A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 73: “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Episode seventy-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, and is the first of a two-part story which will conclude next week with an episode on Buddy Holly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Kansas City” by Wilbert Harrison. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hig. Episode 73, La Bamba by Richie Valens. This is actually going to be part one of a two-part story, which will be continued in next week's episode. Richie Valens died so young that he is nowadays, mostly known for his death. But in this episode, we're going to look at why people cared about him at all. The story of the plane crash that took his life will wait for next week's episode.

This week, we're going to look at his short recording career and at his most famous record. So far in this podcast, when we've looked at race, we've mostly dealt with either black or white musicians. along with a few people who are clearly white by the standards of 2020, but might not have been considered so at the time. But there was, in Los Angeles, a whole parallel music culture growing up around Latino teenagers. This subculture only rarely impinged on the consciousness of the wider American public, but without it we would have had no garage rock and no punk, as we know them today. and the first big star, the person around whom that culture coalesced, was Richie Valens.

Now, I have to stress here that I am at even more of a disadvantage when talking about this subculture than I am when talking about Black America. While black culture has been extensively documented in all sorts of other popular culture I've consumed, and I've studied mid-20th century black American culture to a reasonable extent, though nowhere near enough, of course, that my thoughts on the subject should be taken as authoritative. I have had almost no exposure to the Latino culture

of the same time period. And on top of that, there's an additional problem, which is that I am going to have to refer to quite a few Spanish terms in the course of this episode, and I don't speak Spanish. While I'm going to try my best with those, I will undoubtedly mangled some things. But that's sort of appropriate, at least,

in the case of Richie Valens, because one of the things that people who knew him would say is that he spoke Spanish terribly. While he was a Mexican-American, he was raised in an English-speaking household and only spoke Spanish as a second language, in which he wasn't especially flawed. By all accounts, in fact, Valens, who was born Richard Valenzuela, but had his name shortened when he got a record deal, was at least somewhat unpopular among the other Mexican Americans at his school.

Some of this was to do with his appearance. He was notably light-skinned for a Mexican-American, and apparently there was a level of colourism among Latino kids in that area at that time, and he was also quite fat. and some was due to his willingness to associate with people of other races, as he had both black and white friends. Valens's big interest in school was music, especially R&B, and especially the music of Little Richard and Larry Williams, and other people who had recorded for specialty records. When he was in high school, he joined a group called The Silhouette,

who named themselves after a recent hit of that name by the Rays. That all the shades were pulled and drawn Way down sight Come within a dim light cast Two silhouettes on the shade Oh what a lot That song was also the inspiration for another group A doo-op group also called the Silhouette

Who had a hit with Get a Job That's not this group And they weren't yet known at the time These silhouettes never recorded And after Valens became famous There were a lot of interviews With various members of the band Who disagreed, of course,

On who it was who invited Valens into the band, Who the leader of the band was And who had really taught Valens everything he knew about performing As well as disagreeing on what songs the band performed And who contributed what to the songs that made Valens famous. The silhouettes were, by modern standards, a very big band, having three trumpets, five saxophones, a vibraphone player, a pianist, a drummer, and a couple of singers,

as well as valens on guitar and vocals. They were very unusual for the time in being a mixed-race group. They were mostly Mexican-Americans, but there were also black and Italian members. at a time when Italians weren't considered fully white by then prevailing racial standards, and a Japanese-American saxophone player. Their repertoire was apparently largely based around R&B songs, but they would occasionally play Mexican material,

usually when requested for a particular event, such as a wedding. Valens usually didn't sing on those songs, because he didn't speak Spanish. but he was eventually persuaded to sing one song in Spanish, La Bamba. La Bamba is an old folk song from Veracruz in Mexico, and is an example of a style called Son Haro. The earliest known recording of La Bamba is from 1939, but there are suggestions it's been around for centuries.

The song is traditionally sung at weddings, and its origins are fairly obscure. I've seen claims that the song has its origins in music made by slaves in Mexico, and that the title is a reference either to the Ambamba tribe from Angola, or to a 17th century slave uprising called the Bambaria. But the only references I can find to that uprising talk about how it was an inspiration for the song, and seem to differ on all the other details. As I've said before on this podcast, I tend to doubt a lot of stories

claiming that various bits of music and folklore have their origin in African traditions kept up by slaves, as the majority of such stories tend to have very little evidence backing them up. And in the case of La Bamba, I think it's far more likely that the song, whose lyrics are mostly about a dance, is referring to the Spanish word, Bambolia, which means to sway, swing or wobble.

Which is not to say that there's no African influence on the song. I've talked before about how African music has influenced central and South American musical forms, and the Sanharacho tradition La Bomba is part of, is a mixture of Spanish, indigenous and African styles. But I think it's safe to say that the song doesn't have a ringa ringa rose's style hidden meaning, and for that matter, nor does ringa ringa roses in reality, and that it is what it sounds like, a song about a dance with nonsense lyrics thrown in. When the silhouettes played the song, they did it more or less the same way everyone else at the time would play it. There are no recordings

of the silhouettes, but they likely based their performance on a successful recording of the song, like the version by Hermanos Huesca. The silhouettes built up quite a local following, and in January 1958 they played a show that they promoted themselves, in a hall they'd rented out in order to raise money to pay for Valenz's family's mortgage payment for that month. One of the people who attended the show was a 20-year-old from the area named Doug Machia,

who vaguely knew a couple of the band members. match year was at the time employed by Bob Keene. We've not mentioned Keene himself before, but we have mentioned one of the labels he owned, Keene Records, which was the label on which he'd released Sam Cooke's You Send Me. Many of the people involved in that record, like guitarist Renee Hall and drummer Earl Palmer, had worked with many of the specialty acts that Valens admired,

and Keene had started employing them on a regular basis, both on Keene records and on his new label, Delphi. Machia recorded the silhouettes at the gig on a portable tape recorder and took the recording, which is now lost, to Keen, who was impressed enough with Valens, though not with the other members, that he requested that they come to audition for him

in his home recording studio. Valens was at first reluctant to go to the audition when Machia told him about it, and he also delayed the audition, because when Machia came round, Valens was minding the other children at home, and had to wait until his mother got back before he could go to the studio. While he was waiting, Machia helped Valens finish up a song he was working on, which he named after a girl with whom he'd been having some sort of relationship.

People differ on whether it was just a crush he had, or whether they were in some great doomed romance. When it came to the audition, Keen was impressed with Valenz, not because of his ability, but because of his energy. Keen signed him, and started shaping him into a new style of performer. Valence was not a particularly proficient guitarist.

He had a lot of natural skill and a love of the instrument, but when he first started recording he could only play in a handful of keys. Almost everything he recorded is in the key of D or A and had only 3 or 4 chords. When he recorded one song and needed to drop the key down to D flat, he ended up tuning his guitar down half a step

because he didn't know the chords in that key. And on another occasion, when he was trying to tell the bass player on a session what part to play, He became frustrated because the part he could hear in his head had a low D, but the bass only goes down as far as a low E. He would rarely play the same song the same way twice, and most of the recordings he completed were pulled together by Bob Keane from multiple takes.

The tapes were spliced so much that Stan Ross, the co-owner of Gold Star Studios, described them as looking like they'd been through World War 14. Valens would go into the studio with a rough idea for a melody and a few words, and improvised several different variations on the song, and the best bits of each improvisation would be used for the finished recording. According to at least some sources, Bob Keane would shape the actual song during the recording, and in the edit,

helping Valens finish the lyrics, and editing together bits of different performances to make a coherent song out of them. Other sources, including Ross, say that wasn't the case and that Vowens essentially produced his own sessions and wrote all the material himself. I actually leaned towards Kean's claims in this case because Keen was one of the few record company owners who was himself an accomplished musician,

being a fairly respectable jazz clarinetist, and Valens seems to have had a very laissez-faire attitude towards structure. Members of the silhouettes have talked about Valens's performances on stage, where he would start out playing, for example, Jenny Jenny by Little Richard, but after a few lines he would start improvising his own new melody and lyrics, which would be different every time. This seems to back up Bob Keane's claims that Valens would only bring in a four or eight bar riff and a few lines of lyric, and improvise the rest in performances which Keen would shape. The most obvious example of Valens working this

way is the song, Ooh My Head, a song that's credited as a solo Valens composition. Listen to Valens's song, and now compare Little Richards earlier, ooh my soul. You can see that Valens's song seems to have come from precisely this process of performing someone else's song and changing it around until it became something different, though in this case not all that different. Amusingly, led Zepard, Leppelin later did exactly the same thing with Valens's song, resulting in Boogie with Stu. While Little Richard never sued over his song being appropriated by Valens, Bob Keane, who owned the publishing for Valens's songs, did sue Led Zeppelin for that one, even though they had tried to forestall the possibility of a lawsuit by crediting Valens' mother as a co-writer.

So it seems safe to say that Valenz's music was largely spontaneous to the extent that even after the recording had gone out he would change the song dramatically in live performance. Compare, for example, the studio version of Come on Let's Go with this recording of him performing the song live as his old junior high school after it had already become a hit. As you can hear, the basic structure of the song remains the same. but there are huge variations in both the lyrics and the melody.

At the time of his audition, Valence still thought of himself as primarily an R&B singer, and he was being referred to as the Little Richard of the Valley, but Keene had other ideas. Keene didn't believe that anyone other than black people could make good R&B music, and while Valens would record R&B songs as album tracks, he'd record both Boney Maroney by Larry Williams. and framed by the Robbins. Keen was more interested in emphasizing the Latin sound of Valenz's music. Happily for Keen, Valen's relatively limited guitar playing skills

allowed him to do just that. Most R&B and rock and roll of the time was based on a handful of different chord sequences, of which the most common was the 12-bar blues. The 12-bar blues has only three chords in, which are the first, fourth and fifth chords of the major scale. You play four bars of the first, two bars of the fourth,

two more of the first, then one each of the fifth and fourth, and two more of the first, like this. First, first, first, first,

fourth, fourth, fourth, fifth, first, first, A lot of Latin music uses those same three chords, just arranged in different ways. For example, there's what's known as the 1-451 progression. First, fourth, fifth, first, fourth, fifth, first.

That's the basis of quite a few Latin songs. And it also became the basis of the first record Valens released. Come on, let's go. Come On Let's Go was recorded along with its B-side, a cover of Framed by the Robbins, by Valens at Gold Star Studios, backed by a group of session musicians who would become regulars on his sessions.

The union documents for the sessions are not available, so there's some question as to exactly who played on which recordings, but they would usually involve Renee Hall, Bill Pittman, and or Carol Kaye on guitar. along with Valence himself, Red Calendar or Buddy Clark on stand-up bass, Earl Palmer on drums, and Ernie Freeman on piano. Sometimes one of the guitarists would instead play a Dan Electro bass, a six-string bass guitar with a unique tone that became a signature of many records made in LA.

Many of these musicians would later go on to be important parts of the wrecking crew, the informal collective of session musicians who played on a show. huge number of hit records made in LA in the 60s. Come on Let's Go was a minor hit, reaching number 42 on the Hot 100. This was enough to prove to Keen that his instincts were right. If he pushed Valens into a Latin rock sound, he could have a big star on his hands.

He just needed some more material in that style, and he found the next single by accident, when he heard Valens noodling La Bamba on his guitar. in the back seat of Kean's car. Kean insisted that that should be Valens's next single, but Valens was very hesitant. He considered the song to be an important part of his family's culture and didn't want to be accused of selling out his cultural background for a cheap hit.

Keen thought that was ridiculous, though personally I have a lot more sympathy with Valens' problem. Valens was also worried about his Spanish. He basically didn't speak Spanish, at all, and he originally thought it might be an idea to get his aunt to help him translate the lyrics into English and sing those. But eventually it was decided that he'd just sing it in the original Spanish, and he got his aunt to write down as many of the lyrics as she could remember, and learn them phonetically. While Valens normally could only sing while playing his guitar,

this time he recorded the vocal as an overdub, apparently with Bob Keane standing behind him whispering the lyrics to him. The arrangement was very different from any earlier versions of the song and the result was the first record to successfully meld Latin and rock and roll styles into one coherent hole. For the B side, Keen wanted something

that could be a throwaway so as not to distract from the A side and so he just got the musicians to overdub onto the original demo of Donna that Valence had recorded in his basement. As it turned out, Donner became the bigger hit. Donner reached number two on the chart,

while La Bamba only reached number 22. But La Bamba is the record that became far more influential. La Bamba has another three-cord sequence, based around those same three chords, but in yet another order. This one is known as the three-cord trick, and goes one-four-five-four, like this. First, fourth, fifth, fourth,

First, fourth, fifth, fourth. Labamba wasn't the first rock and roll record to use that pattern. There are only a small number of patterns that one can make out of the same three chords. And in particular, Chuck Berry had recorded Havana Moon a year earlier. And that song would itself go on to be particularly influential. But Labamba definitely was the one that inspired a lot of other records to use the same pattern. and one can hear the distinctly Latin echoes of it in records like Hang on Sloopy, and twist and shout. Between that and the influence of Havana Moon on records like Louis-Louis and Wild Thing,

the three-cord trick became one of the most important chord sequences in rock music, and La Bamba was the first record to make that chord sequence popular, and inspired thousands of garage bands. On the back of the success of La Bamba and Donna, Valens appeared in the Alan Freed film Go Johnny Go, which featured Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, The Flamingos and Jackie Wilson. Valence performed Ooh My Head,

and also appeared in several scenes of the film, but had no lines as the musical performers weren't being paid, as the film was considered to be promotion for them, while anyone who had a line was considered an actor. and had to be paid. That film was the last major piece of work that Valens did before he headed off for what would be his last tour,

which we'll talk about next week when we look at the last recording Buddy Holly released in his lifetime. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon,

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