To Selena, With Love (3 page)

The first time I heard Selena sing, it never crossed my mind that I would ever play in her band—much less that she would one day become my beloved wife.

I was playing guitar in a Tejano band fronted by another young singer, Shelly Lares. Even though Selena lived in Corpus Christi, about two hours from San Antonio, she and Shelly had become friends, partly because there were so few women in Tejano music at that time. One day, Shelly asked me to listen to Selena’s new album,
Preciosa
, and tell her what I thought.

I looked at the album cover.
Great-looking girl
, I thought, studying her dark hair and warm brown eyes. I flipped the album over and saw a picture of the whole band, which included Selena’s sister, Suzette, on drums and her brother, A.B., on bass. The musicians were young and dressed hip for the times, especially for a Tejano group.

“They’re pretty cool looking,” I told Shelly.

“She was just nominated for the 1988 Tejano female vocalist of the year,” Shelly told me with a trace of envy. “Her brother was nominated for Tejano songwriter of the year.”

Listening to the album, I knew instantly why Selena y Los Dinos were rising to the top in the Tejano world. Selena’s voice was outstanding, and this group was adding unique sounds to traditional Tejano music.

Not that I was an expert. I was new to the Tejano world, and in fact I often felt like an imposter. I was a nineteen-year-old rock guitarist whose favorite groups included heavy metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard. My initial reaction when my high school friend Tony Lares first tried to convince me to join his cousin Shelly’s band was foot-dragging resistance.

Tejano music—a mix of traditional Mexican folk music, polkas, and country western sung in Spanish, sometimes with English lyrics mixed in—had been part of my childhood as a Mexican-American growing up in Texas, but it was the only kind of music that I seriously hated. When I was a little kid riding in the car with my grandmother, she’d put Tejano music on the radio and I’d be in the backseat covering my ears, shrieking, “Noooo!”

But Tony had caught me at a weak moment, and despite my dreams about running away to Los Angeles and starting a kick-ass rock band, I was sharing an apartment with my father and the only
work I could find was shelving books at the local library. Tony’s certainty that we could actually make money playing music—even if it was Tejano music at dances and weddings—convinced me to accept his offer.

Tony, Shelly, and the band schooled me in songs by Mazz, Laura Canales, David Lee Garza, La Mafia, and the Latin Breed—great Tejano groups that had emerged in the 1980s. When I first started playing with Shelly, I couldn’t tell the difference between one group and the other. After a few months, though, I got so familiar with the music that I could tell in about four seconds of hearing something who was playing it. Tejano groups all had their individual sounds, just like musicians in any other genre.

At that time, Tejano music was like this big wave building, and we were all on surfboards. We didn’t know just how big that wave was going to get, but we were all determined to ride it as far as we could.

The new musicians, especially those in Mazz and La Mafia, used powerful sound systems and staged their shows with flashy lights; they wore their hair long and dressed in spandex. Tejano music was transforming into something fresh; it certainly wasn’t the same tired sounds that I used to hear in my grandmother’s car. And Selena y Los Dinos were clearly unique. I knew as soon as I heard that album that they were pushing the envelope by fusing traditional Tejano music with rhythm and blues, Colombian cumbia, and pop.

As I listened to Selena y Los Dinos with Shelly, I read the credits on the album cover, shaking my head when I saw that Selena’s brother, A. B. Quintanilla III, had not only arranged and produced this album, but had also written a lot of the songs. Selena had a beautiful voice, sure, but it was A.B. who first impressed me. I had
become Shelly’s musical director by default when Tony left the band; A.B. was doing what I fantasized about doing someday as a producer and songwriter.

“Wow,” I told Shelly. “These guys are right in our backyard. I can’t believe I’ve never gone to hear them.”

“People are saying Selena y Los Dinos are going to sign a record deal with EMI Latin,” Shelly said. “Want to come see them at my house? I have a videotape.”

“Sure. Maybe we can cover some of their songs,” I said.

That night, my friend Rudy Martinez, who played bass with our band, drove over to Shelly’s house with me. We gathered around the television in the living room as Shelly inserted a tape into her VCR. The video was fuzzy—it had been shot with a camera on a tripod—but I could tell that Selena was already a showstopper. She had a cute figure, she could dance like no one else, and her voice was incredible. Even seeing Selena on this small screen, I felt her command of the stage. She had the audience standing up and dancing with her, and she worked the stage from one side to the other, exuding energy and charisma.

Even if I hadn’t noticed Selena’s looks myself, Rudy was determined to make me sit up and pay attention. Whenever he thought Shelly wasn’t looking, Rudy would nudge me in the side with his elbow while we were on the sofa watching the tape.

“Check it out,” he’d whisper.

“Yeah, I see her,” I said.

“Oh, man,” he said.

“I know,” I said. But I wasn’t really looking at Selena anymore. To me, she was just another entertainer. I was a lot more focused on watching the band and analyzing the instrumentals.

Afterward, Rudy and I drove home together. “Dude,” Rudy said. “Did you see that?”

“Yeah, I saw it,” I said, still deep in thought about the music. “Los Dinos sounded pretty good.”

He laughed. “No, dude. The chick in the video. She was smokin’
hot
, man.”

I laughed, too, never once imagining that, in only a few short months, I would be playing guitar in Selena’s band—or that I had just seen my future wife on a VHS tape.

That Selena looked and sounded so comfortable onstage was only natural since she had been performing since childhood. Her father, Abraham Quintanilla, was a second-generation Mexican-American with musical aspirations of his own. In the early 1960s, he had sung with a doo-wop band called Los Dinos. Abraham and his group managed to get one hit on a Corpus Christi pop radio station, but when they couldn’t break into the Top 40, Los Dinos turned to Tejano music and played in dance halls. Abraham eventually gave up music to support his wife, Marcella, and their children by working for the Dow Chemical Company in Lake Jackson, Texas.

The thing is, Abraham may have given up playing music, but he never stopped loving it. He may have been going to that chemical plant every day, but he still played his guitar at night after work. Selena would come and sit down to listen. By the time she was six years old, she was singing along—and Abraham recognized her talent immediately.

As a diversion for himself, mostly, Abraham decided to soundproof the garage and form a family band. He taught Selena’s older
brother, A.B., to play the bass guitar. Abraham drafted Suzette, Selena’s older sister, as the band’s drummer—a move that Suzette fought constantly at first, because she thought it was too weird for a band to have a girl drummer. Abraham stuck to his mission, though, and pretty soon the family band was rehearsing for at least half an hour a day in that garage.

This hobby still wasn’t enough to satisfy Abraham’s creative urges entirely. When a friend told him that the town of Lake Jackson needed a good Mexican restaurant, he leased a space and started to serve authentic Mexican food—accompanied by Selena singing while A.B. and Suzette played their instruments. A.B. and Suzette were already in high school by then and were still resistant to the idea of playing Tejano music, especially since many of the kids they knew from school ate at their father’s restaurant with their families. Selena didn’t care. She was still just a nine-year-old kid having fun.

Business went well enough at the restaurant that Abraham decided to quit his job at Dow. Then, when the recession hit, he lost everything. Abraham had no luck finding another job in Corpus, so he turned to the only thing he knew: music. He named the family’s band Selena y Los Dinos as an homage to his old band and took any paying gigs he could find between California and Florida: dance halls, ballrooms, skating rinks, VFW halls, you name it. Selena had to learn to sing in Spanish—which she didn’t even speak. A.B. played the bass guitar and starting writing and arranging the band’s songs. Suzette played drums and Abraham added in other musicians as needed.

Abraham supported the family partly by helping his younger brother Isaac run his trucking business. But, every weekend, he
would load his family into a beat-up van, hook up a trailer for the equipment, and hit the road, playing any kind of show that would have them. At first they barely covered their expenses.

Gradually they started getting more shows, and Abraham was able to buy a bus—a ’64 Eagle that the family dubbed “Big Bertha.” The bus was in rough shape and had no heating, air-conditioning, restroom, running water, or power steering. In winter months, Selena and her family slept near the motor to stay warm; in the summer it was almost unbearable.

But their hard work paid off. By 1984, when Selena was barely thirteen years old, she had already recorded her first album with Los Dinos on the Freddie label. Abraham was so intent on having his family make it in the music business that he put those goals before nearly everything else. He was focused on seeing Selena’s inevitable rise to stardom come to fruition.

By the time Selena was fifteen, she had appeared on the cover of
Tejano Entertainer
and was earning widespread notice as that genre’s youngest female vocalist. She had released a major hit single, “
Dame un Beso
,” written by A.B. and keyboardist Ricky Vela, followed in 1986 by another hit single, “A Million to One.”

Despite knowing only a minimal amount of Spanish, Selena not only sang in that language, but had appeared twice on one of the most popular shows on Spanish-language television, the
Johnny Canales Show
, and performed in front of thousands of people in Matamoros, the Mexican border city.

In 1987, the year before I met her, Selena was crowned Female Entertainer of the Year at the Tejano Music Awards, knocking the previous queen of the scene, Laura Canales, right off her throne. Her father’s instinct and drive had been on the mark—Selena y Los
Dinos had made six increasingly successful albums and she seemed unstoppable.

During that first year with Shelly Lares and her band, we did well. We were getting regular shows around San Antonio and we had even put out an album that featured three songs I cowrote with her. I was really getting into the game, going into the studio and recording with Shelly and acting as the band’s musical director.

Now that I’d heard Selena y Los Dinos, we started covering their music and I became a serious fan of theirs. As much as I admired Selena’s vocal abilities, however, I was still much more impressed by the stellar arrangements and production quality of Los Dinos, which I attributed to A.B. He was the band’s bass player, and he was a good one, but it’s no secret that the role of a bassist in almost any band is a supporting one; you have to lie down and hold the bottom end to give the other musicians the freedom to do what they do. A bass line has to be solid. It’s like building a house: you can have the prettiest house on the block, but if the foundation isn’t solid, the house will crack and fall.

Far more impressive than A.B.’s qualities as a musician were the intriguing ways he produced Selena y Los Dinos using the newest gear and most complex sounds I was hearing anywhere in Tejano music. I would hear one of their songs and say, “Oh, wow, what is that?”

For instance, A.B. was one of the first musicians to start incorporating the pop drum machine sounds that were being used by Top 40 English-language musicians like Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul at the time. I’d hear those sounds coming out of the speaker
while playing an album by Selena y Los Dinos and feel confused but intrigued. This was supposed to be Tejano music—and most of the other Tejano groups were sticking to the traditional folk sounds created by accordions and drums. Even if A.B. did decide to incorporate an accordion sound, he would do it with an electronic keyboard. He was also on the cutting edge when it came to sequencing and sampling the mix on an album.