I seriously contemplated where to catalog this album because it was released digitally in 2010, but all of the music was originally released in 1965 and 1966. Ultimately, I put this under the ’60s listing it as 1965 since the majority of the music was released in that year.
Los Saicos were the first punk band of Latin America, and possibly the world. Hailing from Lima, Peru, Los Saicos was a short-lived band that released a handful of singles in Peru in 1965 and 1966. They broke ground as one of the first artists to actually record their own music and were hailed as the pioneers of rock and punk music that would find its place in the ’70s.
The band consisted of Erwin Flores (Vocals and guitar), Rolando Carpio (guitar), Cesar Castrillon (bass and vocals), and Pancho Guevara (drums and vocals).
As I continue to find my early-era bands and singers to have created the pathway to the music I love now, I find obscure bands like this. It doesn’t mean that everything will be my jam. I don’t mind the music so much, it definitely is a combination of beat rock infused with surfer music. You can hear influences of that surfer sound that was classic to The Beach Boys. It’s like we have merged The Beatles with the Beatles, and added the anger and political frustrations of the strong-armed government of Peru. You have Los Saicos.
This may not be what I want to listen to on a daily basis and I will probably not keep the music on my Apple Music playlist, but I do appreciate what Los Saicos did for the music. It will be a couple of years before rock music begins to find its place on the radio in places like Peru and South America, which seems to be the birthplace of Latin rock.
Since that day, I have been study Latin pop and rock music and have become a Latin pop music historian through the publishing of articles, fanzine, and websites. My goal is to teach people about Latin pop music and the history behind it with my website, Siempre En Domingo.
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