Salsa was born when the Fania Allstars took dance music from the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. They transformed it into a dynamic New York sound for the 70s. There was a definite move toward establishing identity and being proud of who you were.
and also establishing a sense of history. In the 1950s, Afro-Cuban jazz and dance crazes like the Mambo swept America. Within a decade, they'd be transformed into a salsa music that became the voice of the hungry streets of Spanish Harlem. Salsa provided a rhythm and music that we could live by, breathe and make love to.
It was the essence of the Latino soul. Salsa would inspire Latino audiences throughout the 70s as it became an anthem, not just in New York, but across Latin America and beyond. We got our culture and we have something to say that as a resident of a city you're gonna find interesting too because bottom line is you're addressing people you know and people's lives. By the mid-1960s, the era of Mambo and other big band rhythms that had wowed New York was passing. Latin immigrants who had left their Caribbean islands to make music in New York, now couldn't even feed their families.
It was pretty bad because my father had gotten an apartment in the worst part of New York that he could have gotten it. It was a mostly Irish neighborhood and we were the only Puerto Ricans and the only darkies there. and we got blamed for everything that happened in that neighborhood. I had a few fights there.
I had to defend my father too because he got beat too. But in music, we had the luck of being accepted just by being Latino. They did not understand what we were talking about, but they could feel the vibes.
A new generation watched their parents perform the last rites for the Latin big bands. I was tired of traditional Latin music. I was tired of bands and frilly dresses and perfume, heavy musky perfume, and kisses on the cheek with big red lips.
I was tired of that kind of a... I wanted a more pared down, modern, monochrome... chromatic, less colorful, but more direct hits to the face.
The rebellious sounds of Eddie Palmieri's La Perfecta. hit young Latinos like an earthquake. They embraced this strident dance music that was a generation removed from the big bands where Palmieri had learned his trade. It was his first step towards salsa. HE SINGS IN SPANISH La Perfecta changes everything, in my opinion, because we come with two trombones, which was completely unheard of, you know.
You had trombones that you... in orchestras but never in a front line. They were called the Roaring Elephants. Plus the whole form of a new sound.
It had never been heard before and that made it gel and make it into, in my opinion, one of the most exciting dancing orchestras that ever existed. The Roaring Elephants The trombone sound of the 1960s, Eddie's sound, was important. I think that was the first trombone sound that a lot of my generation saw on the dance hall.
And the dancers, it was great for the dancers. because he would just keep building. It would start out very simple, and then you'd just keep building and building until he would hypnotize you. The music was an act of civil disobedience to a certain extent.
And I think that that little seed was always there. God is God of style. We were watching the civil rights marches down south on black and white TV.
We're watching Martin Luther King. And in a way, we felt connected and we were able to identify. I mean, it wasn't to the degree and it didn't take the same amount of bravery to do what Martin Luther King did, but the music was always there.
It was also a sociopolitical expression aside from merely cultural. America's relationship with Latinos was that of brown teddy bears. We were Desi Arnaz, we were Cisco and Pancho, which was a very popular TV series at that time, of cowboys. We were cute.
And the only negative caricatures or stereotypes we had were the Mexican bandidos. Goodbye, amigos! There was no real visceral antagonism between ourselves and the United States. A new generation of Latinos were now calling themselves New Yorkians, walking with a swagger and a new sense of pride across the district called El Barrio, or Spanish Harlem.
It was their island within the city. We thought we could walk anywhere on their side of the earth. As far as we were, we were very arrogant like that, especially New Yorkers.
This new generation was English-speaking. they had better jobs, they had more money, and they were still Latinos. The Latin teenagers of El Barrio lived beside West Harlem, where the black community lived, and while blacks and Puerto Ricans both jealously guarded their own territory...
their lives and music gradually came together. This was a time that black people and Puerto Ricans were intertwinable, indistinguishable. There was no black person who did not mambo, there was no Puerto Rican who couldn't do the shimmy or couldn't do the mashed potatoes. And we fought together, we made love together, we died together, we went to jail together, we married each other.
Young Latinos now join their neighbors on Harlem Street Corners in soulful doo-wop harmony groups. The Latinos were growing up in an English-speaking environment, they're close to African-Americans, the music was sold, and of course they were influenced by Latin music. We made it ours because we were in the middle of a melting pot. I was about seven or eight years old, I had never seen a 12-year-old singing with a band. And when I saw Frankie Lyman, I thought, oh, I can do that.
Frankie Lyman was very important in my career because he started an era where the music started to change. We were normally listening to the hard, cold R&B, and then along he comes, and we hear this high tenor voice. There was another factor and that was rock and roll. Rock and roll knocked us out.
And it knocked us out as much as it did any other American. All those mid-60s sounds were as much part of life for teenage Puerto Ricans as they were for other young New Yorkers. But Latinos found a way of merging them into a dance rhythm of their own. If you listen to that, what you hear is you hear kind of a funk and the very bottom of rhythm and blues.
So that now becomes the American bridge. for the boogaloo. And then the rest of it is the Latin rhythm on the bottom and the horns.
But it was just putting... The music together, the sounds that you were raised with, you know, a little bit of jazz, a little bit of Latin music, even maybe a little specks of classical music in there, that's what created the Boogaloo. That's really what it was all about, and it was a reflection of the environment. Well, music was the focal point of life itself. You know, music, it soared through the streets.
Through your apartment, you could hear it on your fire skates. You would go to your window and you could hear your favorite song being played outside on the streets. There is a rose in Spanish Hall.
A rose up in Spanish Hall. And I remember walking down First Avenue and 99th Street, and I said to myself, I'm going to start a band. I knew nothing about it.
about music. I had no training. Only what I had is an ear and my ideas.
And of course, with my life story, I was running wild with the gangs and I was a made-apart member of the Dragons. And we fought all of them. If they came into our neighborhood, that was just a thing that you would do.
Nobody was welcome that didn't belong on your turf. I ended up in a reformatory. And having been sent away, I was determined to do something with my life.
And it worked for me because here it was, I knew three chords and I could sing almost 20 different songs to these three chords. And I started to think, I said, maybe I have something. Why is people always coming in to hear me sing?
So I came in. There was a neighborhood band in the auditorium one day and they had no piano playing. There were a bunch of young kids and they had no direction. And I stabbed my knife into the piano and I said, I'm taking over. I'm the band leader.
I said. if you listen to me i will take you to heights that you've never seen before well i took the subway downtown one day just to buy me some chinese food Putting the clapping, of course, was very instrumental in most of the Boogaloo songs back then. And just to cause excitement, that's what it was.
And you knew from the first few bars if you had something. The Boogaloo quickly became the biggest thing that had happened musically in New York. And it was... A true Nuyorican musical experience. We were playing all of the Latin clubs and we were also playing all of the black clubs.
The music united people at least in terms of dance. I said I like it like that, I like it like that, I like it like that. Boogaloo was another part of the musical gene pool that would become salsa. The music made it possible for people to live their lives here and survive.
That was the connection. But I think that there was a lot of resistance to what we were doing. It was the fans of the Cuban big bands who found Boogaloo the most distasteful.
I used to hate it because the trombone players, what they played was three notes and a backbeat, and to me that wasn't music, and they all sounded the same. Thank God it died. It was horrendous. It was Pacheco himself who helped steer a new direction for Latin music and heal its divisions.
For a couple of years he'd been driving around a carload of vinyl aimed at fans of Cuban-style music. 180 Mercedes, the back was already hitting the floor. I was hitting the streets. And I used to load the trunk with records. And then we used to go into New York and part of the Bronx.
And I wanted to start my own label and treat it like a family. That family would be known as Fania, Fania Records, a company that would revolutionize Latin music. To help finance it, Pacheco joined forces with a young Italian-American lawyer, an ex-New Yorker.
cop called Jerry Masucci. He was having trouble with his first wife. He was paying a lot of money. Alimony was very unhappy and he gave me the case.
We hit it off. And I told him I wanted to start a company. I said, do you have any money?
He said, I don't have any money. I said, we gotta come up with some bread. He said, well, I'm gonna ask my mother to lend me some.
So she gave us $2,500. Yeah, we started the record company. company and we call it Fania Records.
Without the two of them it never would have happened. You know Jerry couldn't have done it without Johnny. Johnny couldn't have done it without Jerry.
It wouldn't have happened. Their new albums would combine the raw energy of Boogaloo with the skills and rhythms of older Cuban dance bands. In the solar party, the old man and the new man. Finally, our plan to attract a new generation of Latinos in search of a new identity. We were at that time as Puerto Ricans wanting to be bad.
We wanted to be tough. And Superfly was out and Shaft and all. of that stuff and we wanted to be part of that the mafia thing so Willie a working-class white Puerto Rican kid took the music of Eddie Palmieri and took that trombone sound and also took the image of the gangster and exploited it Clothes I was wearing and that gangster thing kind of played into the image and it really caught on.
It gave us an opportunity to do things with the covers that were interesting and we would kind of parallel what was going on. We did the good, the bad and the ugly and the hug. the movie with Paul Newman. We'd do the untouchables.
So it was kind of a mirror of what was going on in the media in those days. And my mother was going out with this guy who was whose father was Harry Belafonte's doorman. And Harry Belafonte was always giving him these beautiful silk ties, and he would give them to me because he had no reason to wear a tie, so it was part of my look. I had all of these beautiful Harry Belafonte's tie collection. Colon's image had become as intriguing as his music.
I came up with this idea, which was influenced by the fact that I had seen on sale posters by the FBI of Bobby Seale and, you know, some of the Black Panthers. So I took Willie Colon downstairs to a local arcade. I took two profile shots and four right on shots. And then I put Wanted by the FBI.
It looked exactly like a post office wanted poster. And we took like 20,000 of them and we put them around the city. We glued them all over the place. And people that didn't speak a lot of English, they were calling up the FBI to find out how...
much the reward was. Willie Colon's grandmother almost had a heart attack because her neighbors came in, ah, you know, and Willie had to come in and tell them, oh, this is just a promotion in my album. We were like a self-promoting merchandising machine, and it was all just organic because we were playing.
Colon had the nous to team up with a raw, streetwise Puerto Rican who brought to his lyrics a genuine feel of the underworld. Hector Laveau In all of Hector's recordings, he was able to play with the rhythm and put the words in the way they fit, you know You could give him the words and he would just kind of rock them around and wrap them around the rhythm and make it happen. He could ad-lib like nobody else. He could improvise incredible. He is the greatest instant poet in salsa.
Like young Frank Sinatra, when we do the gigs... girls would go crazy over him. I used to get jealous. La Morgue became a big hit on the dance floors of Latin clubs and TV shows.
It's been sampled and copied and stuff on a zillion records. Willie and Hector became the first superstars of Fania records, sowing the seeds of the salsa music business. With Hector as their new Latin pin-up. He was the most popular of all the singers in Fania, because he was a real Puerto Rican.
And the real Jibarito. And he always, he never said, that's me, and that's the way I'm going to be. And the people loved that. We kept working together, and finally we got this, you know, chemistry, where I really got to know him and understand him, and I learned a lot from him.
He taught me Spanish, I taught him English. And it was great. I had the Bronx street stuff going, and he had that country, Puerto Rican folkloric thing, and it was a great combination.
Puerto Rican rhythms inspired Willie Colon to rediscover his family roots in the island itself. My grandmother, every chance she got, she would save money and send me back to Puerto Rico just so I wouldn't get into any trouble, you know, I wouldn't have a total free reign. You know, they put me up in the farm up there with her. And I think that was really important, you know, to me and my development.
Also, I wanted again for my grandmother, for the, you know, Puerto Rican pride kind of thing, I wanted to start bringing in more Puerto Rican rhythms like bomba, plena, and I got all excited about doing things that were Puerto Rican. The second generation of New York immigrants were reclaiming their island's early music, including the plainer sounds that would soon transform into salsa. Because the recording I did with Willie Colón and Héctor Laó was a complete hit. People lined up at the record stores to buy that album. So that's when the concert in Chita came, in the city of New York, and they invited me.
I became a member of the Fania All Stars. The Fania All Stars band that Yomo and Willy Colon had joined was a supergroup, the cream of Latin musicians. This was the first time I'd ever been to a concert in New York. the moment that many strands of Afro-Cuban music converged to create the Latin sound of the 70s.
The All-Stars, under the leadership of Johnny Pacheco, featured traditional Latin percussion. aggressive brass section and jazz piano It was Cuban music that we took and we changed the arrangements. Being that most of the guys were born here or grew up in New York, we had the rock influence, the jazz influence, and we changed the approach.
And it was a New York sound. Now what happened was, people were getting confused with the Mambo, Cha-Cha-Cha, Guaracha. So what we did was took the music and put it under one roof. And we called it salsa.
But it was a commercial idea. A typical salsa number features vocalists who improvise around a strict clave dance rhythm. The energy from the stage and the energy from the audience created what I call an incredible spiritual religious revival meeting of you know It was just something that started somewhere in the depths of your stomach, through your emotions and your feet.
And people couldn't sit. They wanted to stand up and dance in the aisles. Latin music dancing, it is a ritual.
It is a mating ritual. It is a cultural mating ritual. For the people themselves, the audience, salsa's rhythms provided an escape from everyday life in their body. It became a rhythm they lived by, a rhythm they breathed, and a rhythm they made love to.
It was... The essence of the Latino soul. But a few hundred dancers in a salsa club couldn't pay the bills for a super group like the All-Stars, so Masucci hit on the idea of touring his band inside a can of film.
It's ironic that it took an... Italian-American obsessed as a child with Latin music and the movies to find a way of combining both and transforming salsa he was just thinking just out of the box you know this is not there was nobody was investing this kind of money nobody had these kind of dreams it seemed at the time a crazily ambitious project Our Latin thing took salsa music from the Cheetah Club right across the Americas and cinema audiences flocked to see it. It's the first time we manifested a cinematic vision of what our music was.
Prior to that we never had it. We had to go to sort of American movies about Latin. We had to do Carmen Miranda.
This is the first time it was an urban Latin adventure. This is the first time it was an urban Latin adventure. It was a big success, you know, it was a tremendous success. And actually it changed the whole business because from just recording stars, you know, they became big images on a screen and I believe it turned the whole business around. I think that's one of the things that made Fania the big success it is today.
Fania were now turning out hundreds of new recordings 24 hours a day with an eye to the international Latin market Most of them had their music, the whites, the Anglos had their own music and the Latinos They said this is our music, salsa is our music so they had something that belongs to them. As Farnio record sales soared, so the reputation of its boss began to sink. It was the worst. He was a businessman. He wasn't one.
One-sided thing. I mean, all the contracts that we signed were very wisely designed by Jerry and his lawyers. And we got the short end of the stick. All of us.
Jerry was a businessman. He was a businessman. And businessmen do what they do.
He ain't taking the least of the profits, that's for sure. And there's no reason why he should, because he's the guy who's putting up the money and he's the guy who's taking the risk. As long as I have the hits and the artists, I'm in a powerful position.
But I've been lucky enough to know the right talent and sign them and keep them. And after 15 years in the business and bringing the business up from nothing, you get a certain amount of power. Masucci kept a tight rein on the purse strings of the burgeoning Fania music machine. Even its most prolific composer, Tite Coret Alonso, with 300 hits under his belt, had to double. He was a double as a postman to make ends meet.
He seldom found any Fania royalty checks in his post. He wrote all the hits for everybody and he died a pauper and that's a shame because he was a creator he was a master he was the guy that did made us all stars But whatever Masucci's business methods, his vision and his instinct for the music were seldom in question. He was very smart. I used to bring him my record and he'd say, which song do you think was the best song on here? I'd say, this one, song A.
And he'd go, no, it's song C. And 99% of the time he was right. He would pick the hits. He knew what the public really wanted to hear. Larry Harlow became one of Fania's key musicians and producers, but he wasn't always accepted by the Puerto Rican musicians around him.
This middle-class boy from Brooklyn was brought up to play Beethoven sonatas in his Russian Jewish family. Yiddish language called chutzpah, which means cojones, which means I had a lot of balls, you know, and I had all these ideas that I wanted to bring to Latin music. I started playing with African-American musicians and they would play these arrangements that came from Cuba.
Mambo No. 1, Mambo No. 9, but what's written on the paper was this. Which was very simple, but I didn't know how to play a waheo. I didn't know what to do with those chords.
I just played what was on the paper. And the band leader, Hugo Dickens, said to me, well, you play terrible, I'm going to have to throw you out of the orchestra. I felt absolutely miserable. So I ran to the nearest record store and I bought these recordings of Joe Loco and Noro Morales, who were very fine pianists, and I memorized their solos and figured out that what they were playing was just breaking up of these chords. In other words, instead of playing...
Instead of playing that, they're now playing... They take that chord and just separate the notes. I said, oh, that's how it works. Deconstructing those chords led Larry to the very source of salsa, the place where it all began, and it would transform his life.
Being something of an outsider among Latin musicians led me to dig deeper into this music. I felt I had something to prove. So back in the late 50s, I went on my pilgrimage to Havana, Cuba, the place that gave birth to me. birth to salsa music. It was like stepping into paradise.
It was like stepping into Latin music heaven. So here I am with the tape recorders and the cameras and talking to people and recording almost every performance I can and buying old records and stuff like that. Above all, I'd become intrigued by a mysterious figure, the pioneer of this music, that I love. I was chasing the ghost of Arsenio Rodriguez.
Arsenio is a name akin to God himself for salsa musicians, the blind genius who invented the Cajunto dance band from which our music evolved. Arsenio grew up in the country town of Guinness, where he first learned to compose and he first learned to play the piano. play the tres. He seemed to hold the key to the joys and the mysteries of all kinds of Cuban music. Maceño's impact was enormous, first within Cuba and later across the United States.
Maceño, almost single-handedly, transformed the old sextetos and septetos. What he created in their place was a conjunto band playing so montuno. First he added the piano. Then he added a conga drum.
Can you imagine a salsa band without a conga drum in it? Then he added a second trumpet, and then a third trumpet, and then written arrangements. This was the seedbed of what we now know as salsa. I love the song was all about the guy that lost his wallet and he didn't know where his wallet was and and he went to a spiritista to a spiritualist to find out where it was and it just caught on.
Larry combined past and present in this rare 1973 tele-recording of La Cartera. He used a full-size New York salsa band. It was his biggest hit for Fania. And we started playing this song in the studio and Roberto Santiago was singing a choral and he said, Ahora viene el maravilloso. El maravilloso, that is the name they called Asenio.
Asenio was called El Ciego Maravilloso, the blind marvel. And then Junior Gonzalez was on the other side of the room and he said, El Judio, the Jewish marvel. So I started to become known as El Judio Maravilloso, which means the marvelous Jew. By the early 1970s, salsa had evolved a long way from its Afro-Cuban roots.
It was now a New York ethnic mix, a vibrant soundtrack to the lives of millions. For Latinos, New York City during the 1970s was a time of awakening. It was a cultural revolution. This renaissance Latinized the city. In particular, Central Park.
I was so amazed by what was going on in Central Park, I filmed a series of concerts over a three-year period. And I got the musicians and the performers to perform for nothing, for the people. There was a joy, there was an innocence about the 70s.
It was wonderful to be alive. Yes, a lot of us were stoned out of our minds, but these were great times. It was great to be Puerto Rican.
Fania cashed in on this Latino feel-good factor and stayed focused on the Spanish-speaking market. They brought Celia Cruz out of retirement to record her first hits for Fania. She had a powerful voice. She had everything. She had that African heritage.
And that's what she exposed. She was... she was rhythm, she was salsa. Celia's salsa credentials had been hard-earned in the radio stations of 1940s Cuba. When she graduated into the mafia-owned nightclubs of Havana, American tourists, including Jerry Masucci, were entranced by her voice.
I just always loved Celia and I really wanted her to come and to our label. Gary went wild for Celia, you know, he went wild for Celia. Masucci helped reinvent a star.
who'd been disillusioned by the stereotypes and limitations demanded by the Latin market. There is an immense audience. We can't do what happens to a Donna Summer in Las Vegas, who has it full every night.
Because Latinos have a lot to work on, and we can't fill more than the weekend. To win over Latino record buyers, Pacheco groomed her for salsa stardom. Well, Celia was one of the fellows, and she cooperated with everything that we wanted to do. And she never said no.
And she gave us like a touch of class. Salia became one of the pillars upon which the international Fania Empire was being built. Fania was a movement. They saw themselves as a business-making entities, a profit-making entity.
but it was a movement. Fania produced, supported, encouraged some of the finest musicians in our country. The all-stars, with Celia Cruz, were now taking salsa to major venues across the world to satisfy the appetite of Masucci's new markets.
The band's increasing fondness for alcohol or illegal substances led to some lively jam sessions en route. When we were really doing the great concerts with the Fania All-Stars, we would do more business in Latin America than the Rolling Stones. I mean, we had the president and the generals of Panama meeting us at the airplanes with... funny all-star buttons on.
I mean, it was quite, it was ridiculous, you know. And they used to tear the doors down, metal doors down to get in. We did Japan, we did Africa, we did England, we did all of South America.
And wherever we went, we never had a loser. It was always big. Masucci had acquired not only all the top Latin artists, but all the competitors. competing labels, Fania had become a musical juggernaut, and by the mid-70s the All-Stars were on the crest of a Latin wave, touring and indulging like rock stars. It was like a corral full of peacocks, you know.
We had Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy and all kind of rock and roll magazines and stuff covering us, so we understood it was something else. But it was not. The Fanny Allstars was, you know, all of these guys are geniuses, and by the same token, they're just mad, crazy, crazy mad.
But it was great. It worked. It elevated a lot of us to a position where we could really earn a living at this, a respectable living, and I think it created a market that just wasn't there before.
Masucci wanted to expand his Latin fan base still further. so he devised an even more expensive and high-risk strategy for the All-Stars. I decided to rent Yankee Stadium.
It was $280,000 for the night. And everybody in New York told me I was totally crazy. And that was Jerry. That was 100% Jerry.
I even thought he was nuts. I'll never forget, we put $50,000 down on the field, you know? $50,000 as a deposit. The Masucci brothers were guaranteeing with their own money the crowd would not damage the Yankees'valuable turf.
That is, if a Latin audience could ever fill a stadium this size. I'll never forget, I went there, sitting on the pitches of Mount Yankee Stadium, looking up and there was nobody in the stadium. And all of a sudden, they started to come. They started to come. And then we had, what, about 45,000 people there that night.
The show and film began with a roll call of Fania's stable of talent. The singer of the romantic voice, another great boricua, Cheo Galiciano! Willie Carleau.
Willie. Larry Harlow. Hector Lambeau.
The great Johnny Quachico. This filmed performance of an Afro-Cuban classic would cement Celia's position as Salsa's greatest female vocalist. Right now I'm leaving with the bomb But the audience upstairs in the stadium wanted to get closer to their salsa heroes.
Johnny was leading the band, and the band, you know, they're playing Congo Bongo, and Mongo is playing, and Beretto's playing, and the drums are playing, and I'm looking, and I'm saying, what the fuck is that? And it looked like a waterfall. Something was moving from the lodge down, and I realized that's people. These people are climbing down onto the field, and they're charging the stage, and Johnny don't see it, the band don't see it. And all I'm thinking about is that's 50 grand that we're going to lose.
And I'm trying to stop the show. You know, the guy who's going, cut, cut. That was me. They went right over the stage. They stole the piano.
They stole the timbales. You know, the bodyguards picked up Jerry and started carrying him away. And it was pretty much of a riot, you know. And.
And I had two girls waiting for me. I didn't even go. I was so depressed. I took the money and I went home. Jerry said, what are you going to do?
I said, I'm going to go home. I'll take the money. And I took all these suitcases with the money in it.
And I went home. Crowd's favorite, Hector Laveau, was left in the changing rooms, unable to perform. As Fania's top male star, he had to be in that expensive salsa film.
So Masucci took him all the way to Puerto Rico, filmed him there, and then cut the sequence into the movie. This performance turned Mi Gente into an anthem for Latin people everywhere and helped make the movie. I'm going to enjoy, I'll invite you to enjoy with me, yes.
Let my people sing, but let my people sing, I'm Ibaro from Puerto Rico. But behind the stunning success of this high point in salsa music, the tide was beginning to turn, and the most visible symbol of its decline was Hector Laveau himself. He wanted the party to continue forever and I was like his policeman a lot, you know.
He'd be rooming with me and the pushers would come to bring him his stuff and I would have to chase him away and, you know, I'd be taking a chance that one of these guys might kill me. The tensions became evident on stage. Hector was a recipient of all that pressure that we used to get.
He wanted to get out of it, but it was hard. So, things got to a bad end, he ended up the way he did. He was a great guy. The drug scene was always there but then it got kind of a little out of control.
It really hampered the creativity of a lot of musicians. So the Fania family was starting to fall apart. Masucci had bought his own pressing plant, which means we didn't know how many records he was pressing, which means we didn't know how many records were being sold. all the singers were leaving and forming their own bands.
It's like a baseball team, you know. If you're a winning manager and you're powerful, but once the team starts losing, you're only as good as your players, you know. And the players... were leaving.
You talk about rock and roll, you know, you have one group, you make millions of dollars. You know, Jerry had 35 groups that he had to listen to every fucking day and listen to their shit and listen to their problems and listen about the cockroaches and listen about their kids and listen about, you know, I think he just said, fuck it. You know, I think he just said, fuck it. I'm getting out of here. They weigh it down.
And I just wanted to get away and take a break. You know, burnt out, that thing? I was burnt out. Suffering from loss of direction and approaching its lowest ebb, Fania was unexpectedly revived by a new voice that re-energized Salsa with a political edge. Ruben Blades joined Willie Colon in a partnership that would expand the horizons of what was once the music of El Barrio.
Salsa is the folklore of the city, but not of one city, but of all cities in Latin America. And there's so many themes, you know, there's so many things and situations and everything that can be sung. and should be sung.
Ruben had a talent for putting together words, for crafting the words in such a way that he was able to just paint a picture so that you could... hear and smell and see all of the things within the lyric. When I got to New York, for instance, I wrote this song.
El numero seis. What is that song about? It's a subway.
Hurry up, damn machine. I've been here for hours and still I cannot see the number six subway. Number six.
And people still sing it today. Why? Because today you still have people waiting for the number six train and saying, where the hell is this train?
Hurry up, machine. I've been waiting for the number six. Salsa was becoming more and more popular. as Ruben gave a voice to people in cities across Latin America. It's not just to dance.
This is more important. This can go beyond dictatorships and beyond censorships, beyond ignorance. It could also be a way of solidarity, not just dancing. When Ruben combined with Willie Colon to create Siembra, it quickly became Salsa's best-selling and most influential album of all time. And it just came at the right moment.
There was problems in Panama, there was problems in the universities in Puerto Rico, all of these political problems, and here comes Siembra, boom. Pedro Navaja became an anthem for the disenfranchised of Latin America. Siembra got people excited about a new sound and a new concept, a new Pan-American concept that, you know, as you sow, so shall you reap.
It was talking about the future. It also portends the coming of Salsa Romantica, and it was kind of warning what was coming down the road. You had the Saturday night fever craze.
It had taken over. and it's all about dancing and looking a certain way. So all I'm saying to people is, you know, come on, these things fade and they go and then... So pay attention to what's important. What are you doing?
Plastica announced the end of the streetwise salsa that inspired the 70s. Brutal, honest, in your face. It transformed itself because we needed to break into salsa magical. Salsa fantasía, salsa romántica. We needed to get back to that.
We needed, I guess, to hold our women, you know, softly, to say I love you, to dance with them. And by the way, we still do. 30 years on, people across the world continue to dance to the sounds pioneered by the Fania family of the 70s. We became kings, we were the kings. Our salsa music, and specifically the Fania.
stars who were the kings. It was so much fun. It was just so much fun.
They were all nuts. You know, and they were young, and they were all stars. You know, to me, they were all family. It was unbelievable.
It was such a togetherness. That was something like I never heard before. We said at the beginning we were going to take over the world, and we did. We did. Latinos on the West Coast, however, had a very different soundtrack for their lives.
For 15 million Mexican-Americans, it was the music of the borderlands. I think the history of Mexican-American music is necessarily the history of the migrations up from Mexico. To try to get a better life.
All of this music gave birth to consciousness revolution and believing that we can make a difference. What greater way to express what Chicanos stood for? Having one foot in Mexico, having one foot in America. It's a real sense of defiance and the onset of Mexican and brown pride.
If they could be at my height They would have to spend many years