Mambo Combo: Smother Your Mother Tango
[purchase]
Surely there's a more appropriate song out there for our transition from one theme to the next this week - after all, we're looking towards Mother's Day, and though my own mother and I have a classically strained and essentially dysfunctional relationship, the titular sentiment here is a bit violent even for me. But I just couldn't resist this joyous faux-latin tango, in no small part because the backstory is delightfully ridiculous.
Mambo Combo was formed when one of its members, a punk guitarist named Bob Friedman, came up with a truly silly name for a band for a small festival that he was promoting, and - purely as a joke - decided to recruit three drummers and two other guitarists, all local punk musicians themselves, to form a band that fit the name, despite having no experience whatsoever with the world of latin music. In 1997, after fifteen years of tongue-in-cheek for-fun-only gigs led to a serious reputation, Mambo Combo recorded their one and only studio album, Mr. Happy; since then, they've leveraged their work into a full-time gig, continuing to perform for parties and at bars in the Baltimore area.
I have no idea how I ended up with this track after all that - must have picked it up on the blogs somewhere - but for what it's worth, it's infectiously fun. The Mambo Combo website is endearingly old-school, too.
