Tag: concerts

Letters from Madrid – Fiesta de San Ysidro y Loquillo

Timothy Price9 Comments

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While I was baking a heart shaped chocolate cake for Laurie for Valentine’s Day, and she was making vanilla bean gelato, we listened to Loquillo y Trogloditas on the stereo. Curiously enough, today’s letter from Madrid moves to May 27, 1996 and I was writing about the activities and concerts during the San Ysidro Festival that was in the middle of May. We happened upon a concert by Loquillo y Trogloditas in Plaza Mayor during the festivities. We had never heard of Loquillo before then, and we became fans after the concert , bought all their CDs, and saw him in concert a couple more times after that. Loquillo y Trogloditas were very popular at that time, they had been around for at least 10 years or longer and had many albums out by 1996. Loquillo is still going strong 20 years later, as you will see if you click on the photo or follow the link to the YouTube video at the end of the letter.

 

27 May 1996

San Ysidro Festival
San Ysidro is the patron saint of Madrid (and Corrales, NM, USA, also). May 15th was the holiday, but the fiesta goes on all week. As part of the San Ysidro Festival, we attended a very nice concert in Parque de Retiro by the Municipal Orchestra, checked out the festivities at Parque San Ysidro on the south side of town, went to Casa de Campos, and discovered the pool there was free on the 15th for San Ysidro Fiesta (Tristan got to swim, she was beside herself). The concert in Retiro was very good. The orchestra played paso dobles and other traditional Spanish music. Parque San Ysidro was like the midway at the state fair with vendors, rides and a lot of noise. A lot of people were dressed in traditional Madrid feria costumes, that look similar to Laurie’s Sevillanas dress, if you have seen it. The men wore houndstooth (small check pattern) driving caps and a matching vest, sometimes. There were Gypsies playing music with an amplified keyboard and trumpet. The keyboard was on a large speaker set on a push cart. They were playing paso dobles, sevillanis and traditional Spanish music. A small group of people were dancing local folk dances to the music. Tristan and Laurie danced paso doble and sevillanas. I was much to interested in watching the locals to get up and dance.

We decided to go to Plaza Mayor one night to check out the San Ysidro Fiesta activities there. There was a large group of young people gathered around the band stand dressed in leather jackets, black jeans, and T-shirts, with their hair done up in 1950’s James Dean or Elvis styles, sporting manicured side burns. The young women were generally dressed in more punk fashion. They were waiting for a band to play. We made our way through the crowd to a point about 50 feet from the stage, centered between the two walls of speakers. The band came out before 9:00 PM and started paying. This was a major Spanish rock band with great sound, light show and lots of energy. After the band started playing I noticed the whole plaza was wall to wall people (Plaza Mayor is the old 16th century plaza of Madrid that is surrounded on all sides by four story buildings. The plaza is about the size of two football fields). We could hardly move we were so packed in. The crowd knew all the words to every song the band played and yelled them along with the band, so we basically had surround sound on the vocals. The band was “Loquillo y Trogloditas” as we learned later. They had a logo of Woody Woodpecker smoking a cigar, with a snarl on his face over cross bones with stars like a Confederate flag, imitating the pirates. The singer had a Confederate flag hanging on his mic stand. He was dressed in leathers and sported the same hairstyle as the young people. Various members of the audience had Confederate flags and Che Gueverra banners. One fan was wearing a Confederate infantry cap. We have not figured out what the biker-James Dean/Elvis-1950’s greaser look, Woody Woodpecker, Confederate flag, Che Gueverra and troglodytes have to do with each other; maybe Loquillo knows. The band played over three hours straight without a break. Most of the songs were less than 5 minutes, so they played a lot of songs, with a good variety of rock to slightly hyper punk. They even played material they had recorded in 1983, as announced by the singer. We told Tristan that we would have to pay a small fortune to see a major rock band, with a fantastic light show, play a concert like that in the States.
To be continued…

Video
Loquillo Feo, Furte y Formal 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVmzA48ojWk

 

Letters from Madrid – Music

Timothy Price15 Comments
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Insert of LaBanda’s No todo es Seda CD that the band members signed for me

In the last Letter From Madrid we were looking for flamenco classes and I had found a great guitar teacher. Today I move to the music scene we encountered in Madrid soon after we got there in 1996. I wrote the first letter I’m sharing on April 18, 1996 after we had been in Madrid about three months — we discovered at that time Madrid had a very active live performance scene, and we had already seen more than a dozen live performances by the middle of April. We were there primarily to study flamenco, and one aspect of studying flamenco was to go to as many performances by different flamenco artists as possible so we could see what was current, and the different styles of flamenco being performed. While flamenco was the majority of shows we saw, we went to every kind of concert from Rock & Roll to jazz to chamber music to classical. I found a spreadsheet that I kept on every concert and artist we saw perform live in 1996. The tally was 83 concerts and 187 individual performers.  

The “Music” section will take several posts because the descriptions of many of the performances we saw in the first three months in Madrid are detailed and long.

I discuss LaBanda in this post. They were the first band we saw perform live in Madrid, and after some time we became loyal followers of the band, groupies if you will, and got to know the band members well enough that we would sit around and talk with them between sets. Be sure to check out the Youtube videos at the end of this post. Two of the videos are from a TV series on the arts. The lead guitarist, Leo, talks about the group, and if you don’t understand Spanish, don’t worry, most of the time is spent on them performing live.

 

18 April 1996

Music
The music scene in Madrid is big and hopping. There are advertisements for concerts all over the place. Green Day is coming as are “The Smashing Pumpkins” as the posters have it written, Sting, Kiss (unplugged), the Sex Pistols (what’s left living I guess), Mark Knoffler and about every other currently popular or once popular group plus a lot of Spanish and European groups we don’t hear about in the states. There are classical guitar concerts, ballets, musicals, plays and orchestras playing almost every night. We went to a really good salsa dance with two bands that played until 5:00 am, and we saw Irakere, Cuba’s most celebrated salsa/jazz group. We have seen five really good flamenco concerts. We went to Jazz Club Populart on Friday nights in March and listened to the bands they have (April’s lineup didn’t look as good, we will have to see what’s on in May). The first band we heard was a Celtic music band named LaBanda and they were excellent. I would like to see them again. The second group was a blues group. They were pretty good. The leader is from New York and gave us his telephone number, and we have talked a few times since. We are planning to get together with him, his wife, and his daughter. We listened to a reggae band there also, but they did not do much for us. We have seen many ads for ballroom dancing but have not made it out to see what it’s like here. There is so much going on that we could spend every day and night of the week going to museums, concerts, plays, symphonies and discos, listening to whatever live music we are in the mood for in bars and night clubs. With that we would not even begin to see or hear a fraction of what’s available.

Celtic Music
The band that plays Celtic music is worth mentioning. The group is called LaBanda, and they were quite good and the music fun. There was a bass player, drummer, keyboard player, guitarist/vocalist, violinist and a guy who played all kinds of flutes, small reed instruments and the bagpipes. The music was a mix of traditional rhythms with a rock under-beat. The tunes went from traditional to rock and roll. A lot of the tonality between the guitar, violin, and keyboard had an early Kansas sound to it. The band was tight, there was good balance on the sound, and they sounded great. They did lose a little of the Celtic quality from the vocal arrangements being sung in Spanish. However, in one song the guitarist/vocalist got the whole crowd to yell “hey”, “hey hey” at a break in the music. It was pretty funny hearing a bunch of Spaniards yell “hey”. The second time around he said we had to sound more English “you’re learning the language now” he said in Spanish, “say it” “heyy”, “heyy heyy” drawling the words into two syllables. This was even funnier. The band was not very loud. For a matter of fact, the band was having a bit of trouble competing with a few groups of Spaniards setting in the front of the bar. The guitarist finally went back and turned up the volume to drown out the Spaniards, which I think they only matched the volume. The evening was lots of fun and very entertaining.

To be continued…

LaBanda Videos
Labanda – Fin de Semana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS5OXn8Dgfo

LABANDA. PROGRAMA ESPECIAL 1 DE 2 (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIQlkrzBuBU

LABANDA. PROGRAMA ESPECIAL 2 DE 2 (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbeLeRWHww8

LaBanda – La Batalla De Somme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wTV3J3WJIs