Jaime “Dogpaw” Carrillo nostalgically recalls the “age of Latin rock.”
“A vibrant era,” said Dogpaw, who wears his long hair and is dressed impeccably in black, while wearing a pendant with a Native American symbol. “For a moment we were together, we had a dream and we were living this dream.”
Music is Dogpaw’s passion. At his home in the Mission, the neighborhood where he was born, he has a huge record collection.
Dogpaw grew up next to Fantasy Studios when it was located at Treat and 21st streets, where the likes of Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan and Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded.
During the age of Latin rock, Dogpaw was a teenager. It was the age of the rebellious counterculture: the Black Panthers in Oakland formed in 1966; students at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University rebelled against the old order in 1968 and 1969; and the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles demanded an end to the Vietnam War in 1970.
Music played an important role in all of it—through lyrics, clothing and lifestyle.
And in the Bay Area, Latin Rock—the Latino take on mostly white rock & roll —strongly took off. Artists like Carlos Santana, Pete Escovedo, Sapo, Azteca and Malo all played at concerts and house parties.
“You’d go to a house party and you’d meet blacks, Filipinos, Latinos, whites…,” recalled DogPaw. “Once upon a time we were all brown, it was the house party era.
Everyone was at concerts, and San Francisco had a lot of venues. Bill Graham, the music producer, was instrumental in organizing concerts during that era; at the Fillmore, Winterland, the old Cesar’s Latin Palace in North Beach, at the Cow Palace.”
He longs for those days, the ones in which he says that music and art went hand in hand.
“It was all connected back then,” he said, pointing to a mural that pays homage to David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “La América Tropical,” a mural that Dogpaw helped paint inside the Bank of America at Mission and 23rd streets in 1974. He did it with Jesus “Chuy” Campusano and Michael Rios, and many others.
Dogpaw remembered how Chuy, who took part in the founding of Galería de la Raza in 1970, “would make sure we’d all go to the concerts worth going to.”
“Album cover art was one of the primary reasons why I took commercial art in high school,” said Dogpaw, who studied at John O’Connell High School, just a few blocks from his house.
But one day, the dream came to an end.
“The two things that changed everything was disco and cocaine,” he said. “The advent of salsa really destroyed the Latin rock scene.”
Dogpaw remembered a concert at the Winterland Ballroom on October 29, 1976, where Mingo Lewis, a conga player who had played with Santana, opened for the Fania All Stars. The concert was organized by East Coast producer Jerry Masucci.
“The audience was booing, asking for salsa,” Carrillo said. “Not that salsa was boring, but it became predictable, the same thing every time, clave, clave, clave… it’s just boring, conservative.”
According to Dogpaw, the wave of Central American migration to the Mission in the 1980s helped change the character of the neighborhood, as well as its musical tastes.
“A mix of people came–humble, beautiful people. But you also had these ugly, rich people who embraced more conservative music,” he said. “You’d run into them at concerts and parties, and it was like, ‘I wanna dance with your girlfriend and we wanna do a lot of coke’ kind of thing.”
Between 2005 and 2010, Dogpaw produced a show called Radio Café on the radio station KPFA on Friday nights. He worked from the Old Creamery Building on Valencia Street, and played Latin rock and rock in Spanish from the 1990s.
With respect to the music today, he thinks the Latin rock scene looks barren. “It is a dead culture right now,” he said.