Ruben Blades: I was born in Panamá, the Republic of Panamá, on July 16, 1948 in Panamá City, in an area called San Felipe. And my mother, Anoland Bellido de Luna, was born in Cuba. She was a singer and a piano player, excellent at both, and she went to Panamá in the late forties and she stayed there. She met my father who, at the time, was also a musician, Ruben Blades, born in Santa Marta, Colombia, and he went to Panamá when he was very little — I mean like months old. So my father is a Panamánian, but he was born in Santa Marta.

I grew up in Panamá. My grandfather on my father's side was English. That is why my last name is Blades. When people ask me, "how is your name pronounced," I say Blades. If people want to pronounce it Blá-des, I don't have a problem with that, as long as they don't think that I am ashamed of my name or that I'm trying to Anglicize my name to get over or that kind of stupid thing. But if somebody says Blá-des, you know, I'm fine with it. My grandfather on my father's side was English, on my mother's side he was born in Louisiana, in New Orleans. And my grandmother on my mother's side was from Galicia in Spain, and on my father's side, she was from Colombia.

I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang. We did not have a piano at the house — we couldn't afford one, and there wasn't anyplace to put it. We lived in two rooms and there was no room for a piano. But, she played piano, and I knew that, and I saw her sing, perform with the band, and I think that must have impressed me, tremendously. Plus, the fact that I was, in those days, like everyone else, pretty much a radio person. There was no television, so the radio provided you with everything. And music was a very important part of our lives. The radio was on all day. So, I think, it was a combination of elements. What really made me, I guess, become very interested in singing professionally was rock and roll. Because up to the moment when I saw Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — they had a movie called Rock, Rock, Rock — I never saw a twelve year old singing. All the models that I had seen before were people who looked like my dad. Whether they were twenty or twenty-two made no difference to me, they looked like my dad. This was the first time I saw, like, a kid singing. Kids were singing and having fun and I wanted to do that. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers went to Panamá. They were huge — big — and they went to Panamá. I couldn't see them. I wasn't allowed to.

I was going to law school and it was closed in '69. And, my brother, Luis, was working at Pan American. And if you work at an airline, your dependents can travel for very little money, and I got to come to New York for, like, twenty dollars. But I had also made a connection with a producer here, Pancho Cristal. They were producing, like, The Joe Cuba Sextet and Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz. And Pancho was, like, a big-time producer. A Cuban guy, a Cuban-Jewish guy. And, he'd seen me in Panamá, and he talked about maybe doing something in New York so I hooked it up when I came here and I recorded in 1969 my first album with Pete Rodriguez. Pete Rodriguez was the boogaloo guy. Not Pete El Conde. We did all the charts in, like, two weeks. Lino from La Sonora Matancera did a couple of charts, God bless him. I recorded that album and then I returned to Panamá. The university was reopened and I went back to the university. This is important to clarify, because a lot of people don't understand that I came in '69 and then went back to Panamá to finish school. So that when I came to New York again, it was, I'm not too sure right now, but it was '74 or '75. I went to Miami in '74 and then I came to New York, I think, at the end of '74.

Before my trip to New York, people like Roberto Roena and Richie Ray had tried to get me a contract with Fania. They had seen me performing in Panamá, but in Panamá I had to quit performing because teachers in the national university were against my performing. So that I was called and told, "You are not to perform again while you are a student of the faculty of law and political science in this university.” So I quit playing, but they had seen me, these guys, because we used to alternate whenever carnivals came. A lot of bands came from New York and Puerto Rico. In Panamá they had to be paired with local talent. A lot of these guys heard me sing. So when they went back to New York or went back to Puerto Rico, they went back saying, "This guy can sing, this guy can do this and he can do that, and he can write songs and he can do this and that." So Richie Ray, Bobby Cruz and Roberto Roena recommended me to Fania people, and Fania, at the time, was the label. Everybody was at Fania Records. That was like the golden age of salsa. But they weren't interested. So that when I came from Panamá...my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami. My father had a problem with the military. So that in 1974, when I graduated as a lawyer, I figured I'm not going to be a lawyer under a military regime. It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law. So I went to Miami in '74 with my family and while I was there it became obvious that we needed money and we needed to do something, because my family, we left without anything really, and we didn't have any money to begin with. So my father had to start a new life, my mother had to start a new life, and then I was there for, like, six months and I wasn't doing anything. So I called Fania and said, "Look, I'm here and I would like to record and do something." They said, "Well, we really don't need anyone to record." I said, "Well, what do you have? Is there anything that you have?" They said, "Well, we have a place here, there is a vacancy in the mailroom." And I said, "Well, I'll take that." So I came from Miami and I started working in the mailroom at Fania and, like you said, I was sweeping floors and picking up stuff. I used to push a cart filled with mail, it was so heavy that the U.S. Postal Service would not pick it up. I had to push it from 57th all the way to 52nd between Eighth and Ninth. That was '75, '74 or'75.

Before I got to know them, I had a wrong sense of respect and friendship. Masucci was clever enough to understand the potential of the music and he made it big. He made it big. There's no question about it, he facilitated the talent’s opportunity, but he ended up keeping their money. And it wasn't really his money. It should have been live and let live. I mean, he can't sing, he can't write and he can't play. And yet he's a millionaire... and the people who made him the money? Every time one of them died we had to sort of pass the hat around to try to see how we could bury this person. And so, I don't have a good memory of Jerry Masucci. I mean, you ask some other people and they'll say, "Oh, Jerry! Jerry was very nice." I say, "Why was he nice?" And I'm probably the only one at Fania who got back something. I mean, I sued him. They sued me, I sued them back and I got my music, my publishing. To this day he owes me money.

And mind you, Jerry's a charming guy. You know, I think we had a love/hate relationship. Because I can respect his acumen and his vision, which he did have, and if it hadn't been for Jerry Masucci and Fania, the impact of salsa music would have never occurred. I mean, this is a given, OK? So I respect that part of it. What I do not accept is the fact that so many people's talents were ripped off. And that part of it I am upset about to this day. And I don't think that it's correct to be quiet about it, because that's why these things happen.

And he ripped off everybody, including me. And I will never forget that because I went in as an artist, but my best records and everything— I did not get what I was supposed to get. Siembra and all that, they kept the money. And right now, like I said, a CD with no expenses, there are no expenses anymore, and he's selling it for $15.00. They're making a ton of money, and no one is getting a nickel. I want to try to see how I can do this, to try to get my money back from this guy. Although it's practically impossible because they sell the product to one person who sells it to another person. He'll tell you,"No, I don't know, I already signed the catalog over to somebody else.” But he's living like a king, and there are people here, I'm not bad off, but there are people here who really gave everything, their everything, and they have no money and they're going through hell. And he's not helping anybody.

I saw Willie Colón for the first time in Panamá in 1969, I think it was, or '68, when he went with Héctor Lavoe, God bless him. And they were the first salsa group that I saw, again, that was composed of young people. They had an energy that was incredible. They went there for the first time, and there were a lot of bands that were established that went also that year for Carnival. But we were all impressed by Héctor Lavoe and by Willie Colón. I mean, they were like really...that group had an energy that was unbelievable. That was when I saw them for the first time, and that's when I approached them for the first time. To give him songs.

He was receptive to it, but I didn't give him anything at that time, and nothing really came out of it until I got back to New York. When I got to New York in '69, then I called him. And, although nothing came out of it as far as them recording my material, we started contact that proved to be important because in 1975, then, I ended up singing a song in a record that he had done called The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And the next year when he quit the band, when he decided to go on his own with a different sound, that's when we hooked up.

Salsa's brightest era was in New York in the '70s. I have to tell you...something happened in the '70s. When I walked in here, the process was already moving forward. And actually was perhaps already beginning to saturate itself because there was a certain degree of conformism. Every band had their own distinctive sound, but it was pretty much dancing music and rhythmic music with a tremendous emphasis on copying the Cuban models. There was a tremendous interest in everything African. So everything sort of went towards Cuba, towards Africa. When I walked in, I was coming from Panamá. I was the first person to come into New York with a Latin American point of view which was also very much influenced by political happenings in Latin America. So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America. That is very important because it explains why, in the midst of this golden era, we managed to outsell everybody. By singing songs that no one in New York quite understood. The emphasis, again, was dancing and rhythm. I came in with an emphasis on lyrics. What happened is that people bought records when people went dancing on the weekends, or liked to hear the dancing music in the house. But when I came in with songs like "Plastico" and "Siembra" and "Pedro Navaja," all of a sudden these songs were telling stories that were familiar to people in Latin America and what happened was that the albums were bought across the board. The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city. So that where you sold 20,000, all of a sudden we were selling 350,000 records. So it was a big, huge impact that was caused by the fact of the lyrics and that is why Siembra became the first million seller.

Ruben and Colón were sort of like the Lennon and McCartney of salsa and Siembra was probably the biggest selling salsa album of all time.

It was the biggest seller. What happened — this is something that people are not aware of. I wrote music and lyrics, or composed, I don't like to say "write" because I don't have formal training, but I created the songs, the music and the lyrics. What Willie did was produce these songs. And he's an excellent producer, I mean, out there with anybody, one of the best. With his advice and his supervision. And, also, he had a tremendous, dynamic stage presence and he had the band. And he had a sound. So that that combination proved to be tremendously effective.

Basically what happened was I got the lyrics, I got the music and I would go to Willie Colón and we would get together and I either would present it to him in a tape, on a cassette, and/or with a guitar. And then we would decide who would be the arranger. Luis "Perico" Ortiz arranged "Pedro Navaja." A lot of people don't know that. Luis "Perico" Ortiz arranged "Pablo Pueblo." And Willie would arrange certain songs whenever he felt it was right — but that's again his genius in producing. That he would find the right guy for the right song.

And we had a tremendous success, I mean, in Latin America, when we arrived in places like Venezuela it was just...it was something else. I don't think that in New York people in the Latin field understood what we were doing, nor accepted it that much. I think that other, more rhythmically oriented bands, had better reception. But outside of New York City, we were kings. And even here we had respect. But we weren't like El Gran Combo, we weren't like Héctor Lavoe and his orchestra, or Tito Nieves, or Conjunto Candela because we weren't dance oriented bands. We had something to say. Whenever we played, people didn't dance, they listened. Club owners hated that because their things is--you dance, you get hot, you drink and that's where they make their money. They don't want people behaving as if they were in a theater. So we had a situation there where we had tremendous success outside of New York.

I think in New York we had respect and we would pretty much fill up the places where we went, but I never got the sense that we really were Number 1 here in New York among the Latin crowds. I mean, in general, people who knew about music, they knew what we were doing and, again, they really respected us, but you had to not depend on the dancing as a reason why you would go out to really meet with us. We had a wonderful five years, and we produced, we did Metiendo Mano, Siembra, Maestra Vida Parts 1 and 2, Canciones del Solar de los Aburridos and then we had The Last Fight. So we had six albums.

I think all, actually, except for The Last Fight. Metiendo Mano was important because "Pablo Pueblo" came on that one and that was like the first score. The first song that dealt with political and social overtones. And that was my first album, Metiendo Mano. And then Siembra, of course, which was the one that sort of ...Siembra did a lot of different things. On the political side it just created a platform for social commentary in a field that was, up till that moment, defined by its lightness and escapism. All of a sudden you had a record that was confronting issues and that was unheard of at the time. Also, it was the first time that songs were longer than three and a half minutes. So Siembra, in fact, went against all the programming schemes which existed up till the time when it came out. Songs like "Pedro Navaja" were six minutes long. It created a problem for programmers because they had their whole format and advertising built around the two and a half, three and a half minute song. When they tried to edit "Pedro Navaja," people would call and scream at them. So they had to play the whole damn song. And so that also changed a lot of the way that radio was being played at the time.

After I left the band and Willie in '82, I gave him a whole year’s notice, you know, I wanted to go in a different direction. I wasn't sure exactly what it was that I wanted to do. I was thinking about going back to school and getting a post-graduate degree. I wasn't sure where nor when. I wanted to explore film. I wanted to go to Panamá, I mean, there were so many things that I wanted to do. And I also wanted to move away from what we had done up till that time. You know, it was uncomfortable doing the same thing. I don't like a rut. You know, just repeating the same thing year after year. And when I left Willie in '83, no it was in 1982 when I left Willie and the band, and in '83 I decided that I would start a smaller group. There would be more fusion and more experimentation.

And the only guy I knew was Oscar Hernández. And Oscar introduced me to Mike Viñas and Ralph Irizarry and Eddie Montalvo, whom I knew also. I knew Eddie and I knew Oscar. And I had seen this guy, Richie Marrero, an excellent musician, and then the other guy, Louie Rivera, I'd seen with Angel Canales' band. So we had a meeting at my apartment near 81st Street. Everybody got together that day, we had a talk and they impressed me as people who were intelligent, who were willing to take risks, wanted to change things. We all discussed the type of salaries that were gonna be paid and everything and once we got to an arrangement that was satisfactory for everyone, then we said, "OK, we're gonna start working." And we started rehearsing at Boy's Harbor in '83 and we recorded Buscando America in 1983 as an independent project. I didn't have a record label. And Bruce Lundvall, who was with Elektra at the time, and who had known my work before, was interested and I went to Bruce and he loved the record and he pushed the heck out of it.