I never suspected Matt Polley to be a Hector Lavoe fan. He’s a kid from Indiana and well…he looks the part. So when he asked me to perform with him at this year’s Amoebapaloza covering Hector Lavoe and Willie Colon songs, I was a bit surprised. Amoebapalooza is fun as far as seeing your co-workers live out their rock and roll fantasies, but it’s usually just that; rock band after rock band with a smattering of folk, experimental music and Electronica. Salsa at Amoebapalooza? I’ve always been a punk at heart, so playing Salsa at Amoebapalooza would be more punk rock than actually playing punk rock.

Matt and I talked about it for weeks before Amoebapalooza. We signed up as "Lo Mato" and then went combing the store for people who would want to perform with us. We found two people. Cashier Ricky Ray Rivera was down, as was Erick, who works in the Reggae and Hip-Hop section. Erick and Ray were to play percussion as well as sing the chorus. So that meant me on bass, Ray and Erick on percussion and Matt Polley as Hector Lavoe.

Paul Vasquez, who works in the World Music section, wanted to get in on the action. He told Polley he had a trombone and although he hadn’t played in a while he would start practicing. He had not picked up a trombone since elementary school. For Paul to pull off the Willie Colon parts would be nothing short of a miracle. Most professional trombone players would find the task difficult. So it meant myself on bass, Ray and Erick on percussion, Matt Polley as Hector Lavoe, and Paul Vasquez, a rusty trombone player as Willie Colon.

Weeks went by and we hadn’t practiced once. Amoebapalooza was a week away and Matt was in a slight panic. He had found a piano player and a drummer and by then Paul had backed out, so we had no horns. I called my friend Pat Hoed to take over for me on bass. He is a huge Willie Colon/Hector Lavoe fan so he knew all the songs already. I switched to the keyboards and got my friend Jeremy Keller on guitar to help me play the horn lines. We learned the horn lines an hour before our first and only rehearsal.

track                                         artists                                                    album title

Cumbia De Los Aburridos     Calle 13                                                 Residente o Vistante
Oración Acere                          Spam All-Stars                                     Eletrodomésticos
Para No Vivir Desesperado  Mexican Institute Of Sound                Pinata
Mundo Insólito                         Toy Selectah & Up Bustle & Out       Mexican Sessions
Tifit Hayed                                 Wganda Kenya                                   Colombia!
Tambo Iya                                 Ricardo Eddy Martinez                      Si Para Usted
Grande de Cadera                  Sonidero Nacional                             Tributo A Los Mas Grandes
Crazy In Kingston                    Beatconductor                                     The Greastest Hits of GAMM
Café Con Sangre                    Jose Conde Y Ola Fresca                 Revolucion
Nuestras Demandas               B-Side Players                                    Fire In The Youth

So my back is almost healed. It’s probably at 70%, a passing grade to most but I feel 100 times better than I felt just a few weeks ago. One of the things I could not do, besides sit or stand for long periods of time was go dancing. During that time I went to see Calle 13 in concert and I had to stay perfectly in place or experience more pain than I already had. It was a hard task. Calle 13’s band is amazing. They had three percussionists and a horn section. Residente and Vistante of Calle 13 are step-brothers and they had their kid sister (P-13) as a their back-up singer. She looks like a b-girl but sounds like Toto La Momposina, the Afro-Colombian singer. The Calle 13 album, Residente o Visitante, is still one of my favorites of this year. I wanted to dance, even with the pain in my back but when I tried to dance it looked odd. Imagine Frankenstein dancing to Cumbia and that is what I looked like. (My girl probably still thinks I dance like that, even when I don’t have a bad back.) I appreciated that no one laughed at me. The people at the show had class. Not what I’d expect from a Reggaeton show, but then again, this is Calle 13, one of the more intelligent groups out there.

Class, is something that some people severely lack. I hate to generalize but some of the most awful displays of low class that I’ve seen have come from affluent people. People with money and success can act the most “ghetto” as they like to call it. The funny thing is that you can’t get away with that kind of an attitude in most barrios otherwise someone would put you in check if you did. Last week after I finished my DJ set at Zanzibar (insert shameless self-promotion here) in Santa Monica, I sat with my lady to have a drink. There was an older gentleman that was way into the music we were playing that night. He looked like he could have been someone’s Anthropology professor. He had a little bit of an Australian outback look to him. Anyhow, he was dancing by himself, a little strangely, but harmless. A group of drunken West Side peeps came into the club during Mexican Dubweiser’s set. One Paris Hilton knock-off noticed the guy and immediately started taunting him by dancing just like him. The guy stopped dancing, perhaps conscious of the fact that she was making fun of him. I quietly fumed as I continued to watch the bitchy Paris Hilton knock-off prance around the club.

During the 80’s and early 1990’s, there was an effort by Hollywood to make movies about Latinos but rarely did you see Latinos actually played by Latinos. During my back injury I watched a slew of movies from that era, including Scarface and Carlito’s Way. In Scarface, Al Pacino played a Cuban refugee with F. Murray Abraham as a Cuban as well. In Carlito’s Way, Pacino played a Puerto Rican. In each role Pacino had a terrible accent. I also watched Altered States with Thaao Penghlis, a Greek actor from Australia, playing the role of Prof. Eduardo Eccheverria, a professor from Mexico. In the movie, Thaao doesn’t try to hide his Aussie accent. I guess Hollywood figured his dark skin would suffice. To top it off, I watched Lou Diamond Phillips play Ritchie Valens in La Bamba and Angel Guzman, a former Chicano gang member turned math wiz in Stand And Deliver. Phillips is everything but Chicano. He, according to his bio, is of American of Scotch-Irish, Hawaiian, Cherokee, Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese descent.


During that time period, it seemed like no effort was made to use Latinos in staring roles, even if the movie was about Latinos, unless you were James Edward Olmos. Olmos played most of the big roles during that era. He played Jaime Escalante in Stand And Deliver, Abraham Quintanilla in Selena, police Lieutenant Martin Castillo in the television series Miami Vice and starred and directed the prison gang classic, American Me. This led to the classic joke by La Cucaracha’s satirist Lalo Alcaraz,
“He’s in Olmos every movie!”

The only other Latino actor that worked as much as Olmos during that time was actress Lupe Ontiveros. Lupe was a graduate from Texas Woman's University in Denton Texas who relocated to Los Angeles and got into acting by accident. She claims to have played the role of a maid over 300 times in her career between her stints in movies, television and theatre. She portrays a maid in El Norte, Goonies, Charlie’s Angels and Fame, just to name a few. One of the only roles that she didn’t play a maid or a women with a heavy accent was in the movie Chuck And Buck, made by Puerto Rican filmmaker Miguel Arteta, in which she plays a Beverly Hills executive. Even the pseudo-ultra hip, Sex In The City had her as a maid. Perhaps there was liberation for rich straight white females, but not for the Latinas.

So I’m back after a small hiatus. First, my back kept me in bed for a week. All I could do was lie on my back and watch endless hours of T.V. After my back got a little better, it was time to hit the studio with my band, Monte Carlo 76. We have been writing our second record for close to three years now and to finally hit to the studio is a welcomed relief. During this time it has been painful to sit for long periods of time. Even as I write this I am on my knees with my laptop on my bed rather than sitting at my desk. I still managed to check out a few bands (Calle 13, Ely Guerra and Manejo Beto…more on them later) and I recorded all my keyboard tracks. I just had to do all this while standing up.

If you are under 25 and you are reading this, remember this; Take care of yourself because the older you get it becomes so much harder to recover from injuries, especially if you don’t take care of yourself. I will recover, but like I said, it’s taking a lot longer then it used to.