As everybody knows, the counterculture revolution of peace, love, and rock n’ roll, can be said to have died, grimly and without shelter, on a racetrack outside of San Francisco on December 6, 1969. Perhaps less well known, is that some two years later, a parallel movement south of the border–dubbed La Onda (“The Wave”)–was still cresting. Coincidentally, this revolution too reached something of a climax beside a racetrack (in a place historically known as “San Francisco del Valle de Temascaltepec,” no less). However, the 1971 Avî¡ndaro Festival was no Altamont. The original idea had been to present a Rock y Ruedas (“Rock and Wheels”) showcase involving just a handful of rock acts as prelude to the main event: a weekend of auto racing. However, massive crowds of onderos descended on the site early, and more and more bands kept being added to bill as they arrived. In the end, the races had to be nixed altogether, making way for the Woodstock-sized audience and a full weekend of Mexican Rock. After preliminary concerts and sound-checks, things officially kicked off at dawn on Saturday with a mass Yoga session and a theatrical performance of the Who’s Tommy; it closed early on Sunday Morning with a performance by Three Souls in My Mind (aka “El Tri”) during which frontman îlex Lora famously told hundreds of thousands of onderos and jipitecas the following:

“In this festival, a lot has been said about peace and love, and those things are really cool–but that is not rock. To show that we’re concerned about things such as the Tenth of June [Corpus Christi Massacre six months prior, in which student demonstrators were gunned down by CIA-trained Mexican Special Forces], we’re going to play a song by the Stones called ‘Street Fighting Man’.”

Avî¡ndaro is important because it offered undeniable proof that, despite brutal government crackdowns, a big counterculture wave was still viable. The largely totalitarian Mexican government had been working determinedly to promote conservative values throughout the country; events like Rock y Ruedas were canny, bone-tossing consolations to Mexican youth growing hungrier for the more liberal and worldly culture embodied in rock music. Now here were these same supposedly drop-out kids organizing themselves on a massive, politically-alarming scale–how dare they? How dare bands with incongruous names like Los Dug Dug’s, Peace and Love, Tequila, and Los Soul Masters play their defiantly English-language rebel music to such large crowds?

It was a big deal. The Mexican Attorney General labeled the festival a “Witches’ Sabbath” and even the President condemned it. Witnessing the great muddy exodus of the festival’s aftermath, the government’s promise was No More Avî¡ndaros. And so it came to pass: further rock n’ roll events were banned (even Avî¡ndaro auto racing was suspended for fear of crowds). Through the mid- to late-70s, Mexican rock would be institutionally pushed as far into the dark as possible, further and further into so-called hoyos funquis (“funky dives”), improvised clubs and working class roadhouses on the outskirts of the cities.

It was on the eve of this Dark Age that, druid-like, a band called Toncho Pilatos mysteriously appeared. (Even if this isn’t quite a case of “no one knows who they were or what they were doing,” it does come close.) The best and most comprehensive study of the period in question, Eric Zolov’s Refried Elvis: the Rise of the Mexican Counterculture, mentions the band hardly at all, except to admit that they, somehow, weirdly, existed. Biographical details are scarce. We do know that they came out of the thriving Guadalajara scene that also produced seminal bands like La Revoluciî³n de Emiliano Zapata. We also know that “Toncho” refers to the band’s lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Alfonso “Toncho” Sanchez Guerrero, while “Pilatos” suggests a plural form of Pilate (as in “Poncio Pilato”). But compared to their better known contemporaries, Toncho Pilatos seem to have no definable back story or immediate musical lineage. Instead, the group seems to have arrived, fully-formed, at the dawn of Mexican Rock’s end of days (it would, alas, take until the Eighties for them to produce a second album). Indeed the band members appear on the cover of their self-titled debut as caped wizards, prophets, or Holy Mountaineers, rising from what might as well be the smoldering ashes of Avî¡ndaro.

Toncho Pilatos :: Kulkulkan



At the time, Mexican Rock was generally divided by those bands that aped or “refried” Anglo Rock and those that made of point of being distinctly Mexican in their approach. The path, really, was split by a choice between just how international a band should strive to be and how much national pride to weave into their sound. That said, both routes were definably modern, progressive, liberal in their electrified rock n’ roll ethos; either way, bands were seeking a Nuevo Mexico. What makes Toncho Pilatos strange and difficult to categorize is the fact that they didn’t just fuse the two paths–bands like La Revoluciî³n de Emiliano Zapata were already producing what might be called Mexican roots rock, and sounding rather like Creedence Clearwater Revivalists doing so. (And, obviously, by the early Seventies, you also had Santana’s latin-jazz-blues-rock amalgam to contend with.) Toncho Pilatos, on the other hand, seemed to be taking a long midnight detour through the country’s Mesoamerican heritage. Here, suddenly, was a rock band that was beating a trail not towards a Mexican Age of Aquarius, but back-back-back, through an old, pre-Colombian Mexico of shadows, myths, and dreams.

If all this seems to lack the political edge of La Onda or Avî¡ndaro, you only need hear the funky, punked-up abandon with which Tonchos Pilatos wrestle with the ghosts of their ancestors.

Toncho Pilatos :: Dejenla en paz (Let Her Be)

But let’s also consider the following: centuries before, Spanish colonialization had attempted to eliminate as much of Native American religious culture as possible; in the face of this oppression, however, there appeared in Mexico a new, defiant form of ritual dance, called the conchero, which simply absorbed Christian motifs into indigenous rituals. To this day, concheros are still performed at sacred sites around the country, in various forms and under various names–aztecas, chichimecas, and huehuenches. Distinct in their costumes and instrumentation, what links all of these ceremonial dances together is their uniform, marching-band movements, their trance-like repetitions, and their rumbling, polyrhythmic drums.

Now, with that background in mind, listen to the way that cultural critic Carlos Monsivî¡is’ remembers his first encounter with this most enigmatic of Mexican rock bands:

“The new group from Guadalajara goes by the name of Toncho Pilatos. What makes them special is the band’s leader and singer. He has strong cheekbones, copper skin, a prodigious head of hair that accentuates his Comanche or Sioux looks. By the second song, Toncho Pilatos has already defined its style and its purpose: to create Huehuenche rock using Indian elements and fusing them with heavy metal [sic: this was ‘71/‘72, obviously, when heavy metal just meant heavy]…[W]ith his set of maracas he weds his desire to be Mick Jagger with being the patriarch of all the shell dancers in the Basilica of Guadalupe, so that the violence of rock is calmed by the monotony, the trembling repetition of the Indian dancer.” (“Dancing: The Funky Dive,” from Mexican Postcards, 1997)

And that’s exactly it in a nutshell (or conch shell). You hear it from the very moment the Toncho Pilatos LP begins: no standard rock n’ roll posturing, no guiding the listener carefully into the remote past, no tourist trinkets or cheesy exotica. The opening track, “Espera (Wait)”, simply kicks off on an incessant rumble of drums pitched somewhere between Krautrock and Fela Kuti. A tambourine shakes as if conjuring spirits. Meanwhile, a fat, noodly bass begins swirling around, speaking in funky tongues. The electric organ and guitar chime in warmly, loosely, not so much on the beat as a heat rising off it. And then there is that voice: hollering, hooting, sermonizing, right at the edge of a cliff. Monsivî¡is’ draws a comparison to Jagger (by which he can only mean the slurring Jagger of Exile on Main Street and, in particular, the ghostly gospel meeting of something like “I Just Want to See His Face”), but one is especially reminded here of Can’s Damo Suzuki. Stoned and incantatory, it’s a voice that seems oftentimes to be emanating from a shitty PA system, rigged to spread the news throughout the countryside. If one could be forgiven for not discerning that these are English lyrics (“I’ll wait for the sunshine/ Wait, Wait”) there’s still no mistaking the shamanistic sincerity.

By the second track, “Kukulkan,” we’re already offering blood sacrifices to plumed serpent deities with an almost scary groovability. What begins as a quiet little bit of strummy guitar and haunting flute, suddenly gets swept aside by a chunky riff, mariachi violins, and even more fiery drumming. Sure it’s indebted to the progginess of bands like Magma (who set their music in distant galaxies of made-up languages) but this is a sound just as much of the sweaty backroom of a funky dive. Once again, the really terrifying thing is Guerrero’s powerful vocal, which this time brings to mind John Lennon’s aim to channel “a hundred chanting Tibetan monks” on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Indeed, halfway through the song, the whole band freezes, and begins whispering in unison: “Dios Kukulkî¡n a ti te ofrendamos/ el sacrificio de un ser humano/con sangre del corazî³n te baî±aremos.”

A similar thing happens on one of the disorienting count-ins ever, on a track called “Tommy Lyz”. Opening the song is a call-response that sounds more like the recitation of a secret code than a time signature–“uno-dos, uno-dos-uno, dos-uno, dos-dos-dos, uno-dos–uno, dos-uno, dos-uno…alto, alto, alto”. The music that follows is not “Wooly Bully” but a battle march from the Court of the Aztec King. Then, unnervingly, a sleezy, Sabbath-y guitar figure upsets everything. Then there’s some surprisingly cheery whistling-past-the-graveyard, some inebriated organ and some even more incapacitated singing about the titular Tommy. ..then (what’s this?) some loopy jazz-rock…before the band apply the brakes again and start chanting, shaking maracas, leading innocent rock anthropologists further and further afield.

Throughout the album we’re forever being dizzily led astray, swept up in some kind of secret ceremony. Grooves that lesser bands would simply ride out for the song’s duration continually start and stop as if leaving cues for dancers to re-assemble. That anti-pop, sub-tribal “monotony and trembling repetition” that Monsivî¡is notes is everywhere interwoven into the fabric of Toncho Pilatos sound. A motif repeats and repeats, circling round itself in a mad dervish before it halts abruptly, leaving just an airy space. Like Mariachi songs which repeat-repeat-repeat before switching time signatures and again repeat-repeat-repeat, Toncho Pilatos’s ‘La Ultima Danza” is a fifteen minute rite in which all the dancers are ghosts. There is the sound of the cantina, of the jarabe, of countless concheros, of Avî¡ndero jipitecas, of every Mexican kid alone in his room finding his first chords after hearing his first Black Sabbath or Jethro Tull record. There is nothing intellectual about it. It is even brilliantly dumb at times. At times it hardly moves, inching the song forwards with mincing little steps around the Mexican hat. Almost every instrument takes a solo (guitar, piano, drums, even a cunnilgual harmonica) before doubling back to some version of the main theme. It repeats and repeats, working over different iterations of the same dance steps over and over again. All these echoes, calls that are met not with responses but repititions of the same call: No los juzgues! Es una herencia mal interpretada (“Do not judge! It is a misinterpreted inheritance”) At the halfway point the whole thing seems to have run its course, is out of steam, is hanging on the precipice of a big crescendo that doesn’t let up for bar after bar after bar, and then: Guerrero and the electric guitar squeal out one of those Plant/Page duets, but Houses of the Holy funky, stoking the fire for whoever dares sit close enough. There are still plenty more ghosts to conjure. words / dk o’hara