By Mark Kemp

Latin rockers and twangers reflect the Carolinas’ new diversity

Bakalao Stars. Photo by Daniel Coston.

When I first heard the song “Raleigh,” by a roots band from the Triangle area, the words of love for North Carolina in the song sounded like they could have come straight from one of those ultra-patriotic ditties by right-wing Southern rocker (and Wilmington native) Charlie Daniels: “Raleigh, North Carolina, you are in my heart… Beneath your blessed sky my life changed … Raleigh, I know that I owe you a lot … and I know that when I can, I’ll be back.”

Over twangy acoustic music, the singer wailed “Raleigh” with a passion not unlike the Osborne Brothers’ high-lonesome harmonizing on “Rocky Top” or Ray Charles heartfelt crooning of “Georgia on My Mind.” The Triangle band’s song came from a rich continuum of shout-outs in Southern music that extends from Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” straight up to Jermaine Dupri’s “Welcome to Atlanta.”

The difference is, Rey Norteño’s words about those “blessed” Carolina skies are in Spanish, and the guy singing them is named Huerta, not Daniels. As for the twangy instruments — they’re guitars, sure, but fleshed out with accordions and bajo sexto, not pedal steel or banjo.

Rey Norteño is just one of many acts formed in the Carolinas by members of the area’s culturally rich and constantly growing Latino population. Not all of the bands perform traditional norteño, the genre of music from northern Mexico that’s equivalent to American bluegrass or folk. A growing number of Spanish-language bands in the Carolinas play classic rock, indie rock, hip-hop, ska or electronic music. By the early 2000s, the demand among young Caro-Latinos for homegrown rock en español had reached a point to where Tony Arreaza, guitarist of the now-defunct Charlotte band La Rúa, launched the Latin alternative festival Carlotan Rock. Between 2005 and 2009, the festival brought international bands like Venezuela’s Los Amigos Invisibles to play alongside a slew of local and regional acts including Arreaza’s former group and the Charlotte-based Spanish-language ska-punk band Bakalao Stars.

“Charlotte is a real hot spot for the whole rock en español movement in the South,” Arreaza told me for a story I wrote in 2008 about Spanish-language music from the Carolinas. Arreaza, now the events manager for the Charlotte Latin American Coalition, has worked hard to make Charlotte a Latin-music hotspot. This past summer alone, he’s brought Mexican alt-pop band Zoé and tapped the legendary Colombian experimental-rock band Aterciopelados — whose music has evolved since the ‘90s from straight punk to protest cultural fusion —to play Charlotte’s annual Festival Latinoamericano. Arreaza had been trying to get Aterciopelados to play in the Carolinas for years, he told Creative Loafing in October. But the band either demanded too much money or shrugged off Charlotte as an out-of-the-way spot between Latino-heavy Miami and New York. Arreaza’s big goal when he began working at the Coalition was to bring the regional festival’s music up to date and consistent with the growing number of young Latinos raised on everything from norteño and salsa to Animal Collective and Lady Gaga. “A lot of people think Latin music is going to be mariachi or salsa,” he told CL. “We need to educate them on things like reggae cumbia” and other, more contemporary fusions.

The Latin music scene in the Carolinas has been growing steadily since the 1990s along with the explosion of the Latino population in general. In the 1990s alone, North Carolina’s Latino population skyrocketed more than 300 percent. South Carolina’s Latino population tripled. In 2002, BMG thought it was taking a risk when it booked the Mexican Latin alternative rock band Los Jaguares into several cities in the Southeast including Charlotte. Guitarist César “Vampiro” López told me for a Paste article in 2004 that he wondered if the band’s brooding, Cure-like music would go over. “I didn’t know that there were big Latino communities in cities such as Charlotte,” he said. “We worried about whether people would show up.” Not only did they show up for the band’s performance at the Latin club Skándalos, but they packed the place. “It feels like there’s Mexicans everywhere [now],” López told me.

Not just Mexicans. At several Charlotte shows by Venezuelan funk-rockers Los Amigos Invisibles since 2004 — at non-Latin clubs ranging from the Visulite to the Neighborhood Theatre — people have come in waving flags of countries ranging from Venezuela and Ecuador to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. One of the Charlotte area’s bigger draws on the Dominican pop-bachata scene is Leydy Bonilla, whose family moved from D.R. to New York City and finally Charlotte. In the Bronx, Bonilla had performed alongside her neighborhood friends in the band Aventura, whose 2009 album The Last crossed over to Anglo and African-American audiences on the strength of the band’s collaborations with Akon, Wyclef Jean and Ludacris.

Since the early 2000s, several other big-name Latin rock acts have done well in clubs across North Carolina. Arreaza twice brought the critically acclaimed experimental Mexican band Café Tacuba, which collaborated with downtown New York avant-gardists Kronos Quartet on one album and came to indie rockers’ attention in 2000 when the band opened for Beck’s Midnight Vultures tour. Arreaza also has brought the Mexican rap-rock band Molotov to Charlotte numerous times and went out of his way to help promote the September 2011 performance by Spanish protest singer Manu Chao. “These bands now see Charlotte as a must-stop city on their tours,” Arreaza told me in 2008.

Here’s the rub: As hard as Arreaza has worked to bring Latin music to non-Spanish speaking music fans, it’s been a major uphill battle. When I first arrived back in the Carolinas in 2002 after 15 years spent in New York and Los Angeles, I was convinced that Latin music would totally cross over within five years. That was eight years ago and it’s disheartening to me when I go see a band like Café Tacuba or Aterciopelados find little overlap between those bands’ audiences and the audiences for, say, Benji Hughes or Dirty Projectors or TV on the Radio.

One way to learn about the similarities in these musics, language notwithstanding, is to visit Charlotte resident Armando Bellmas’ excellent, flawlessly sequenced podcast Be Still Please/Quieto Por Favor (www.bestillplease.com), where you can hear the banjo-driven indie rock of Mexico’s Furland (“Yo quiero ser un color”) back to back with Tom Waits’ noisy, atonal “Don’t Go into that Barn.”

As for Rey Norteño – I haven’t heard anything from them since they sang Raleigh’s praises in 2008. But since then, I’m sure a hundred other norteño acts have, like the bluegrass bands that play annual mountain festivals, formed, split up, reformed and reconfigured. And I’m sure they’re still singing those twangy songs about the new land they work de este lado — on this side of the border.

Mark Kemp is the former Editor in Chief of Option magazine, and holds that position now for the Creative Loafing weekly in Charlotte