After the origins of rock in Cuba: Los Llopis

Rock and roll jumped into the world in the '50s of last century as a marginal, groundbreaking, thug and rebellious rhythm ... The industry, then, created two icons nuanced by the dictates of the market and the social urgencies of enjoying such attractive music without any prejudice. This is how they launched the highest figure of rhythm into the arena of record companies and the media in the second half of the 20th: Elvis Presley, and a practically exemplary group in the further development of the genre: Bill Haley & His Comets.

There were also others such as, just to mention a few, Big Joe Turner and Carl Perkins, the latter pioneer of rockabilly, or the multifaceted Joe Brown who, in addition to being a vocalist, was a guitar, ukulele and banjo player. All that musical baggage enters, first, two Latin American countries: Cuba and Mexico. Later it spread throughout the continent and devastated Western Europe, with the exception of Franco's Spain, where it was not frowned upon by the caudillo's hosts.

In this context, two Cuban brothers who were music fans, trained in an engineering degree - first in Cuba, then at the prestigious Harvard University in the United States - decided to form a small band to dedicate themselves professionally to music, after trying at parties of friends and family.

Although on the Island, from a very young age and as amateurs, Manuel (nolo) and Francisco Llopis ventured into the guitar, in North American lands they expand their musical knowledge and definitely lean more towards eighth notes and sixteenth notes than for the calculations of the chosen career. So, in the new group, Ñolo is the guitarist and Francisco leans towards the steel guitar, a string instrument with Hawaiian sounds widely used in the country and American rock.

Back in Havana, the composer Ñico Rojas appears, who advises them to incorporate new instruments and members, suggesting another Cuban, a professional musician and pianist: Felipe Dulzaides. To close the quartet, Ñico puts them in contact with saxophonist Leandro Torres.

Under this format the Llopis-Dulzaides Quartet debuted. But, after five years, while the repertoire is increasingly opting for rock and roll —whose temperature had risen with the appearance of Presley—, Felipe Dulzaides decides that this is not his thing; He is more interested in jazz, and leaves the quartet to form his own, Los Armónicos, one of the most interesting groups in the Cuban musical scene of the 1950s and 1960s. With their departure Los Llopis emerged, with the three original members - although Leandro Torres, in addition to the sax, deals with the piano and the accordion - and Manolo Vegas, a gigantic man with a powerful voice who with his charisma will define, stylistically, the new formation with which the quartet reappears some time later.

The Llopis. Illustration: Rubén Cabrera (Goat).

Los Llopis made their debut in 1957 on Radio Progreso's El show de las 7 y 30. Later they reached television, cabaret and, finally, recording studios. The appearance in Cuba of the steel guitar had been an event for the general public. Now, with the rock and roll repertoire, its presence is re-dimensioned, because in its sound there is a kind of reference to electronic modernity, without giving up boleros and Caribbean rhythms.

It is curious that in none of the quartet's formations described on the Internet is the percussion performer consigned, an element so significant both for rock and for Caribbean numbers. Tony Pinelli states that the first line-up included Javier Dulzaides, Felipe Dulzaides' cousin, but does not refer to his instrument. It could have been he who was in charge of the percussion in the first stage of the band, although the most likely is that —for the second period— it was carried out by one or more of the instrumentalists of the group.

Two years after that debut, the first LP appeared, Chiquita, recorded with the Meca house, but the label refused to include rock songs on the album, preferring to offer only boleros. Of that long duration, Do not ask for more forgiveness stood out, a song seasoned with the Hawaiian sound and close, in some way, to rock and roll. The success of this number in Cuba and its repercussion in Mexico take Los Llopis to the Aztec country, where they are invited to record for the Peerless label, which also refuses to include rock on the new album.

The claims of the public, however, lead to another LP being recorded at the beginning of 1959 that would become history: Rockabilidad, an album with 11 numbers of North American rock covered in Spanish and one of the supposed new genre that gave it the around the world: La Pachanga. With this album, Los Llopis became the first group to record rock in our language, since their counterparts on the island, Mexico and Spain, had not yet done so. Because if we take a brief look at the scene of the 1960s, Los Rebeldes del Rock and Los Rogers appear in Mexico; while in Spain there are Los H.H. and Micky and the Tonys. They are all an obligatory stop for the study of rock in Spanish, but all, in turn, are after this Cuban group.

Despite the fact that there were many who thought that the genre would not sound good in Cervantes's language - which is why the record companies refused to bring the new Anglo-Saxon rhythm to the acetates - the sales of the album would say the opposite. Although there is a curious fact: contrary to what everyone expected, of the 12 songs that made up Rockabilidad, none of the rock versions released into Spanish took the record of being the most liked. The honor went to La Pachanga, by Eduardo Davidson, a piece highly criticized by many specialists.

Just rockability It serves as a cover letter for the group to perform in two of the most important nightclubs in Madrid in the '60s: Pasapoga and Florida.

Upon their arrival in the Spanish capital, Los Llopis ran into an obstacle: they couldn't make public the source of those Hispanicized rock that they interpreted. Why? Well, because Franco did not like the lascivious movements, the tight pants and the hair on the forehead of Elvis Presley. He considered it harmful to the traditional spirit that he wanted for his land. Without any official prohibition, the idol of youth in half the world had been demonized by Francoism to such an extent that nobody played him on the radio or sold his acetates. However, their interpretations circulated clandestinely among the youth who identified them very easily. The first thing that was heard of Elvis Presley there, openly, were these versions that Los Llopis popularized. They could be good, brilliant or bad, but they were the ones that made the King of rock and roll known among the great public of the Iberian Peninsula.

The Llopis. Illustration: Rubén Cabrera (Goat).

Los Llopis are cited by almost everyone who deals with rock in its Hispanic variant. But, at the same time, they are that incognito, obscure and recognized - albeit unknown - referent that remains in nine letters. And the cause of all this seems to be in the eclectic and incoherent repertoire that characterized the group from its birth until its dissolution.

With a sound that did not change in the slightest (perhaps only in the Spanish guitar that was replaced by an electric and more modern one), Los Llopis allowed other Hispanic groups to go ahead with newer and more attractive options.

Attentive to the tastes of the public, the demands of businessmen and the market - too attentive, I would say - they interpreted in the same presentation a bolero, a rock by Bill Haley, another by Elvis Presley, a Peruvian waltz, a pachanga, and closed with a Cuban carnival conga. Something like all the content of a disco in the same quartet. This, inevitably, was weakening his proposal.

In Spain, for example, they accepted a contract to record —in a single morning!— rockability in full, 12 songs that were released in the form of three EP's and one LP, under the Zafiro label. Versions of songs previously recorded in Mexico to which they could well have dedicated more time in the new recording, to revisit them and clean them of impurities that, without a doubt, they contained. However, the disc in Spanish lands had a remarkable success. He gave the big blow shudder, which remained several weeks as number one on the program discomania, by Raúl Matas, chair of musical radio programs in Spain at the time.

In the musical proposal of Los Llopis there is not exactly a fusion of Antillean rhythms with Anglo-Saxon rock, as some think. The result they arrive at is a kind of mixture that is always disparate, which also influences the premature appearance of decadence.

After the Spanish success, the band made several tours of Latin America and Europe to settle, at the end of the '60s, in the United States, a wrong decision: they went to dance home from the top. There they dissolved because of the little interest they aroused among Hispanics who, at one time, were their most loyal followers.

There are very few references to the fate of the members of the group after its dissolution. It is known that Leandro Torres, the saxophonist, died in Miami in 2005; that Francisco had an orchestra in Los Angeles that reiterated the quartet's eclectic repertoire; that his brother Ñolo lived in California, it is not known exactly what he did. They all passed away. Today the only survivor could be Manolo Vegas, the solo voice, who released a nostalgic album in Miami in 2005, with the same concepts that weighed down the group during its successful, albeit very short, career. But it's been too long to say that Vega is still alive and well.

We can only enjoy the recordings of these Cuban pioneers of rock in Spanish that have been lost in time and have not even awakened nostalgia.