One October night in 1964, at a gig with Los Sinners at a cafe called Milleti, I hit two milestones at once: I met my first wife and went to my first orgy.
Sonja came into the club looking very square in her American-coed outfit, a powder blue skirt and pastel blue sweater plus nylons and white ballet flats. I had just given up hope that Kathy would ever come back and here was another gringa, but a much different one, quiet, straight, a nice Baptist girl from Phoenix with blonde Barbie-doll bangs and an open, clean-cut face. Like Kathy, she was a college student. She went to the University of Redlands in California and was taking language courses at the National University.
I had never met an American girl like her before, so pure, so genteel, so sweet. She fascinated me. At the end of the evening one of the cafe owners invited us to a party, so I talked Sonja and her friends into coming with us.
Suddenly, one of the guys at the party turned to me and whispered in my ear: "You might want to take your gringa friends home pretty soon. See those two chicks over there? They're going to put on a show for all of us. Then they are going to fuck every guy here. If your friends are as innocent as they look, this isn't their scene."
I grabbed Sonja by the hand and headed for my motorcycle. "Time to go home," I said, pretty firmly.
When I kissed her good-bye, she clamped her lips tight. She didn't know how to kiss. In fact, I learned later that she had never kissed anyone before. Although I liked her a lot, under the circumstances it was not something I wanted to pursue right then.
I wanted to get right back to the party.
It was ironic that at the same time I met this lovely, young saint, I was leaving her to scramble back to an orgy. It was a sign of things to come. An awareness of the darker side of the musician's life was already growing in me.
By the time I got back to the apartment, the two women--both very attractive Latinas--were nude on the carpeted floor. One looked a little reticent, like she had never done this before, but the other was going totally nuts, rubbing and licking her all over. They were surrounded by more than a half dozen men, who were stroking themselves and encouraging them.
The shy one came with a wild scream, then began giggling and laughing: "I'm a bad girl. Oh God, am I ever a bad girl."
Watching them excited me in a way that I had never felt before, and when they finished with each other, they did all of us. It was just like the gordita in Tierra Blanca. We lasted barely two minutes each.
Our quick performance couldn't have been much of a thrill for them after the terrific time they obviously had with each other. But, they appeared to like us, the innocent kids in the band. Since we'd been more than properly taken care of, we headed home to sleep.
We didn't know yet that we were supposed to go on all night.
A new girl (Sonja my future wife) on a new bike (my first BMW, an R60)
Los Hooligans (sic) holding one of many gold records from Orfeon.
At A Tardeada: Tony & Emilio de la Barreda, Fito, El Topo, Javier Florez "El Zoa"
Los Hooligans: Agustin Islas, Fito, Johnny Ortega, Humberto
Cisneros, El Cuervo
3 - CARRYING WATER TO THE SEA
Los Sinners at Raul Astor's T.V. show right
before our first U.S. Adventure.
In the mid '60s, the other guys in Los Sinners and I began to dream the impossible dream: playing in the United States.
After a gig one night, we were sitting around in a cheap bar, the kind where they have sawdust on the floor, talking about it. In fact, it was all we ever talked about.
The bass player from another band, who was with us that evening, looked at us like we were crazy. "You'd never get a job there. Not even in the worst places. The Americans invented rock n' roll, idiotas. It's their music, about their country. There are so many great bands there already. You'd be carrying water to the sea," he sneered.
"Hey, man, there are Chicanos doing it," I pointed out, thinking of Ritchie Valens, Trini Lopez, Cannibal and the Headhunters, and ? and the Mysterians. "If Chicanos--people who looked like us--can be rock stars in America, why not Mexicans?"
"They are Americans, pendejo. They are born there. They grew up listening to that music. They live that life; they go to American high schools. They play football a whole different way. Their girlfriends run around in little short skirts. They have American cars and go to drive-ins and eat hamburgers. Those Chicanos are more American than they are Mexican," he replied.
"The British do it. They didn't grow up on the Mississippi and surf at Malibu and all that," I insisted.
"They have their own sound. And they are like the Americans' smart cousins, part of the family. It's easy for them because the Americans like them. They don't like us. They would just call you a beaner or a greaser. What do you think? You're some kind of gods or something?
That was the big insult.
Dioses. The gods. That's what other rocanroleros in Mexico City called those of us who dreamed of going to the States. They thought of us as arrogant, as if we were planning to climb Mount Olympus to knock back a few drinks with Zeus and get a date with Venus, as if we could ever be in the same class as the divine ones.
But Los Sinners weren't about to abandon that dream. We thought we sounded just as good as some American bands. We looked good. We could sing in English, at least some of us. We even had Jon Novi, an American, as the musical leader of the band. We called him El Cachalote (the whale) because of his size; he was a short-haired, big-nosed guy with glasses, who was well educated and very knowledgeable about music, but dressed like an accountant from South Dakota.
There was also El Monstruo (the monster), the nickname we cruelly hung on lead guitarist Federico Arana because of his acne-pocked face. He was older than the rest of us and a biology teacher by day. He later became a prominent writer on the history of Mexican rock n' roll.
Our lead singer Renato was good-looking and dark-skinned with green eyes and the girls just idolized him. Girls also flocked to Baltasar, the other singer, although he was so short we nicknamed him El Enano (the dwarf).
The other members, Tony de la Barreda and Ramon Rodriguez, were like me, middle-class kids from European-Mexican backgrounds who were heavily into motorcycles. We didn't think Los Sinners would be a good name in America because it sounded so American (which, of course, was the whole point in Mexico). Realizing we couldn't disguise our Mexican origins, we decided we needed a name that said "Mexico" to the gringos. We settled on Los Tequilas.
The Not So Wild Ones; Los Sinners and friends arrive
at Renato's wedding
We worked very hard to prepare for our version of the British rock invasion. We polished the act on several TV programs and even appeared in a couple of Mexican movies. We recorded four tracks of original songs written by Jon and arranged by everybody, paying for and producing the records ourselves