Strachwitz Frontera Collection

In the late 1970s, in between journalism jobs, I worked in the music industry, on the selling, not the producing, side. With absolutely no direct experience in the market, I took a job as Latin-music buyer for Pickwick International, a major record distributer on a national level. With a gargantuan warehouse in the San Fernando Valley, the company operated its own chain of record stores, Musicland, and supplied hundreds of record departments in national retail chains, including Sears, Woolworths, Montgomery Ward, and Kmart.

The problem was that Latin music wasn’t selling well in these outlets, despite a heavy Latino clientele in many of the stores. So I was brought on board in hopes I could fix the problem. The managers took a chance on me because in my previous job as an editor at Billboard, I covered the business and also tracked the sales charts for top sellers in Latin music.

That’s when I discovered that writing about the business and actually being in the business are two very different things. I was nervous, but truthfully, the solution wasn’t very hard to find. The records weren’t selling because the company simply wasn’t putting out the right product, for various internal reasons.  In a nutshell, the stores didn’t have the big hits by the big stars, so shoppers were turned off.

My job was to make sure we got the right records in the racks, then did enough promotion to win customers back. Sometimes even I was surprised by our success.

One of our biggest promotions featured an in-person visit by one of the major norteño acts at the time, Los Cadetes de Linares. These promotions were typical in those days. An artist would agree to visit a retail store and sign autographs for fans, while the dealer sold a pallet of records in a few hours. A win-win, as the cliché goes.

Los Cadetes were hot at the time, so we knew they would draw a crowd. But we never expected the masses that showed up at the Kmart store in Delano, California, to greet the singing duo, Homero Guerrero and Lupe Tijerina.  Of course, this was farmworker territory, the natural fan base for norteño music. People waited in line for hours and packed the aisles so thick that other shoppers couldn’t get to the toothpaste or the TVs. It was a mob, but a most orderly and patient one.

I was impressed by the professionalism of the two musicians. They stayed to sign the very last autograph. They were not exactly charmers; they didn’t smile and you couldn’t call them outgoing. But they didn’t complain, either. Dressed in matching guayaberas, they were serious and respectful, and that’s all their fans required. People approached them with a mixture of awe and delight. Even the star-struck Kmart employees proudly displayed their personally autographed posters, as you can see in one of the photos I took with my old Minolta 35mm manual camera (which explains the lousy focus).  In the other photo, Tijerina takes a copy of the LP Pistoleros Famosos from a fan to sign, while his partner signs a separate autograph with a curious boy looking over his shoulder.

That day, records by Los Cadetes sold like hot tamales. In the end, promotions like this helped drive Latin music albums to the top of Pickwick’s western-region sales charts. I wound up being sort of a star myself at the company. But it’s easy to look good when you’re simply making available the music by artists that so many people love.

Both members of Los Cadetes have now passed away, but their music is still played and sold. You can read my full biography of this enduring norteño duo here.

-- Agustín Gurza