Post by Admin on Aug 13, 2020 8:15:20 GMT -4
Trini Lopez, popular 1960s singer who had hits with If I Had a Hammer and Lemon Tree – obituary
Trini Lopez, who has died from complications of Covid-19 aged 83, was the Mexican-American singer and guitarist who became an international star in the 1960s with hits such as If I Had a Hammer and Lemon Tree; in the cinema he was also one of The Dirty Dozen.
Boyish and exuberant but technically impeccable, Lopez became famous for his up-tempo covers of familiar songs, especially those appropriated from the increasingly fashionable US folk scene.
They were peppered with the infectiously joyous vibrato squeals and hollerings he had learnt from Mexican folk music, creating a sui generis sound classified by one commentator as “Latin folk rock”.
In his early career Lopez played mainly at nightclubs – often establishments that he would not have been allowed into as a customer. He was one of the first Mexican musicians to become famous under his own name, standing his ground when record executives told him that the public would find such evidence of his heritage off-putting.
It was as a resident performer at PJ’s, a modish nightclub in Los Angeles, that he was discovered by Don Costa of Reprise Records. Lopez became a protégé of his idol Frank Sinatra, Reprise’s founder.
His first album, Trini Lopez Live at PJ’s, was a recording of his standard set, and included covers ranging from Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land to America from West Side Story and the traditional Mexican folk song La Bamba, which became one of his signature numbers. Released in June 1963, the album went on to sell a million copies.
One of the cuts was If I Had a Hammer, written in the 1940s by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays as a hymn to Communist values, but transformed by Lopez into a raucous favourite of nightclub dancers. It had been a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary the previous year but it was even more successful as a single for Lopez, reaching No 1 in 36 countries and No 4 in the UK.
In late 1963 and early 1964 he went on a sell-out tour of Europe: in Paris he was supported by the Beatles (“I used to steal the show from them every night,” he recalled), congratulated backstage by Maurice Chevalier and asked for an autograph by Brigitte Bardot.
In the following five years he released 12 further albums with Reprise, and had hit singles with Lemon Tree and Kansas City among others.
By the end of the decade, although hugely popular as a live performer and a regular headliner in Las Vegas, he was starting to seem old-hat to the record-buying public: a benign golf enthusiast who neither smoked nor drank, and was often described as one of the best-dressed men in showbusiness, seemed irredeemably square in the psychedelic era.
He developed ambitions for a film career, having made a cameo in Marriage on the Rocks (1965) opposite Sinatra and Dean Martin – he appeared as himself in a nightclub, singing Sinner Man, which promptly became another hit single for him.
In the Second World War action thriller The Dirty Dozen (1967) he played Pedro Jiminez, alias Number 10 – one of a group of US convicts who agree to take part in a near-suicidal attack on a French chateau full of high-ranking Nazis, in exchange for their freedom. Once again he performed a song that did well as a record – The Bramble Bush, aka The Ballad of the Dirty Dozen.
Lopez held his own among the eclectic cast, but his character suffered a fatal parachute accident too early to make a real impact.
The part was bigger in the script, but filming in Hertfordshire was repeatedly delayed by interminable rain and Lopez decided he should return home. By his account, “Mr Sinatra” flew to England to tell him directly that his fans would forget him if he had any more time away from his musical career.
Lopez went on to play the title role in Antonio (1973), about an indigent Chilean befriended by a rich American, played by Larry Hagman. But neither he nor the film were memorable and his acting career petered out.
He had a more successful sideline as a designer of guitars for Gibson. His Trini Lopez Standard and Lopez Deluxe were huge sellers, and he claimed to have sold more signature Gibson guitars than anybody apart from Les Paul. Later on they became collectors’ items, and were cited as treasured possessions by Noel Gallagher and Dave Grohl. The Edge, of U2, auctioned his Trini Lopez for $280,000.
Trinidad López III was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 15 (some sources say May 13) 1937, the son of Trinidad López II and Petra Gonzalez, immigrants from Guanajuato in Mexico. He was brought up with a brother and four sisters in a one-room house in the city’s Spanish-American ghetto. Of his parents he recalled: “They worked and struggled together just to survive. They ploughed fields together. My mother washed clothes on the rocks in the river.”
His father bought him a Gibson guitar from a pawnshop when he was 11. He began to play on street corners, mostly Mexican songs, but with nods to African-American bluesmen and pioneer rockers such as Elvis Presley.
He became so successful as a performer that he dropped out of N R Crozier Technical High School, supporting his family by playing in clubs. He met another Texan musician, Buddy Holly, who recommended him to his producer, but a record career failed to take off.
In 1960, with $200 in his pocket, he left Dallas and drove to Los Angeles in a Chevy station wagon with “Trini Lopez and his Combo” painted on the side – the combo comprised Lopez and his guitar.
He briefly agreed to become frontman of the Crickets following Buddy Holly’s death, but he found that the band were too wealthy and preoccupied with partying to be interested in making music. However, discovery as a solo performer eventually came his way.
Lopez, who claimed in the 1980s to be retired from recording, although he still toured widely, had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and never married – “Maybe it’s because I’m a Catholic, and I feel that when I get married it must be for good.”
In 1996 he was tried and acquitted on charges of assaulting his former long-term partner Rose Mihata; his defence was that it was she who had attacked him because he refused to marry her. He conveyed some disappointment that the press were not more interested in the case.
His popularity enjoyed a resurgence in the new millennium, when he began to record regularly again, producing six new albums. Although he claimed to be “too lazy” to write his own material rather than cover other people’s hits, in 2016 he finally released an album of his own work, All Original Songs.
Trini Lopez, born May 15 1937, died August 11 2020
