Directly from the Mission District in San Francisco, the explosive fusion of Latin, salsa and rock is chronicled from a writer who has followed the music and the musicians for over 30 years. The book covers the stories of prominent Latin rock bands including Santana and Malo, examining in detail the pioneering records and the ways in which both reflect a wide spectrum of Latin influences. It highlights the cast of characters and emerging period in the US during the late ’60s, with all the cultural background events including the Summer of Love, Woodstock, political activism, and the record label expansion. Legendary figures such as Bill Graham, Clive Davis and the Escovedos family play crucial roles in the development of this sound. As Latin music continues to become more mainstream, the interest in its musical roots grows. This book sheds light on these musical pioneers, and is gorgeously illustrated with over 800 BandW photos by Jim Marshall, Rudy Rodgriguez, Joan Chase and others, plus artwork of dozens of rare album covers.
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Voices of Latin Rock: People and Events that Created this Sound
By Jim McCarthy, Ron Sansoe
Contributor Ron Sansoe
Published by Hal Leonard Corporation, 2004
ISBN 063408061X

Napa Valley Register Wednesday, August 27, 2008

It began as a movement, born out of San Francisco’s barrio in the 1960s and ’70s. It evolved into a style, then a revolution and finally a musical genre of its own: Latin Rock.
Saturday, an all-star cast of artists who participated in the birth of the movement take the stage at Lincoln Theater Napa Valley for a one-night, special performance of “Voices of Latin Rock.”
The show was inspired by Jim McCarthy’s book of the same title, which traces the people and events that created the sound. According to producer Jeff Trager, “The book is the story of the birth of Latin Rock music as it became known in the 1960s and 1970s with groups like Santana, Malo, Azteca and Sapo.”
In the foreword, Carlos Santana writes, “I’m grateful this book was written, because it’s a chance to take us back and bring us forward. If our history can challenge the next wave of musicians to keep moving and changing, to keep spiritually hungry and horny, that’s what it’s all about.”
The artists performing Saturday have been part of Latin Rock groups such as Santana, Malo, Azteca, War, Tower of Power and Sly & The Family Stone.
“Basically, Latin Rock was born in the Bay Area out of the Mission District in San Francisco,” Trager said. “There was Richie Valens before that but the Latin Rock sound exploded out in the late ’60s with Santana and their performance at Woodstock. They went there as the only unsigned band onstage, and when they finished playing they were world famous.”
Santana’s success was followed by Malo — whose founding members included Jorge Santana, Arcelio Garcia and Richard Bean who will all perform in Yountville — and their 1972 Top Ten Hit “Suavecito” which became a Latin Rock anthem.
At least 20 artists will play on Saturday night including Jorge Santana, brother of Carlos Santana; Arcelio Garcia and Richard Bean, who wrote “Suavecito;” Tony Lindsay from Santana; Greg Errico, who performed with Sly & The Family Stone, Santana and the Grateful Dead; and Abel Sanchez from Abel and the Prophets.
Carlos Reyes will be the opening act. A harpist and violinist who plays in Latin and jazz styles, he currently plays with Steve Miller and had performed for four U.S. presidents and a pope.
Trager, who grew up in San Francisco with many of the artists in the show, produces the “Voices of Latin Rock” to benefit autism at Bimbo’s in San Francisco each January. The popularity of that event, which has raised thousands of dollars for autism awareness, was the catalyst for taking the show on the road.

Of all the surprising developments to come out of San Francisco rock during the Fillmore/Avalon era in the late ’60s, none was richer in cultural wealth than the emergence of Latin rock after the success of Santana.
It was a short, golden moment for young Latino musicians, when things were possible that had not been previously dreamed of, and it coincided with the rise of Chicano culture – Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union and a growing sense of ethnic pride that took root in the Mission District.
Latin rock, like most pop music trends, came and went, but it left a lasting imprint on those who remembered. For the past four years, Mission District dentist Bernardo Gonzalez, also manager of veteran Latin rockers Malo since 1985, has been throwing a remarkable event called Voices of Latin Rock, which will take place Thursday at Bimbo’s 365 Club.
Without advertising or promotion, this annual benefit for autism sells out. Families buy entire tables, and old friends stand in the aisles talking, while a procession of the greatest Latin rock musicians take the stage.
Last year, the surviving members of the original Santana band played together at Bimbo’s for the first time in more than 20 years. The event began in 2004 as a publication party for a book, “Voices of Latin Rock,” by authors Jim McCarthy, a British music journalist, and Ron Sansoe, Gonzalez’s partner in managing Malo.
“We didn’t make any money the first year,” said Gonzalez. “In fact, it cost us a little bit, but the people wanted to have another one. Each year we expected to be the last.”
The original Latin rock bubble didn’t last long – Santana’s first three albums sold millions between 1969 and 1971 – but the effect on young Latin musicians throughout the country was incalculable. Conga player Michael Carabello and timbales samurai Jose “Chepito” Areas of Santana brought the fire of the Aztec gods to their band’s blues-rock foundations. It was flavored with a taste of their parents’ music, the mambo and rumba records by Tito Puente and Willie Bobo they heard growing up.
Gonzalez remembers seeing Santana’s groundbreaking performance in the Woodstock movie when he was 15 years old. “Talk about a life-changing experience,” he said. “When I saw that, I no longer wanted to be a baseball player or a football player. It still gives me goose bumps.”
Jose Simon played in country and western bands before he joined Sapo, the Latin rock band formed by Richard Bean after he left Malo. Bean wrote the Malo hit “Suavecito” when he was an 11th-grader at Mission High.
“Before that, I was just a musician making a living,” Simon said in an interview last year for “American Sabor,” the current exhibition at the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle. “No pride, it was just making a living, a good musician supporting my family, but when I played with Sapo, it was more than that. It was like ‘I’m proud to be Jose Simon playing to my people with my people and other people,’ and the sound, and it made me proud.”
Not since Ritchie Valens, an anomalous ’50s Latino rock ‘n’ roller, had music with a Latino accent been heard at the top of the pop charts. Latino rock musicians found themselves swept up in a cultural movement. The bands all played benefits for Chavez’s United Farm Workers. Chicano artwork decorated the album covers that could have come straight off the murals painted on Mission District walls.
But these young musicians were not just following the Afro-Cuban traditions of their musical forebears. They were fed by distinctly American tributaries. Jorge Santana, lead guitarist of Malo and younger brother of Carlos Santana, grew up with nine people living together in a two-bedroom Mission District apartment after his mariachi musician father moved the family from Tijuana.
“I can go right now to any Mexican restaurant,” said Santana, and “as soon as I hear mariachi, my heart just melts from the experience of having grown up listening to it, as well as my father having played it all his life. It’s built in me. I think it was the circumstances of my sisters, modern radio, Dick Clark and everything else that was taking place at that time – Motown, rhythm and blues, the English Invasion, everything. We had a different ear, or we were listening to this new music that we didn’t get a chance to listen to as much in Tijuana when we were there.”
The Santana band immediately became famous in its neighborhood. Musician and educator John Santos, who will also be honored at Bimbo’s and grew up in the Mission, remembered how inspirational the band was when he was growing up.
“They started talking about Carlos, because he was in high school at Mission High School with my older brothers and my older cousins,” he said, “and they started telling us about, ‘Hey, there’s this electric guitar player that is using timbales and congas.’ And we knew very well what the timbales and congas were because my grandfather’s band used that and we had grown up with those instruments.”
While Latin rock may not be hitting the best-seller charts today, it has never gone away. Musicians like Santos carry the Santana sound in their hearts. Young bands in the area such as La Ventana or Mestizo keep the sound alive. Los Lobos has carried the flag for many years, coming from East Los Angeles, where Latin rock musicians have a lineage going back to ’60s garage bands such as Thee Midnighters or the Premiers.
The people involved in the San Francisco Latin rock scene carried their pride with them. Abel Sanchez, who played in a number of Mission District bands and will head the house band at Bimbo’s, went on to work as an administrator for the Postal Service and eventually played a key role in the campaign to create a Cesar Chavez stamp. Simon of Sapo went to work as a stand-up comic and founded the annual Comedy Day in Golden Gate Park. Malo continues to perform – and will appear this week at Bimbo’s and at the satellite concert Saturday at Redwood City’s Little Fox Theatre – although founder Arcelio Garcia is semi-retired. Santana is still a world-famous brand name, but guitarist Carlos Santana now leads a band that bears little relation to the incendiary outfit that burned out of the Mission and can still be heard blasting “Oye Como Va” in jukeboxes everywhere.
To Anglos, this Latin rock wrinkle may seem li ke a momentary aberration on the pop scene long ago, but to Latinos it is a moment never to be forgotten.
“Whatever movement Carlos started,” his brother Jorge Santana said, “and whatever support I had given in regards to Malo and then my 10-piece band, and with the radio play that I had, it was like the Mayans. They were here and all the sudden they disappeared. Where the hell did they go? And look what they left behind.”
VOICES OF LATIN ROCK

E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page N – 42 of the San Francisco Chronicle