The musicians of Los Amables del Norte say that behind the veil of legends that covered the figure of Chalino Sánchez was a humble, happy and very talkative man.
-But he was a very delicate person. Short fuse. He fought with others; and he didn’t fight with his fists, he brought his 38 Super (pistol). We always look at that as something negative for him. “An artist cannot be so brave, so brave,” says Nacho Hernández, accordionist and leader of Los Amables del Norte.
Hernández and Jacinto Reyes, the band’s bassist, were two of the last people who saw Chalino Sánchez alive. It was May 15, 1992, and after performing in a packed room in Culiacán, Sinaloathe singer became hungry. Upon leaving the auditorium, Sánchez lowered the window of his truck.
“Let’s go eat tacos, I’m hungry,” he told Reyes as he left the place’s parking lot.
“No, we are going to go to the ranch,” answered the bassist.
―When they arrive from the ranch, they tell me to go to Quilá (a municipality in Sinaloa, where they were to perform the next day).
They were the last words they heard from him. His lifeless body was found the next morning next to a road in Culiacán. That 31-year-old man in an immaculate suit and ranch tie was murdered, shot twice in the head. It all happened on that early morning in 1992, but the echo of his legacy still resonates today. The Craft Records record company is preparing the launch of a limited reissue of vinyl from Soul in Love (1992)one of the artist’s most representative albums together with Los Amables del Norte, which will be released in mid-November. “32 years after my compa It’s not there anymore, people are still listening soul in love, January snows and many more. (…) You continue to hear it almost, almost, as if it were present,” says the accordionist.
A year before the tragedy, in 1991, Los Amables del Norte entered the studio to record the northern sound that would accompany the singer’s corridos and ballads. “soul in love It emerged as most of Chalino’s recordings emerged. They weren’t like something that was prepared, like ‘we’re going to record an LP.’ Chalino Sánchez’s thing was always very spontaneous, very improvised,” reveals Hernández, who specifies: “(They were made) without much rehearsing, but well.”
The two musicians say that the performer paid more attention to recording corridos and putting them together on cassettes than to planning studio albums, with ballads and other types of songs. “We started to introduce the idea of also putting songs on the albums,” says Hernández. For the musician, a corrido translated into money; In the genre, the creation of commissioned corridos is common, those created at the request of a client.
The version of soul in love by Los Amables paid tribute to previous versions of the song, such as that of Los Alegres de Terán or that of Ramón Ayala. The northern band respected that representative sound of the accordion that gave way to the voice. But in that recording released just a few months before Chalino’s death, the voice created a different atmosphere. “What my friend Chalino had was that whatever he recorded, no matter who it was, he made it his own,” Reyes explains.
The unforeseen did not only happen in the studio. Also on stage. “People imagine that it was something prepared, that the shows, that the presentations, that the recordings… We tell them the reality. “Everything was improvised.” Everything was sudden, like the gunshots in the westerns. Chalino appeared on stage with Los Amables. The public asked for songs; he sang them.
Something like this happened in a Californian bar at Coachella in 1992, one of the anecdotes that elevated that image of a brave musician. Edward Gallegos, a man in the audience, insisted that he play The rooster of Sinaloain the face of an apparent refusal from the singer. Gallegos became enraged and fired at the stage with his gun. Chalino, with a short fuse, also took out his pistol. A shootout then began in which one member of the public died and several were injured. “An artist cannot be so brave.” The singer was hospitalized due to the impact of the bullets; and Gallegos, imprisoned.
Without advertising campaigns, from ‘word of mouth’
Chalino made his first recording at the end of the 80s. It was on cassette, at the San Ángel Studios. The run of the toadalong with The Border Four. He forged his marketing in it word of mouth and selling those cassettes in street markets in the city of Los Angeles. The beginning of a domino effect that ended up making him a legend among border society. “If we are realistic, Chalino never had an advertising campaign. Many artists had to campaign when we joined (the Mexican label) Musart, they brought us on a tour in Mexico, in the United States. Chalino Sánchez did not reach that point,” says Reyes.
musart It was the label they recorded with Soul in Love. Los Amables claim that before that signing, the performer was not played on commercial radio stations and that a company had never before set their sights on him. “Many record labels now say: ‘I discovered Chalino.’ It’s a lie. We can deny it. “We had to meet Chalino Sánchez when he was nobody.”
32 years have passed since the Sinaloan musician received a note from the public on stage in Culiacán. No one knew what he had written on that paper that made him swallow saliva and make his face turn yellow. Neither Hernández nor Reyes noticed that scene, which was recorded on a home video of the time. The body of the Sinaloan musician appeared lifeless next to a road the next morning. Becoming a popular hero over the years, his face – often adorned with a slightly tilted hat – is already part of popular culture. It is not strange to see his photograph on a t-shirt.
-Do you think death turned him into a legend?
—For me, no. Many people say that Chalino hit after he died, that if he had not died he would not have hit. It isn’t true. If Chalino, after three decades, is still alive in people’s tastes, without making recordings or films, how would Chalino’s success be now? – asks Hernández.
