Drinking in San Salvador (Part 1?): Nothing’s Shocking

The place was a dump, really; a bi-level structure held up by iron beams, covered by a combination of tin tiles and thatched palm leaves on top, absolutely no windows around, a dirty concrete floor that may as well be the sidewalk outside; two pock marked pool tables, and a twelve foot long bar with a strip of rubber matting on top. In the back there wasn’t the usual display of rum, vodka, tequila bottles; if you wanted any of those, you would have to bring the bottle with you or come in drunk from it, ‘cause all they served was beer there. The back was just a partition of the room where the owner/bartender slept and did his daily ablutions and relieved whatever he needed to relieve, and that’s it. But Sansivar, it was agreed, was the place to be on any given night except Sunday.

Salvadorans and foreigners gathered there, to drink, talk and any other thing having to do with carousing. In those days of ’93, cassette tapes were still a viable option to provide music for the drinkers. The provider of that music was a chain smoking Spaniard from Madrid whom I shall call Javier. He would play a variety of music that I had never heard prior to my going to that bar; I was still a tender horn when it came to so many things, especially, how to live overseas.  Those were dangerous times in El Salvador. The Peace Accord had been signed in January of ’92 after a civil war that lasted twelve years, but the gunshots could still be heard a year and a half later. 

This was an exciting time for me: new country, new life, new optimism, and a different sense of danger than the one I was used to in NYC; that city had become too complacent for me and I was afraid that it was contagious.  There were a few cassette tapes that Javier played that captured the excitement of that time, but one tape really made my adrenaline surge with dark possibilities, and that was Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction.

Ted Just Admit It was a wakeup call to the violence that was all around us and how we can’t seem to get enough of it. The song was about serial killer Ted Bundy, but it went beyond that; it was also about how the media feeds us all the details of his accounts and how we just lap it up—just as long as it doesn’t happen to us, I guess. The song was gruesome and it made us feel dirty; but there was also a strange kind of gritty sensuality about it.  It was the right combination of vocals (Perry Farrell), bass (Eric Avery), guitar (Dave Navarro) and percussion (Stephen Perkins) that made this tune and others in 1988’s Nothing’s Shocking such a memorable album!

Just a couple of weeks prior to listening to Ted, I was doing a story on nocturnal streetwalkers along Bulevar De Los Heroes where I had managed to gain their trust for that evening. It must’ve been around three in the morning and I remember sitting on a grassy mound feeling tired and bored –a hooker’s life can get monotonous—when all of a sudden one of the women screamed and ran away from a parked vehicle with a couple of male passengers; “run, girls, he’s got a gun,” cried the woman, and the others began to scream. My heart pumped indicating that I was going to do something foolish, as it has been my wont. I stood up from the mound and looked at one of them getting out of the car, he looked back at me… and I grinned at him. He looked confused at first, but then he broke into laughter, got back into the car, and drove off. The incident seemed to have disturbed the other women and kept their distance from me for the remainder of that night. One was even brave enough to say that she was probably more afraid of me than of those guys; I was surprised by her remark at the time, and I wanted her to elaborate, but she just turned away from me.

Listening to Ted a couple of weeks later brought me back to that incident, especially when Farrell cries out and then chants “sex is violence/sex is violent” repeatedly. Thinking of the interaction between the hookers and the johns made me think at how cheap life can truly be; how these women take their lives into their hands by approaching the most harmless looking man; at how weeks before, I had laughed when I thought I was shot by a passenger in a passing car; it turned out to be a paintball, but I didn’t know it at the time, and I remember my incredulity as I examined the supposed wound and I couldn’t stop laughing: so much violence, so very little love. Javier looked at my expression listening to the song, as somebody who has traveled to many dangerous places in his young life (he wasn’t even 30 at the time), he understood it. “Kicks you right in the balls, doesn’t it?” It did kick me in the balls.

Sansivar didn’t last as long as Jane’s Addiction, as Javier, much like Farrell, always needed to keep moving.  Jane’s put out one other studio album, Ritual de lo Habitual, in 1990 and then in 2003 they put out Strays without bassist Avery. Jane’s officially broke up in 1991, after they put out the equally powerful Ritual, Sansivar closed in 1995 after it became just another joint to score some coke and Javier got bored with the whole scene. I stayed for 15 additional years that witnessed many hairy incidents; some ended in tragedy, others were just ridiculous. But these are stories for other posts.

Home Grown: Manchester

Home Grown is where I’ll be writing about the music scene in particular cities. Just so you know, in the future I’ll be covering, Philadelphia, Detroit, three of the five boroughs of NYC, and more will come to mind.
But first, I want to cover Manchester…

This is what I knew about Manchester: it’s in the U.K., it has a hated/loved football team, and for decades the city has had a concentration of well-known bands coming out of there; and their diversity is quite impressive. Since doing my mini-research, I have since found that Manchester is a textile city; the settlement that would become Manchester was founded by Julius Agricola, back in the Roman days; and there are many more Manchester bands than I thought! They are legion! I can’t possibly feature them all, but I will try, and I will link those that I prefer.

John Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke was dubbed the Punk Poet of the seventies, where he was well received by his peers, but not so much by record sales. His career has been indefinitely sidelined since the early eighties due to a heroin addiction. I personally like his tunes and his style of singing; there was a dark humor and a hypnotic cadence about how he interpreted his songs. If he ever makes a comeback, I sure as hell would hear what he has to say about the last three decades since he dropped out.

Joy Division
Ugh, I get frustrated just thinking about how short their musical career was as Joy Division. Their members were Bernard Sumner (guitar), Peter Hook (bass) and Terry Mason (drums; and then a revolving door policy of drummers. Almost like Spinal Tap, but less tragic, or comic); vocalist, Ian Curtis, answered an ad on the newspaper—and, thus, Joy Division was born! Their sound was quite exciting to my ears; some songs, such as Transmission, er, transmitted an air of menace, and in others, like Love Will Tear Us Apart, conveyed a kind of tenderness, even though there was nothing tender about the lyrics at all. Unfortunately, in 1980, Ian Curtis hanged himself as a result of the disintegration of his marriage.

The surviving members carried on as New Order:

I mean, they were okay… Let’s move on now.

The Fall
Mark E. Smith is one of the most unique vocalists out there. His style of singing reminds me of one of those cranky old men – who speaks in his own particular way and doesn’t care if you understand him, or not. The lyrics are also that of an old curmudgeon. His band has been around since the late seventies and continues to make music in the present. The Fall’s style is always changing, but Smith will always be Smith at the center of it all, and therefore will remain being The Fall.

Oh, and speaking of Smith…

The Smiths
I must confess that 21 year old me wasn’t a fan of The Smiths. It was Morrissey’s weird, whimsical crooning that sometimes clashed with Johnny Marr’s pop rock guitar. But as time went by, their music had grown on me; plus, their song titles Girlfriend in a Coma, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Shoplifters of the World Unite were so quirky that I couldn’t resist them. Even though the band has become a pop icon of the eighties, I am surprised to see that their run only lasted five years (’82 to ’85). That speaks volumes about them.

Morrissey
(Steven Patrick) Morrissey launched his solo career soon after The Smiths broke up in ’85 and has been solo (to date) five times longer than he was in The Smiths. I think it would be fair to state that his songs are an extension of his work on his former band, but he did start making his own sound eventually. Since he has been around so long, some of his songs are misses for me, but the hits are really good! I Have Forgiven Jesus is as powerful a song as the title implies (again with the titles!). It is actually through Morrissey that I have gotten a better appreciation for The Smiths.

The Buzzcocks
I would be remiss if I’m in Manchester and didn’t give my respects to The Buzzcocks (don’t think that I don’t hear your girlish giggling out there. Quit it). The Buzzcocks is a punk band whose lyrics focus more on playfulness than anger, formed in 1975 with Pete Shelley (guitarist, backing vocals), Howard Devoto (vocals, guitar), Steve Diggle (bassist) and John Maher (drummer). Amazingly, they are still active putting out their fun brand of music.

I have to say that there are way too many other artists and for me to cover in one post, so I shall list them so that you know the wealth of music that Manchester possesses:

A Certain Ratio / Stone Roses / Ian Brown
Barry Adamson / The Chameleons David Gray
Happy Mondays / Lamb / Badly Drawn Boy
Doves / 10cc / The Verve / Robbie Williams
Simply Red / Oasis… and so much more!

I’m pretty sure that you’re familiar with at least one of these artists/groups. Were you surprised that they were from Manchester? I must say that I was surprised about 10cc. I used to hear I’m Not In Love constantly as a kid, and at the time, I didn’t know they were English, much less from Manchester; and I highly doubt I even knew that Manchester existed! Well, I sure do now!

The Late Bloomer: The Velvet Underground

Hey, welcome to the very first edition to The Late Bloomer! The idea of this section is to focus on artists and bands that I hadn’t been exposed to as a child, or even as a teen, for that matter. There are many reasons for this, insulated neighborhood, indifference, or perhaps I wasn’t ready to listen to them yet. But the list of folks who fit under that category is long.

I think The Velvet Underground is a great place to begin.

My first exposure to The Velvet Underground was somewhat indirect in the late seventies. Just to put a fixed date on this, let’s just say that it was late 1977. I was living in a predominantly white neighborhood (my family moved around a lot) in the Bronx, and I was still hanging on to Soul and R&B as my go-to music. At the time, I was listening to WBLS, a Black Music station. Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, Millie Jackson, and the sort, got a lot of airplay and I loved it. Of course, because of my exposure to the whites in the neighborhood, I would get to hear rock tunes from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, etc; eventually, I learned to love most of it, but there was a tune that I used to hear from time to time that stuck out of the kids’ normal playlist. It was upbeat, it was fun and kind of funky, and it made me want to dance, if weren’t for the fact that I was awfully shy and would not even think of dancing in front of these kids who were stoners and lushes. I never even tried to find out about that song until three years later, when I started my first official job at a record store in Manhattan. That song was Rock and Roll, by The Velvet Underground.

It was in the Eighties when I really discovered more about bands, solo artists and record producers. By that time I had known about the album The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), and the now iconic banana on the cover, and how Andy Warhol was involved in that project. But I never really learned any real details. These were the days before the Internet and MP3s. All we had were the print magazines, and that’s how we learned about musicians. I must confess that I did put off getting anything by them, and chose, instead, artists that were still around, such as Peter Gabriel, David Bowie and even Lou Reed (a former member of the core group in Velvet Underground, but had been solo for over a decade. In case you don’t know, Reed’s biggest single was Walk On The Wild Side).

It was the cool people that knew about The Velvet Underground and their first album and what a classic it was, and they would hum to it. I was always the guy who didn’t inquire because I didn’t want to be uncool. I am not proud of that, I have since found that it is better to admit ignorance, than to stay silent and never learn anything.

At the recording of the first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, the group was composed of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker. At the behest of Andy Warhol (who discovered them), they had also included German singer and model Nico. Their album wasn’t a success when it premiered because of the lack of airplay on the radio. Radio programmers just didn’t know how to categorize them. The band’s relationship with Warhol didn’t last long because of personality clashes; clashes that extended within the band as well, as their last real recording together was in 1972.

When I finally heard all the album (again, thanks to the 21st century), I was struck at how there was an overall pop sound, but the lyrics were full of all kinds of images of self loathing, addiction, sadomasochism, and others that really made it stand out for that era.

Although all the songs were very good, for me the standout was Heroin, and in a strange way, it’s the one I related to the most. Let me just say that I spent my early childhood in a neighborhood that was plagued with junkies and there was nothing glamorous about them. The blackened teeth, the emaciated form, and just the general foul odor that the junkies had emanated at that time made them the best PSAs one can have. For me, the song Heroin is a metaphor for the desire to disconnect and be a part of the nothingness. Whenever I have felt overwhelmed by things, I would ask why I couldn’t be a junkie. As a junkie, all I would have is one desire instead of many. All I would have to worry about is how to get it, and never be straight. If you happen to get a lethal dose one day, then so be it. For some reason, thinking about that always cheered me. The song Heroin is a cautionary tale, but also a love song to the narcotic. Most addicts of any vice will have fond memories of their habit of choice.

From the White Light/White Heat (1968) album there was an incredible jam, Sister Ray. I’ve heard all seventeen minutes and I wouldn’t cut one minute of it! It was perfect when I was living a somewhat decadent lifestyle (to some). Its lyrics contain fellatio, shooting dope and, yes, sadomasochism. There was a kind of desperation in the musical arrangement, as though the narrator wanted to have it all; it’s a feeling that I’m not unfamiliar with.

You can find all the glorious 17+ minutes on this link:

Listening to these songs gives me the impression of a gritty, sad underground full of heartbreak, drugs and body fluids; and yet, this band made it seem so alluring. Let just say that I could easily see a parallel universe me not being alive in the present day because I had lived that lifestyle.

The Many Lives of In Dreams

Kyle MacLachlan is being held captive by demented crime boss Dennis Hopper and his crew. They are in a medium size dingy living room, the air is charged with the with certain gruesome death; in comes Dean Stockwell dressed in a cheap brown tuxedo jacket with a white ruffled shirt and white slacks, he is carrying a plugged in light fixture and he lights it and lip synchs into it like a microphone:

A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper:
“Go to sleep, everything is alright”

I close my eyes
Then I drift away
Into the magic night
I softly sway
Oh smile and pray
Like dreamers do
Then I fall asleep
To dream my dreams of you

In dreams…I walk with you
In dreams…I talk to you
In dreams…Your mine
All of the time
We’re together…

The song was interrupted by Hopper’s pain racked glare; Stockwell knew who the boss was. Such a beautiful song put into such a terrifying scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This was my introduction to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams. At the time, I really hadn’t noticed the beauty of the song, because of Stockwell’s creepy performance, but despite that, the song kind of stuck to me. I knew that it was Orbison who sang it; his angelic tenor voice was familiar to me as a child in the previous decade, when they were announcing his greatest hits on TV. I remember thinking, wow; his voice doesn’t match his face! It was cruel, I know, but I was a child then, and children can be cruel.

A few months later when I got the cassette of his greatest hits, I listened to it intently and thought that it was such a beautiful song, and that I hoped I never had to feel the pain that he expressed in it. As it turned out, I got familiar with that pain.

The song is about a yearning for a lost love, and how dreams of her would torment the sleeper when he awoke. I have awakened like that too many times in my life, but it was songs like this that would help me get through that. It is all I will divulge on the subject.

It was in the beginning of the 21st century when I had my future ex-girlfriend listen to the song. She was a musicologist who studied behind the Iron Curtain, and she had never had any exposure to Roy Orbison. She was not moved at all, and focused more on the musical arrangement of the song, she called the strings “corny” and can we please listen to another song so that we can have sex. I just walked her to her car and bade her good night and grumbled home after.

Corny, she says, the USSR was indeed a cold place, and grumble, grumble, and why couldn’t she just feel the song? The arrangements were from somewhere in the sixties, so of course it was going to seem corny!

It was produced in 1963, to be precise. Rock and roll was still in its infancy, but the change was already in the air, what with folks like The Beatles and Bob Dylan. In Dreams was a hold out of the previous decade. But did it make it corny? Should the singer’s pain be invalidated because of the musical arrangement? Of course not! I considered her criticism and promptly rejected it. Turns out I used it when this musicologist kicked me out of her house because of some outside skullduggery, so there; once again, In Dreams helped me with the healing.

In my mind, In Dreams is Orbison’s masterpiece, and it is no wonder that the song keeps popping up in my life, and it will always be welcome, but I would prefer to listen to it for just the sake of listening to it.

And here’s a bonus track of another well known song of his:

Boogaloo Music: Too Fun To Last

Aaaah, beep-beep, aaah, beep-beep…

I was actually looking for those lyrics from the Joe Cuba song, Bang Bang, to do a post on boogaloo (or boogalu) music, and I felt stupid doing it. The lyrics are simple, but in the spirit of accuracy, I looked it up anyway… and I did feel really stupid because I found:  Aaaah, beep-beep, aaaah, beep-beep… bang-bang… those are pretty much the lyrics!  When we were children in the sixties, my sisters and I thought we were so clever when we would sing “Ah, pee-pee…(tee-hee),” in front of our parents. In the South Bronx during the sixties, boogaloo music was everywhere, as were building fires and junkies. Bang Bang and Pete Rodriguez’s I Like It Like That were raging hits! Those songs crossed color/ethnic lines. That was the purpose of boogaloo.

Created in the inner-city (some might say Spanish Harlem) by Hispanic musicians, boogaloo was the type of music that courted the young, black listeners to dance to a Latin beat.  Mixing Cuban music son with R&B, made this fusion irresistible to anybody with a sense of rhythm and fun!   It also seemed like a natural progression since some of the boogaloo singers were also Latin Soul singers. Back in the day, all the hip, young Latin musicians would play this music and the listener would have no choice but to dance and look sharp doing it. Among the pioneers of boogaloo are the aforementioned Joe Cuba and Pete Rodriguez, along with Richie Ray, Johnny Colon, Joe Pastrana, The Lebron Brothers, Jimmy Sabater, and others, like Willie Colon and Eddie Palmieri, who eventually would turn away from boogaloo to do other music.

The boogaloo craze, alas, didn’t last too long. By the seventies Fania had just about taken over the Latin music scene and there just didn’t seem to be enough space for boogaloo (Fania is for another post though).  The other reason some have stated was snobbery from the old band leaders, perhaps they felt that boogaloo was too “urban” for them, and even undignified. My own theory is that, as fun as this music was, it is not a sub-genre that had the weight to last for the ages, but rather a cyclical phase. A few musicians, such as Gecko Turner and the folks of Mo’ Horizons have put out a couple of boogaloo songs, and I have enjoyed them, but in my opinion, it never had the durability of Salsa or R&B, especially with the renaissance of the seventies.

Asphalt Jungle Sound

I don’t remember the first time I heard music as a child, I mean, really heard music! My earliest memory was my parents taking us to parties at the local social club in the South Bronx, where they would enjoy dancing to mambo, rumba and bolero. This was in the sixties. I don’t want to be redundant in mentioning in great detail the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the hippies… well, at least not for this post.

I’ll focus on what was going on closer to home, and talk about how my older brother, my personal bully, forced me, the six year old boy, to listen to an album that he bought with his own money.  You see, my brother would sit me down and have me listen to all the tracks. He was thirteen years old. In retrospect, I noticed that he liked to listen to the, say, less traditional tracks on the LP. I do remember that he was enthralled by this one song that kept chanting “Number 9, number 9…”* and the slightly more melodic Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, which I understood as Buffalo Bill, and I remembered that my tender ears thought the music was bizarre, this made my brother scarier to me. He kept playing this song (and the album) again and again, and it was seriously driving everybody in my already dysfunctional family crazy.  It was my oldest sister, who took matters into her hands, and put the double album into the oven and watched it melt. She, too, was scary to me, and I guess my brother shared my assessment of her because he took no action against her. So I suppose that The Beatles’ White Album was my first memory of really listening to music… or else!

In the years that followed, my exposure to music was constant. My parents and their friends made a big deal out of the Santana album, Abraxas. I suspect that they were proud of a fellow Latino putting out an album that was a commercial hit, even if he was a Mexican, and not Puerto Rican like us. It is important to note that my parents weren’t hippies, but hipsters.

The Ed Sullivan show was also a big influence, since my mother insisted that we watch that variety program. She fawned over that Puerto Rican blind boy Jose Feliciano singing Light My Fire, she swooned over the Spanish singer Raphael. I personally enjoyed Topo Gigio. Ed Sullivan had so much variety, that I think that show was also a bit of an influence regarding my diversity.

My tastes expanded when my sisters began to listen in earnest to Soul and R&B. I never acted as though I liked the music because my sisters and their friends were girls, and girls were icky; but deep down, I did like the songs.

Salsa had also come into play, and even though I liked it a lot, I always felt a little too naïve for it. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, but I just couldn’t fathom dancing to such a complicated rhythm. Oh, but the songs were so much fun, and all the characters we’re so cool and macho! I remember trying to be like them, but I failed miserably!

I gradually accepted that I loved music by the time my sisters and I shared a transistor radio.

This blog is about life’s different soundtracks, from my past and present, and I would like to share them with you, and know just how many of you have never ending soundtracks in your head. Don’t worry, the music will be in the forefront, but there will be passages from my life that will serve as a time reference. So welcome readers, and please feel free to share with me, because there is still a lot of life left in me.