Los Tigres del Norte

The video below is from a New Yorker profile (24 May 2010) by Alec Wilkinson of the Norteno band Los Tigres del Norte. Although there's quite a bit of Norteno music in our vinyl record library, we'd never heard of them either before the story. What caught our eye in the story was that Ry Cooder was on the bus with the band during the tour that Wilkinson covered. There's New Yorker audio with Cooder and the author that fills in the back ground story of what brought them together. Flaco Jimenez, who appeared with his band on various Cooder albums in the late 1970s, was one of the most authentic Norteno musicians you could find at the time.

Los Tigres are a little different. They play traditional Norteno music, but you don’t have to go hunting for them in obscure parts of San Antonio, although their tour bus probably gets there regularly. They are the biggest North American band that no one's ever heard of, partly because they play exclusively in Spanish. One of the stories the band elder — they've been together since 1972— tells on the bus is a dream about a Yankee boardroom where the band for the Super Bowl is chosen by someone who says, "Why not Los Tigres again?" As it turns out, the dream is not that far-fetched. They've sold 34,000,000 million records and played the largest concert (67,002) ever at the Houston Astrodome in 2002. The video and audio tell all about the band. The story is worth looking at too (sorry, it's not part of the New Yorker free stuff).

When it comes to free/restricted that's about where it ends with Los Tigres. Sumner Redstone, Condé Nast and all those folks who are conspiring to make our free internet just about as useful as a fax machine ("You can't really watch this video from where you are because we sold the rights to some technically challenged local organization in your neighbourhood..." — those folks) could learn a trick or two from Los Tigres. All their recent big hits are available as well produced YouTube video, including La Granja, which is described in the article as a fable about the havoc that ensues when you turn your guard dog loose to look after everything. It's brilliantly animated. Maybe this kind of story is not the right metaphor for sophisticated Hogtown. I mean, are we the kind of city that would turn our city over to Canada’s new government (Harpspeak for Canada governed by Harper) for a G8 photo op, exile our surprisingly good baseball team off to Philadelphia for the event, hold an embarrassing rollout of all the new techno toys our police have purchased for the task, hold parades of various animals (dogs, horses and ferrets) being press-ganged into security service, remove the picnic tables and benches (barricade materials) from our public parks, cancel train service into the city during the event, and spend a billion dollars of our country’s money in the process? Would we do that? Hmm, maybe we’d better listen to that Granja song again. Let’s hope we'll see Los Tigres at the Grey Cup half-time show this year. It would be a big improvement over the submoronic nonsense usually on display there.

More in subsequent post about the interesting connection to Ry Cooder and The Chieftans in the making of the San Patricio album.