El Chicano – Coming Home Baby
El Chicano
Listen/Download – El Chicano – Coming Home Baby MP3
Greetings all.
I hope the new week finds you all well.
I have been digging-econo of late, and so when I dipped into a Discogs store and found a grip of interesting looking one-dollar 45s, I thought I’d grab me some and see how it played out (if you will). Most of the things I picked up hardly amounted to ‘taking a chance’, seeing that they were either very cheap, or by reliably great artists (or both).
One of those purchases sits before you today, East LA giants El Chicano’s smoking version of Bob Dorough and Ben Tucker’s oft-recorded ‘Coming Home Baby’.
The group’s version of Gerald Wilson’s ‘Viva Tirado’ was a substantial hit in 1970, and though they continued to record/release music for the next decade, they never really had another big hit.
This is not to say that they weren’t making good music, as today’s selection will attest.
‘Coming Home Baby’ hit the charts a dozen different times between Mel Torme’s brilliant version in 1962 and 1971.
El Chicano’s version, a blazing, overmodulated Hammond feature only charted very briefly in a few California markets, but it is among the finest versions I have heard.
Cramming almost five and a half minutes onto one side of a 45, the El Chicano version has a hot, live sound with just enough Latin percussion in the mix to remind you who your listening to.
In addition to the general hotness of this 45, it should serve as a reminder that El Chicano’s stuff is uniformly excellent and as our friends in the UK are wont to say, ‘cheap as chips’, so go out and get you some.
See you next week.
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Keep the faith
Larry
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