Ritchie Valens

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Image:Ritchievalens.jpg Richard Steven Valenzuela (May 13 1941 – February 3 1959), better known as Ritchie Valens, was a pioneer of rock and roll and, as a Mexican-American born in Los Angeles, California, became the first Mexican–American rock and roll star.

1 Career
2 Death
3 Tribute
4 Sample
5 External link

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Career

The professional career of Ritchie Valens lasted barely eight months, but in that time he managed to record some of the greatest and most influential songs of the 1950s. In May 1958, Bob Keane, the owner and President of Del-Fi Records, a small Hollywood record label, was given a tip about a young performer from the San Fernando Valley by the name of Richard Valenzuela. Valenzuela, then aged sixteen, was already making waves in a local band named The Silhouettes.

As well as performing with his band, Ritchie (the added "t" and the shortening of his surname to "Valens" were Keane's idea; there had never been a Latino rock and roll artist before, and Keane was worried that the name might put off prospective listeners) also played solo at parties and other social events. A completely self-taught musician, Ritchie was an accomplished singer and guitarist. At his appearances he would begin playing and singing a popular song, and make up new lyrics and riffs on the spot. This is an aspect of Ritchie's music that is not really heard in his commercial studio recordings. Due to his high-energy performances, Ritchie had gained the nickname "The Little Richard of the [San Fernando] Valley".

Keane, swayed by the Little Richard connection, went along to see Ritchie play a Saturday morning matinee at a movie theater in San Fernando. Impressed by this performance, he invited Valens to audition at his home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, where he had a small recording studio located in the basement. The recording equipment comprised an early portable tape recorder – a two-track Ampex 6012 – and a pair of Telefunken U-87 condenser microphones.

Several songs that would later be re-recorded at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood were first demoed in Keane's studio. The demos were mostly just Ritchie singing and playing guitar. Some of them featured drums. These original demos can be heard on the Del-Fi album, Ritchie Valens — the Lost Tapes. As well as the aforementioned demos, two of the tracks laid down in Keane's studio were taken to Gold Star and had additional instruments dubbed over the top to create full-band recordings. "Donna" was one track (although there are two other preliminary versions of the song, both available on "The Lost Tapes"), and the other was an instrumental entitled "Ritchie's Blues". Ritchie played a guitar part on this track using a pencil!

After several songwriting and demo recording sessions with Keane in his basement studio, Keane decided that Ritchie was ready to enter the studio with a full band backing him. Amongst the musicians were Rene Hall and Earl Palmer. The first songs recorded at Gold Star, at a single studio session one afternoon in July 1958, were "Come On, Let's Go", an original (credited to Valens/Kuhn, Keane's real name), and "Framed", a Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller tune. Pressed and released within days of the recording session taking place, the record was a smash hit.

Valens' next record, a double A-side, which was sadly the final record to be released in his lifetime, had the songs "Donna", coupled with "La Bamba". The latter became the title of a 1987 film about his life (see La Bamba), which introduced Lou Diamond Phillips as Valens and co-starred Esai Morales as his older half-brother Bob Morales.

Valens was a pioneer of Chicano rock and influenced the likes of Chris Montez and Carlos Santana.

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Death

In early 1959, Valens was traveling the Midwest on a multi-act rock and roll tour. In the early morning following a February 2 performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, a small four-passenger Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft departed into a blinding snowstorm and crashed into Albert Juhl's cornfield several miles after takeoff at 1:05. The crash killed Valens, along with co-performers Buddy Holly, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, and the pilot Roger Peterson. This event inspired singer Don McLean's popular 1971 ballad "American Pie", and immortalized February 3 as "The Day the Music Died".

Ritchie Valens is interred in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6733 Hollywood Blvd. in Hollywood, California. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001 and his pioneering contribution to the genre has been recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

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Tribute

Image:HollyMonument.jpg In 1988, Ken Paquette, a Wisconsin fan of the 50s era, erected a stainless steel monument depicting a steel guitar and a set of three records bearing the names of each of the three performers. It is located on private farmland, about one quarter mile west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, approximately eight miles north of Clear Lake. He also created a similar stainless steel monument to the three musicians near the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin. That memorial was unveiled on July 17 2003.

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