For once I was attending a show fitting my age, even better, I was among the youngest people attending the show and it doesn’t happen this often. I got a chance to see the Mavericks at the Fonda on Wednesday, and despite the last minute offer, I decided to go… I only vaguely knew them but I did remember about one of their songs, ’Dance the Night Away’, a super sunny dance-y tune bringing lots of joyous rhythms in your entire body.
In the theater, I was surrounded by die-hard fans of a certain age, and in particular, a somewhat loud family was standing next to me; they were from the valley but ‘Texans at heart’ as they said, and the patriarch, who was wearing a full cowboy outfit, kept telling me that I could not stand where I was, ‘I don’t want to be rude but my daughter is coming’ he said to me for the second time… oh come on, how big is your daughter if she can’t fit in the space between me and the pit? Does she have the size of Texas? I don’t want to reinforce stereotypes about people ‘Texans at heart’ but this guy was really working at it. Was I still in LA? It was such a quite vibe from the usual crowd I usually see, but never mind, the Texans didn’t spoil my evening at all, and the Mavericks brought the crowd to their knees, as they kept playing song after song, after two encores but no request… ‘I am turning 50 this year’, laughed lead singer Raul Malo, ‘I don’t take requests anymore!’
Seriously, these guys are true showmen and had a wonderful energy all night long, bringing their fusion music to the Fonda, playing a 28-songs-2-and-half-hour-long concert! Toward the end, it looks like they didn’t want to leave and nobody wanted them to leave. By the way, the Texans disappeared after 10-11 songs and I have never seen the size of the daughter, so I don’t know what was the deal with these people, but let’s go back to the Mavericks. The band is back with a second album ‘Mono’ following a 10-year hiatus, they have started a huge tour and I realized Iman just saw them, a month ago in New York. This is how he started his review:
‘Half way through the second encore, The Mavericks reached the apotheosis of the evening and of their career: in 2015, with their second album since they reformed just released (by Big Machine Records, no less) on Tuesday, they stepped back just two years for “Come Unto Me” and leader and lead singer Raul Malo took his band to a place where Latin American rhythms and guitars met rockabilly but only as an ingredient of the song. It had the sax and trumpet like an unconscious echo of the ghost of Tito Puentes, Raul’s accented (which it isn’t always) vocal and lead guitarist Eddie Perez’s samba in place electric guitar, immersing the song in Tex-Mex, plus a terrific solo and the hook is all “yi-yi-yis” as the band explodes in one mini jam after another, it is but it isn’t all form. It exists precisely in the place south of the border, down Mexico way, where some young girl is whispering Manaya in a Gringos ear.’
On Wednesday night, they were equally good, they played a hell of a show with many songs off their new album, starting with the infectious ‘All Night Long’, that 88.5KSCN, which was sponsoring the show, plays regularly on its airwaves. Despite the cowboy hat, the music was tainted of many sonic colors, impossible to pigeonhole in a word, jumping from one style to another at each song. Sure, it’s not really country, but there were obvious Tex-Mex flavors, rockabilly, swing, honky-tonk and Latino-Cuban tempos, bringing memories of Mexican fiesta, retro country romance, with the ghosts of Jerry Lee Lewis or Roy Orbison. Orbison? Yes! Malo’s tenor voice has effectively this kind of force and effectiveness, an operatic howl mixed with a real sweetness which brings wonders during the most romantic songs and doesn’t reveal even a minor flaw during the whole night.
And there are the often present Mexican trumpets and sax blowing up fierce and colorful notes, the upright bass and bandoneon, each part of this full band contributing to this composite recipe, which kept mutating all night long. Of course, keyboardist Jerry Dale McFadden was the star of the show… dressed in a pink suit with color stripped socks, he was both Malo’s clown sidekick and keyboard virtuoso, often dancing like a pro all over the stage.
It’s difficult to pick a specific moment or some sort of apotheosis of the concert, because there were many, a few songs could have been this big show-ending, although the band kept playing. ‘We did Conan earlier, but this is better’ said Raul Malo, which brought more applause. The night continued with some rare touch of blues (‘The only question is’), more happy sides of Texas and joyful claps (‘There goes my Heart’), some heartfelt boogie (‘As long as There’s Lovin’ Tonight’), and more Roy-Orbison romance (‘I Should Have Been True’, ‘Foolish Heart’). Couples got closer at this point and it was plain valley girl night.
But sometimes the Mavericks give the impression they are trapped in a retro vibe, just like in the movie ‘Back to the Future’, when Michael J Fox plays some guitar distortion and says to the perplex crowd ‘your kids are gonna love this’. The Mavericks live during this time, sounding like a big swing band with a pinch of Tex-Mex spices (‘What You Do to Me’), or like an East LA Mexican polka band (‘Fall Apart’). But there are adventures, some real cinematic ones like the matador-Tarantino-western ‘Sinners & Saints’ or the almost Tom Petty-esque ‘What a crying Shame’.
The romance certainly didn’t slow down during the acoustic songs of the first encore ‘Let it Rain’, ‘Here comes the Rain’, and the uber classic ‘Besame Mucho’, ‘One that I wanted to do forever’, explained Malo. I thought it was over after their euphoric hit ‘Dance the Night Away’, but they came back again, with more Mexican fiesta (‘All Over Again’), the festive ‘Dance in the Moonlight’, which could work like a Byrne-Miss-America-precursor… And the more songs they played the more I was getting the impression I knew all these songs, and this was even truer with ‘Come Unto Me’ and ‘All You ever Do Is Bring Me Down’. The Mavericks could be anyone’s favorite party band, and play this role probably much better than my favorite Latino band (Los Lobos) could ever do, as they are more retro vintage in the best sense of the term. At the end, I couldn’t keep track of all the songs, and I didn’t even see the setlist,… which doesn’t seem to vary much from town to town during their ‘Mono Mundo’ tour. But who cares when it is this festive and diverse?
