Paul Songs: Paula Y Fred

Latin Playboys: Paula Y Fred
[purchase] 

When brilliant roots rock/Americana/Latin band Los Lobos joined forces with producer Mitchell Froom and engineer Tchad Blake for the 1992 album Kiko, their murky, quirky and layered production style added a new, experimental, facet to Los Lobos’ already diverse sound, and many believe it to be the band’s finest album. After Kiko, Los Lobos member David Hidalgo played some demos for Froom, who suggested that, instead of using them for a new Los Lobos album, they be used for a new side project. Enlisting fellow band member Louie Perez to form Latin Playboys, the quartet released a self-titled album in 1994 that took Los Lobos’ eclectic sound and pushed it to the limit, with all sorts of noises, distortion, and just plain strangeness. It was compelling and fascinating, even if I admittedly rarely listen to it from start to finish (but that’s pretty much true for me with most albums these days, I guess). 

Los Lobos came together with Froom and Blake for Colossal Head in 1996 and This Time, in 1999, and Latin Playboys released a second album, Dose in 1999 which was also pretty experimental, but had more distinct songs than the debut. 

One of those songs is “Paula Y Fred,” which The New York Times (yes, the Times actually gave a pretty long review to the Latin Playboys’ second album) described as “a cheerful son jarocho, sung in Spanglish, in which unrequited love leads to murder.” It is cheerful sounding, and my rudimentary Spanglish allows me to concur with their description of the plot, but I had to look up “son jarocho.” Wikipedia says that it is the “Veracruz Sound", “a regional folk musical style of Mexican Son from Veracruz, a Mexican state along the Gulf of Mexico.” You can read more about it at the Wikipedia link, or, I bet, at other sites that are more authoritative about Mexican musical styles. I listened to a few examples of traditional sones jarocho, and I think the Times is right. By the way, “La Bamba,” which Los Lobos famously covered, was originally a son jarocho too. 

Dose was the last Latin Playboys album, and Los Lobos would move on from Froom and Blake, using a different producer for their next album—lots of critics began to write that the production seemed to be getting in the way of the music, although in my opinion, all of their collaborations contained gems. But Los Lobos' desire for mixing sonic experimentation with the basic rootsy sounds never really disappeared, and it has enriched their music. As regular readers of this blog know, I really like Los Lobos (although I’ve had some issues with some of their live shows over the years). 

Look, I’m not sure what the point of this theme is, but it gave me the chance to revisit some interesting music that I hadn’t thought about in years, and I hope that this piece introduces you to Latin Playboys, or makes you go back and check them out again.