YOU GOTTA COP TO PEREZ

You've got the list, right? The one with all the movies every well rounded young adult should see, if for no other reason than to have a point of reference when someone mentions them? If you don't have the list, La Dolce Vita is on there, along with about a half dozen other Fellini flicks. I saw it when I was a young adult, and it was my introduction to a musician every well rounded young adult should hear, if for no other reason than to have a point of reference when someone mentions them. That's a whole other list. (You know how this works, hipsters weren't invented yesterday.) I'm not talking about Nino Rota, who did a lot of Fellini's film scores. As you may have guessed from the photo above, I'm talking about the swanky Cuban, Perez Prado.

Prado's "Patricia" appears a couple times in the film, notably during a party scene, when a lady at a party starts to strip, in the middle of the party. Just before she gets down to business, one of the attendees says "Patriiicia, Patriiiicia!" As tame as the scene seems now, it was pretty decadent for the time. For some reason, I really wanted that song. For a few years, I had a song title in the back of my head, but no artist to go along with it. (This was before the interwebs.) Then, out of nowhere, an old fart radio station appeared in San Diego. If you were around these parts back in the eighties, you know the station I speak of, good ol' KPOP. The station played music from another era, primarily the forties and fifties, but it wasn't an oldies station in the classic mold. Because, instead of Elvis and his lot, KPOP played Glen Miller, the Ink Spots, Patti Page, Sinatra, and others like that, among them, Perez Prado.

The cool thing about the station was (besides unknowingly turning a younger audience onto records that were probably hipper than shit in their parents day), they had a semi-reliable playlist, meaning that you wouldn't hear Perez Prado just once. If you tuned in regularly, you were likely to hear "Patricia" and "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" several times a week. (On AM radio no less. I miss that station.) So it was, that Perez Prado was embedded in the post-punk, pre-grunge, group of San Diego music scene barflies. So, here's a few from KPOP's playlist; and some from later, funkier and every bit as cool. Huuh!

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

KPOP mainstays:
Perez Prado - Patricia mp3 at TropicalGlen
Perez Prado - Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White mp3 at IHS55
Perez Prado - Mambo No. 5 mp3 at Bailey Beach Boy
Funkier 70s stuff:
Perez Prado - San Luis Blues mp3 at Soul Sides
Perez Prado - Tequila mp3 at Soul Sides
Perez Prado - Circle mp3 at 45 Giri a Porta Portese