In the 1960s, Trini Lopez had seven top forty albums, the
most famous and successful being "Trini Lopez, Live at
P.J.'s," which peaked at #2. He also had four top
forty hits, the biggest being "If I Had a Hammer," which
reached #3 on the national charts. The Beatles opened
for him at the Olympia Theater in Paris, France in 1963.
I first met Trini in the 60s, but really got to know him
when I moved to the Palm Springs area full-time in 1990. Trini had bought his house in the desert in 1962.
In 2004, I heard through John Byrnes, a friend and Trini
Lopez' public relations man, that Trini was going to
record a new album. Upon hearing about Trini's
upcoming recording, I submitted seven songs to him on CD
that I thought could fit his style. A couple of weeks
later, I got a call from Trini saying he wanted to record
one of my songs. He asked me to guess which one and
after several failed guesses I hit on the correct answer,
"Oh Maria." "Oh Maria" is a song I had written way back
in 1979. The idea was that I wanted to write a
Mexican-style polka with lyrics in English. I already
had a demo of the song I had recorded in 1993 on my Tascam 688
8-track cassette recorder. I sang and played all the
instruments on the demo. To my surprise, a few days
later I got another
call from Trini saying that he would like to use my music
track for his recording. He liked it like it was.
However, I had to make two alterations. First, my
recording was in the key of "A" and he wanted it changed to
his key of "E." This was not too difficult because the
bass, piano, and marimba were recorded digitally, therefore
I could easily change the key by pushing a few buttons on my
sequencer. The drums, which were digitally programmed,
could be left unchanged and unaffected. The guitars would have to be redone,
however, since they were recorded analog directly onto tape.
Second, Trini wanted the solo to be twice as long as it was
on my demo. Once again, thanks to digital technology,
I was able to "fly in" eight more bars to the solo section
and copy the bass and keyboard parts to the same new
section. Voila! The track was ready to go. I made a copy of the
new version of my track onto a CD and took it to the studio in which
Trini was going to record his album, a local studio called Rancho Mirage Music People. The studio
happened to be owned and operated by my longtime friend Leon Becken, whom I'd known since we were 15 years of age.
(At the time Leon was a drummer and leader of his own band, Leon
& the Leisures.) Leon "dumped" the two tracks (stereo left and
right) to two tracks of his digital multi-track recorder
which made it possible to overdub other instruments and Trini's
vocals.
The first session was in the evening of June 20, 2004. I first overdubbed an electric
bass guitar to fortify the existing digital bass. Next, I
put on a new electric rhythm guitar part, a typical two and four
polka part, to replace the original guitar which was in the old key. I then doubled the part with a twelve-string
acoustic guitar. The addition of the electric bass and
acoustic guitar fattened up the sound of the track. I then
put on a lead guitar part for the new eight bars of the solo
section. (The first eight bars was a marimba
solo that was on my original recording.) I then played a harmony guitar part on the guitar
solo section. Now all the music track was completed and it
was time to add Trini's lead vocal. By this time it was
around midnight. Trini went into the vocal booth and did
his lead vocal in just a couple of takes. The following
week, on June 27th, we all came back to the studio and Trini added his
harmony vocal and his ad lib vocal to the ending section of the
song. Over the next week or two, Leon mixed the track and
it eventually found a home as track #6 on Trini Lopez' album
called "Romantic and Sexy Guitars," which was released in
late 2004. You can hear the recording from a link at the
bottom of this page.
