by Chris Perez
“Hey, Tony,” I said, “can you paint on my guitar?”
He looked startled. “Dude, yeah, I can paint on anything. But that’s your guitar, man.”
“I know. But I really want you to do this thing for me.” I told him that I wanted him to paint a portrait of Selena right on the Jackson’s white face. When Tony agreed, I started taking the guitar apart right there on the bus.
Selena came by and saw me in the bus with this stranger. I had a screwdriver in my hand, and the Jackson was in pieces all over the bus table. Selena gasped. “Chris, what happened to your guitar?”
I introduced her to Tony, and said, “Tony’s a real good friend of mine, and he’s an artist. We go way back. Here, look.” I showed her the shirt Tony had painted.
“You did that?” Selena examined the shirt, clearly impressed.
“Yeah,” Tony said. He’s a shy person and never would have shown her anything. But he was pleased by her reaction.
“I’m going to have him paint a picture on my guitar,” I said.
Selena just stared at me like I’d gone insane. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Tony said, “So what do you want, Chris?” He already knew that I wanted a portrait of Selena. He also knew enough not to tell her.
“Surprise me,” I said. “Just do what you do.”
“What’s he going to paint on there?” Selena asked.
“Oh, it’s just going to be a black-and-white picture. Nothing major.” By now, I had the guitar face off. I handed it to Tony and stored all of the little metal bits and strings in a plastic bag.
The next time we played in Austin, Tony brought back my guitar with this gorgeous picture of Selena on it. I put the guitar back together in secret, while Selena was busy getting dressed for the show, and then I just carried the Jackson out to the stage and set it on the stand as my backup guitar.
When she came out, I said, “Here. Check out what Tony did.” I pointed at the Jackson.
Selena covered her mouth and her eyes went wide. She was all smiles and totally tripping. “I can’t believe you did that for me!”
“See? I told you Tony’s a great artist,” I said.
Selena loved that guitar. To be honest, I felt a little weird playing the Jackson at first, because our marriage was still so new, but after a while I was very proud of it. The fans loved the guitar, too; they would take pictures of me playing it, or just photos of the guitar on its stand.
At the same time that Tony brought over my Jackson, he gave Selena and me a gift: a three foot by four foot painting of Selena’s face and hand that he had done in black, gray, and white. The painting fit our art deco décor perfectly. We hung it above the couch, between a pair of tall floor lamps with smoky glass bowls. When we turned the fader switch down on the lights, Selena’s face was the only thing you could see in the living room. I still treasure that painting.
In the Tejano world, groups knocked out their albums fast. We were no exception. The Quintanilla family had an incredible work ethic, and I continued learning a lot from A.B. We could put together an album in a month or less, and that included writing the songs out of thin air as well as arranging, producing, and recording them.
There are very simple ways to play Tejano music, but we were continuing to incorporate new sounds. I was a good enough guitar player that I could play broken chords, sustained notes, and a lot of different rhythms. Even though we were playing within a certain genre, I was like A.B., in the sense that I wanted to think outside the box and do something different.
Basically, anytime we were ready to make an album, we’d book the studio for a week and record the whole album at once. In the weeks leading up to that, we spent time perfecting the songs in A.B.’s bedroom studio—he lived in a house next to Abraham. At the studio, instrumental and vocal tracks had to be recorded separately and from beginning to end before they could be mixed. If you messed one of those up, you had to go back in and start over.
During my first year with Los Dinos, we had released an album comprised of Selena’s old songs because Capitol EMI had bought them from the previous label and they wanted them rerecorded. For that album, we recorded the songs exactly as they had been written originally. I simply played the same guitar part that had already been done before. I wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to try to take over; I was being as true as I could be to the guitar sounds they’d had on those songs originally, to the point that most people probably didn’t even realize it was a different guitar player.
But, in creating Entre a Mi Mundo in 1992, we broke out of that mold and came up with truly innovative sounds. The album shot to the top of the charts and went gold fast. My favorite song on the album, “Como La Flor,” was written by Pete and A.B. while we were on Big Bertha touring in late 1991. The song’s simple, plaintive melody and aching lyrics tell the story of someone who sees her old love with someone new and must move on; she wishes him the best and compares their love to a flower that has withered and died.
“Como La Flor” was the first solo song of Selena’s to really take off, especially in Mexico. The song became a fan favorite and one of Selena’s signature songs. Selena really loved to sing all of the songs we did, but “Como La Flor” was probably her favorite. As it gained popularity, we began either opening or closing our sets with that particular song, with fans singing along to the chorus, “Ay, ay, ay, como me duele.” The bigger that song got, the greater our connection was with the crowd.
Even though I love “Como La Flor,” I don’t think it would have been such a popular song if Selena hadn’t been the one singing it. The lyrics and music aren’t what make the song special; it’s the emotion in Selena’s voice. Every time she sang “Como La Flor,” that emotion came through and it was real. I’ve heard a lot of people sing it since, but nobody can touch people’s hearts with that song the way Selena did.
Entre a Mi Mundo propelled us to another level in the music business entirely. The album was number one on Billboard’s Regional Mexican Album’s chart and was called the number one Regional Mexican Album of the Year. More importantly, this album made it onto the Top Latin 50 chart.
We had done it. EMI now considered us a commercial group. It was one of the happiest times in my life: I was making music, Selena and I were married and still madly in love, and the band was poised to enter the international market. Of course, because every one of us had come up from hard times, we never let our successes go to our heads and took nothing for granted—especially Abraham.
“We have a number one hit? So what?” Abraham would say. “Any clown can get to number one. The question is, can you do it again?”
We didn’t know. But we were sure going to try—Selena harder than anyone.
It helped that we were in the right place at the right time. Latin music seemed to be everywhere that year, playing on radios all across the U.S. and not just in our corner of the southwest. Billboard magazine had even started “Hot Latin Songs,” which tracked Latin music in the American music market. This chart was based on airplay on Spanish-language radio stations, but the songs didn’t have to be in Spanish. Selena’s idol, Rocio Durcal, put out the first song to reach number one on that chart, “La Guirnalda.” Since then, the chart had featured hits by Chayanne, Luis Miguel, Marco Antonio Solis, Ana Gabriel, Gloria Estefan, and Selena herself, whose duet with Alvaro Torres, “Buenos Amigos,” hit number one the year we were married.
Within this mix, Selena y Los Dinos were representing regional Mexican or Tejano music, but in a completely new and different light. We were striving to set ourselves apart from other groups in the Tejano world. We weren’t those guys wearing cowboy hats, Wrangler jeans, and boots. None of the other Tejano bands were as young as we were. Besides being young, we were all incredibly energetic, talented, and willing to do whatever it took to create a unique sound.
Ricky Vela was writing creative songs with heavy arrangements. I brought in the rock and roll element because I had be
en in a Top 40 cover band and I loved experimenting on the guitar. Joe, our keyboardist, was raised in the border town of Laredo, so he brought that traditional street music. Pete, our other singer and songwriter, brought in complex lyrics and melodies with lots of chords. A.B. held down the bass line and arranged our songs to highlight Selena’s vocals, and Selena put her soul into singing. We were poised and ready to cross over into the international music scene like Gloria Estefan.
Soon after Selena and I were married, the band was invited to perform in Las Vegas at the Premio Lo Nuestro awards for Latin musicians, sponsored by Billboard. This was the first hint I had of the fame that would soon come barreling our way.
Something was wrong with Big Bertha, so we all piled into a fifteen-passenger van and drove nonstop to Las Vegas from Corpus. This wasn’t the most comfortable way to ride fourteen hundred miles, but as always, the cool thing about Los Dinos was that all of us were determined to do whatever it took to propel our music to the top of the charts. We never complained. We just did what we needed to do, especially Selena.
We arrived at Caesars Palace at about ten o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t believe that I was in this city that I had always heard so much about, but had seen only on TV and in the movies. The sight of so many neon signs had me reeling. The lights, the smells, the sounds of the coins dropping in the slot machines—it was almost too much stimulation for me to handle.
I’ll never forget checking into our suite at the Palace with Selena. Not because it was a cool room—though it was! Really, it wouldn’t have mattered to me if they’d given us a matchbox-size room in the basement. It was just such a joy to have our relationship out in the open, and to hear people say, “Well, they’re married, so they should get the suite.” We were finally able to be on our own without having to think of excuses or sneak around behind Abraham’s back.
Selena and I lay down and slept for a little while, trying to recover from the long drive. I was so excited to be in Las Vegas, though, that I soon got up and went downstairs by myself to play the slot machines.
Within an hour, I had hit and won enough quarters to fill up my little white plastic cup. I was so excited that I walked as fast as I could back to the elevator. I couldn’t wait to show my big winnings to Selena!
Back in the room, I dumped the quarters on the bed and started counting them. I was convinced that I’d won at least a thousand bucks, the cup was that heavy. It turned out to be maybe sixty dollars in all.
Selena laughed, but when she saw my crestfallen expression, she said, “Come on. Let’s go back down there. I’ll show you how it’s done.” She put on her clothes and we went downstairs.
“Are you crazy?” I asked when Selena got one hundred dollars in dollar coins.
“Just watch,” she said. “If you see somebody playing a slot machine but not winning anything, it’s starting to get hot. We’ll go play it as soon as that person leaves.”
Finally, we spotted a guy who had been playing on the same slot machine who just kept losing and losing. The minute he left, Selena said, “Okay. Let’s go get it.”
We walked over to the machine and started feeding it coins. Selena went to put three dollars in, and when I tried to stop her, freaking out over that, too, she said, “If you put in just one dollar at a time, you don’t get as much as if you put in three.”
“Wait, that’s a lot of money,” I protested. I still couldn’t get my head around this whole concept of possibly losing so much money. Then again, I never was the kind of risk taker Selena was all her life.
“Shhh,” Selena said. “Just push this button here so it spins, and I’ll do the lever thing.”
We did that three times, and that’s all it took. The machine started spitting dollar coins, and before I knew it, we had three hundred dollars in our hands.
After playing the slots for a little while longer, Selena said, “Let’s go play blackjack!”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “I am not sitting at one of those tables and losing money. I don’t know anything about playing blackjack.”
“Come on, it’s easy,” she pleaded.
“No, no, no,” I said.
“What’s the matter?” she teased. “Can’t you count fast enough?”
I folded my arms. “Say what you want. I’m not playing.”
Selena laughed. “Okay, then. Watch what I do. If you want to do it, just jump in.”
So I watched, and again, Selena amazed me. I have no idea if she’d ever played blackjack before or if, once again, she just put her mind to something and learned it faster than anybody else could have. Selena sat down at one of those blackjack tables and, within minutes, she had mastered all of the hand signals. She tapped on the table or waved her hand over her cards, and even slid her cards under the chips when she wanted to stand.
Selena lost a few hands and, quickly disgusted with herself, said, “Let’s go.”
But she hated to lose at anything, so I knew that wasn’t the end of it. Sure enough, Selena returned to that same table a little while later, sat down, and played a few more hands until she started winning. Then, smiling that full-wattage smile of hers, she said, “All right. I’m out.”
She didn’t care about the money. She just wanted to know that she could win.
At the Vegas show, I realized for the first time that we had been big fish in the small Tejano pond, but now we were swimming in a much bigger pond with more exotic fish. Our old friends La Mafia were there; that group now included my friend Rudy on bass, so it was a bit of a reunion for us.
I was hanging with those guys while Selena went off to do some shopping with Suzette, when all of a sudden I saw Ricky Martin heading toward us. He was just making his name as a solo artist after a huge career with the group Menudo.
“Hey, I like your work. What’s going on?” Ricky said. As we stood there talking, I realized with amazement that musicians I admired were actually listening to our songs.
In addition to performing at the Billboard show, we walked away with the regional Mexican music award and it became clear to all of us that we were achieving our goal of having our music recognized internationally. It was time to cross the border and play in Mexico and Latin America—the next logical step before we broke into the mainstream English market.
SEVEN
MAKING MUSIC IN MEXICO
AP Photo / Houston Chronicle, Dave Einrel
The promoters at Capitol EMI were intent on having us continue building our reputation on the international music scene after the success of Entre a Mi Mundo. This meant traveling abroad.
Mexico was the logical place to begin our international publicity blitz. We already had a fan base there, and we could easily drive to the shows from Texas. Of course, none of us fully realized just how nerve-racking it would be to go from playing relatively small venues in the U.S. to playing large amphitheaters and doing interviews in Spanish in Mexico.
We were scheduled to play in Monterrey during our first trip, and there was mad press all day. We went from one interview to the next: radio, television, magazine journalists, you name it. Before the trip, Rick had helped me practice saying my name and what instrument I played.
I kept repeating this phrase to myself like a mantra: “Mi nombre es Chris Perez y toco la guitarra. Mi nombre es Chris Perez y toco la guitarra.” I knew how absurd the Mexican journalists would think it was if we sang in Spanish but couldn’t even manage to speak in basic textbook phrases. I was determined not to embarrass the band—or myself.
Despite my good intentions and all of that practicing, I still managed to humiliate myself. During our first interview with the radio DJs in Monterrey, we all had to go down the line and introduce ourselves, just as we’d practiced. I froze up completely. When it was my turn, I said “toca” instead of “toco,” essentially saying, “My name is Chris Perez and he plays the guitar.” Naturally, everyone laughed at my expense.
“Dude, I told you how to say it,” Ricky scolded me afterward.
My only source of comfort was that some of the other band members stumbled around in Spanish, too. Selena, though, rose to the challenge, as she always did. She was the one who really felt the media pressure, because by now everyone in Mexico knew her not only from her music, but from the Coca-Cola commercials. She was already hugely popular in that country and crowds surrounded us everywhere we went, to the point where Selena couldn’t even get off the bus unless it was to duck into a hotel or go onstage.
With the journalists, Selena was as personable as ever, giving each media personality a warm hug and a big smile, winning them over before she ever had to say a word. As a third-generation Texan who had to learn Spanish phonetically, with her father coaching her on her accent, she knew that there was a chance that the Mexican fans might dismiss her. Instead, they adored everything about her, from her dark hair and brown eyes to her curvy figure.
The fans saw Selena’s sincerity and generosity, and felt her love for them. Selena appealed to everyone from excitable preteen girls who wanted to dress and dance like her, to abuelas who loved those heart-wrenching ballads like “Como La Flor.”
To Mexicans, and to most Mexican-Americans, Selena was that perfect symbol: a sexy star who had come up from the streets, bringing her family with her, and still remaining virtuous and hard-working along the way. It wasn’t an act, either. What they saw was true and the fans knew that.
In Mexico, Selena mangled her conversations in Spanish like the rest of us, but not for long. She said, “It’ll be cool. You watch. I’m going to learn Spanish and surprise everybody.”