How many dictators would have liked to ban rock? President Luis Echeverría turned off metals in Mexico in the early 1970s for fear of subversion, but ignored that an elastic band that stretches to one end turns more strongly to the opposite. Advancing the eighties, when the big bands came to play in the country, the young people went crazy. "Only with two concerts, one by Billy Joel and the other by Black Sabbath I built this workshop and with a few others I gave the race to my three children," says bassist Fernando Marín. Eject smoke from the cigar and take another drink of beer. It was not the music, to which he has dedicated 50 years, but the t-shirts that allowed him to live comfortably: “Metallica has been our record, we would sell about 50,000 shirts. At the Rod Stewart concert we had to go back to the workshop to load another van. ”
Fernando Marín played in several rock groups between the sixties and seventies, but the atmosphere became stormy. Mexico was still mourning the killing of students in Tlatelolco Square in 1968, when in June 1971 more than a hundred young people demanding democracy were shot dead. The Mexican government disregarded the so-called Halconazo: the gunmen entered to finish off some dying people to the hospital where they were treated.
Just two months later, the famous Avándaro rock festival, known as the Mexican Woodstock, was held in the country, which the regime's press received as an infernal orgy of drugs and scandals. Two days of music, peace and love, some pot and several girls getting rid of their clothes under the spotlights. Fernando Marín missed it because his group was hired to play elsewhere. Almost half a century later, he is still comforted by meteorological arguments: "It rained a lot, it became a quagmire, there were no toilets, I was not prepared for that crowd." Up to 300,000 attendees, say some chronicles, enjoyed the event.
Then there was silence. Forbidden the great concerts, the rockers took refuge in clandestine premises. “We played even in private homes, we advertised ourselves and without alcohol and maybe a touch of speck, we took out some money. If you were wearing pants, you were a homosexual, a drug addict, they accused us of everything, there were police reasons, ”recalls the bass player. Many turned to commercial music. Fernando, in addition, set up his t-shirt workshop when there was nothing similar in Mexico, "and who hits first, hits twice."
The shirts allowed him to enjoy the history of rock in the front row. Remember when the PRI veto fell and Santana, the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, ZZ Top, Pink Floyd, AC DC, Queen, Guns N 'Roses, and other pop music, such as Madonna, began to arrive in the country. Fernando tells him in t-shirts: "With Michael Jackson we sold 6,000 shirts and with Elton John about 3,500". Now four people work in the workshop. They print about 500 shirts per week in that kind of library where hundreds of wooden frames with the drawing of each band are stacked on the shelves. There is the history of world rock. A peculiar eight-arm ferris wheel rotates with the stretched garments to receive the color inks. Then they will go to the oven, a hypnotic process of pure artisan.
Fernando wears black, casual but without rock badges of any kind. The hollow of the cap leaves his eternal ponytail in the air, but you have to look for his gaze under the visor. Indiana Jones was no more faithful to his hat. Take another shot at the chela and remove the smoke from the lungs by moving the mouth almost to the ear so as not to disturb. The gesture reminds the manga cartoons, in which the circle of the mouth moves here and there so that the face is expressed. He barely raises his voice, and his movements are feline, more of a cat than a tiger, nothing to do with the strident contortions of rockers. Kind and obedient, he hangs the bass to rehearse some notes at the photographer's request.
Fernando Marín is well known in the world of Mexican rock. He went from begging places to rehearse to lend his workshop and the equipment his father financed to other artists. “The joke of music is having fun. Rock pushed us, fed us, took us for a walk. We had fun squirting, ”he recalls. Self-taught, he was a good music reader, that's why he was called to do substitutions; He played with Los Castro Brothers, with Dulce. And he had offers to settle in Chicago and Los Angeles, but he gave up. His current group is April and this 2020 that just stretches expect to release a fourth album. In March, to celebrate his 50 years of music, Fernando and his family will open the concert of Martin Barre, guitarist of Jethro Tull. "It is an honor for us," he says. Those years had a great time [upload to play a song] with the greats of rock. Because after the silence imposed the noise came with much more noise to the Mexican stage.
An artist's hand
Music has not been the only vocation of Fernando Marín. Or put another way: the shirts you printed were not made just to get money. He likes to paint. The skeleton that gives image to his band was drawn by him and many of the acetates that later passed to the rock shirts made them by hand when the technology was neither expected nor expected. His vocation for watercolor culminated in an exhibition at the local Pinche Gringo, in the Miguel Hidalgo mayor's office, near Polanco, the strawberry neighborhood in the west of Mexico City. There he sold some of the portraits of his idols: Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Beatles ... Now the protagonists of his shirts are others, he now calls these bands "The monsters that eat cookies", as in Sesame Street . “Well, they sing well guttural, right? But you have to do what the kids want, we can't be left behind. ”