Review: Ritchie Valens - Ritchie Valens (1959)
Tracks: 1) That’s My Little Suzie; 2) In A Turkish Town; 3) Come On, Let’s Go; 4) Donna; 5) Boney-Moronie; 6) Ooh, My Head; 7) La Bamba; 8) Bluebirds Over The Mountain; 9) Hi-Tone; 10) Framed; 11) We Belong Together; 12) Dooby-Dooby-Wah.
REVIEW
Easily the most striking thing about Richard Steven Valenzuela, a.k.a. Ritchie Valens, is that on every single photo from his short musical career he looks like a burly, rugged, been-there-done-that guy in his thirties, late twenties at the least — more Charles Bronson than Buddy Holly — and yet he hadn’t actually turned eighteen on "the day the music died" (February 3, 1959). While these elevated levels of testosterone were indeed far more common back in the old days, the circumstance that they manifested so specifically in the shortest-lived rock’n’roller of the entire decade further adds to the mystery — who knows, maybe Ritchie Valens somehow actually lived ten or fifteen additional years within himself, of which we can only guess? Maybe he had somehow managed to fool the space-time continuum? Maybe he’d been there, done that, saw what this world would get up to in ten years, and decided to go out before the shit hit the fan?..
Anyway, all nonsense aside, if anything of the sort was even close to reality, it would have certainly been manifested in the music — and while there are indeed some odd things about the way Ritchie took to constructing his rock’n’roll personality, his music on the whole does not sound like the sounds, thoughts, and feels of a 30-year old. It does sound like the music of an imaginative teenager who is every bit as concerned about taking it to the future as he is about admiring his elders and peers, even if he might still be somewhat confused as to how exactly he should be achieving his goal.
Indeed, while every single source invariably mentions the term «Chicano rock» next to the name of Ritchie Valens, that association largely rests on two things — Richard’s Mexican ethnicity and ‘La Bamba’. The first of these is a little shaky, considering that Ritchie’s childhood in Pacoima largely took place in an English-speaking environment and that, according to legend, he even had to learn the words to ‘La Bamba’ phonetically; nevertheless, his parents were genuinely Mexican and there was a lot of mariachi music and such to which he was consistently exposed since birth, so the Latin influence does manifest itself, albeit in subtle ways, in many of his tunes. Still, they did call him the «Little Richard of San Fernando», not the «Andrés Huesca of San Fernando» or anything — the fact remains that, more than anything else, Ritchie Valens just wanted to be a rock’n’roll player, rather than a godfather to Carlos Santana and Los Lobos, which is a posthumous title that he himself might have resented. Or maybe he wouldn’t. We’ll never know anyway until we all die and get a ticket to that never-ending Heavenly jam session that he’s forever stuck in with Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper.
Actually, the very first single he cut for Del-Fi Records was much more Buddy Holly than Little Richard: ‘Come On, Let’s Go’ opens with a slightly modified melody of ‘Peggy Sue’ — the biggest difference is the closing phrase, which breaks away from the grumbly bass pattern of the song and replaces it with a ringing, upbeat phrase coming expressly from Chuck Berry’s rather than Buddy’s stock. Thus, in twelve seconds time you can already see the rock’n’roll of July 1958 as a well-established institution, whose canons and trademarks can be played with, reshuffled, reconstructed and deconstructed by a new generation of admirers. The song in general plays out like a toughened up, tightened up version of a Buddy rocker, with the legendary Earl Palmer helping Ritchie out with his big, echoey drum sound — and, for the record, this is indeed one of the earliest recordings where you can hear the equally legendary future Wrecking Crew member Carol Kaye (for now, still on rhythm guitar rather than bass, to which she would permanently switch only in the early 1960s), though her role here is mostly to provide reliable support rather than to be particularly expressive. Completing the picture is René Hall on lead guitar (excellently clean and melodic solo, still a rarity on rock’n’roll records at the time) and, of course, Valens himself, who kinda tries to sound like Buddy but still rather comes across as a bit of a friendly, klutzy lumberjack.
This is not a new style — more like a demonstration of the infinite possibilities of a new language — and in that light, even the B-side of the single, a rather lackluster cover of the Coasters’ ‘Framed’, is forgivable because its main point seems to be Ritchie proclaiming, "see, and now I can do something completely different with all those cool Lego parts that all those swell guys left for me to play with", adding blues-comedy-tinged R&B to the list. Of course, this was nowhere as surprising as the decision to adorn his next A-side with a sugary-sentimental doo-wop ballad: ‘Donna’ was written for his high school sweetheart (and probably sung under her balcony, too) and is more Flamingos than Buddy Holly. There’s probably even less actual «writing» involved here than in ‘Come On Let’s Go’, but the song was still an important milestone in the evolution of sentimental teen-pop — not a lot of white (or Latin) young boys at the time based their balladeering personalities on the structural and soulful laws of doo-wop or R&B. Honestly, it is not a particularly listenable or inspiring number, but it had its own historical function and it played it well.
And then, of course, THE song, which, as it fairly often happens with THE songs, initially remained semi-concealed on the B-side of the single. While plenty of Latin artists did their own ‘La Bamba’ before Valens, and plenty more of rock and pop artists would cover it (often in more professionally and cleanly-sounding versions) in later years, it was Valens who took it from the dimension of Mexican folk and firmly inserted it into the dimension of rock’n’roll, almost singlehandedly creating «Latin Rock» in the process. His main achievement here can also be heard in the opening six seconds of the song — the unmistakeable riff, which seems itself to be of Cuban origin (though I could never pinpoint the exact source) but is played rock’n’roll-style on a thick-sounding electric guitar. Once Ritchie begins to sing the Spanish lyrics, the riff fades into the background, yet its presence is still acutely felt throughout the song, giving it a full, massive, virile drive that could not have been provided by any mariachi outfit — while still preserving the joyful, carnivalesque Latin spirit of the original.
It is fun to realize that the very same riff would later be incorporated by the Beatles into their cover of ‘Twist And Shout’ (yes, the Beatles: the original version by the Top Notes was melodically dissimilar, and the Isley Brothers’ version which the Beatles based theirs upon only gave hints at the same chord progression without making the resemblance so blatantly obvious) — which would later lead to many performers, including Bruce Springsteen, playing the two songs in a medley. With the defining emotion found in most popular Latin-style dance-oriented numbers being «energetic, non-aggressive happiness», it could be argued that any early rock’n’roll number that only served to express joy, without any shades of anger or irony, must have had a Latin seed inside it — hence the defining role of ‘Twist And Shout’ in the Beatles’ early repertoire (especially live), and the reason why Ritchie Valens, with his «synthesizing» mind and feel-good attitude, must have been a far stronger influence on the Fab Four than one could imagine.
Those were the only two singles that managed to come out while Valens was still alive and allow him to bask a short bit in the light of new-found fame and fortune — though, gruesome as it is to realize it, it was precisely the success of ‘La Bamba’ that would be directly responsible for his demise. The album that included both of the singles was issued two weeks after his death, although, confusingly, some sources list the issue date as «January 1959»; one thing that is for certain is that the LP was in the works prior to the plane crash, since the liner notes on the back make no mention of the catastrophe, instead promising the unsuspecting listener that Ritchie "will continue to be one of the really great talents produced from this generation" — meaning that they did not even have time to replace the album cover.
But does the album, in fact, produce this kind of impression? This is difficult to say, as there is always an obvious impulse to exaggerate and hyperbolize the talents of anybody so unjustly taken away in his prime (or, perhaps more accurately, before his potential prime). Honestly, there are way too many covers and blatant rewrites here for us to be able to make a proper judgement. For one thing, it is as if Ritchie really needed to justify the «Little Richard of San Fernando» moniker — he flat-out steals Mr. Penniman’s ‘Ooh! My Soul’, remaking it as ‘Ooh, My Head’; writes his own tribute to Little Richard, directly quoting from ‘Tutti Frutti’ and mixing it up with a little Elvis poppiness (‘That’s My Little Suzie’); and covers Larry Williams (‘Boney-Moronie’), who was one of the most diligent students of the Little Richard spirit. The best thing about all these tunes is that the Great Ancestral Spirit of Rock’n’Roll, in all of its gloriously inebriated state, is present in all of them — with shaky guitar sounds, Earl Palmer’s maniacal drumming, and Ritchie’s vocals (which typically sound as those of a nerdy teenager who just gulped down a whole bottle of whiskey in order to make himself look MANLY), they all sound delightfully irreverent and crazy-fun, particularly for an age in which production and parental control were beginning to descend like leeches on the young, but already mutilated body of Mr. Rock’n’Roll.
Somewhat charming, but less fun is the acoustic pop bit of ‘Dooby-Dooby-Wah’, written directly in the style of Buddy Holly; much more interesting is the ballad ‘In A Turkish Town’, which, as claimed by Lou Diamond Phillips who played Ritchie in a biopic, actually reflects «Eastern influence» — personally, I hear no Eastern influence other than in the song title and the lyrics’ references to "the mystic Turks", but I do hear a beautifully and unusually colored guitar tone with a sort of «spicy-reverb» effect that might have been expected from a British producer like Crazy Joe Meek, but hardly from Robert Keane, and, apparently, that’s Ritchie himself milking the orange juice out of that guitar. It’s not that much of an effort, but it is a highly unusual song for its time, and it does hint that Ritchie might have been interested in the psychedelic revolution, had he lived long enough to sniff it on the horizon.
Another mini-highlight is his cover of Ersel Hickey’s ‘Bluebirds Over The Mountain’, a song that most people know from the Beach Boys’ single version from a decade later — but it was actually Valens who started working on «beautifying» Hickey’s raw, skeletal original, with the deep echoey production (probably fit for a song that refers to mountains, right?) that makes his voice sound as if ghostly floating across a wide canyon. The vibe emanating from the song is anything but rock’n’roll — if anything, it is indeed more reminiscent of classic Beach Boys melancholy, stuck somewhere in between lonesome cowboy meditation of the old days and sorrowful art-pop odes of the future.
In between ‘Bluebirds’, ‘Turkish Town’, ‘La Bamba’, and even all the rough, patchy, but creative rock’n’roll Frankensteins on the record, there is no denying, the way I see it, that what we had here was a promising artist on the rise — there is no telling, of course, if that promise would have been realised had he lived, but I don’t see anything other than a weaker voice, for instance, that might have precluded him from becoming an alternate Roy Orbison (at the very least, there are plenty of songs here to match the potential of ‘Ooby Dooby’, and who knew in 1956 that the author of ‘Ooby Dooby’ would go on to the levels of ‘Crying’ and ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’?). In any case, the record, short as it is, is well worth listening to in its entirety if only to reinforce one’s shattered faith in 1959 as the infamous «year that strangled rock’n’roll» — because, yes, the Lord did put two, not just one, of the most promising artists of the year on the same doomed plane, merely to give Liverpool, England an unfair advantage over the states of Texas and California. Go figure.