Hey Mr. Trombone Man

Back to the celebrity profile thing--this time I have a 45-minute talk with Willie Colon, who is of course from the Bronx, and one of the most important Nuyoricans of all time. It's kind of humbling to listen to his endless array of stories about a time many of us romanticize. How many of us helped to invent a musical genre when we were barely out of our teens?

SPANGLISHKID: What is your reaction to this repackaging of your work?

WILLIE COLON: To be totally mercenary about it, it’s going to represent an additional new income, but also the remastering and the repackaging is also going to expose a lot of people to my music who are not that familiar with it. I find that when the youngbloods, they have a great reaction to the old school hardcore salsa.

SPANGLISHKID: I think it shows different aspects of your career. Some people have a simplified view of old school salsa that is just about the peak era. This shows the evolution of your music, which is more subtle than a lot of people think.

WILLIE COLON: Some people, especially nowadays with Hector and my singers have become so big that they eclipse me some times, most of the time now. Hector is beyond legendary already, it’s like mythic. Especially now when the movies come out people are going to be curious. It’s good to have something new like this around. I think also when these records were first mastered onto CD, they didn’t do the best job. Maybe they weren’t so familiar with the new technology or whatever but I think they did a much better job this time.

SPANGLISHKID: They made a big deal about the re-mastering process. Most of it sounds very good. It depends on the condition of the original masters. It shows the African rhythms and bomba and Mon Rivera.

WILLIE COLON: When I first used to play trombone I used to follow Mon Rivera around. I just kind of hung around until he said, okay, and let me sit in. In those days Steve Pulliam was his first trombone, and he used to call me El Americanito. After that I made it with Hector and we were very successful and I was in Puerto Rico and I met Mon again and he had stopped playing, he was repairing refrigerators and stuff. And I introduced myself and he said “who are you?” and I said “El Americanito” and he goes, oh! So I asked him would he record with me. I had kind of digested all his old riffs and everything and I just kind of changed some of the chord progressions and stuff like that so it felt like what he used to do but it was a little hipper. That’s one of my favorite albums, that thing with Mon.

SPANGLISHKID: It has that Santurce feeling, you know?

WILLIE COLON: That’s not chopped liver. I’m born and raised in the Bronx, you know? He was one of my teachers and I learned a lot from listening to his music. The same thing happened with Celia and then I had the opportunity to work with them. There’s just something about that kind of experience. It’s very gratifying, I’m really thankful to have had that opportunity.

SPANGLISHKID: There were people who argued about the music being Cuban and wanted to keep it pure like that…

WILLIE COLON: I got exposed to a lot of that Puerto Rican stuff, the bands playing…that concept like with Tito Puente—they would put the tracks side by side and the next step was to switch from rhythm to rhythm on the same cut and that’s where their socks started going up and down. You can’t do that. This rhythm is from here and the other one is from that. And that was a lot of the premise of why it was wrong. They couldn’t easily accept having all of these different ethnic rhythms together.

SPANGLISHKID: So this was critics or the dancers?

WILLIE COLON: Well, the musicians… and you would switch from bomba or merengue or whatever you’d get resistance. Some of them would want to play it but they’d be rolling their eyes, you know? When we were recording, we had musicians get up and say, look I can’t play this shit and just walk out of the session. Not because it was too hard, but because it was ridiculous to do it.

SPANGLISHKID: Do you think the music really crystallized when that attitude was over?

WILLIE COLON: A lot of the people that had that attitude then still have it now, but you can’t argue with success. You have millions of people that accepted it. It just made the music more relevant and inclusive. Some of the wildest salsa fanatics are Peruvians and Colombians and really pretty far removed from Cuba and the tropics. I don’t know when it happened for them but we started getting called to come down there. I’m not sure if that was the first time anything had happened like that. Now they practically carry the music, the amount of live concerts we have in Latin America and the sales and airplay, it’s really an important part of the market now.

SPANGLISHKID: Some people say that salsa was invented in Venezuela.

WILLIE COLON: Yeah, the term. People sometimes, like Joseph Campbell used to say, they hang on to the literal. You can’t separate the terminology from what the music is. They’ll say we were the first ones to say salsa, well okay, sabroso, but we’re talking about a music that’s a blend—I hate to use hybrid, but a reconciliation of all of Latin America instead of just a local folkloric thing. It’s much bigger, more than its name. It’s a social phenomenon, at one point it was a sociopolitical movement, an awakening. Latinos are competitive in a lot of areas but one thing a lot of us can agree on is salsa. You’ll go to a…as proud and competitive as Latinos are, you know, countries vis a vis a…I can go to Venezuela or Colombia and they’ll be shouting to play La Murga de Panama, which is about Panama.

SPANGLISHKID: Another interesting thing about salsa is its reconciliation of Puerto Ricans on the island and Nuyoricans.

WILLIE COLON: It’s a really big piece of that puzzle. It was our diploma or something. Once we really started making some interesting music we were more embraced than before. We became really part of the family. I remember when I was a kid I used to go in the summers but I really felt as a little boy that there was a line drawn there between the New York Puerto Ricans and the island Puerto Ricans. I think that when the salsa boom happened it kind of blurred that line. It was like a bridge. And I think one of the things that made the music more important was that the political situation in Puerto Rico, the music kind of replaced the flag in certain ways. I think there was one thing that they could say, this is ours and this is one of the things that identifies us and makes us unique and proves what we are, with the situation of not being able to fly their flag without having the American flag and you’re not a country, and all those kind of things that poor Boricuas have to hear, especially the ones here, growing up here. I think the music became a substitute or a reinforcement to that.


SPANGLISHKID: Your partnership with Hector was symbolic of that because he was from the island and you were Nuyorican.

WILLIE COLON: He spoke little or no English and my Spanish, I understood Spanish very well but I couldn’t really speak it well, either so we had to kind of teach each other. We were both kind of street kids too. We were both very independent at a very young age out there on the street. To a certain extent we were more like brothers than a collaboration. We had no real plan other than wanting to make some good music and make some money. But everything was gravy from where we came from, the traveling, the attention, the glamour, but it was all organic. It was not a premeditated we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. Hector had a great repertoire. He was very bright and very funny and he was able to use that…I was able to learn how to work with him and I’d say I want to write a song about this or whatever and he’d be able to just jump into it because he really knew those styles well. He could sing anything, you know, and probably knew the lyrics of any song, he had such a great repertoire. And he was pretty good at imitating Carlos Gardel or Chuito or Santitos Colon. He would just go on, you know. He was a great, great talent.

SPANGLISHKID: Did you change the end of the Calle Luna Calle Sol because it kind of disses La Perla?

WILLIE COLON: “Calle Luna, Calle Sol” is like 139th Street, where I grew up. It’s like, we weren’t making stuff up, it was just stuff that we knew about, stuff that we lived and I think that I finished writing the song after we had an incident in Puerto Rico. We were playing in Puerto Rico and we went down to La Riviera, which was a bar around the docks where there were sailors and everybody hanging out. It wasn’t a great neighborhood and we got into a big scrap and they beat…we got our asses kicked pretty seriously and I wrote the song after that. I used Calle Luna Calle Sol just because it fit. I wasn’t talking about those streets per se. It was an imaginary place but a place that we all know. It just became universal. It’s almost 40 years later and there’s kids re-recording, everywhere we go they ask for the song.

SPANGLISHKID: Calle Luna, Calle Sol is not in La Perla, it’s in the top part of Old San Juan, near La San Sebastian.

WILLIE COLON: Right, it’s in Old San Juan…

SPANGLISHKID: In the ‘60s and ‘70s it was still kind of rough because it was getting close to La Perla…

WILLIE COLON: And they don’t intersect, they’re parallel.

SPANGLISHKID: Yeah, but it’s poetic, you know, like Night and Day? And then pela’o rhymes with babalao. You can’t walk away from that, right? How much were you involved with the Héctor Lavoe movie?

WILLIE COLON: I was contracted as a consultant and advisor. They sent me the script and I made some corrections and I never heard from them again. I haven’t seen the movie. I made some notes on the script and I don’t know what they did with the notes, if they used them, or…

SPANGLISHKID: Did you feel good about the script when you saw it?

WILLIE COLON: You’re asking the wrong guy because I want everything to be historically correct and I’ve got other motives, agendas. I think for what it is, it all depends. I don’t know how it’s going to come out because I haven’t had a chance to see any of the rushes or anything. I don’t think I’d be happy with any movie about it because I have my own version…I’ve seen—there’s another movie in Puerto Rico and they showed me some rushes of it and I wasn’t happy about that. It was not correct chronologically or historically.

SPANGLISHKID: Did John Ortiz, who plays you in the J-Lo version talk to you?

WILLIE COLON: I saw him once, he came to see me as a gig. He’s a decent actor. It just depends on the direction; there’s so many variables, you know. You don’t have to make a good movie these days to make money, you know.

SPANGLISHKID: That Pinero movie was a little weird…

WILLIE COLON: It was kind of too stylized. I know they had to expand and make Puchy larger than life and clean it up a lot to have a role that’s befitting Jennifer.

SPANGLISHKID: They can get away with that because there’s not that many people who know much about her except the people who were immediately attached to the scene. How about the connection with reggaetón, the singers make a big point of how they hold the salseros in high esteem. What do you think about them?

WILLIE COLON: I think reggaetón is a good thing generally and something that had to happen. It was an organic thing since salsa became such a corporate product and it turned into kind of like a formula. When you have maybe three record companies that are handling all of the whole genre anymore, they’re not going to want to compete with themselves because they’re only going to hurt themselves. It’s like inbreeding. Here comes reggaetón under the radar and boom! Raw, raunchy, and young and independent and that’s what made it attractive to the kids. Most Latino kids were headed toward hiphop and rap and all that stuff because it had that animal attraction, it had all of that rebellion and that stuff that salsa lost along the way as it became a more bubble gum and rhythmic ballads and over-produced. But I think that it’s going to run the risk, as money starts pouring into reggaetón, it will be in danger of caving in also and you could see just how quickly all of these guys, young boys are cleaning up and they’ve totally changed in a couple of months. You can see the money hit it, so let’s see what happens to the music. I wish there was a little bit more social consciousness, I know Tego tries to go there but I think it was good because the Latin scene needed something like this, something wild.

SPANGLISHKID: Why do you think “Pedro Navaja” wound up becoming the “most famous salsa song”?

WILLIE COLON: It made history because it was different. We tried to build a little soundtrack, the production of it was different, the whole concept of having so much lyrics, such a long, detailed story, and it kind of dressed salsa up to the next level where people that weren’t great dancers could sit and listen to the story. It’s good for radio, when you’re driving and it was just something different. A lot of people that weren’t into the music back then have trouble sitting through the drum solos. And sometimes they weren’t really fans of it, they would find it a little monotonous. This was just another approach. It seems tame but it was kind of like the prototype—and I don’t think it ever really happened again, nobody writes salsa songs with eight verses, especially nowadays you practically have to write jingles, a four-minute song. I think it offered that. Pedro Navaja became popular in Class A radio, which was the ones that were playing Julio Iglesias and things like that and it became popular in Spain where there weren’t real rumberos but they understood the language. It crossed a lot of barriers.

SPANGLISHKID: Your horn arrangements were coming to a peak then, where the horns acted as if they were another voice. Rubén would sing and then there’d be the jazzy horns answering.

WILLIE COLON: We were full of energy, we were young kids. Also, we had carte blanche back in the Fania days. I don’t know about the other guys, but we could just spend as long as we wanted in the studio. So the album has a lot of detail. We’d go back and nitpick over little things to really make a good mix, different ideas. At one point in the middle of the song when the sirens are coming, we were recording and on a break and there was a fire in a building next door and all of these sirens started coming and we said, “open the window!” and we recorded it live. Stuff don’t happen like that anymore. It was at WOR, 1440 Broadway.

SPANGLISHKID: What was your collaboration with Celia Cruz like?

WILLIE COLON: I grew up listening to Celia and when I heard she was coming over to Fania I thought, wow, this is interesting. She did some albums with Pacheco and then I asked Jerry Masucci if I could do an album with her and he said sure. He asked her and she said yes, and I got a shot at producing Celia. I was really scared because she was like an institution already. I came up with the Brazilian song, a couple of other things, bomba and plena, stuff like that and she went along with it except with the Brazilian song, “Usted Abusó,” she said, I can’t do this one. I talked her into it and in the end it was the big hit from the album. Celia was easier to work with than Héctor or Rubén or Mon, she was just very easy. She would try anything. She kind of brought me out of my shell. She’d say what do you think about this, what do you want to do here? As I got a little more confidence in the relationship she was willing to try just about anything and by the end of making the album, she was just a great talent to work with and travel with. Very professional and I guess, motherly, you know?

SPANGLISHKID: The break in “Usted Abusó” is one of the best I’ve ever heard. I think it’s one of the peaks in your career.

WILLIE COLON: It’s a key moment. It’s very exciting and very simple. You get that from playing at the Corso for years and watching people dance. You remember moments like that. I would use that whenever I would write a chart. It was pretty successful, stuff like that. Look at “Periodico de Ayer,” look at “El Cantante,” I was able to, especially Tite Curet songs.

SPANGLISHKID: Tite Curet is one of those names that is more appreciated in Puerto Rico.

WILLIE COLON: He got blacklisted, his songs were very social, very political. He was just a great Puerto Rican, a great black man. He was a really great musician and his songs were just beautiful. Some were very simple but he knew exactly how many syllables to use, and he wrote in clave. He would seek out Héctor and he would call me and say look I got this great song and he would always come up whenever he would bring something it was monstrous, something really tasty.

SPANGLISHKID: Do you want people to know more about the singing part of your career?


WILLIE COLON: After Rubén…after Hector and I broke up I didn’t want to play anymore man, cause like, I was just a mess. I was a friggin’ mess in every sense of the word. I started to get myself back together and Rubén comes, knocking on my door every day, singing me songs and I wanted to do something else. I started producing prolifically, I wanted to get into television or film to do music for that. I wound up recording with Rubén again and I felt bad about it because I knew Héctor was going to be hurt. I was supposed to have retired and here I come back with Rubén and then in the end I had like six years with Rubén and I just couldn’t take that anymore either. We reached a critical mass and we had to get away from each other before one of us would wind up in the hospital and the other one in jail. Now I’m back out on the road so what am I going to do? I still had a contract with records to fulfill so I started recording and writing stuff and picking out material for myself. My first album I was so—I overcompensated. In those days I spent $75,000 on an album which is like $2 billion today. After the album was finished it was pretty, the solo album, you had the French horns and everything but there was still something missing and thank god I wrote that song “Sin Poderte Hablar.” We didn’t have a lot of budget left and we did just a flute and flugel horn for the brass section next to all of these other songs with a 25-piece band. And that was the song that hit and saved that album. Then for my next album I had a better idea of what I could do and I did “Fantasmas.” I was into Brazilian music, still am. I did that version of “O Que Sera,” I did a merengue, and lo and behold the album really took off. In Venezuela alone it did 350,000 albums. This is before videos and big distribution and that made me think I would be a viable artist just singing. A lot of people weren’t crazy about my singing, and I was almost stoned to death a couple of times. I just persevered and people just got used to it and I guess I got more confident and whatever, I learned how to write for myself and I’ve been doing it ever since, I never really went back to another collaboration.

SPANGLISHKID: It was kind of necessary for you to go that route because of the shift in commercial sense of attention from the musicians to the vocalist, paralleling what happened in hiphop with the shift away from the DJ to the MC.

WILLIE COLON: That was also a factor. The music was no longer about musicians, it was about singers and that’s what it had to be. I started composing more because I would do these arrangements for other people’s songs, and they would be tremendous hits, and I would go no economic, nothing from the publishing of the song at all, except the satisfaction of saying I wrote the arrangements. I started writing more and recording my own songs. I kind of realized that when we had this tremendous hit of Siembra and I didn’t have one song on there. There’s that economic factor, people tend to think that’s ugly but artists gotta eat too. We gotta live, and a broke artist is in trouble. Because he becomes prey and you can’t really be…you need freedom, you know? An artist has to be free.

SPANGLISHKID: In the long run your name and contribution have survived in spite of what you said about your singers’ eclipsing you in recognition.

WILLIE COLON: Yeah, I have, I’m surprised sometimes. I guess I have a defense of marketing. It’s just an instinctive thing. I didn’t do the gangsta thing on the covers just because I thought it was going to sell, I just thought it was cool.

SPANGLISHKID: You had a goof with it.


WILLIE COLON: Yeah I had fun with it, I thought it was…I was thinking about how I recorded Ernie Agosto, he was one of my early productions and I was reading the liner notes, which I wrote and people have to say, especially Latinos, ‘What the fuck is he talking about’? It looked like something out of Mad magazine or something.
It was just like a very playful….when I read it I said, shit, I was on my own trip here and I did a disservice to Ernie with these liner notes, trying to be so funny. But that’s where we were at, we were having a lot of fun with it and I think there was a lot of sense of humor that had to do with the success of my trajectory. The sense of humor was a key point. In “Lo Mato” when I’m holding the gun to his head. I’ll kill him if you don’t buy the album and then on the back he’s sitting on my back. Today the kids really believe the gangsta shit and they want to go out and shoot people. I didn’t want to do that, I thought it was just…funny.

SPANGLISHKID: These days you’re working with the mayor and you’re also touring…

WILLIE COLON: With the mayor I work with an advisor on Latino affairs as a liaison with the Latin Entertainment Commission. We did the Celia Cruz school; we did a thing called the Latin New York Festival and we’re going to be doing a directory of Latin New York. We brought in the Latin Grammys which was not easy. It took about four years to get them. The Latin Grammys is a very political thing. Basically everybody thought it belonged in Miami, so getting it to come up here was a big score. I travel with the band frequently and we do Colombia and Mexico a lot. I lived in Mexico for five years. The music, there’s a lot of people just getting into it now and I’m getting ready to leave. I just started an orchestra in Mexico and these Mexicans are playing pretty good. I’m working on a new album which may be my last album.

SPANGLISHKID: Are you producing the whole thing yourself and then trying to sell it to a label?

WILLIE COLON: Exactly. It’s about 85% finished. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I hope I can get it finished in the next couple of weeks. And it’s good. There’s a couple of really, really good cuts that I’m happy with. It’s got good players on it, the charts are good, the lyrics are very good.

SPANGLISHKID: Is it old school, salsa dura, jazzy?

WILLIE COLON: It’s old school, it goes back and forth. We even went into a couple of sections where it’s reggaetón-esque. But some of the stuff is like epic, one of those epic songs. Very like chronicles, good story lines and some are just fun. It’s 14 songs so far. I’m going to try to kick it out as soon as possible, maybe by the end of this year. I thought I was going to be able to finish it by now, March, but I got a cold and it screws my voice up for weeks, so that’s really set me back.

SPANGLISHKID: Who’s playing on the band?

WILLIE COLON: I’ve got almost everybody on it on different songs. Ozzie Melendez is helping me with the musical direction, the trombonist. We have guys like Ray Colon, Ricky Gonzalez, a lot of the young warriors on it. It’s like a new thing for me, with this friggin Pro Tools; I’m used to seeing the two little wheels spinning around. It’s a little bit of techno-shock to me.