Week 160: Song Tracking 2: I Wonder Who

I’ve been diving into the darker corners of rock en español. Famous Jonny Mambo asked me to do a one time set of rock psicodelico en español on his Mojo Ballroom show on WCOM. So in preparation I’ve been digging deep into the dusty sections of my collection and crawling through the greasy corners of the web to reacquaint myself with some tunes and bands, and discover others which I hadn’t heard.

A lot of the earliest rock music coming out of South America and Spain was sung in English, and a lot of what you find is highly influenced first by Elvis, Bill Haley and Chuck Berry and later on by the Beatles and the Stones. From these early groups you get a lot of derivatives, but you also get some inspired imitators like Los Shakers, who according to WFMU are “the Realest Fake Beatles to ever record.” From this period though I think Los Saicos are the roughest and most rockin’ of the bunch. While Los Shakers sound like the Beatles with George Martin, Los Saicos sound like the Beatles in Hamburg at 4am.

Once you start getting into the mid-sixties and the advent of psychedelia you start getting bands doing it their way. They start to sing in Spanish and start to experiment with their own traditions and reflect their own cultural, social and political environments. This leads to bands like Los Gatos (one of the most consistently interesting), Sui Generis (and most of Charly Garcia’s projects), and Aguaturbia.

Aguaturbia is what I would call a transition band. There were already bands like Los Gatos and Los Blops playing almost completely original rock en español, but most of them veered towards the more folksy sounds. Aguaturbia were one of the first groups to go for the heavier psychodelic sound.

In their two records they mix it up between original songs in spanish, originals in english and a few covers (they do a great version of Somebody to Love, I would venture to say it’s even better than the Jefferson Airplane version, though closer to the Great Society original, but even raunchier). In the song Erotica they seem to be chaneling a heavy-laced version of the Chakachas’ Jungle Fever.

But as much as I like both the originals and their covers, the song that’s really sticking with me is an song called I Wonder Who, a sort of heavy rockin’ blues in english. A lot of these bands wrote originals in english, so it could be an original, but they also got a weird selection of anglo records so a lot of times they just play covers of obscure songs. I was curious as to whether this song was an original, so I looked on line, and found out that it’s not, but it almost is, as far as I can tell.

Here’s the song.

So then I found out that Rory Gallagher played a version of the song.

Could it be that Aguaturbia had heard his version? I looked at Gallagher’s discography to find out when he recorded it and all I found was a version on a live record from 1974. On the record the song is credited to Morganfield, which is the real name of Mr. Muddy Waters. Here’s his version.

I imagine Aguaturbia was familiar with Waters’ version, but the change in feel is pretty radical from one to the other. I wonder if there is another version between them, a sort of missing link that connects the two songs.

Bonus:
While looking for some kind of video of Muddy Waters playing his song I came upon these gals.