SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 1998:
It's a grossly overcast Sunday, with rain pouring from the heavens all over New York and New Jersey, and low visibility on the roads making for dangerous travel. A perfect day to have Armando and his girlfriend over for dinner, eh? Guess they'll have to provide the sunshine on this dreary day (or should that be brillo de sol?). And believe me, they did. As Mom cooked up chicken cordon bleu with all the trimmings, I set out to the Port Authority where I was to pick up Armando and Alejandra. The appointed meeting time was 3 PM, but I knew I'd be waiting a little longer than that. And of course, it's impossible to try to pick them out in the crowds outside the place when there seems to be nothing I can do but keep driving around the block again and again until the two of them appear, another task made impossible by the curse of gridlock.
So when an actual parking space miraculously manifested itself before me as I was gearing up for my second attempt to cruise around the block, I knew this would be another day where magic things were going to happen. Safely parked, I then spent the next 15 minutes crawling the Port Authority trying to find them, but I never did. No, Armando and his girl found me instead, walking around with a confused look on my face, and Armando acted just as surprised to hear that I had found a parking space as I was when I found it. His girlfriend Alejandra looked younger than her supposed 40-plus years (until her age was revealed I assumed she was in her early thirties!), and although her command of the English language was virtually nonexistent, she never once displayed any lack of enthusiasm in the entire afternoon and evening following.
We went to the car and headed out of NYC as fast as we could. I'd brought along a tape of the Beatles' Anthology 2 and immediately popped it into the car stereo as we took off. This led to a long conversation about the Fab Four, whom Armando absolutely admires. We both quickly discovered that we had the same favorite Beatles songs in common, and it was a joy to hear Armando sing along to some of the songs, providing some live vocals for my entertainment! (I was particularly impressed by the fact that he knew every word to every song, and delighted in showing off this knowledge!) Armando eventually revealed to me that in the early eighties he organized and led an orchestral concert tribute to the Beatles that played a string of gigs in Mexico!
We arrived back at Mom & Pop Brazen's, and it was there that the party kicked into high gear right from the get-go. No sooner were we settled than Armando brought out all the unreleased recordings that Frank Mangano had given him a few days earlier, over an hour's worth of material on reel-to-reel tapes and unissued acetates, and of course I had the cassette deck rolling to tape my own personal copies of everything as we listened. We took a brief break after listening to reel #1 of two reels' worth of Dug Dug's live recordings from 1968 to sit down to dinner, and let me tell you, not only was Mom's cooking completely spot-on this afternoon, but none of us can recall having two people as guests in our house who were as enthusiastic about the food as Armando and Alejandra! Armando, in particular, smothered almost everything on his plate with gravy, saying he absolutely loves the stuff and that back in Mexico, hardly any food you order there comes with it!
We sat around from there comparing various observations on Mexico for awhile, then resumed our listening party, after which Armando took out his camcorder, which I didn't even know he had actually brought with him until that point! After taking the time to capture some footage of our little gathering, we hooked the thing up to the TV and Armando showed us the footage he had just shot of all of us, as well as some already existing footage on the tape of a Nava family gathering at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City, pointing out everyone from his 12-year-old daughter to his nephew (on whose computer Armando first got to see my website!) to his 70-plus-year-old mother, still his manager to this day! Fascinating footage, I wish I'd thought to pop a tape into the VCR! Both my parents were absolutely enthusiastic about the company I'd brought over for dinner the whole time. Even my dad, who's not particularly social and stayed in the background for much of Armando's visit to the house on the day he arrived, mingled freely with the guests, traded a few jokes with them, and afterward told me how much he enjoyed them!
The hour was growing fairly late and I had a long haul ahead of me, so at around 8 PM we loaded up the car again and I set into the grueling task of driving Armando and Alejandra all the way back to Brooklyn, with the rain still pouring down from the skies and low visibility making for a truly neck-risking experience, but with Armando aboard, somehow I knew fate would once again be kind and everyone would make it home safely in the end. On the way back to Brooklyn, Armando pulled a cassette out of his pocket and popped it in the car stereo, treating me to one unreleased track we didn't get to at our listening party earlier, a nice version of Brenton Wood's "Gomme Little Sign" recorded at the sessions which produced the four new tracks on the new compilation CD Los Dug Dug's are on. I followed that with one of my own homemade comp tapes, playing some of my favorite music for him (not surprisingly, Armando was very quick to notice the thundering double-bass drum sound on Motorhead's "Overkill"). And my luck continued onward from there as the rain gradually stopped as we headed for Brooklyn, allowing for a much safer commute home for me once I'd dropped the two of them off. Again, my body was exhausted when I got home, but my mind was still on overdrive, so instead of forcing the issue, I stayed up and ate some leftover chicken cordon bleu from the afternoon and replayed a few of the unreleased Dug Dug's tracks I now had in my grasp, until I finally felt like sleeping at last.
MONDAY, APRIL 27, 1998:
Precious little sleep the night before, so many things to catch up on today, and by the end of the day I was even more exhausted than before. It's good that this day wound up being another day off from the Armando adventure for me, because I needed a rest! I knew Armando wanted to have some time alone with his girl, so I left the two of them alone this evening and concentrated instead on listening more closely to the unreleased tapes and acetates I now have on cassette:
The two live tapes from 1968, both half-hour reel-to-reels compiled from at least a few different performances (although I have no info on exact dates, venues etc.) are just the sort of unreleased, tapes-that-sat-unknown-in- someone's-basement-for-thirty-years wonders that make garage-rock addicts salivate. They feature the band tearing through a truckload of covers of popular hits of the day in a very punky style indeed, with Armando playing very prominent, very garagey-sounding keyboards throughout, Gustavo Garayzar taking some very raw and exciting turns on lead guitar, and lead singer Jorge de la Torre offering very good diction of the English lyrics. It's mildly disappointing that we don't get to hear any originals done live, but Los Dug Dug's play with so much energy and enthusiasm throughout that after a short while the energy level makes it inconsequential that they're doing cover tunes. There's 60s punk standards like "Pushin' Too Hard," the Strangeloves' "Nighttime" (here with some astounding siren effects done with feedback!) and the Music Explosion's "Little Bit O'Soul" in the set list, but even when they're doing songs not associated with the garage genre, they still sound like a garage band: "Gimme Some Lovin'" completely wipes the floor with Steve Winwood and there's an insane cover of "Summer in the City" that kicks off with a minute-long freakout sequence that must be heard to be believed! I also like the double-shot of Yardbirds tunes on reel #2, "I'm A Man" followed abruptly by "The Nazz Are Blue" off the Roger the Engineer album, an inspired choice indeed. Great, great stuff!
After the live tapes, the second best item in Armando's pile of unreleased Dug Dug's goodies is the "World of Love/Eclipse" acetate, two noticeably different early versions of tracks that would later be redone for the first LP. "World" has a similar feel to the album version, but throws in an extra verse, while "Eclipse" is faster and punkier than the album version and is noticeably missing the instrumental portion that begins and ends the version we all know. The remaining stuff is a bunch of solo recordings Armando made with a bunch of studio hacks shortly before his return to Mexico after the Frank Mangano deal soured. Armando himself acted a bit sheepish when I threw them on the turntable during our listening party the day before, saying the recordings "really aren't all that good," and I would have to agree with him. Of the four songs, Armando only wrote one of them, "God is Crying (Teardrops in the Sky)," which, not surprisingly, is the best of the songs, a fairly pleasant ballad of sorts inspired by his living in Brooklyn Heights and viewing the East River on a rainy day. But that and the other songs (written by the session's producers) are awash in syrupy strings and a turn-of-the-decade orchestral pop sound, and much though Armando's voice sounds as fine as ever, songs like "With the Wind at My Back" and "Beautiful Green" go in one ear and out the other in the end. Oh well, two out of three ain't bad.
After listening to the unreleased Armando/Dug Dug's tracks, I finally got caught up on my sleep once again, putting my body clock back into synchronization from the craziness of the past eight days...
TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 1998:
...only to learn by the end of this day that I would have to work to throw my body clock out of whack again for the culmination of my duties accommodating Armando: when I called him this evening, he informed me of his departure plans, which involve taking his girlfriend back to Kennedy Airport on Wednesday afternoon to see her off, then rushing back by train to Brooklyn, catching as much sleep as possible, then waking up super-early for his own flight back to Mexico City, which requires his arriving at Newark Airport no later than 6:30 AM Thursday morning. So of course, I have to get my own self out of bed by 4 AM to arrive in Brooklyn to pick him up by 5:30. One last insane morning and the whole Armando visit is over for the both of us. But let this much be said: though I've pretty much bent over backwards to make sure all has gone well for my special, special guest, you won't hear me complaining about it, now or ever.
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