Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,699

This is the grave of Johnny Pacheco.

Born in 1935 in Santiago, Dominican Republic, Pacheco grew up around music. His father Rafael was a bandleader who led Orquesta Santa Cecilia. a major Dominican big band of that era. When Johnny was 11, the family decided to take a shot at life in New York, following an already common path of immigration. His parents taught him their love of music and he learned to play all sorts of instruments, starting with his father’s favorite, the clarinet, but also violin, accordion, flute, and sax. However, it was percussion that grabbed his heart. He went to a technical high school and got the kind of job a working class kid could get after high school, but that wasn’t exactly satisfying to him and didn’t make him much money, so why not go all in with the music?

As early as 1953, Pacheco played in bands, first playing percussion in Gil Suarez’s band. and in 1954 he founded the Chuchulecos Boys, a band that included the great Eddie Palmieri on piano and Barry Rogers on trombone. He also took percussion courses at Juillard to improve his art. He and Charlie Palmieri, Eddie’s older brother, played together in various projects for most of the rest of the 50s, but to less satisfaction to Pacheco. There were a few reasons for this. One was that Palmieri was getting famous and wanted his name on all the recordings and so did the record companies. Another is that their styles began to diverge, with Palmieri going toward an older, smoother sound and Pacheco wanting to push the music forward.

So in 1960, Pacheco went solo and formed Pacheco y Su Charanga. In effect, Pacheco was starting to create salsa by this time. His first album sold 100,000 copies and they went on tour in Latin America. Influenced by merengue and cha-cha-cha, the band helped create a dance craze called the pachanga, which also had roots in the fertile musical grounds of Cuba at the time. Pacheco’s part in this was to create the Bronx Hop, a dance move that went big with the fans of this music. His band became the first Latin headliners at the Apollo, in 1962, showing just how powerful a musical force they were becoming in New York. There were a lot of new people in New York in this era and they came from a variety of places in Latin America. They brought their own musical traditions with them that combined with the popular music from both white and Black America and made the city one of the most important cities in Latin music. Pacheco was a central figure to this.

In 1963, Pacheco and a divorce lawyer and fan of Cuban music named Jerry Masucci decided to create Fania Records to promote the new music coming out of the city. Of course Pacheco would headline the label. This also made him the godfather of the city’s burgeoning salsa scene, as the label had a lot of success and so the young’uns coming up wanted to record there. He created a new band called Pacheco y su Nuevo Tumbao, which got rid of the violins and replaced them with trumpets, giving his sound a less big band and smooth sound and pumping that brass with the percussion. Pacheco played percussion and Pete Rodriguez, El Conde himself, provided the vocals.

For the next 20 years, Pacheco was the biggest thing in salsa. He recorded a huge variety of work, often really more just gatherings of who he wanted to play with at a given time than having a steady band. As he got big, he toured Africa and started bringing sounds he heard over there into his music.

One of the biggest moves Pacheco made was getting Celia Cruz to record with him. The Cuban star had come to the U.S. to escape the Revolution and her career wasn’t exactly translating that well. She was skeptical of the new salsa scene. She was almost 50 years old and was a bit distrusting of change, as we olds get. But Pacheco basically tricked her into showing up at his studio and he had a whole band there and they started recording. She was pissed. But she decided not to walk out and then liked what was happening. This led to the release of Celia and Johnny in 1974, one of the true seminal albums in salsa history. Now, I hate dancing and won’t do it, but my wife loves salsa and so I hear a lot of this stuff. I like the music just fine, even though I’m not sure a new idea had happened in it since Pacheco’s death.

So I started finding some of the most highly regarded albums and really listening and I have to say, this is a fantastic album. It also revitalized Cruz’s career and made her the global star that she remained for the left of her great life. I read Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York that Changed Music recently and he strongly makes the case that what Pacheco and Cruz did here was at least as important to musical history as anything by Ramones or Talking Heads or Blondie or New York Dolls or any of the bands transforming music in New York in the mid 70s. I agree. It’s possible this album is less important to you than these other bands, but there are many musical audiences in the world and just because something isn’t your music means nothing in terms of the quality of other types of music. I personally disdain metal, but I’d hardly argue it isn’t hugely important or that metal fans have bad taste. It’s just not my thing. Especially when it comes to hip-hop, a lot of people in LGM comments could remember this lesson.

Pacheco mostly did covers over the years, because that’s part of what salsa is, reinterpretations of other songs. But he wrote about 150 cuts of his own and that’s a lot of songs, though he recorded so many albums that these are only a fraction of the songs he put on tape. The Fania All-Stars brought together various groups of his friends from his label for a number of key albums in the 60s. El Conde went on for his own solo career in 1974 but there were so many great vocalists that it wasn’t hard for Pacheco to pick the best available and keep on going, which was Hector Casanova. Renaming his band Pacheco y su Tumbao Añejo, they continued pounding out great salsa through the 70s. It wasn’t only Cruz that he did duet albums with either. Using his sizable name, he co-led recordings with all sorts of greats from the scene, including Justo Betancourt, Papo Lucca, Pupi Legarreta, Celio Gonazlez, Jose Fajardo, and Luis Silva. I need to check more of these out. Need to check out some more salsa graves too.

Later, Pacheco became a mentor to a lot of hip hop musicians. In fact, when the rapper Mangu reached out to work with him, Pacheco was pumped and they did a whole album together, Calle Luna y Calle Sol, that he produced. Pacheco was also a global ambassador for his music and that included through film. He worked on, helped fund, and played on a number of documentaries. The first was Our Latin Thing, the 1972 Leon Gast film about Fania Records, which was the first film that really explored salsa culture in New York. Pacheco got into soundtracks too, including for Something Wild, for which he collaborated with David Byrne, which at first might seem an odd pairing but in fact was pretty brilliant.

There’s more to say, but this is very long as is. Pacheco died in 2021. He was 85 years old.

Johnny Pacheco is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York, just down the path from Celia Cruz. And I think we can all agree that this is a fantastic grave.

Let’s listen to some Johnny Pacheco.

That’s some great music right there.

In 2013, Celia and Johnny was included in the Library of Congress’ prestigious National Recording Registry. If you would like this series to visit other artists who had worked inducted in 2013, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Aaron Copland, whose Copland Conducts Copland: Appalachian Spring recording from 1974 was inducted that year, is at the Tanglewood Music Center in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, a place I need to check out and hear something at anyway. Isaac Hayes, who had Shaft inducted that year (fuck yeah!) is in Memphis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.