In Search of Bobby Marin

On my last visit to New York, pre-Covid about six or seven years ago, my Man in Manhattan took me to his local thrift store on Columbus Avenue, where he has been buying records for next to nothing since the year dot. My own insatiable search for great music encompasses all formats, so I had the run of the CD shelves. Among the one-dollar delights I picked out was The Best Of Ocho on Universal Sound. I’d never heard of them, but the cover quoted Wire magazine’s description of “an 8-piece latin funk ensemble almost completely ignored by Salsa-ologists” and verdict that this was “a ludicrous record”. That was good enough for me.

Just how ludicrous was evident as soon as we got back to my friend’s apartment and played the opening track, “Undress My Mind”. The combination of band leader Chico Mendoza’s rippling vibes, Charlie Jones’s insistent chekere, Willie Torres and Jimmy Sabater’s beguiling vocals, the thunderstorm sound effects and the frisson of a hot, sultry night in the city worked its magic. This was something very special. According to musician and graphic designer Chico Alvarez’s liner notes, many of the United Artists team involved in its production believed it could have been a national crossover hit, but “for some unknown reason, UA chose not to release it as a single.”

One of the personnel very much involved with the putative single and the band’s four albums was co-writer and producer Bobby Marin. Looking for “a Latin jazz group that played in the classic fifties style”, he it was who had asked Alvarez for any tips. The graphic designer singled out the group he’d stumbled upon in 1969 at the Kenya Club in Bayonne, New Jersey: a (then) sextet led by vibraphonist, Chico Mendoza. The band became an octet, changed their name to Ocho at Bobby Marin’s suggestion, added three vocalists at Marin and Alvarez’s urging, and recorded three classy albums for UA Latino between 1972 and 1974 (with a fourth and final album, Tornado, appearing on Marin’s own short-lived El Sonido label in 1976). Ocho disbanded in ’76. Among other members, former vocalist with the Joe Cuba Sextet, Willie Torres, became a bus driver and Chico Mendoza a teacher and leader of gospel choirs in Newark, New Jersey. Alvarez concludes, “The whereabouts of producer Bob Marin are unknown to anyone who was ever connected with Ocho or UA Latino.”

My own search for information proved futile. Bobby Marin doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, while other rabbit holes ended in dark cul de sacs. Then, out of the blue, Vampisoul released We’ve Got A Groovy Thing Going, The Latin Soul of Bobby Marin. Sure enough, there on Side D of the double LP is the third track, “Undress My Mind” – in among a plethora of forgotten gems from the golden age of boogaloo and shingaling by bands with crazy names like the PS 54 Schoolyard and 107^th Street Stickball Team. The kind of music, indeed, that jazz-buff Chico Alvarez confessed to hating in his liner notes for the Ocho retrospective.

Admittedly, many of the lyrics are about as profound as a puddle, but if you can listen without prejudice, these 24 tracks are glorious groovy things. What’s more, Vampisoul’s resident researcher, compiler and DJ, Pablo E. Yglesias (DJ Bongohead), has found Bobby Marin (now nominally retired, but writing album notes and artist biographies for Fania re-issues, running his own online digital label, Mambo Music LLC, and working on his memoir) and written the missing story in his comprehensive liner notes. It’s the story of a self-taught musician and singer, producer, talent scout, label chief, genial Svengali and general all-round good guy: the son of Puerto Rican parents, who grew up in the barrio of Manhattan “in the era of the gang war, [when] we used to play stickball, get in fights.” He and his pals would sing doo-wop under streetlamps, backed by Latin percussion in the form of bottles, car bonnets, dustbin lids and conga drums. And some of these pals and associates in and around Spanish Harlem would make up the ephemeral bands that Marin created in order to record the music he wrote in his spare time (and what an irony that Colombia’s Discos Fuentes should release a record under his name that has nothing to do with him).

It’s this mix of Latin rhythms and vocal harmonies that informs so many of these musical morsels from Marin’s most prolific period between 1967 and 1977: the sound of boogaloo mating with black American soul to spawn the kind of Latin soul synonymous with Joe Bataan and others of his kidney. Just listen, for example, to Bobby Marin & The Latin Chords’ “Take A Ride” or 107^th Street Stickball Team’s “Rhythm And Soul” and you’ll get the idea. It’s no accident that the hybrid reflects Marin’s diet as a youth of Frank Sinatra and Frankie Lymon, Machito and Tito Puente, and a little later Jackie Wilson and James Brown – whose influence leaps right out of the opening “Movin’ Much Too Fast”.

There are clear parallels, too, with Eddie Bo down in New Orleans: not just in the sounds they produced, but their modus operandi. Motivated by a desire to make people dance and have a damn good time in so doing, both had a gift for writing infectious three-minute singles and album cuts; both used a host of largely obscure and often unknown musicians to manufacture them; both plied their trade as in-house writers, arrangers and producers for a whole plethora of minor record labels. Both, too, often used bands that weren’t really bands to create a signature sound based on rhythm and soul. Here, for example, is Bo’s irrepressibly funky “Check Your Bucket”…

It’s not a million miles from what Bobby Marin was doing in Latin New York. Here’s the final cut on the album – with the emphasis on the word “cut” as it exemplifies Marin’s ability to cut and paste or chop and splice earlier material (in this case, his long-time collaborator Louie Ramírez’s “Bailar Lambada”) to re-create something new – the wild, wonderful and demented “Gimme, Take It”.

Enough already, though. There’s no need for me to recount the full story. You can buy this joyful compilation and read DJ Bongohead’s comprehensive notes yourselves. Suffice for me to tell you that there’s a happy ending to the tale. Marin, like Eddie Bo and like so many musicians before and after him, was shafted by a small-time shyster record-label boss, who tried to prove in court that the sample used in a hit for Christina Aguilera was his. He couldn’t because he’d never paid Bobby Marin for the songs he’d written for the label. Justice was done for once: Marin was awarded the royalties, which he used to set up his Mambo Music LLC project.

My Man in Manhattan has just been to visit me here in deepest rural France, the first time for a decade or so: a case of Johnny Town Mouse and Johnny Country Mouse. I played him my new Bobby Marin record. He’d never heard of the producer despite living in New York for half of his life, yet the impact was instantaneous. The two dozen disparate “Bobby Marin Productions” blew his cotton socks off.

Purists and philistines might sneer at the lyrics and the handyman DIY artistic aesthetic. They might even call some of it trash. But if it’s trash, then it’s some of the most joyful and deliriously danceable trash ever laid down in a recording studio. Johnny Town Mouse and I agree that We’ve Got A Groovy Thing Going is, in the immortal verdict of Wire, “a ludicrous record”.

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