? & the Mysterians Empty Bottle, November 1
It’s not the sort of recognition ? was seeking: he claims that he was born on Mars, that he’s lived many lives, and that he’ll return in the year 10,000 to sing “96 Tears.” But by most accounts his name used to be Rudy Martinez, and he was born in Mexico in 1945. According to Mysterians guitarist Bobby Balderrama, the band members’ families migrated to Saginaw from San Antonio to work in the fields, and stayed to take jobs at the General Motors plant in Saginaw. After World War I San Antonio had become a clearinghouse for Mexican and Mexican-American labor. Its agencies drew workers from the Rio Grande valley and dispersed them to the sugar-beet fields of the midwest, where they worked for about $2.70 a day. In the 20s Mexicans who came to Saginaw had been treated with suspicion by whites–in church they were restricted to the left-hand pews. But Balderrama, who was born in 1950, remembers a town segregated more by income than by race. Mexican-Americans lived on the east side of town, but so did some blacks and whites. “It was cheaper to live on the east side,” Balderrama recalls. “If you were Mexican and you had the money to live on the west side, that was OK.”
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The band began as a trio, covering Duane Eddy and the Ventures with Balderrama on bass, his nephew Larry Borjas on guitar, and their friend Robert Martinez on drums, and by 1964, with the British Invasion in full swing, they’d gravitated toward the gritty R & B of the Kinks and the Stones. Watching TV one afternoon Balderrama and Borjas saw a 1957 Japanese sci-fi movie called The Mysterians, and the name stuck. Eventually they recruited Robert’s brother Rudy, older than all of them at 19, to sing. Rudy had been performing since age five; he wanted to be a dancer on American Bandstand or maybe Broadway, and as ? he became a dynamic presence, spinning and twisting like James Brown. Their manager, Dave Torres, got them gigs at the G.I. Forum, the Saginaw chapter of a Texas-based civic organization. Saginaw had its own all-ages rock club, a converted theater called Daniel’s Den where Balderrama once saw the Yardbirds, but the band could never get a show there. Later Balderrama heard that the manager had refused to put a band full of Mexicans on his stage.
The single became the first release on Lillie Gonzalez’s Pa-Go-Go (Pato-Gonzalez-Gonzalez) label. Balderrama remembers Gonzalez calling the band over to her house when the first pressing of 750 records arrived: “She said, ‘Here you go.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Wow, what am I supposed to do with them?’ I thought they were supposed to be out at all the radio stations. So ? went in one direction, I went in another direction, hitting radio stations, and we were going to all the little mom-and-pop record stores, dropping them off.” Saginaw’s WSAM was the first station to play the single, and Bob Dyer and Dick Fabian at WKNX held listener-request contests between “96 Tears” and a release by the Bossmen, another local favorite. Bob Dell from WTAC didn’t like “96 Tears” and tossed out his copies, but as the song caught on elsewhere he broke down and added it to the playlist. Throughout the spring and summer of 1966 the record shot up the charts at WTAC and CKLW in the Detroit area. The original pressing sold out, and stores began asking for more copies. “I knew that all of us, because we were Mexican, had a lot of family,” Balderrama jokes. “I thought that was it.” When the single started moving in Detroit, the record labels started calling.
In November 1966, ? & the Mysterians released “I Need Somebody,” an organ-powered rave-up that peaked at number 22 in Billboard. At the same time Cameo-Parkway released the 96 Tears LP, which rode the coattails of its hit single to number 66 on the album chart. “I Need Somebody” was the last ? original to make an A side on Cameo: “Can’t Get Enough of You Baby,” released in March 1967, had already been recorded by the Four Seasons, and Bogart, impatient for another big hit, insisted that the band open its version with the organ riff from “96 Tears.”
Balderrama claims the third album was excellent, but Tangerine released only a belated single, the dark, bluesy “Ain’t It a Shame.” The band’s west-coast agency booked some gigs to get them back to Michigan, but they only made it as far as Albuquerque. “I remember we got in an argument with the club owner’s wife,” says Balderrama, “and he got upset with us and fired us onstage. It was this big old Texas-type dude; he had a cowboy hat and everything. It looked like a country-western bar. He walks up to the stage and he looks at ? and goes, ‘You guys are fired!’ He told ?, ‘Gimme that mike!’ And ? says, ‘Get your own mike!’ We thought it was so funny we laughed all the way back to the hotel.”
The new release brought them to Chicago the night after Halloween. Few people at the Empty Bottle knew what to expect of these 60s legends: at worst the show threatened to be a lame oldies band huffing and puffing in front of a crowd of smirking slackers. But anyone who came to laugh at the Mysterians had his ass handed to him in the first three minutes–as they tore into a high-powered two-chord vamp, a trim ? bolted onstage in black spandex pants and a silky orange shirt, working the crowd like Mick Jagger in his prime. Balderrama on guitar and Rodriguez on organ could have drawn on 30 years’ worth of chops but held back, cutting loose only when the moment was right, and bassist Frank Lugo, wearing a silly grin throughout the set, was solid as a rock. But the real revelation was drummer Robert Martinez, who missed the party in 1966, completing a tour of duty in Germany while the band he helped found was touring the U.S. behind its number-one single. His eyes shut, his head snapping back and forth, Martinez laid down the beat like a drill press.
