It was summer 1965, and the Beatles needed help.
The Fab Four’s film and album Help! were about to be released in the United States. John, Paul, George, and Ringo planned to spend half a month among young Yankees to stoke the fires of Beatlemania. Not to be outdone, Motown, the Beach Boys, and folk rockers were mounting a counteroffensive to the British Invasion. Suddenly, the greatest group in rock history needed to step up their opening with an act that could match their energy and cool. They found it in four Chicanos from Los Angeles’s Eastside, working-class lads just like them.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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Cannibal & the Headhunters were the breakout stars of a scintillating local scene that saw kids born Jorge and Consuelo go by George and Connie while they jerked and mashed-potatoed as well as any gringo teen on American Bandstand. The vocal group’s serpentine cover of “Land of 1,000 Dances”—go ahead and sing it: naa na na na naa—was a hit all spring and summer. The song allowed them to appear on nationally aired television shows and tour from New Jersey to Iowa to Florida, sharing bills with the Temptations, the Righteous Brothers, the Dave Clark Five, and other future Rock and Roll Hall of Famers.
Somewhere along the way, Paul McCartney noticed.
The Liverpudlians loved L.A. Chicano rock. Chan Romero’s “Hippy Hippy Shake” was a favorite of theirs during their Germany days, and they opened for Chris Montez (“Let’s Dance” and “Call Me”) during the Hawthorne native’s 1963 U.K. tour, the last time the Beatles weren’t top of the bill.
“McCartney told his people, ‘I want the Nah, Nah boys,’ ” Headhunters member Richard “Scar” Lopez told an interviewer decades later.
The Beatles tour began on August 15 at Shea Stadium in New York (“Mick and Keith came backstage to tell us how good we were,” Lopez told another interviewer) and took them west, with concerts in 10 cities. Cannibal & the Headhunters would open along with go-go dancers, instrumentalists Sounds Incorporated, and Motown chanteuse Brenda Holloway. The Ottawa Journal called the Headhunters “inspired” after a Toronto concert; the Houston Post praised them as “athletic singers.” The Oregon Daily Journal dismissed their singing as “so-so” but added, “Their dancing excelled that of the discotheques.” On plane rides between stops, Lopez said, the Beatles would join him and his bandmates in belting out the immortal chorus of “Land of 1,000 Dances” to pass the time.
But the crowds didn’t care. They wanted the Beatles. That would change on August 29 and 30 at the Hollywood Bowl.
INSIDE THE AMPHITHEATER
Mark Guerrero was the 16-year-old frontman for Mark & the Escorts, a Chicano rock group that had the same manager as the Headhunters. He says that news of their peers joining up with the Beatles “spread wildly” throughout the Eastside. “A couple of them were picking vegetables in the Imperial Valley when they got the call,” he says. “Can you imagine, you’re picking shit for a dollar an hour and then you get a call to be with the Beatles?”
Guerrero joined hundreds of Eastsiders to welcome their guys home at the Bowl with handmade signs and cheers. No known audio, film, or even photos of those performances exist, but he remembers the night he went as clearly as yesterday.
“The truth was, no one else gave a damn about the opening acts. They came for the Beatles,” says the 76-year-old Guerrero, son of Chicano music legend Lalo Guerrero. “When Cannibal came on, they got the most attention of anybody.”
The Headhunters roared through “Land of 1,000 Dances” and did the rowboat, a signature dance that consisted of using their butts to crawl along the stage. They did it with such force that, as Francisco “Cannibal” Garcia told the Los Angeles Times in 1984, blisters sprouted on their nalgas.
“It took us almost a whole number to get everybody on our side,” Garcia said. “There were so many cameras and lights and screams, the energy just shot up so high I must have been in heaven.”
The Beatles’ tour ended after a pair of shows on August 31 in San Francisco, and the Headhunters hit the road to open for another all-star British act, the Animals. The two foursomes never met again.
Those two nights at the Bowl are remembered by many Chicanos as one of the most consequential events in the history of Mexican Americans—no joke. If four kids from the tough Ramona Gardens and Estrada Courts projects could rock with the pinche Beatles at one of the greatest music venues on Earth, then anything was possible.
The Bowl “is just down the road if you’re living in East L.A. or Boyle Heights, but psychically, it’s a long way away,” says Tom Waldman, coauthor of Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ’n’ Roll from Southern California. “That wasn’t a dream of Chicano kids because it was way too off the scale.”
The moment stuck with Waldman so deeply that he included it in Eastside Heartbeats, a 2016 musical about a fictional band based on the Headhunters that ends with them playing at the Bowl. By then, all the Headhunters were dead except Robert “Rabbit” Jaramillo, who flew in from Colorado to see a rehearsal and wept. The show premiered at Casa 0101 Theater in Boyle Heights.
“We’re at a time with what’s going on with ICE and these raids that once again we have this notion that Chicanos don’t belong here,” says Waldman, who hopes to restage Eastside Heartbeats in 2026 for its 10th anniversary. “Our show showed that not only did Chicanos belong at the time but they’re central to what American pop culture means.”
“I don’t even know if the Beatles knew that the Headhunters were Chicanos,” Waldman adds. “All the Beatles knew is that they heard something that they liked and wanted them to open.”
Since the Headhunters’ Bowl cameo, a parade of Mexican American musicians who either were born in the Golden State or found fame here have shown the world that Chicano rock, well, rocks. These musicians have absorbed the beats around them—Latin American rhythms, Black vocal traditions, white rockabilly, and others—to create music ranging from the neo-soul of Cuco to the jarocho rock of Quetzal and Las Cafeteras to the jazzy sounds of San Francisco’s Malo to the mix of cumbia, rock, and soul of Ray Camacho & the Teardrops out of the Central Valley and the protest music of Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez of San Diego.
While some have become musical icons, like Carlos Santana and Linda Ronstadt, most acts have stayed critical darlings and community stalwarts—Los Lobos, Chicano Batman, and Ozo-matli—while never quite blowing up. Chicano rock doesn’t get cited enough as a foundational sound of California because of this lack of mainstream success, even though it’s the most Californian genre of them all.
Its practitioners were raised in one culture and embraced others. They don’t conform to what each side of the Mexican-American hyphen wants them to be; for them, the hyphen is them. They’ve created a template of how to express the United States at its multicultural best.
The rest of the country may never understand how magical Chicano rock was and is. But at least one American institution has: the Hollywood Bowl.
FROM ZAPPA TO LOS LOBOS
Growing up in Walnut, east of East L.A., Miguel “Oso” Ramirez never visited the Bowl. “We went to Born in East L.A. and La Bamba,” he says, the former a comedy by Cheech Marin and the latter a biopic of pioneering Chicano rocker Ritchie Valens.
Ramirez is the percussionist for La Santa Cecilia, a quartet that mix everything from klezmer to corridos for their irresistible sound, which includes a hypnotic take on “Strawberry Fields Forever.” They’ve played the Bowl three times—and that’s not including a weeklong residency on the walkway leading up to the arena, serenading about their time on Olvera Street, the birthplace of L.A.
“The connection and the explosion with the audience is always one of the most humbling moments of your life,” says Ramirez. “I have to leave it all. I can’t be like, ‘We made it, and this is it.’ We try even harder. We didn’t take it for granted, and we still don’t.”
He especially remembers La Santa Cecilia’s first appearance at the Bowl, in 2017.
“I had never experienced the extreme turnout of the hometown. It was the most special feeling,” Ramirez says. By then, the group had been together for more than a decade, their songs appearing on TV shows like Entourage and Weeds and in movies like The Book of Life and Cantinflas. “All these years, we passed [the Bowl] by, and we were finally there. I don’t like using the word ‘epic,’ but it was.”
Irma “Cui Cui” Rangel is a vocalist who performed with Chicano roots rock group Califas and her own band, Cui Cui and the Angel Warriors. In 1993, she was singing for a choir that backed up Paul McCartney for an Earth Day concert at the Bowl.
“It’s the highlight of my career,” Rangel says. “I didn’t realize until I got there that I was the only one in the choir that looked like me. It was real important for me to represent my people, my nation, in a positive manner.”
She and her fellow choir members sang “Hey Jude,” the Beatles anthem with its own “nah nah” chorus. McCartney left the stage, “and for some reason, I just followed him,” Rangel remembers with a laugh. “And when I got back there, he smiled at me, and I just said, ‘I just wanted to thank you for the beautiful music you’ve given to the world, and I wanted to know if I may hug you.’ ” They embraced.
The only Chicano rock act I’ve seen at the Bowl was in 2003, and it was the best concert I’ve ever attended. The lineup: Mexican electro-norteño group Kinky, rock en español gods Café Tacuba, and Los Lobos. It’s my generation’s Woodstock—seemingly every Gen X Chicano born and raised in Southern California I know claims they were there that night, even though I know they weren’t.
The Bowl is an intimidating venue: open-air, near the 101 freeway, with rows of box seats and benches stacked on top of one another like dominoes ready to collapse onto artists if they begin to choke onstage. Powerhouse groups have shrunk in its immensity. But I recall how Los Lobos swallowed it whole when I saw them, embodying their namesake spirit animal while roaring through original tracks and ranchera covers. So I call up the group’s main songwriter, Louie Perez, to get his memories of that evening.
“The Hollywood Bowl to Chicanos was something as distant as watching Father Knows Best,” he says, noting that his sister was at the Headhunters-Beatles show. “It wasn’t until Cannibal got that ticket to cross the river to do something so monumental that Chicanos had a sense of the bigger world.”
“I can’t imagine what it would’ve felt like for [them],” he continues. “With. The. Beatles. At. The. Bowl. For me, just playing at the Palladium was like, ‘Wow, OK!’ ”
What about Los Lobos playing the Bowl?
“There’s not too much I can tell,” he says nonchalantly. “Certainly it wasn’t ever our best shows.”
Really?!
“We played the Playboy Jazz Festival one year. Bill Cosby was the host. Three or four songs. Uneventful, except he was a rude son of a bitch.”
When I remind Perez that I attended his band’s 2003 Bowl show, he cracks, “That one completely fell off my radar.”
Then a cherished memory of the Bowl comes back to him—but it doesn’t involve Los Lobos.
September 14, 1968. The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Perez’s first time at the Bowl. He was 15. His mother paid a neighbor to take him, dressed in his JCPenney best.
“I listened to Mexican music all my life until I listened to Jimi Hendrix,” Perez says. Seeing him in person “changed my life forever. At that point, I knew what I wanted to do.”
He thinks again about the significance of Chicano rock at the Bowl and remembers another concert he attended: Frank Zappa and the Grand Wazoo Orchestra in 1972.
“There was a brown guy in the band, I remember,” Perez says.
I google “Chicano member Grand Wazoo.”
Tony Duran?
“That’s him!” Perez excitedly replies. He stays quiet for a bit, then chuckles. A year after that Frank Zappa concert, Perez and his friends created Los Lobos.
“Man, I’m 72, and I’m going through my life in review talking to you, brother. The Bowl really means something!”•
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
