CRUZADOS Time For Waiting

CRUZADOS Time For Waiting

Bud Scoppa

Cruzados fit together so well, you’d think they were a product of central casting. There’s the riveting, reflective leader (Tito Larriva), the wisecracking, tough-guy drummer (Chalo Quintana), the steadfast bass player (Tony Marsico), and the enigmatic lead guitarist (Marshall Rohner). The alignment is so perfect that it’s nearly a cliche. So is the line—borrowed from a review in Billboard—that Arista has stickered on the shrinkwrap of the Cruzados’ second album, After Dark: “They play like their lives depend on it.” Come on, people, get real.

As the Plugz, Larriva, Quintana and Marsico toiled away on cramped L.A. club stages for the better part of a decade before landing a record deal—and all they had to show for it was the prevailing misconception that they were an East L.A. band a la Los Lobos. (“We have nothing to do with them,” Larriva insists.) Ironically, the Plugz’ showstopper was a punkedup, high-speed version of “La Bamba,” more recently Los Lobos’ biggest hit.

Even now, with two albums under their beaded belts, the Plugz-cum-Cruzados are in dire need of a hit of their own to insure their continued existence as a recording act. When Larriva is asked about his hopes for the current album, he quickly replies, “To be able to do the next one—that’s my hope.” Nevertheless, the four veteran players don’t appear to be overly troubled by the lack of career momentum.

“We’re good waiters,” Quintana says—and he’s not talking about waiting tables. “Nothing has ever happened to us quick.”

“Plus we’re keeping busy doing other stuff,” Marsico adds. Larriva acts (he appeared in True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 film), and his bandmates moonlight in other groups. Notably, Rohner and Quintana have been backing newcomer Danny Tate, who may well be signed by the time you read this. So why isn’t Marsico working with Tate? “Tony’s too short to be on stage with him,” Quintana explains. “The damn guy’s six-foot-four.”

“Waiting around for it to happen is the wrong attitude; you’ve gotta make your own reality,” the glint-eyed, Apachetressed Larriva philosophizes, in the manner of a rock ’n’ roll Carlos Casteneda. “It’s gonna get as far as it gets, and you do your best.”

“There’s no sense killing yourself about it,” says Quintana (who is known to his bandmates as Charlie). “Even when we get bad news, we always seem to shrug it off easier than other people. The patience is there. Once you do something and send it out to the world, it’s too late. You did your best. You can’t let it hound you.”

“We’ve always had these little bones thrown at us that keep us goin’ from one thing to the next,” says Marsico, punning intuitively.

“So you get hard,” Larriva picks up. “It’s like a boxer who can take the blows, and then, in the 15th round, the guy who’s throwing ’em can’t throw any more, and you win the fight.”

Larriva arrived in L.A. from El Paso in 1978 with the intention of becoming an actor. “I actually came here as a clown,” he says, prompting a roar of laughter from his bandmates. “They make fun of me ’cause I worked on the Queen Mary as a mime. I was a ballet dancer, and I came here after four years in Mexico City. I danced in a company there, and I did theater and television. I came here and did theater for a while, and then I fell into the punk thing, which was just another way of expressing myself. I picked up a guitar and that was it.”

When Marsico, an Italian from Philadelphia, joined Larriva and drummer Quintana (another El Paso native), the Plugz began building a rep on the lively L.A. club circuit.

“Coming from the punk scene, we didn’t wait for a deal—we did our own records,” Larriva says. “Over a six or sevenyear period, we had offers from Slash but never got past the whole lawyer routine. We weren’t really looking for a deal; we had our records and we had our audience. To us, there wasn’t that much more—we weren’t after the world, we

were just doing what we did. We didn’t have that broad vision; we had a punk vision. Our ambition was just to keep doing what we were doing.”

The band remained a trio until Larriva realized he wasn’t much of a guitar player. Guitarist Stephen Hufsteder was added, and the punk minimalist Plugz became the rock ’n’ roll Cruzados.

“We went out of L.A. to get a deal,”

Larriva says. “In L.A. they knew who we were, and they didn’t know who we were. When we went to New York as a band and played at CBGB’s, this woman at Warner Bros, called to L.A. and said, ‘Who are these guys and how come I don’t know about them?’ Felix Chamberlain (an L.A.-based Warner Bros. A&R man) had seen us a hundred times. In New York, we were ‘refreshing’; out here it was just ‘the Plugz, another L.A. band.’ ”

Warners didn’t sign the band, but several other labels caught the scent. After commitments from Enigma and EMI America resulted in nothing more than a shelved album, the Cruzados finally landed a legit deal—from N.Y.C.-based Arista Records. Southern-rock specialist Rodney Mills produced the band’s selftitled debut, which was released in late 1985 to good notices and a modicum of airplay on the cut “Motorcycle Girl.” When Hufsteder abruptly left soon after the release of the LP, the band scooped up Rohner, a veteran of such underground L.A. combos as Jimmy & The Mustangs, the Divine Horsemen, Dino’s Revenge and his own Bursting Aortas. Equally adept at blues-based riffing and classic jingle-jangle, Rohner enabled Cruzados to turn up the intensity level a notch or two. His sonic slabs and Quintana’s stylish crunch comprise the Cruzados’ present power train.

On After Dark, “the focus is clearer,” according to Larriva. “We cut the (original version of the) album pretty quick with Rodney. Then our release date was pushed back. So we sat around for many months and, during that time, wrote more songs. Two of those songs, ‘Small Town Love’ and ‘Road Of Truth,’ were obviously right for the record. We got Greg Ladanyi and Waddy Wachtel to coproduce the new songs, and the way they put the band up front was the way we wanted the whole record to sound. So we went back and rethought how it was mixed, basically. And if bringing it all up front wasn’t working, we redid things so that it would work that way. We simplified a lot of things—we pulled out most of the keyboards. Now you hear the band.

“So the delay turned out to be really, really lucky for us. And it was fortunate that Roy Lott, (Arista’s) senior vice president, had the foresight to know that we were on the right track.”

“Yeah,” Quintana cracks, “we needed a big chunk of money to take some shit out”

The crucial cut on After Dark is “Bed Of Lies,” a midtempo groove-rocker agitated by Marsico’s snaking bass line and beefed up by arrogant guitars and urgent backing vocals. When (Arista president) Clive Davis picked it as the initial single, the band didn’t argue. “You gotta respect the guy,” Larriva insists. “He’s had some luck. It was the obvious choice, because it grows on you and you don’t get tired of it.” Davis is also partial to “Time For Waiting,” a life-affirming ballad sung from the corozon by Larriva.

Another song from the LP, “Road Of Truth,” has particular significance for the band members. “Tony had this riff and it was really good, but I just couldn’t get it,” Larriva recalls. “And when I went home to Texas for a while, it just came out of me.”

“The song’s just about goin’ home,” Marsico clarifies.

“And it made sense,” Larriva goes on, “because I was home when I did it. I was there because my mother was really ill— she died a couple of weeks ago—and there was a lotta stuff in me. Tony’s mother was ill, too, at the time; she was stricken with cancer, and... my mother, too. Charlie’s father just passed away.”

Marsico: “It was a hell of a year.”

Larriva: “A weird time for us.”

Quintana: “But you gotta keep goin’, you know?”

“This all happened within three or four months, and we were right in the middle of doing the record,” Larriva says. “It was really intense. We all went home—”

“And Marshall bought a car,” says Marsico, attempting to lighten the tone.

“He was burning rubber all over town,” Larriva laughs. “But Marshall’s been through quite a bit himself.”

“A self-made hell,” Rohner says softly.

“When you’re on the edge like that, it really gets you to concentrate,” Larriva reflects.

Quintana: “Makes you tough, man. It’s just another layer.”

Larriva: “But all this happening to us shows us what we’re made of. If we can weather all this stuff and still manage to create what we have and survive...”

“It makes terrible monitors at a real important gig look like nothing,” Quintana says.

The room is quiet. Then the wisecracking, tough-guy drummer experiences an epiphany. “We play like our lives depend on it!” he jokes. But he’s only halfkidding. Ill