Los Ombligos

That was the name of my relatively short-lived band in Oaxaca, Mexico.  Los Ombligos.  The Bellybuttons.  And yes, it’s every bit as stupid in Spanish as it is in English.  The guys and I were pretty stoned when we came up with that name, to be honest.  When the time came when we had to actually name the band – we had gigs coming up and we needed a name to give to promoters – Roberto the bass player and I pointed out that we already had a name.  Julio the guitarist played dumb, so we reminded him of Los Ombligos.  Julio absolutely balked.  He was having none of it.

Roberto and I stuck to our guns.  After all, we had sworn to use the name, even if we thought better of it the next day.  We really pushed it, and I pointed out that it didn’t really matter what the name of the band was.  Think of The Beatles (beat…beetle….beatles….get it??).  The Sweet, The Foo Fighters…my point was that the name doesn’t really matter.

If the band’s music and shows get popular enough, people stop paying attention to the “meaning” of the name.  That is to say, The Beatles is no longer the dumb pun it surely was in 1962, it became and remains forever the group name of those four musicians and nothing else.

And, at least locally, Los Ombligos rose to that level of popularity, for a very brief time.

There was certainly a bit of silliness to it all.  I had managed to acquire the nickname “Cucharas”(spoons) because once, playing a quiet gig for which I didn’t have brushes to play and my sticks were just too loud, I went into the kitchen and borrowed a couple of wooden spoons to use instead, and those did the trick.  One time, and that name stuck for years.  I once even got on a bus:

Driver: Hey, aren’t you Spoons?

Me: Uh….what?

Spoons!  From Los Ombligos.  That’s you, right?  The gringo?

Me:  Oh!  Yeah, haha, yeah, I guess so, yeah, that’s me.

We weren’t huge at all, but we were fairly well known within the city.  It was kind of cool.  It was enough.  No one made fun of Cucharas or Los Ombligos, not in my earshot anyway, not that anyone ever told me.  That was just me, and us.

Kinda cool.

The photos are the obverse and reverse sides of an invitation to what was my favorite gig that we ever played.

This show was held at a small private cinema called Pochote, in a park in Oaxaca called Los Arcos.  It was sort of a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the book On The Road, by Jack Kerouac.  As far as I know, Mr. Kerouac had no direct connection to Oaxaca, nor did his book, but Oaxaca is a very artistic community, and any fan of that novel or of the work of the Beat Generation would feel a like connection to Oaxaca; I miss that place horribly.

Anyway, the event was in two parts.  The first part was a screening of several locally produced silent movies with their basis in the novel.  After that show was done, there was an outdoor cocktail and dinner party with a couple of speakers to speak about the importance of the book, the meaning behind the Beat poets and writers, etc, things like that.

Los Ombligos was hired to improvise music for the silent movies, much in the way that piano players would improvise music for silent movies back before talkies.  For that part, we played different instruments.  Julio the guitarist played bandolón, which is sort of like a mandolin with a thyroid condition, Roberto the bassist played flute and I played hand percussion, like bongos, congas, a djembe, various shakers and sound effects, etc.  That was great fun.

For the dinner party outside, we had our regular instruments set up, changed into nicer clothes, and played reasonably quiet lounge music, interspersed with the occasional instrumental rocker, for the party goers to enjoy, in between the speakers of course.

I think that may be the most memorable gig I have ever played.  It was a beautiful night out, it was in Oaxaca, we got to do that first half, which went really well, and I guess there is a lot of nostalgia involved in that memory.  It was a good night.

Thanks for reading.