Ivan Cadin
El Universal
Wednesday July 8, 2009
* The facet of the teacher who many know *... and so we honor here.
In late November 1965 on the streets of Puebla de la colonia Roma, nightclub more flamboyant of the city of Mexico, El Quid-owned TV producer Ernesto Alonso, had a new show with the bass drum and cymbal that characterized him.
The Lord called a cabaret show called and offered all possible artistic freedom. The architect contrived "to make a trendy show." That author was the artist Alfonso Arau and this happening born our The Velvet Underground: The Tepetatles.
Experimentation
With suitcases full of experience after a world tour with his show of pantomime Follies happy, having founded and directed the Music Theatre of Havana, Cuba, and classes pantomime in the sight of Etienne Decroux (master Marceau), the film landed in Mexico in the mid 60's with the offer of Ernesto, who "had the idea that I was going to do something very classic and Follies happy, do no? And I happen to do a parody of The Beatles, "recalls the actor.
Thus, Alfonso Arau was given the task of building your new number. In the Harlem cabaret, by the directions of Coyoacán, where the youth of those years got together for coffee or lemonade, came after his musicians.
Marco Polo, Mark Lizama and José Luis Martínez The Bayoya, were selected, respectively, to fill the positions of the band, on bass, guitar and drums. A Venezuelan musician of jazz roots, Julian Bert, would make keyboards and musical direction.
In some of his recurrent visits to the restaurant Tirol, invited Carlos Monsivais, then hardened film buff and a regular contributor to several cultural essays, to prepare the letters of the fledgling group. Similarly, the renowned graphic artists Vicente Rojo and Jose Luis Cuevas were summoned to assemble the visual part of the show. All and everyone in the pure excitement, were the years of the cultural ferment of experimental film competition and exhibitions of Manuel Felguérez, the days when Gabriel García Márquez decided to start writing enclosed Hundred Years of Solitude.
God and the comic makes the board ...
conceived the show went beyond parody to Liverpool.
In a dossier that was included in the now highly valued disc recorded this experiment, its various members signed texts that explain what the hell it was that presented in the Quid, a show that brought the name of "Triumph and crushing of the modern world with high risk of Arau and much noise."
Alfonso Arau, (33 years old then), wrote: "The central theme is the rebellion, with or without cause, with or without legal right (...) To understand them (the rebels), we must first express (...) The task of a show is to express moods, if necessary, with long hair, beards, guitars, satire and ROCK AND ROLL. "
Monsivais (27 years) entered the show in this new wave, pop art, which "has made us relentlessly warn the cultural significance of the Coca Cola and hamburgers, and the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and leather outfits and cans of food and motorcycles and jingles and posters and comics and manes and counter power (...) Our show wants to be pop -art, and express themselves through song and humor, pop pop. "
A third text no less explosive but more important, as is traditional in its author José Luis Cuevas (31), challenged:
"Did you know that the most educated in New York, London or Paris, people no longer speak of unbearable Dylan Thomas or Arthur Miller or Osborne or Robbe Grillet or concrete music (puff!)? Lee is now discussed Falk (creator of The Phantom and Mandrake) and who does not read Creepy (American horror comics) is a retard. " Debut
and farewell "?
That cold November 1965 when he stopped feeling The Tepetatles hit the stage of Quid. And not because of the innocence of his presentation.
Carlos Monsivais, witness the primal debut, recalls: "The response was not gleaming. Rather, the Quid is rapidly depopulated. Ernesto Alonso, when he heard the songs, not excited, not exhilarated vi. I said: 'This is not to my clients'. " Marco Polo Tena, bassist of the project and also the legendary Rock Rebels, photographed by our customers, "was the cream of society in Mexico and artistic society."
Alfonso Arau adds: "was the hot spot: the tout Mexique was there," he says, not without some sarcasm and continued: "When Ernesto Alonso saw it, was terrified. It disappointed a lot, that was not what I expected. He went to his home in Cuernavaca and never reappeared. Thought we were besmirching the place. "
The show, a" satirical show a go go in two acts ", as officially presented at the" boite de nuit "(the cabaret and was cataloged) was, first, a live video show, as they installed a closed circuit and each table was a small television, pictures that were run by "a total lunatic" switcher, Fernando G.
Lyrics to the sui generis band were given by the chronicler par excellence of the twentieth century Mexican Monsivais (Chava Flores was required, but to the author of Days Save the project "did not care too much because the very fact that it was in a cabaret of some flights it was insufficient.")
When you hear the 12 cuts on the disc sees this description, irony, urbanity, that ubiquity-pop that has characterized the writer.
We have, for example, the song that opens the band's self-titled album with a chorus something punk who makes fun of the deities of the time under a rock steady base: "And our cry to the Beatles seem / Enclosed nuns pray in silence. " Or what about "I want to love ya, Cordoba" with "Espartero, since you left."
The role of Tepetatles not reduced only to play music. They also gave life to characters previously designed: a jazz musician to tie knot on drums, a classical musician on keyboards lost rock and rollers, a dandy British-style on the bass, a scarf and blanket Maya on guitar and vocals impertinent screaming and howling while playing a double neck guitar where a third hand sticking out of props.
Cult tepetatle
"We came from very different places and each who had their own lives. It was never planned to do a rock band, "says Arau.
"The intention was purely satirical, there was never an attempt to make rock music but have fun at the expense of what was" Monsivais added. Despite the immediacy that represented the show, Marco Polo Tena gives a certainty: "I think what was planted was harvested properly." More than 43 years of that event, the show and The Tepetatles not fell into oblivion. Two decades later, the group eighties bottle of Jerez (where campaigning fellow filmmaker Sergio Arau, son of Alfonso), would return to cut his debut album 100% tepetatle, "Tlalocman."
The album, the only remains of this show is left for posterity, with a non-traditional design then (collage, drawings, two Arau expressive faces on the cover) has a price proportional to its shortage of units. In Poplar Tianguis know of that value in thousands of pesos, up to 20 thousand.
If parents are Botellita and these, in turn, are Café Tacvba, "then those are the grandparents of these?, Asked the distinguished interviewees.
"It perpetuated in La Maldita Vecindad, Caifanes in, etc. Absolutely: they are my grandchildren this ball of unconscious, "he jokes Arau.
Monsivais, laconic, also offers a line of relationship: "I'm thinking about filing my great grandfather who left because the time I reached (...) And certainly, if I go ask those groups to record civil status sign my grandfather. "
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