Nowadays, gringos can pick up copies of El Tri's latest Spanish-only release, No Te Olvides de la Banda (Don't Forget About the Band) in their local record stores. "They told me that you will never make it with a rock 'n' roll band in Mexico City," the curly haired imp Lora, now in his 50s, says just before El Tri's first-ever show in Miami earlier this month. "Time has proven me right, and I feel very proud of how far rocanrol has come."
If El Tri laid the foundation for Mexican rock, the group that built La Raza's stairway to heaven was Caifanes, a rock-god outfit given to heavy atmospherics and mystical lyrics: "Before we are forgotten/We will make history/We won't walk on our knees." Twenty years after El Tri began its incessant tours across the hemisphere, winning fans gig by gig, Caifanes infiltrated the airwaves in 1988, becoming the first Mexican rock band to hit big, really big, with a raspy, slow-drag rendition of the Cuban classic "La Negra Tomasa." Typical of the group's ponderous meditations on the damned of the Earth, the song "Antes de que Nos Olviden" ("Before We Are Forgotten") comes from 1990's El Diablito (Little Devil), the second of four Caifanes discs released before the band broke up due to bad blood between frontman Saul Hernández and guitarist Alejandro Marcovich.
Marcovich kept the name Caifanes, but songwriter and singer kept the soul, establishing the Jaguares along with Caifanes drummer Alfonso Andre. After releasing El Equilibrio de los Jaguares (The Equilibrium of the Jaguares) in 1996, the pair ratcheted up to a power trio by enticing guitarist César "El Vampiro" Lopez away from the softer pop-rock supergroup Maná. While both Jaguares and Maná embrace Caribbean and Mexican folkloric influences, the former Caifanes deliver arena-filling epic rock and guitar-inspired ritual led by Hernández as mystic.
During an interview with a Spanish-language gossip program during what has become the band's annual promotional pilgrimage to Miami, shortly after the release of 1999 double album Bajo el Azul de Tu Misterio (Beneath the Blue of Your Mystery), the interviewer played on that mysticism by asking Hernández and Andre to confirm the rumors that the two had made a pledge to the Virgin of Guadalupe that they would never cut their hair as long as she granted the pair success.
The usually serious Andre played along, aping Samson for the camera.
Or maybe he was serious after all.
Last year, the shaggy Jaguares made Mexican rock history again with their third album, Cuando la Sangre Galope (When the Blood Gallops), by landing a rock platter at the top of the Billboard Latin album chart. The sales of Sangre in the United States seemed to take the press and even Jaguares' label, BMG, by surprise. If any rock band were to claim a place beside tropical, pop, and Mexican regional favorites, wouldn't it be one of these adventurous new proponents of the so-called Latin alternative sound?
"The public was not surprised," Andre grumbles on a return visit to Miami earlier this fall.
As Sangre is the first album produced by Hernández and Andre without any outside help, the pair sees its success as a vindication of Jaguares' mystical evolution. "That was the first time that we got rid of the crutch of the producer," Hernández says. "We were looking for a more aggressive, more visceral sound. Something much cruder."
The partnership worked so well that the pair took to the control board again to produce their most recent release El Primer Instinto (The First Instinct), a collection of acoustic versions of songs from earlier Jaguares and Caifanes albums, a few new tracks, and a remake of the Juan Gabriel classic "Te Lo Pido Por Favor" ("I Ask You Please"). Hernández's wounded whisper and a raunchy blues harmonica rough up the delicate flower of Mexican sentimentalism, giving the sappy love song enough bite to rock as a single. On other tracks, especially those with the sparest arrangements, Hernández's pained vocals grow monotonous almost to trance-inducing effect. That spell is broken by the excellent symphonic version of Caifanes favorite "Mátenme Porque Me Muero" ("Kill Me Because I Am Dying"), with the strings and bass playing counterpoint to the singer. Less successful is the version of "Como Tú" as a tropical son, practically a boogaloo. Sure, the funky percussion does not so much shake up Hernández' singsong as knock against it. His voice falls perfectly into balance against his own solo piano on the final track, a spare, heart-rending rendition of the previously unreleased "No Importa" ("It Doesn't Matter"): "It doesn't matter if you left and lost me along the way/What matters is that we fly together."
That puzzling assurance could be directed at a new generation of rockeros in Mexico and abroad. "A lot of the new generation thinks we shouldn't be playing anymore," complains drummer Andre, who, like Hernández, is within a few years of turning 40. "It has to do with consumer society; everything is disposable."
Jaguares' recycling of its own songs (like the repetition of the band's epic ritual on-stage that generated an energy that threatened to blow away the tiny Colony Theater during the band's first show here last year and will likely shudder the foundation of Billboard Live this Wednesday) stands as a reminder that there is no future without the past. The new is always anchored in antecedents.
"I think one thing that helps is to produce not from the point of view of sales or marketing but from the point of view of evolution," Hernández says. "Every time that you do something new, you have the possibility of inventing yourself." Suddenly overcome by the mystic, he adds: "In the end, living and dying are the same thing."
Does that mean that Jaguares will continue to rock beyond the grave? Running a hand through his thick hair, his dark mane shorn earlier this year but his manner as gothically rock as ever, Andre promises, "I'm going to keep doing this until my body can't do it anymore."
