an NPR report I did on the topic with my MC homey Franc Contreras producing, as well.) You can see the border wall from the stage and the singers compete with the graffiti and the old American cars rumbling by. Expect 7000+ people.

A real event.

The city’s opera scene has  a cool story behind it, involving a group of Russians musicians imported by one music-obsessed Tijuanense in the early 1990s — but that’s a long story and one I’ll tell later, or which you can read in my book.

 

 

 

 

 

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February 15, 2012 · 7:48 pm

CULTURE: More photos from Los Cenzontles, David Hidalgo, Jackson Browne recording session

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· 1:15 pm

CULTURE: Cenzontles with David Hidalgo and Jackson Browne

This weekend I spent time in a recording session with Los Cenzontles (the Mockingbirds), along with David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos, and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, as they recorded the band’s new CD, Regeneration.

An amazing time. Many thanks to Eugene Rodriguez, of Los Cenzontles, for inviting me. I’d never watched a record get made, let alone with two of my musical heroes. We had chats about music, about immigration, New Orleans and Bob Dylan. They now all have my book. :\) Read on, guys!

Los Cenzontles are an amazing story. The brainchild of Eugene and Astrid Rodriguez, they’re a Mexican roots band that spawned a youth center in San Pablo, near Berkeley, and which in turn spawned an expansion of the band.

Cenzontles now have several CDs out and have played with other roots music heroes of mine – Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, in particular.

I felt a little dazed to be around these guys. Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky was one of the soundtracks to my 1970s and his voice remains once of the most distinctive in pop music, I think. (He also has the good taste to continue to play with Claremont’s own master instrumentalist, David Lindley; their Love is Strange CD is very greasy.)

Los Lobos were the band I listened to most in the 1980s. Hidalgo is a deeply musical cat, I always thought, and his tenor voice remains one of the greatest in rock n roll. (For the coolest grungy garage band tune, listen to Georgia Slop.)

I turn to both guys’ music often.

The three songs they recorded sounded like the best of good music — sweet and raw: Adios California, a ranchera in Spanish, The Silence, an elegant song about the drug violence in Mexico, with a sweeping vocal by David Hidalgo, and Jackson Browne adding the harmonies; a third song, collaboration among the band, Browne and Hidalgo, is about the border, which Browne is singing, but isn’t finished and is untitled. Still, so far, it sounds great.

The band will be raising money to complete the album and I’ll post more when they do. Hopefully, by then they’ll have a chunk of The Silence I can put up. Either way, can’t wait to listen to Regeneration.

Meanwhile, what’s your favorite song by any of these guys?

 

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February 13, 2012 · 8:00 pm

LOS ANGELES: Solitary Virgin

Here again, another in my attempt to photograph every Virgin of Guadalupe in South LA.

This one was just off Compton Boulevard, painted on what had once been a payphone casing.

If you have photos of the Jefa you’d like to put up, please send them in — doesn’t matter where from….

Virgin of Compton Boulevard

 

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