This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for one dollar a month at patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey. Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. This episode is going to be a little different from normal, because I'm comforting a band about whom there's almost no information in English. Normally, I do all of a search myself, but in this case I've had to ask Tilt, who can speak a little Spanish, to help with finding some of the information and also with the pronunciation of some words and names. Many mistakes I make are still mine, and I will definitely still be mispronouncing things, as I have a mild speech impediment which means I literally can't make some of the phonemes in Spanish, but anything I've got right, you can probably credit him for. That's because today we're going to take a look at Los Shakers, your otherwise most important band of the 60s, and at their masterpiece, like Comforencia, Socreta, Del Toto's Bar. Los Shakers, like many of the greatest bands, were based around a spends spends spends spends spends spends spends spends spends spends spends spends but was a frustrated musician. In the 1950s he formed a small trio, trio Faturoso, with two of his sons, Hugo and Asfaldo. With Hugo and Piano and accordion, Asfaldo and Rums, and Antonio playing a bass made out of a bucket, a broom, and a piece of string. This trio seems to have played a sort of Yorvaguayan equivalent of Skiffle, playing Boleros, tangos and so forth at street parties with rudimentary instruments. In much the same way as small groups like the Quarriumem were playing in the UK. When he was 16, Hugo switched from keyboards to bass and joined a band called the Hot Blowers, who seemed from the small amount of information I've been able to find out about them, so he'd been a Yorvaguayan equivalent of the trad bands playing in the UK at the same time. The Hot Blowers recorded at least a few EPs while Hugo was a member of the band. I've been unable to find exactly when the Hot Blowers split up. I've seen sources claiming years from 1961 to 1963, and I've also seen some suggestions that Asfaldo was a member of the band at one point, which seems likely given that throughout the rest of his career, Hugo always worked with his brother. But what we do know is that like so many musicians, the Faturo Sobrothers had an epiphany in 1964. The Brothers had actually become aware of the Beatles before almost anyone else in South America. As the daughter of a local baker had visited the UK in late 1962 and brought back a copy of Love Me Do, which had not impressed either of them. But in early 1964 they saw something at the cinema that changed everything. Depending on what sources you look at, they either saw, yay yay yay, Paul John Georgi Wingo, the Spanish language title for a Hard Days Night, or a trailer titled The Beatles Are Coming. Either way they seemed to have had an almost damacine conversion, and soon they were blowing cold rather than hot on jazz, and had formed a new group clearly inspired by The Beatles. As Faldo switched from drums to guitar, while Hugo also switched to guitar, but also carried on playing keyboards, the duo started writing songs together, with Asfaldo writing the lyrics and Hugo the music. During by Roberto Pellín Capobianco on bass, and Carlos Cayo, Villa on drums, they formed Los Shakers, the other Guayan Beatles, and signed to Odin Records, an EMI subsidiary that operated in non-English speaking countries, mostly in Latin America, and released their first single, Rampantodo. The group's first album just titled Los Shakers, featured that track, and covers of It's My Party and Del Chalens' Keeps Searching, along with eleven other originals, almost all of it and by the Fatal Rose of Others. While the song titles were in Spanish, the songs were written in English, and the lyrics tend to be the kind of thing that you would expect from people for whom English isn't their first language. Some song titles, translators, everybody shake, shake in the streets, and baby do the shake. But while the groups lyrics were rudimentary, though they do a much better job of writing in English than I would in Spanish, they had managed to perfectly absorb the melodic style of the early Beatles, and they were at this point very specifically being influenced only by The Beatles. They had not particularly enjoyed rock music before The Beatles, having all been jazz musicians, and they had no interest in any of the other bands who were around at the time. On the first album, songs like Paratee Paramee are perfect pastiches of The Beatles sound. At the group release, the series of singles that came even closer to The Beatles style, like Solo and Tuzo Holes. While the group were from Yoruguay, their recording career was based in Argentina, and they quickly became the biggest group in either country. They even spearheaded them in a Yoruguayan invasion of Argentina, where they were soon followed by Los Mockers, not the same band as either the 80s New Zealand New Wave band, or the more recent Powerpop band from Virginia, who were build as the Yoruguayan Rolling Stones. There was even an attempt to break the shakers in the US to very limited success. There was signed by a small company called Audio Fidelity, who originally existed to promote stereo sound. I have a copy of an album by the Trad band The Jooks of Dixieland on Audio Fidelity, which I was given when I was 8 or 9. And then it's gatefold sleeve, it actually has a long explanation of what this new technology, Stereophonic Sound, actually means. Of course, by the mid-60s, all the major labels were also releasing stereo albums, and Audio Fidelity had lost its unique selling point. The label was also aimed very much at the Audio File market, which at that point was older adults who liked jazz or classical music, and they had little or no experience in the pop market. For the album on Audio Fidelity, titled Break It All, the group re-recorded their South American hit and some tracks off their first album, re-titled with English titles. Ugo had a bad throat on the day of the recording, and so as valdo took the lead vocals instead. That album wasn't a success, as the label didn't know how to promote it, but because it had an auto-American release, for a long time it was the only album by Los Shakers to be known outside South America. More recently though, the group's EMI catalog has been be issued in expanded editions, while Break It All is the hardest to find, it's commonly only available on vinyl as the second disc of a set with their first album. The group's similarity to the Beatles was not entirely a positive thing for them, and they started expanding their musical palette for their second South American album, Shakers for you, incorporating some of their jazz influence, and also the Samba and Busson over music that was popular in their home country, on tracks like The Single, Nunkai Nunkai. I'm going psychedelic on Espevo Keles Gusto, a song which showed the strong influence of John Coltrane on the group, although the backwards guitar and heavy bass also show that they were still listening to the Beatles. But their label was actually pushing them to be more beatily. As there was sign to an EMI subsidiary, they had access to forthcoming Beatles releases before they came out, and the label pushed them to release cover versions before the originals were released, so their label would get two bites of the cherry with each song. Sometimes these would be straight sound relex as close as possible to the original. Sometimes there would be completely rearranged inventive covers. And sometimes, as with Submarino Amarillo, their Spanish language cover of Yellow Submarine, the result just doesn't work. The group's most influential album, La Comforencia Secretad del Totos Bar, released in 1968, is often called the Latin American Sargent Pepper. But this is actually a rather lazy comparison based more on the group's early Beatles imitation. By this point they're doing something very different from pure Beatles copycat material. The opening and title track is about a summit of the members of the organization of American States that have been held in Yoruguay in 1962 when Cuba had been kicked out of the organization, but were relocated in the group's mind to that local bar. And I can hear records of all sorts of different musicians in the album. Masalago KLC Ruela is closer to some of the material and pet sounds of Odyssey and Arrico than to anything the Beatles have a dead. While Canton Bay incorporates music from the Yoruguay and Canton Bay style of music, which is not to be confused with the Canton Blay, I talked about in part three of the sympathy for the Devil episode, even though both are Latin American styles incorporating complicated percussion parts. That track pointed the way to the direction that Latin rock music would go in the next few years. No longer an imitation of Northern Hemisphere music but something of its own. La Confreencia secreta del Totos Bar is definitely an album of its time, but anyone who enjoys Ogden's not gone flake by the small faces, Mighty Garvey by Manfred Mann, Guerilla by the Bonso Dog du Dar Band, Odyssey and Arrico by the Zombies, or Genuine Imitation Life Gazette by the Four Seasons, owes it to themself to check out the album, which is one of the finest examples of that kind of eccentric psychedelic Baroque pop. They would, however, be the last album by Los Sheikers for nearly 40 years, though Pellin Capobuyanco and Karyo Villa would record an album as Los Sheikers without the Brothers' involvement in 1971. By this point, Yoruguay, which in the early 60s had been one of the most liberal countries in South America, was facing unrest from left-wing militias which led the president to impose a state of emergency. Over the next few years, the country grew steadily more authoritarian until by 1973 it was under a military dictatorship. This was not a time to play at being the Beatles, and by the time La Confreencia secreta del Totos Bar came out, the group had disbanded. Ugo and Asfaldon moved to New York and went back to the jazz they had grown up with, first recording a duo album of bus and over music, including one Beatles cover, one Backpack cover, several new songs and several remakes of Sheikers songs. Before joining the band of Brazilian jazz legend Ertomo Verba, in the mid-70s they formed their own jazz fusion band, Opa. Opa recorded several albums, including one under the name Atro Sheikers, meaning Other Sheikers, titled Alos Sheikers in 1981, which was a tribute of sorts to their earlier band. Both Faturo Subwothers became major figures in the Latin Jazz world, especially Ugo, and in that genre they played with a huge number of major figures both together inseparately, and received many awards. In 1998 they re-formed the trio Faturo So, with Ugo's son taking the place of their father on base, and Asfaldon back to his first love, The Drums. The original lineup of Los Sheikers also re-formed in 2005, recording an album titled Bonus Tracks Sadly the album didn't capture the old magic and as Faldo died in 2012, Kappel Bianco in 2015 and Villa in 2019. Hugo continues to perform the last remaining shaker. Lost shakers didn't make much impact on the world outside South America, but in their home continent they were one of the biggest and most influential bands of all time, and some of the music they made is easily the equal of some of the bands that are household names in Britain and North America. There can be air and this episode is a reminder of why this podcast is A History, not B History. Because for every story that I can tell in this space, there are entire continents' worth of stories I can only glancing the elude to. Entire history is written in languages I don't understand. About musicians every bit as important as the ones whose lives happen to be told in English. On the down round and round was played with the swell in the spell of the broken
