The Long and Winding Road : Four Offbeat Unknowns With Day Jobs Pursue the L.A. Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy

ON A SWELTERING night inside a darkened little club in Fresno last August, Rogelio Fojo--”El Fojo,” as he prefers to be known onstage--knelt before 100 people, frantically twisted the pegs of his silver Fender Stratocaster and felt his life passing. If the traveling salesman’s worst nightmare is locking himself out of his car, this was the guitarist’s. In the middle of his band’s opening song, after a year and a half of lowly gigs with crowds the size of Thanksgiving dinners, Fojo’s guitar strings had suddenly come out of tune. Panicked, he simply could not restore their proper tension. The harder he tried, the further out of tune they got.

No! Not now! After spending half of his 32 years nuzzling guitars as though they were extensions of his soul, after coming to Los Angeles from Uruguay with his boyhood pal to re-create the band they’d invented as teen-agers, after hooking up with a pair of Americans to play a hybrid music called rock en espanol --after all this, El Fojo’s very existence was unraveling. On his new band’s first road trip. On his first club date in front of a real crowd. He had to get his guitar back in tune!

The audience’s restlessness in the quiet seconds pressed upon him like a 1,000-pound rock. The stage lights were making him sweat. He put down the Strat, threw off his black leather jacket, his black Pink Floyd cap and his sunglasses, picked up the guitar and feverishly tested each string once again. Ahora , dammit! Now!

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A BAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF. This is a story about a band that opens for bands you’ve never heard of. This is a story about the trench of infancy where most rock bands die, where a few master their art well enough to survive and fewer climb out to succeed. Where you lug your own equipment, pay promoters to put you on the bill, cringe when clubs misspell your band’s name in their L.A. Weekly ads and abandon your home studio when your neighbor calls the cops.

This is also a story about Los Angeles, because where else could Rogelio Fojo and Robert Colucci, the self-styled Lennon and McCartney of Montevideo, stumble into Evan Richards, an Anglo hard-rock drummer from the suburbs? Or Gloria Dawson, a black singer raised in the soul-music tradition of old South Los Angeles who hung out with Latino kids who populate the new South Los Angeles, enabling her to sing the surreal Spanish lyrics that Fojo and Colucci write? Or Fred Kharrazi, a sweat-the-details Iranian immigrant who signed on as unpaid manager and sound engineer at age 22? Where else, too, could a band leap back and forth over a Berlin Wall of musical tastes, shifting between the Anglo rock clubs in Hollywood and Latin music festivals downtown, desperate to grab whatever opportunity the record business might float down either track?

This is a story, finally, about what happens when you decide that instead of spending the rest of your life as a teacher or a secretary or deliveryman, you’d rather roll the dice and find out if you can make a living by living out your fantasy. Not merely the fantasies of fame or wealth but the fantasy in which you pull from your gut or your throat or your guitar the notes that you invented.

The band is called Los Reos. Its four members performed 24 times in 1991. They grossed $250.

THEY HAD COME TO FRESNO BECAUSE ELENA RODRIGO, THE DJ ON A BILINGUAL music show on Fresno’s public-radio station, liked their three-song demo cassette. Rodrigo is a fan of the burgeoning Spanish-language rock movement, part of an astonishingly diverse Latin-music scene whose pop, salsa and more traditional ranchera groups routinely draw large crowds. Intrigued by the demo’s contradictions--melodic yet forceful and edgy, the singer’s dramatic wails demanding attention--Rodrigo put it on the air. Now, promoting a concert by a hot rock en espanol band from Tijuana, she’d offered Los Reos second billing. She’d pay for transportation, three $25-a-night motel rooms and $100 worth of meals.

They didn’t have to think twice.

With manager Kharrazi at the wheel on two hours’ sleep and a Led Zeppelin tape blaring, the rented Dodge van, crammed with drums, amps and guitars, lumbered up Interstate 5 in the fierce heat of a summer morning.

“Spinal Tap” jokes filled the van. Fojo and drummer Richards had recently seen a tape of the movie, a 1984 parody of an aging British rock band so pretentious that it once outfitted a stage with models of the prehistoric monoliths at Stonehenge. Dawson catnapped. Colucci, the honey-voiced backup singer and bass player, a moody man far less confident of his English than Fojo, sat silently in the front seat.

“Fred! Did you bring the Stonehenge pieces?” shouted Richards, blond, lanky and fresh-faced, from the third row of seats.

“Everybody is calling the radio station about the show,” Kharrazi called back. “So by now they’ve probably sold 20 tickets.”

“We have never played before 20 people before,” the bearded Fojo joked in deadpan, heavily accented English. It was funny only because it was so close to the truth. “I will be so happy to see people sleeping outside the club.”

They were nobodies, with no reason to quit their day jobs and no evidence it would ever be different. Fojo taught Spanish off and on. Colucci, 32, did movie dubbing in Spanish. Dawson, also 32, was a part-time legal secretary. Twenty-one-year-old Richards worked in a movie-studio mail room and lived with his parents. Kharrazi was a gofer at a music-business management agency. Outside of rehearsals and gigs, they lived their lives separately, strewn around the city from Echo Park to the Valley. Yet a bond had formed. Each time they took the stage, they would dress in black and struggle as one.

“To me,” Dawson mused as Fresno neared, “all of us coming together is the weirdest thing in the world. We’re so different. Evolution couldn’t have figured this one out.”

ROGELIO FOJO WAS NOT PERMITTED TO ENTER THE GROUNDS OF HIS MONTEvideo preparatory college on the first day of school in 1975 because his hair fell over his shirt collar. One other longhaired boy was also held out for one day. That was how Rogelio met Robert Colucci. They were 16.

A few months later, Fojo discovered the Beatles. “A Hard Day’s Night” was on television. Uruguay was two years into a 12-year military dictatorship, a nightmare in a small, pastoral country. But now Fojo was liberated.

“I went crazy,” he says, laughing. He ran to school the next day to jabber with his classmates about the incredible music, but no one had seen the movie--except Colucci. They decided to do what so many American kids, confronted by the same sound, did a decade earlier. Start a band. They didn’t know how to play, they didn’t have instruments. It didn’t matter. They practiced with guitars borrowed from guys in the neighborhood, singing British rock songs phonetically, understanding none of the English phrases they were imitating. They quit school, got part-time jobs, spent the money on records, disappointed their parents.

In six months they played their first gig, a dance in a room with a floor-level stage, still using borrowed instruments that another band had to tune for them. “In that moment we were convinced we were the next Beatles. No doubt,” Colucci says. The first song they played was Lennon and McCartney’s “From Me to You.” One guitarist ended in a major chord, the other in a minor chord. It didn’t matter. Other band members came and went, but Fojo and Colucci stayed on, Fojo on lead guitar, Colucci on bass. With them it was never a hobby. They wanted to write songs, but there was no market: The only rock on the radio was cover versions of American and British songs.

Gradually, they moved into Montevideo clubs, performing as Los Reos--roughly translated, “prisoners with no chance of release.” It was an ill-advised name in a country whose armed forces and police were kidnaping and murdering hundreds of people each year, but audacity, rather than protest, was what they were after.

Los Reos played festivals and received good newspaper reviews. But the kind of songs Fojo and Colucci were writing--surreal, dramatic, electric guitar-dominated anthems rooted more deeply in Pink Floyd and Queen than a South American sensibility--did not fit. They could not stand it. Yearning to rock free, they split.

Fojo came to Los Angeles in 1984 on a journalist’s visa, followed a year later by his wife, Alicia. He wrote free-lance pieces and taught Spanish for Berlitz Language Centers and struggled to learn English. Colucci came soon after, but returned to Uruguay, homesick. He vowed to return, stockpiling money by playing salsa.

Fojo, who had sold all his musical equipment to finance his trip, found his first American guitar, a cheap acoustic model, in a trash can near his downtown apartment a few months after his arrival. He resumed composing. He began filling journals with microscopic details of day-to-day practice assignments, lyrics, music, sketches--page after page of Los Reos logos, drawn in scores of styles. He wrote a song, “Robert,” describing how he missed his pal: “ Me siento solo, escribiendo canciones que no encuentran tu voz “: “I feel alone, writing songs that will not meet your voice.”

By 1988, Robert arrived here for good, with his wife, Mary. Alicia, working as a teacher’s assistant at an elementary school, described the band to another TA, who told her boyfriend, who told his brother, and that was how Fojo met Evan Richards. Richards had been banging on a drum kit since he was 9, but the teen-agers he was playing with were no better than garage-band musicians. He was eager to move up.

He drove out to Los Alamitos for an audition in the garage of one of Fojo’s Berlitz students, a man who’d been so intrigued by the music that he’d given Fojo $250 to finance the purchase of an electric guitar. The stop-and-start Latin textures of Fojo and Colucci’s sound were alien to Richards, but he dug these guys. They were older, and serious. He felt challenged. He tried to answer back by applying his straight-ahead rock beat to their elliptical, more esoteric melodies. They liked it. They sounded more powerful. He was on board.

They found their singer just as randomly. Gloria Dawson, college-educated and ambitious, was taking Berlitz classes to improve the Spanish she spoke to law clients. One day she mentioned to her instructor that she’d sung with a couple of bands. Fojo’s eyes widened. He began pumping her with questions. He told her his story, played some tapes he’d made and visited a studio where she was working as a background singer. Eventually he asked if she’d sing with the band. Dawson was enticed. Singing in Spanish would be a different trip, but music was in some ways her lifeline, and she trusted her instincts.

She had grown up heavy and bookish in a tough neighborhood around 57th Street and Avalon Boulevard. It was only through her soaring voice in the Jefferson High chorus, she felt, that she’d gained respect and popularity for the first time. But she was past 30 now, and if she was going to make it in music, it had to be soon.

FOUR NIGHTS A WEEK THEY MET AT RICHARDS’ GARAGE BEHIND HIS PARENTS’ Studio City home and practiced and dreamed. A basic set of fewer than a dozen songs, over and over. They had a lot to learn. Richards found himself using muscles he never needed playing hard rock. Dawson found she had to breathe differently singing in Spanish and scaled back her hours at work, taking cuts in benefits, to make time for the band. Richards and Fojo took private lessons from studio musicians to bolster their skills.

Their stage presence was weak, and you couldn’t dance to what they played, but their sound, when they got it right, was a distinct collage. There were traces of South American rhythms, the exclamation marks of guitar feedback, the intellectual complexities of mid-’70s British “progressive” rock. Thundering atop the sound was a singer whose swaying and stomping were anchored in soul and gospel but whose Spanish intonations were so keen that she liked to joke, “Yo soy blacksican.” Fojo, Colucci and Richards were a power trio of guitar, bass and drums that alternated between dramatic sweeps of dissonance and more languid moods. Lyrically, the music was stuffed with insinuations, symbolism and weirdness. “Nunca Llueve Sobre Mojado” (“It Never Rains in Mojado”), for example, told the story of a woman writer who creates an arid land called Mojado at her typewriter. Out of pity, she inserts herself into that world and seeds the clouds, which produces massive rains, which cause marijuana to grow, which drives the villagers bonkers. Another song, “Bacanal de Panama,” described an invasion from Mars circa 2000.

The best thing about this music was that it didn’t fit any category. The worst thing about it was that it didn’t fit any category. While rock en espanol is an old amalgam, it is often reserved for cult bands. Billboard magazine charts Spanish-language music under three headings--Pop, Regional Mexican and Tropical/Salsa--but this unsigned band had too much rock and too little Latin for any of them. Much of the music would fit on American rock radio, but the Spanish lyrics wouldn’t.

Los Reos played their first gig late in 1989 in a room so small that only the band fit. It was in a classroom at the Berlitz office in Torrance, where Fojo’s boss invited him to perform at a daytime open house. Interested passers-by could stick their heads in. Language instruction continued in adjacent classrooms.

A few months later, they went looking for club dates. “We had no idea how was the thing to get gigs,” Fojo said. “We started on Sunset, stopping everywhere we saw a club. We didn’t even have a picture of the band.”

They stopped at a place on Hollywood Boulevard across from Mann’s Chinese Theater called Hollywood Live, a collection of clubs that happened to be trying to book its dumpiest venue. The promoter startled the band by offering a once-a-week job. The room he showed them was small, with a low ceiling and horrid acoustics.

Rogelio Fojo thought about this. He had spent much of his life resolutely fantasizing about Los Reos, the way a high-jumper grows obsessed with the inner vision of clearing the bar at eight feet. In the process, it seemed to Dawson, he had become a control freak, a man whose devotion to the band could be maddening, if charming. He had, at various moments, advised her to lose weight and to avoid fraternizing with fans after performances. She and the others usually rolled their eyes and forgave Fojo these pretensions because he was so talented and cared so much, and because he was fun, able to wisecrack more adroitly in his second language than many people could in their first. And now Fojo was sure that Hollywood Live, for all its flaws, was the perfect next step in his unfolding vision.

“We need a place to make mistakes,” he said.

They played there every Thursday for nine weeks, into the middle of 1990.

Toward the end of that stint, with no further prospects in sight, Fojo drew a pyramid in one of his journals and divided it into 12 stages of progress: formation of the group, debut, rehearsing, recording, television, playing Los Angeles’ Anglo clubs, playing America, playing Latin America, playing the world. He drew a circle atop the pyramid, a final stage, and wrote inside it: The Beatles. He would put a check next to each stage as it occurred.

Los Reos got their first review a month later, one paragraph in a Spanish-language entertainment paper: “ Los Reos--Excelentes musicos. Su estilo va mas hacia el rock clasico como Pink Floyd, Rush. . . “ (“Excellent musicians, in the classic style of Pink Floyd. . . “).

A slow swirl of progress--slow because they could get bookings only twice or so a month--began.

They talked their way onto a county-sponsored weekend music festival at Belvedere Park in East Los Angeles. One of their appearances at Hollywood Live was reviewed in depth by another Spanish-language newspaper. BAM, a popular English-language rock publication, reviewed the band’s demo in its Demo Derby and concluded: “Considering the success David Byrne has had in bringing Latin and Brazilian sound to an American audience, this band may ride the wave.” They grew more confident.

Then law and order struck.

Richards’ neighbors complained about the rehearsal noise coming from his garage. The LAPD’s decibel cops--a small squad that responds to sonic evils such as garage bands and pre-dawn trash trucks--came calling. Los Reos were forced to scale back practice to twice a week, and to pay for it: 20 bucks per member each week to rent space at a studio in Hollywood.

That hurt because in today’s club scene a young band’s time and money are precious. Business means as much as music. To get on a stage, talent alone doesn’t cut it.

Once assured of ample audiences in the days when free-spending record companies had unlimited bar tabs all over town, clubs now demand that bands guarantee a head count. If your band doesn’t have a track record that guarantees 50 or 60 customers, it can often get on the bill only by buying those tickets itself and pre-selling them. It’s an odious burden that forces groups such as Los Reos--already performing for nothing--to develop mailing lists, canvass local hangouts with tickets, fliers and business cards and beg their friends for support.

They did what any hungry band would do. They paid to play. That was how Los Reos crossed over into the mainstream club scene late in 1990, as opening act at the Whiskey and the Roxy, where Spanish is usually heard only in the kitchen.

Then, one day last April, they were validated. The Los Angeles Times published a glowing four-paragraph review of the band’s set at Madame Wong’s West in West Los Angeles, which had drawn perhaps a dozen people. “Curious and eclectic,” Ruben Martinez wrote about the music. “Well-penned, whimsical . . . magical,” he called the lyrics. This was a gift from God, a gift you could wave in the face of any promoter. “This,” says Richards, whose most notable public performance before Los Reos had been a lunchtime rock gig at North Hollywood High, “was my reward. It was a sign we were definitely on the right track.”

The review helped them escape the pay-to-play syndrome. They played a series of club dates in Hollywood, the West Side and the San Fernando Valley. They were usually the first act, on at 8:30 or 9, when members of other bands on the bill usually outnumbered the spectators. They made their only money of the year, $250, playing the Belvedere Park festival for the second year. They were the only band in the city moving between one world where bands call themselves Drunken Pond Scum and another where they call themselves Los Matlachines.

Soon Fred Kharrazi fell into the band’s life. Kharrazi’s well-to-do family had come to Encino from Iran via London in the mid-’70s, anticipating Iran’s Islamic revolution, but he grew up a Valley kid and a smooth talker. One day in a doctor’s office, he was trying to pick up the receptionist. He told her he was a rock ‘n’ roll sound engineer. In truth, he was taking some classes. The receptionist knew somebody who knew the band, which was looking for someone to run the sound-mixing systems at their club dates. Kharrazi quickly became the band’s manager, although the musicians continued to book the shows. They had gigs lined up at two outdoor Latino festivals, including KMEX-Channel 34’s annual all-day show at the Coliseum.

But first, Fresno loomed.

ON THE 23RD OF AUGUST, KHARRAZI DROVE THE VAN TO THE MOTEL. THEY checked in, walked across the street to a pie place for lunch and were coming back, planning on a couple hours’ rest before going to the club for a sound check, when they walked into the damnedest thing.

It was a telephone pole.

With a green poster on it.

Advertising them, along with the night’s lead act, a band from Tijuana called No.

It was as though Jesse Jackson had stepped from behind the telephone pole and delivered a sermon. They were somebody.

Driving to the club, called Wild Blue, in Fresno’s gentrified Tower District, they saw dozens more posters. Lacking a map, Kharrazi got lost. Finally, he found the club: 300 seats, black upholstery, small white Formica tables, big speakers hanging from the ceiling, an elaborate poster on the window proclaiming: “Rock Latino.”

“It’s nice!” Kharrazi exclaimed with surprise.

They dragged in their guitars and amps and Richards’ eight-piece drum kit. They rushed through the sound check because No, which sounds the way Sting would if he’d been born in Mexico, ate up 90 minutes testing its equipment.

“You want reverb, Gloria?” Kharrazi shouted. “It’s pretty dead in here.”

Richards tightened the knobs that would hold his drums steady inside a huge metal frame. Fojo walked over.

“You got it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Richards said. They exchanged a three-position soul handshake and banged fists.

Now they’d have to rush back to the motel, change clothes and rush back--no time for dinner--to make the show on time. On the way back to the motel they quarreled over meal money. They were simultaneously weary and excited. Kharrazi dropped them off at their rooms and told them to be ready in half an hour. Fojo and Colucci were 10 minutes late. Kharrazi waited, furiously, belittling Fojo as a prima donna.

“Do you have an ulcer?” Dawson joked, trying to kill the tension.

“No, but I will after this road trip,” Kharrazi said grimly.

They were seven minutes late to the club, but scrambled and made the stage at 9:30, launching into their standard 40-minute, 10-song set. The 100 people who faced them were four times as many as they’d ever played before indoors. There was another difference. This audience, virtually all Latinos, was sitting in rapt attention.

The sound sparkled. The music that Fojo and Colucci conceptualized so long ago roared from the amps. The drums exploded. Dawson’s voice arced perfectly. This was what they had waited so long to feel.

And then, at a dramatic break of silence in the first song, El Fojo’s guitar came out of tune, and he realized he was dead: If he didn’t retune, he’d sound horrible. If he did, he’d turn a three-second pause into an eternity, and the audience, on the verge of seduction, would be lost.

He chose to retune.

Perhaps 100 slow seconds passed, the rest of the band able to do nothing but watch, the crowd patiently silent. Finally, Fojo was satisfied. He hit a quick chord to make sure and breathed a relieved sigh into the mike. ‘ ‘Muy bien. “

They kicked back into the song, and when it ended with Fojo’s guitar solo the crowd responded, and it was real applause, not merely politeness. Los Reos knew they had survived, and they plunged ahead. The crowd’s attentiveness raised their adrenaline. Between songs Fojo and Dawson yelled for towels and wiped the sweat off their faces. The applause built after each song. This was new. Before, the only chances they’d had to cut loose with good acoustics had come in front of Anglo audiences, who missed all the words. They were very, very tight. Tonight it was all jelling.

The eighth song was “A Saber” (“Who Knows?”). At the opening notes, something happened that Los Reos had never experienced at the start of a song. People began clapping. They recognized it from Elena Rodrigo’s radio show.

“I felt like--how do I say this?--a lifting of the audience,” Fojo said the next day, still marveling at the moment. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but I felt something.”

As Dawson sang “A Saber,” she found that if she turned slightly away from the spotlight, she could see fans singing along. She would not stop beaming about that for a long time.

The song ended with shouts of appreciation from the crowd.

They played a version of “Nights in White Satin,” a pseudo-symphonic late-’60s hit by the Moody Blues. Fojo had never heard the original. In Uruguay, someone simply played the pretty melody for him on guitar. That was preserved. What was stripped away was the pretentious words. Fojo had written his own lyrics, a love song, and the result, punctuated by his shuddering guitar solo and climaxing with Dawson’s moans, was raw, unpredictable drama. Something was gained in the translation to Spanish.

They left the stage to wild applause and found themselves, exhausted and elated, in a dark hallway leading to a tiny dressing room. Fans followed, asking for autographs--another first.

Kharrazi and the three men spent the next hour packing equipment into the van. Onstage, No, a band of greater versatility than Los Reos, had the crowd dancing immediately. Dawson joined in. You want global? There in Fresno, a band from Tijuana was playing a Jamaican beat and singing about the problems of South Africa.

THEY ATE AT DENNY’S AT 2 IN the morning, woke up at 8 and headed back to Los Angeles. Some of the glow was wearing off. They wanted changes. Fojo, Colucci and Richards wanted to hire roadies to lug the equipment. Kharrazi wanted the others to be more punctual. They had to stay serious, focused. Things were breaking for them, they could feel it.

The next weekend they played early on the bill of a Latin music festival in MacArthur Park, and their sound, so powerful indoors, dissolved in the open air. During the rest of 1991, for all the magic of Fresno, they could not persuade a single record-company functionary to watch them play.

It would take more time, they decided. Ninety-two would be the year they were signed. They videotaped a club performance and studied themselves. Fojo coined a slogan--”The rock group that will make you bilingual overnight”--and added it to the fliers promoting their appearances in Anglo clubs. They talked about seeking out a deal with a distribution company: an advance of a few thousand dollars in exchange for the right to sell their album. They’d use the money to make a studio-quality demo. They’d take the demo to record companies.

Channel 34 booked them on its annual daylong Christmas telethon in early December. “They’re an incredible band,” said Alma Ayon, then the station’s talent coordinator. “I think they’re going to make it. They’re different.” It was their first appearance on live TV. Another checkmark on the pyramid to success. They came on at 2 p.m., an hour after the show started, and played two songs.

That night, Dawson called five friends she’d told about her upcoming TV appearance. None of them had watched the show.

In the first months of 1992, Ayon would pass along Los Reos’ name to a new Spanish-language record company that was looking for acts. And she would book them for the Fiesta Broadway on April 26, a sidewalk food-and-music extravaganza downtown that attracts nearly 1 million spectators.

But now, on this night in December, after each of her friends had apologized, telling her no, they hadn’t seen her band on television, Gloria Dawson cried herself to sleep.