It was both her good fortune and mine that my parents figured I was old enough to fill that role.
I will never forget that evening. The nightclub (the first I'd ever been in) was absolutely beautiful--outdoors, right by the ocean. More importantly, for the first time I heard a really great drummer: Richard Lemus. While my sister danced with her boyfriend, I moved to a table right near Lemus and watched every move, thinking "my cookie tins don't sound like that." I spent the evening soaking up everything I could; there was no question that I was bitten by the show-biz bug. I really loved the environment. Everybody was clapping. I thought: this guy's a star--look at all these women.
I couldn't possibly foresee all the treachery the music business would hold for me in the future. As Lemus captivated the crowd, I thought "this is great, this is glamorous, this is wonderful, I want to play and be adored just like this guy. I want to be like him; he looks like he's having such a good time."
It was years before I learned that that's part of the job--you have to look like you're having a good time even if your guts are on fire and your soul is sick and you'd rather be dead than on stage. I learned that part too well, later on.
During this period, I was attending an excellent British-run school called Colegio Williams for Boys. It was not religious, but stern, with lots of English-style discipline. I started making friends with kids who liked rock and roll. That was our link, the only thing we really related to. A lot of them had Elvis Presley records, but I was already farther down the road. I was listening to Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Big Joe Turner.
One of the guys I started playing with was Javier Flores, El Zoa, who had an acoustic guitar. We were among the first garage bands in Mexico City, copying Elvis Presley hits, hanging around just being kids, just making noise. It was all feeling; we had no technique. I hadn't taken any lessons and El Zoa knew only a few basic chords. It wasn't long before we met some other middle class kids in Colonia Narvarte who were also into rock music. Mexico City is divided into neighborhoods called colonias and where you live forms your basic identity. This new group of guys had a piano, a couple of electric guitars and a snare drum. A real Slingerland snare drum with a cymbal. Wow!
They even put a microphone on the piano, creating sort of a first generation electrified rock band. We were pretty pitiful by comparison. All we had were my marching band drum and Javier's little Mexican acoustic guitar. We used to peek over the fence to watch them rehearse.
One day their drummer wasn't there. "Hey, you, ojos de gato (cat eyes), across the fence. We know who you are. We've seen you've play with El Zoa. Want to sit in with us?"
I was thrilled. They accepted me immediately, replacing their drummer with his fancy snare drum and cymbal with me and my banged up, military snare drum and cookie tins. This became my first band, called the Sparks, with Lalo Toral on guitar, an American kid named Charles Lee on piano, and Ricardo Delgado on guitar and vocals. (Many years later in the 1970s, a band called Sparks became famous worldwide. I doubt they ever knew they had assumed a name that set teeny-bopper hearts to beating wildly in Mexico in the '50s.)
Soon the word was out and people in our neighborhood would pay us to perform at their parties. The other guys didn't share my passion for Fats Domino and Little Richard. They were copying what they heard on Mexican radio, which were actually white covers of the black records I listened to. In those days, much of America was still very segregated and black radio stations played black music for blacks and white stations played white copies for white audiences. They never told their listeners that Elvis Presley was copying Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup with "That's All Right Mama."
Along with the pesos we earned, I enjoyed the recognition. Our rehearsals were more like parties. Every time the band rehearsed, we had 10 to 20 girls sitting around the garage. When we got a job, Lalo and I, along with the rest of the band, had to push his piano down the street to parties, dragging it over pavement, battering it totally out of tune. But we didn't care. We were enjoying ourselves. We bought metallic pants with matching vests and considered ourselves unbelievably cool.
The music was still part of an innocent era in Mexico. In the United States, the beatniks were already bringing a serious touch to the youth movement, such as it was then. Later, it would surface on the streets of countries around the world. But we were still untouched. Rock n' roll was just starting to catch on and all kinds of bands were popping up all over Mexico City.
In 1958, when I was only 12, we got a record contract with RCA Victor covering American hits like "At the Hop" and "Oh, Carol." Unfortunately, Charles Lee, the center of the band, died unexpectedly from an infection just a few months after The Sparks started taking off, so I inherited the band and we went on to record two LPs for Columbia.
When Bill Haley and the Comets came to Mexico, my father immediately bought tickets for the whole family. It was one of the strongest impressions in my life. I was in shock. When I heard that music and felt that beat and saw those American guys rocking and playing the real stuff--so acoustic--so full of tonality and beat--it was absolutely beautiful. I went back to hear them three times. Haley, the grandfather of rock music in America with "Rock Around the Clock," was even bigger in Mexico. So popular in fact, that years later, when his star had faded in the United States, he moved the band to
Mexico City where many fans still loved him. He married a Mexican woman, played at one club for many years and went on making records in Mexico after he was all but forgotten in the States.
Before I was 15 great stars like Jerry Lee Lewis came to Mexico, along with other groups that weren't as well known. These people were gods to me. I just idolized them. I remember thinking: "We will turn into salt if we touch them."
Los Sparks after the death of Charles Lee
Everyone was in awe; my sister, even my father. We loved the music that America was coming up with. Elvis, of course, was not going to come to Mexico. He was too big.
My father, who was into hot rods and fast cars, made me an offer: If I got A's and B's for six months straight, he would get me an Italian moped, so I could go back and forth to school. It was the start of my love affair with motorcycles that has never ended. I also discovered girls during this period and the connection between the two has never left me.
Across the street from Colegio Williams was Colegio Madrid, an all-girls school, where I saw my first true love, a beautiful blonde named Maria del Carmen, who caused me to blush madly whenever I said hello. For a whole year, I would show off by riding my moped around her, but I never had the courage to ask her to go for a ride.
As I became more serious about my music, my mother began a small business in our colonia selling farm fresh eggs, which she would deliver by car. Our neighborhood was very supportive. They knew I was saving the money for real drums. With their help, plus money from grandmother Pilar, I finally got my first professional set of drums, my first Slingerland kit. Adios cookie tins, though I have to admit I got a pretty substantial start with those tin cans and the army drum.
At 16, I met Fernando, who everyone called El Tarolas--snare drum in English--but among Mexican musicians it was a nickname for a spastic, odd-duck kind of guy. He was a great pool player, a real ladies man and an adequate piano player who knew all the standards like "Misty" and "Tea for Two," as well as some jazz and a little rock and roll. He had a lot of contacts at coffee houses that were springing up as the beatnik movement spread to Mexico; places full of older guys from the National University wearing beards, playing bongo drums, worshipping Jean Paul Sartre and flirting with communism. Some even smoked pot, but I didn't want to know about it; it just didn't interest me. I was interested in jazz, which was coming on strong with groups like Art Blakey and the Jazz
