Los Super Seven – Border radio
It’s a glorious mess, the same way yellow cheese congeals into the chili gravy on a plate of real truck stop enchiladas. And it tastes just as good and spicy, even though as a Latin album, my colleague John Morthland compared it to a Hollywood movie about civil rights where the lead characters are white.
Going English, though, is very much part of the Texas-Mexican story.
To cross over or not has been a challenge every successful Mexican-American artist from South Texas has had to grapple with since Narciso Martinez, aka “El Huracan del Valle” (the Hurricane of the Rio Grande Valley), became the first accordion recording star, releasing a string of 78s back in the 1930s. Martinez, who later was recognized as the father of Tex-Mex conjunto accordion, recorded polkas and waltzes for his immediate audience; many sides were also released under the pseudonyms Louisiana Pete and Polka Joe to reach a broader audience.
That give-and-take has been played out every decade since — by the duet Carmen y Laura and orchestra leader Beto Villa in the 1940s; by singer Chelo Silva, big-band leader Isidro (El Indio) Lopez and rocker Baldemar Huerta (who became Freddy Fender) in the 1950s; by Little Joe & the Latinaires, Trini Lopez, Rene & Rene, Sam the Sham, and Question Mark & the Mysterians in the 1960s; by Fender again as a country-pop crooner along with Johnny Rodriguez in the 1970s; by Flaco Jimenez in the 1980s; and by Emilio Navaira and Selena in the 1990s, along with Rick Trevino.
Ruben Ramos, one of the two charter members of Los Super Seven, launched his career in the 1950s singing “Blueberry Hill” and “I Got A Woman” in English with his uncle’s thirteen-piece orquesta before emerging as a Tejano superstar who sang almost exclusively in Spanish. Rick Trevino, the other LS7 careerist, has a similar early history. Although his father played in Tejano orchestras, Rick grew up American, not Mexican, and didn’t delve into his own culture until he’d established himself as a young Nashville hat act. The first two Los Super Seven recordings were the conduits that inspired him to learn his past.
No single artist or song defines the Texas-Mexican crossover quite like Sunny & the Sunliners did in the early 1960s with “Talk To Me”, a slow blues belly rubber oozing a particularly sentimental brand of teen sincerity easily understood by blacks and whites as well as browns, and earning Sunny Ozuna the distinction of being the first Mexican-American to appear on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand”. Such crossovers were orchestrated by white producers and promoters — in Sunny’s case, by Huey P. Meaux, the Houston independent hitmaker, and in Los Super Seven’s, by Goodman and Clark.
Two years after Sunny’s English-language hit, he shifted gears and returned to his people’s music, much like Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., did with Los Dinos in the 1950s. “Carino Nuevo” was a hit among the hardcore Sunny fans throughout the southwest, but it didn’t cross over mainly because Spanish lyrics were used to convey the same sincerity-oozing romanticism of “Talk To Me”. For the rest of his storied career, Ozuna stuck with the onda chicana sound singing in Spanish, but switching to English whenever he answered inevitable requests for “Talk To Me”.
Assimilation has worked both ways. In Texas, the mexicano influence was so persistent and pervasive, it managed to rub off on Anglos and African-Americans whether they were aware of it or not, from Bob Wills’ “San Antonio Rose” and Cliff Bruner’s “Jesse Polka” through the Champs of “Tequila” fame, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and Bobby Fuller, all the way to Joe Ely.
Doug Sahm played perhaps the most critical role of any Texas Anglo who dabbled in Latin, using the backbeat of the conjunto polka to power a pop hit, “She’s About A Mover”, in 1965, then burnishing his chicanismo by reviving Freddy Fender’s career, introducing gringos to Flaco Jimenez and the bajo sexto 12-string Mexican rhythm guitar, and writing a song, “Soy Chicano”, that has been embraced as an anthem of Texas-Mexican pride.
In that context, Heard It On The X makes sense.
Arturo Sauce Gonzales has been hiding out at his girlfriend’s apartment on the west side of San Antonio, he informs me when I finally track him down. “When you’ve been married for 35 years, you gotta take a break now and then,” he reasons. He’s looking sharp for a vato trying to keep a low profile, decked in a natty fedora and tinted shades that complement his thick lowrider mustache.
Sauce is Los Super Seven’s missing link, and its essence. He played keyboards on the original version of “Talk To Me” as a member of Sunny & the Sunliners. “We did it in the summer of 1962 at a place called Southwest Recording here in San Antonio. It didn’t take off until the summer of ’63. That October we were on ‘American Bandstand’ with Dale & Grace, Gene Pitney and Wayne Newton. After that record hit, every dance we did, we had to play that song three or four times.” And 42 years after that first recording, he played on the Los Super Seven version.
I met Sauce through the West Side Horns — trumpet player Charlie McBirney and Rocky Morales, the most underrated tenor saxophonist in Texas. They, along with bassist Jack Barber and drummer Ernie Durawa, were Doug Sahm’s band of choice through much of the 1970s and 1980s. They were all part of a brown beatnik conspiracy bubbling up on San Antonio’s predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American west side that Sahm tapped into in the 1950s. These meskins spoke Spanish as their first language but were all about rhythm & blues, jazz and cool music, better versed in the ways of Louie Prima and Jimmy Smith than Vicente Fernandez or Antonio Aguilar.
Sauce, more than any player on Heard It On The X, is the true border radio rat. He grew up in the Starr County town of Roma, a splendidly preserved historic village on the north side of the Rio Grande. The family lived on a ranch. His father ran a cantina on the old town plaza and played piano accordion in a trio with a standup bass player and a drummer.
“They would load into a wagon and head upriver or downriver, stopping at every ranchito to visit, talk, eat, drink and play. It would take them five days to get to where they were going,” Sauce remembers. “Once they were supposed to play in McAllen and they never made it.” He learned to play keyboards by sneaking into the Roma school auditorium to play the piano, picking out the “Dragnet Theme” and other songs that came to mind. His father taught him Mexican standards like “Jalisco”, “La Paloma”, and “Guadalajara.”