The Godlike Genius of Los Bravos

Maybe it's because it's been something like 135 degrees in LA this weekend — so hot that my clothes keep soaking through despite the constant air-conditioning — but my mind has been wandering back over the last few days to a similarly hot summer eighteen years ago.

In the summer of 1989, I was fresh out of college and living with my friends (and Lava Sutra bandmates) Bob and Jason in a clapboard coach house in Chicago's downscale Uptown neighborhood. The other guys worked at local record stores, and while I would land a similar gig in August, I pretty much spent all of that June and July hanging around the Sutra house in a post-graduation daze, listening to records, trying to write songs, sweating profusely, and swigging ice cold Carling Black Label in an attempt to take the edge off the summer heat.

When Bob and Jason came home in the evening, we'd jam — drummerless — for hours in our basement rehearsal space, trying to forge a sound that would somehow encompass our shared love for 60s garage and psych, Sub Pop style hard rock (no one was calling it "grunge" yet) and early Neil Diamond. There would come a time when living and playing in the same house produced more tension than joy; but for now, we were all high on life (and other things), stoked on the seemingly endless possibilities of rock n' roll, and thoroughly enjoying each others' company.

We were all budding record geeks, and part of the fun of moving in together was pooling our record collections. We often played a game called "The Game," which involved one person pulling an album at random from someone else's collection, and then finding a good track from it to play; since Jason and I had accumulated more than a few totally crap records for sheer ironic humor value, this wasn't always as easy or rewarding a task as it might have initially seemed. Still, "The Game" was a good way to get turned on to records you might not have otherwise taken a chance on.

Black Is Black, the 1966 debut LP of Los Bravos, was one of those records. I'd previously seen it while flipping through Bob's collection, but I always avoided it, figuring that Los Bravos were kind of jive. And, actually, they were kind of jive — c'mon, a Spanish beat band with a German singer who sounded like an even more uptight Gene Pitney, produced for brassy Top 40 appeal by English hitmaker Ivor Raymonde? Though the album's title track had always been a guilty pleasure of sorts for me, the rest of the stuff on the album pretty much made Gary Lewis and the Playboys sound like the Sonics by comparison.

As we quickly discovered when I pulled it out during "The Game," the best (or at least most hilarious) thing about the record was the liner notes on the back, which were a strange mish-mosh of English-as-a-Second-Language press release and teen-mag slanguage. Much was made of "the powerhouse vocals of Mike Kogel," the group's lead singer, while the Spanish guys in the group were only listed by their first names and vague personal attributes: "Miguel — the matador from Mallorca!" "Pablo — what a 'gas' guy!" etc. Since the back sleeve didn't match the names with the faces, figuring out which guy was which became a running topic of stoned discussion for the next couple of years. (Kogel, with his blond hair, was pretty obvious, but which one was the matador from Mallorca? Which one was the "gas" guy? And what the hell is a "gas" guy, anyway?)

Still, I shouldn't be too hard on Los Bravos. Though the title of this blog entry is obviously sarcastic, they did manage to rattle off a few more good singles, including a frantic cover of the Easybeats' "Bring a Little Lovin'", a decent version of the Bee Gees' "Like Nobody Else" and the rousing "Going Nowhere" (the latter of which is featured on the Nuggets II box set). And, like any self-respecting beat group, they had their own film — Los Chicos con Las Chicas — which featured this amazing pop art segment for "Sympathy". The song is easily one of their best, making excellent use of the aformentioned "powerhouse vocals of Mike Kogel", and I love the way his accent makes the phrase "crying shallow tears" sound like "crying CELLO tears" — a much cooler lyric, even if I have no idea what it could possibly mean. And the video's combination of the animation and high-contrast live action, while definitely low-budget, is unquestionably groovy — kinda like the iPod TV ads, but far more interesting. Enjoy!

Comments

[Paul Gaita]

Kogel is also pretty great as a freaked-out hippie in Lucio Fulci's LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN. No singing in that one, but his psychedelic outfit definitely qualifies him as a gas guy.

[MJ]

I'm sure this stuff was the inspiration for the iPod ads...

But uh, what's with the rabbits toward the end (.30 left) of the video?

[Jeb]

If you ever play that game again with Bob do not pull out the Lemon Piper's 2nd album Jelly Jungle. It is not good even for a laugh. We were playing it out the window while housepainting in 1981 and the old guy next door to him said "that's the worst music I've ever heard". Agreed!