Puertorican Super Group RAICES (Rah-ee-ses)

[Tony Alicea]

I don't have the time to translate into English this one of my many cultural web sites ...
However, as an ex-musician from Puerto Rico, once I decided to follow the University route (I ended up #1 at the Univ. of PR in Physics in 1974), other friends of mine chose the professional musician route, no matter the risks.
Well, in 1974 some of the very best musicians from Puerto Rico (none of them was older than 25 years old! I was 24) decided to get together and form what I can comfortably call a "super-group"
At any rate, I recorded them live at one of the campuses of the Univ. of Puerto Rico (Cayey) on a reel-to-reel tape recoder at 7.5 inches per second (ips). I then copied that reel unto cassette using what was then probably one of the state of the art cassette recorders - it was not a Nakamichi but another japanese 3-head cassette deck named Sony TC-177SD (I think!).
In this page I have the recording that I made, in both low and hi quality MP3s (for high and low bandwidth requirements)
Keep in mind that this is a live recording. The advantages of a studio recording were not present and everythig you hear is just as it happened in real-time.
Raíces broke up shortly after their first album (contract with Atlantic records) because some of them got into the celebrity trip: "Who's the star of the group etc?"
I tell you, knowing them from even before they formed the band (when I was like them): It was impossible to tell who was the 'star'. They were all excellent executors of their instruments. Asking a question like that was irrelevant and only conducive to dissolution. Which it did.
Oh well, "All Good Things Must Come to an End..."

[Cindy Glass]

Very nice music .
What were YOU playing?

[Tony Alicea]

Thanks Cindy!
I received a call form one of them, now, and for a long time living in NY, asking me for the original tapes etc...
Ha ha! I knew this would happen if only after a quarter of a century!
Now, when they want their children to hear how they sounded when they were the age of their children now!!
Ha ha!
No; I'm not playing anything in those tapes. I had made my choice by then and did graduate from the University of Puerto Rico that same summer. When I made that live recording I was a grad student in physics with an almost state of the art reel-to-reel tape recorder, the preferred method of recording high fidelity live concerts. You know, it was all physics
Now, eight years before, when I was 16, in 1966, This is what we sounded like
I'm playing lead guitar...
"I Can't Get No... SATISFACTION!!"