Los Super 7
I Heard It on the X (Telarc)
ZZ Top's 1975 border-radio tribute, "I Heard It on the X," provides the perfect title for the third installment of the Tex-Mex collective Los Super 7. The song, like the album, toasts the renegade stations that, from 1931 to 1978, cranked out unvarnished versions of blues, country, gospel, R&B and Mexican conjunto and mariachi music from high-watt towers just beyond the regulatory reach of the U.S. feds.
Mexican stations XERA, XERF and XEG are a permanent part of American music lore mostly because they featured music deemed too raw or too ethnic for mainstream commercial stations. That the stations broke—or at least circumvented—U.S. law is part of their legend. They were outlaw stations playing neglected, but essential, music. By the '50s and especially into the '60s, they proved greatly influential on the emerging rock 'n' roll culture.
XERA was launched in 1931 by Dr. John Binkley, a radio station owner from Kansas who had lost his broadcasting and medical licenses for selling illegal potions, including an infamous impotence cure derived from goat-testicle glands. After being shut down, Binkley hired RCA engineers to build super-powered radio towers in Mexico's tiny Ciudad Acuna, just across the border from Del Rio, Texas. Binkley wanted a signal strong enough to reach Kansas; he ended up with a signal that could be tuned in as far away as Canada. On a clear night, all of North America could hear the station, and Binkley wound up a millionaire—at least until he became a Nazi sympathizer and had his stations seized in 1941.
Others took up where Binkley left off, and the border stations came to provide what seemed like a forbidden thrill. With a mix of fundamentalist preachers, folk artists and jive hipsters behind the mic—The Carter Family and deejay Wolfman Jack are the two most famous show hosts in border-radio history—the stations were a shared secret of music-loving teens and adults.
For Los Super 7, celebrating the rhythm-driven sounds of border radio is the next logical step on an illogical path. The band began in 1998 as a supergroup featuring David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos, members of the Texas Tornados, country singer Rick Trevino and roots-rocker Joe Ely, as well as Texas-based Mexican stars like Ruben Ramos and Joel Guzman. They presented a balance of rocked-up and romantic versions of Mexican tunes popular among American Latinos. The second album broadened out to cover Central and South American tunes, with several cast changes.
Only Ramos—who sings a growling version of the title song—and Trevino have been on all three albums. Ely, Freddy Fender, accordionist Flaco Jimenez and organist Augie Meyers return after sitting out album two, as does Mavericks singer Raul Malo, who missed album one. The new lineup adds several roots-rocking Texans—Delbert McClinton, Rodney Crowell, Gatemouth Brown and Lyle Lovett—and John Hiatt, whose exaggerated romp through the late Doug Sahm's "I'm Not That Kat (Anymore)" is one of the album's many highlights.
Despite the great vocal lineup, the key to the hardest-rocking Super 7 entry yet is the musicians and the arrangements. Pulled together by Nashville artist manager Dan Goodman and musicologist Rick Clark, who co-produced the album with Austin guitarist Charlie Sexton, the record works so well because of how the assembled band maintains the energy of the originals yet artfully adds clever twists to each song.
The concentration is on rollicking garage rock with a Latin-rhythm influence sprinkled with blues, R&B, country and several mariachi tunes. The band shifts members on each track: John Convertino and Joey Burns of Calexico form a core group, along with Sexton and Austin bluesman Denny Freeman on guitar. Giving the album its flavor, though, are Austin's West Side Horns, the band Mariachi de la Luz, and Doug Sahm's old rhythm section of organist Meyers, pianist Sauce Gonzales, bassist Jack Barber and drummer Ernie Durawa—all veterans who ably cross between Spanish and American popular music.
The variety stretches furthest when Lovett winks his way through the Western swinger "My Window Faces the South" and Malo lights up the jazzy "The Song of Everything," where the horn section burns like a fresh-picked habanero. Brown, who has terminal lung cancer, ends the album with an ominous version of Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," but by then the house has been rocked hard by Hiatt and others.
Amid two soulful Mexican folk songs by Trevino and Fender, Ely bops through a Buddy Holly-influenced version of the Bobby Fuller Four classic "Let Her Dance," while Crowell offers a jaunty take of Holly's "Learning the Game," with Jimenez providing the bounce on accordion. Meanwhile, McClinton nails Sunny & The Sunliners' Texas soul ballad "Talk to Me" and brings a menacing swagger to Mose Allison's "I Live the Life I Love."
I Heard It on the X doesn't try to encompass all that border radio offered American listeners. But it does capture the intoxicating jolt—at once sexual and spiritual—felt by those turned on by the underground sound of the time.
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