¡Cabeza de Vaca muevan muchos traseros!

Behind every rock band there's a Latin revue. It's just that simple—or is it? For the six members of La Cabeza de Vaca, what started as a bastard child of their primary bands, Arcaro and 33.3, has exploded into an underground Yale sensation—the biggest band you've never heard of—and might make some wonder who's behind whom. Because anyone who's seen Cabeza live knows that this band is for real. Authentic? Fuck authentic. This group of white boys from Kentucky, Georgia, California, Hawaii, and Connecticut writes fat-bottomed Latin jazz originals, and has the grace and style to play them straight and kitsch-free. Funky without being funk, Cabeza are the greatest party band to hate party bands, and they're starting to believe, or at least acknowledge, their own hype.

COURTESY LA CABEZA DE VACA These funky gringos keep the crowd's hips in motion.

"We still can't believe we get away with it," said Cabeza keyboardist Matthew `Sticky' Dunkel, JE '01, of the group's unexpected praise. "It's sort of incomprehensible to me."

Actually, "get away with it" is quite an understatement. Since forming in May 1999 for the singular purpose of playing the Drama School Prom (the theme was "Havana") Cabeza, who play at the Graduate and Professional School Center at Yale (GPSCY) this Saturday, have set many a group sousing to a salsa beat. They have packed GPSCY a couple times before, played a chic art world party in New York, and even did a turn as a wedding band. Two weeks ago, they organized a fund-raising benefit at Rudy's to buy a vending license for Annette, the well-liked "flower lady" recently prohibited by police from pursuing her trade. While netting more than the necessary $250, Cabeza enveloped the Elm Street bar for nearly four hours, pushing their audience to such an outer realm of ass-shaking hysteria that hardly a table surface was left unscraped by dancing feet.

My own introduction to La Cabeza de Vaca—"head of the cow" for the Spanish-impaired—came over a bleary-eyed game of late-night Scrabble on the floor of bassist and local New Havener Will Nolan's apartment. Arcaro had just finished recording "Iterate/In Absence," (Pensive) its first seven-inch single, a dramatic—if willfully difficult—offering to the Cult of the Odd Time Signature, replete with smothered vocals, probing guitar dissonance, and tricky drum beats as big as black holes. But all Nolan, Dunkel, and trombonist/guitarist Joe Grimm, JE '01, could talk about was this Latin jazz show they were playing at the Drama School Prom. Of course, consuming my fill of chocolate-covered strawberries and beer while watching, stiff and awestruck, as the velvet-clad couples cut the kind of other-worldly rug one only sees in American movies about South America.

When Cabeza's five songs concluded, the band broke for 15 minutes while the theater students hooted and hollered. Then they came back out and played the same set, song for song, which was all well and good as far as just about everyone was concerned.

"We didn't really know what we were doing, and we didn't know what to expect from the crowd," Dunkel said. "But people reacted. They moved their asses."

If the band started as somewhat of an art rocker's experiment at "fun," the experiment's overwhelming success has made Cabeza take fun that much more seriously. "Ass-shaking" is not a word that applies to any aspect of an Arcaro or 33.3 show—head-nodding and shoe-gazing are more appropriate modifiers. While perhaps more creative than Cabeza, Arcaro's sound is essentially ponderous, almost cartoonish—the kind of rock music in which the simplest pleasure is waiting confidently, in nearly every song, for the guitar-bass-drum Godzilla to rise up and crush the shimmering melodic tension like a wrecking ball into Lincoln Logs. 33.3, which Arcaro/Cabeza members Nolan and Grimm joined last spring, noticeably share some influences with Arcaro—Slint, Shellac, Rachel's, if you're keeping score—but their execution is more cerebral and relies less on sudden, violent climaxes than on rolling crescendos, made fluid by the brilliant, jazz-inflected drumming of Steve Walls, ART '99, who also lays down the powerhouse beat for Cabeza. The new lineup of 33.3 recently released their newest album, Clay's Music (Aesthetics), produced by Bob Weston (Archers of Loaf, Shellac).

Concert

La Cabeza de Vaca Sat. Sept. 30 GPSCY Doors open at 9 p.m.

The question of priority that side projects inevitably face is hardly inevitable here, since most of the members of 33.3 and Arcaro are in Cabeza. The only question is whether Cabeza is just a guilty pleasure for its more serious members.

"When we first played, it wasn't a joke, but it was sort of a throw-off," Dunkel said. "But if you can make a crowd move, if you can elicit that response, it's hard to look at it as nothing more than a throw-off."

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