“There’s a gay club in Milwaukee where Jeffrey Dahmer used to go and pick up victims,” Caughthran recalls. “This five-storey building, The Rave; it’s super old and super creepy, it’s got this ballroom on the very top with all of these other clubs throughout it. But underneath, the creepiest part, there’s this giant drained pool. This crazy fucking ghost pool room you hang out in, and there’s all this wild graffiti. The whole building is just fucking creepy as shit. That’s the most haunted venue we’ve played. We’ve played the Queen Mary, which is kind of fake haunted. But this place was the real deal.”
History is most certainly an ominous thing (and yes, rudimentary research does indeed confirm that people died in that pool back in the day). You seek it out like a sore tooth, and while Caughthran is presumably no haunted reservoir the curious overlap of El Bronx and Mariachi El Bronx – the former a hardcore punk outfit, the latter straight-up mariachi – piques your interest for where it all began.
“It came from boredom, really. I grew up in a Mexican neighbourhood and was surrounded by that culture [and] music. But I’d never taken a real dive into it. After the third El Bronx record we were just feeling a little bored, and we getting these cool TV spots that wanted El Bronx to do acoustic songs, and we’re not an acoustic band. We didn’t want to turn this stuff down, but at the same time we didn’t want to be boring and typical. We figured, well, if we’re going to do acoustic stuff, how can we shake it up? Mariachi was the answer. When we started it, it was just covering a Bronx song with mariachi rhythms [and] syncopations. But it turned into this thing that was just really fun. And what did we have to lose? It became this insane, inspiring thing that we’d really stumbled upon out of nowhere. I know people had messed around in it, but doing original mariachi tunes in English, it’s pretty unique. Especially coming from a fucking punk band.”
On the contents page, punk and mariachi are at a pretty great remove, although most everyone can identify with the desire to stop what you’re doing and run in the other direction. Not out of defeat necessarily, but in the yearning for something new, something you might return from with a greater perspective. The prospect of seeing Caughthran explore a third musical avenue however is slim.
“Finding something that’s that opposite of the other two, I don’t think so,” he considers. “Those are both pretty opposite ends of the spectrum, so if we just concentrate on experimenting within those two realms I think we’ll get everything we need to get out of music, life, creativity. All of that stuff. For us it’s not about creating something from nothing every time. We love El Bronx, we love Mariachi El Bronx, and they both allow us to be creative in different ways. Mariachi El Bronx was a search, we needed something else. And now that we have it, there’s not really that need. I think we’ll probably keep it in those two ballparks.”
The success of both bands now sees them touring worldwide, so even finding the time for a third genre might be asking too much. They’ll soon be touching down for Bluesfest followed by a national tour, and all this after a huge run of UK and US dates beforehand. It’s a sprawling tour, but as footsteps begin to shuffle outside (which I hope to God belong to my friends), Caughthran insists it’s all worth it.
“I didn’t grow up fucking dirt poor, but we were lower middle class with the expectation that my world was going to be California. I certainly never expected to get out of the United States. I preach to people to get out and travel, because what it does to your mind is so beautiful. The worst part, well, one thing I know for sure is that being sick on the road fucking sucks. It’s just fucking terrible. You do get homesick every now and then, but it’s a hard thing to complain about because that’s what you’ve signed up for. Sometimes your body breaks down, and when that happens, you’ve got a hundred and four fever, fucking strep throat, it’s fucking two degrees in fucking Montreal, and everyone’s speaking French and you can’t find a fucking doctor, and you’ve got a fucking show at nine o’clock and there are fucking low ticket sales. That shit, every now and then, just makes you cry, ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ But lucky for us, those times don’t happen too often. You can’t complain, right?”
BY ADAM NORRIS
