Don’t Let Their Scary Masks Fool You | Los Straitjackets are as cuddly as a surf-rock band can be.
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LOS STRAIGHTJACKETS
w/ Big Sandy, The Igniters. July 24 (8pm). The Pawn Shop (10551-82 Ave, upstairs). Tickets: $20, available at the door or through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca)
Wearing costumes onstage is not a new phenomenon in music. From the demonic pseudo-drag of KISS to Gnarls Barkley’s airline uniforms and Austin Powers-wear, donning digs other than your own is a surefire way to separate yourself from your music and build a spectacle. But for Nashville’s Los Straitjackets, their onstage costumes are simply an expression of their love of lucha libre wrestling.
“I was at this lucha libre match 20 years ago,” says guitarist Danny Amis, “and there was someone selling the masks for about four bucks each, and I ended up buying a whole bag of them. A year later when we were trying to figure out a good way to present the band onstage, someone found the bag of masks just sitting in a corner of my house and that was that.”
Their colourful masks might be the bait, but their surf-influenced music is the hook. The instrumental rock group has developed a cult following since their first album, The Utterly Fantastic and Totally Unbelievable Sound of Los Straitjackets, was released 13 years ago. Last year, the group took a musical detour and released Rock en Español, an album of Mexican roll ’n’ roll songs, which were themselves covers of American rock tunes.
Having previously recorded two of these tracks with rockabilly vocalist Big Sandy, the group felt like an entire album of covers was long overdue. Although none of the members of Los Straitjackets is Mexican, they grew up listening to these songs and felt there was something about them worth sharing—even to listeners who don’t understand Spanish. “When you don’t know the language,” Amis explains, “you take the words out of the song and you concentrate more on the melody and the vocal styling. These songs are beautiful on their own, separated from their meanings.”
Not that the songs mean much, especially when English equivalents of some of the phrases just don’t exist. “Some of these versions have absolutely nothing to do with the originals,” Amis says. “For instance, ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie,’ which was a hit for Los Apson in Mexico, was translated into ‘El Microscopico Bikini,’ about a girl in a microscopic bikini. ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ became ‘La Plaga,’ which is literally ‘The Plague,’ about a dancing fever that has come over everyone. Miss Molly is nowhere to be found.”
A few of the songs from the album, plus others from Los Straitjackets’ back catalogue, will be featured in the upcoming animated film Los Campeones de la Lucha Libre, from the creators of the Cartoon Network series ¡Mucha Lucha! Contributing to the film—about a group of lucha libre wrestlers who moonlight as superheroes—was a no-brainer for the band. “When they called us over the phone,” Amis says, “we were really just waiting for them to stop talking and give us a chance to say yes. I can’t think of a more perfect fit for the band’s music.”
