Los Straitjackets
Damas y Caballeros!

A blonde with big blue eyes, pigtails, and a bikini, on the beach. She accidentally loses the bottom piece of her bikini. It ends up in the hands of her clumsy friend she’s talking to after his attempt to help her by removing a pin from there. It's a scene from the film Psycho Beach Party, filtered with acid colors and vertigo designs, projected onto the background of a stage in a completely dark club in Alessandria (in first period Pink Floyd style) where people are playing in undertaker outfits, wearing Mexican wrestling masks, making instrumental rock with a calculated abuse of tremolo and doing strange dances while playing. Surf music, rockabilly, garage, sullivan rock, arcibald and braccobald rock mixed together. This stuff was simply defined as surf rock on the poster at the entrance of the club. It’s the memory of the first time I heard Los Straitjackets. This was a little less than a decade ago, a period when I evidently still had somewhat confused ideas about the pleasures of life, considering the Cuba Libre I see in my hand and the mustache I feel under my nose in that memory.

The two guitarists and the bassist were playing aesthetically horrible instruments, brand “Di Pinto” (who knows), probably a mandatory choice for those who have made the variation of sound tuning their reason for living. They looked like wings stripped from roller coasters where they had put the strings, with a color combination (silver with an orange pickguard) that should be illegal in any country that cares about the well-being of its inhabitants. But even though the aesthetics of the instruments were terrible, they were functional to the staging devised by the band to make their surf rock even more psychedelic. I remember the feeling of alienation, of finding myself at something similar to a 60s horror party. Taking trips with the pitcher in Alessandria (in Alessandria!), without nudging, is truly a strange experience. Normally, it would be as easy as proving insightful while a beautiful woman is trying to suck your soul out of your body through the dick.

These Straitjackets, when they said some nonsense between one song and another, did it in Spanish. “They must be Mexican,” a friend tells me. “Why not Spanish?” I say. And he explained this thing about the masks. In reality, they are people from Nashville, and probably in their lives, more Mexico has happened in their heads and, perhaps, in their veins, than under their feet.

Well, how can you not understand them, I think that any male human being who doesn't shave and who isn't Mexican, desires to own something Mexican: a god, mushrooms in the garden, debts, a lover, the toads near the mushrooms in the garden, a kiosk on the beach, a name… a name like Ramon for example. Useful. There are things that it’s not possible to say explicitly but it's appropriate to communicate, like “I have something incredible in my pants!”, but if you carry that name, then you manage simply by introducing yourself: “pleasure, Ramon!”, nothing else needs to be said.

In sum, with the good feelings that evening left me, I went to look for something by Los Straitjackets. I wanted a live album. I chose “Damas y Caballeros!”, the first live album published by the band. I propose it to you if you are interested in the genre because it is a good primer of their early production in my opinion. The performances are quite faithful to the studio versions, with that bit of dirtiness and aggression in the sound characteristic of live performances which I like so much, and I would also say that it includes the best pieces of the repertoire from that period (I leave a version of Tempest, not from the album because I didn't find it on YouTube, and Tailspin). Almost all original stuff. Their offer is what I described quickly at the beginning. Surf music/rockabilly/instrumental garage. Songs that all revolve around well-defined riffs with B movie horror atmospheres (in The Munsters theme style). A nice solid rhythm section, few virtuosos, fireworks left to the two guitarists, not bad solos. The album also has a handful of covers among which I point out a classic of surf music, Sleepwalk. To be honest, removed from a live context experienced firsthand and without the visual aspect of the performance, their music loses quite a bit of charm. Personally, it has the effect of ska: the first three pieces wow, then it tires.

But live they are really worth it for me.