Not sure what happened to Week 161… but…
Talk about hidden gems. Los Albas were a somewhat cheesy rock band from Spain in the late 60s early 70s. They had a solid beat, but they favored chorused vocals with the cheesiest of pop melodies. Like a lot of the best/worst pop music their stuff makes its way into your head whether you like it or not, but then just a quickly you forget it. I think they are one of the wave of bands that were the precursors to the one man Casio keyboard bands of the 80s.
Here they are, for example, doing a cover of the Ataualpa Yupanqui classic, Los Ejes de Mi Carreta. They take a poignant folk masterpiece by an Argentinian original and pose it as a pop rock ditty, complete with rear view ass shaking in satin pants. Pretty terrible if you ask me.
And you can go trough their catalog finding song after song with this same sort of bland swing. But there is something there, something in the back by the drums and the bass that is persistent and gives them a slight sense of urgency, though admittedly a very slight one.
One of the things that in my mind has always differentiated rock en Español from its Anglo counterpart is a certain randomness. This is not something you can usually notice from just listening to a couple of songs by a given band, but once you start getting into their catalog, you start running into some strange tangents. Not sure why this is, in my case it has to do with growing up with the music, but without the various cultural attachments that the music seemed to have developed in Anglo countries, no mods vs rockers or punks vs. disco or metal vs hardcore or whatever. It was always rock vs. everyone else. And rock pretty much included anything with a rock beat (even a hint of a rock beat would often do).
Los Albas were on the radio when I was a kid, and when I started looking more intently for good rock music, I didn’t even consider them an option, Los Albas were rock for grandparents. Recently, though, I’ve been working on this rock psicodelico set for Jonny Mambo’s show and I asked New York Night Train Soul Proprietor Mr. Jonathan Toubin, having just returned from several DJing gigs in Mexico, if he had any leads to some cool tunes and among other things, he told me he found some killer Los Albas b-sides, with these bands, not sure why the rocker is always on the flip, he says.
So that got me curious, cause Los Albas were a band that was so consistent that they even seemed to deny the slight randomness that most other bands offered as a hope that maybe something somewhere was going to be good. Those choral vocal melodies (like in the above clip) seemed to go uninterrupted from song to song. So I start looking for rare Los Albas b-sides and run into this little gem here:
Now that is certainly a cover. No way Los Albas, who didn’t often sing in English, wrote that. And it’s a rocker too. One of the other things that is cool about foreign rock bands is that the songs that might have been hits in another country might not have been hits in the US or England, so a lot of bands end up playing covers that to us are somewhat obscure.
So looking for the origin of A Little Bit Hurt, I run into an earlier version by Julien Covey and The Machine and it’s smoking too. Maybe even more so.
Now I’m interested in this Julien Covey fellow.
Check him out on the cover of this 45. This is Sweet Bacon which also rocks.
From what I can tell, this guy released only one single. Released by Island Records in the US and UK, by Fontana Records in France, and Stone Records in Canada, and produced and co-written by Jimmy Miller of Rolling Stones and Spencer Davis Group fame. Check out this blog for the barely existing story of this record.
