One Man's Experience With
A Mexican Rock Sensation!
by Ray Brazen
 It all started for me in July of 1988, when I was vacationing in southern California. Bored with the San Diego & L.A. scene in a hurry, I knew the only cure for my boredom was to head across the border, and not just to Tijuana, but somewhere where I could truly feel like I was surrounded on all four sides by a foreign country. So I took a tour bus down Highway #1, along the pounding Baja surf, until I reached the city of Ensenada. There, I took a tour of a shopping strip that led me into a dusty, dingy record store I came across. I started browsing through the racks of local Mexican rock records, with the idea in mind of picking out whichever one looked most interesting and outrageous and purchasing it as a souvenir of my trip. The album I selected would wind up changing my life forever.
It was an album that pictured three young men in very 1970s looking, glittery jumpsuits, looking like the Mexican answer to Black Sabbath, performing in a swirling haze of dry-ice fog. On the back cover was a cool illustration of a scorpion and the names of the songs, some of which were in English. I guess it was the punk rocker in me that made me choose an album with song titles like "Stupid People" and "We Always Hate Your Manners." That album was EL LOCO by Los Dug Dug's, and when I got the album back to the United States and my home in New Jersey a few days later, it exploded out of my speakers right from the first note, and I knew I'd picked out a good Mexican rock & roll souvenir.
Now, I might not have become as obsessed with Los Dug Dug's as I did, had it not been for the fact that just a few weeks later, in a used record shop in New York City, I actually found another Dug Dug's album! This one was a best-of called 15 EXITOS DE LOS DUG DUG'S, and since it was in the one-dollar bin, I knew I had to hear this one as well. Just one single listen to "Lost In My World" later, there was no turning back for me. From that moment on, I was obsessed.
I had to find out all about this mysterious Mexican group. Since they were on RCA in Mexico, I tried unsuccessfully to contact the label for more information. A few friends of mine who visited Mexico at various times over the next few years were all requested to search for traces of Los Dug Dug's. Though none of them brought back any more records, one of them passed by a concert hall in Mexico City that announced an upcoming concert by the band on its marquee. In 1991, a bootleg reissue of the band's first album circulated on the collector's market, and though it was a counterfeit release, I still welcomed the addition to my growing collection. But as for information, it was still slow in coming.
Just six days after I received those tapes, I got an e-mail from Mexico City, from a man named Marco Mejia. He knew the main man behind the group, Armando Nava, was hanging out at the band's nightclub, La Reunion, and wanted to know if I might be interested in writing to Armando. At first I thought it was a put-on, especially after being unable to write back to him at the e-mail address he'd sent his messages from, but I finally got through to Marco at another address he eventually provided, and we set it up for me to send a fan letter to Los Dug Dug's.
The evening of November 22, 1997, was a true example of the magic of the Internet. That was the night Armando Nava of Los Dug Dug's visited the website from his nephew's computer in Mexico City, and wrote me a long and beautiful letter in response that I received later that night in my e-mail. I was in a state of shock for hours afterward! The message included the address of La Reunion and its two phone numbers, and it is there that I reached him by telephone a couple of weeks later to wish him happy holidays and get the story of Los Dug Dug's straight from the man who had kept the name alive for more than 30 years running. I recorded this historic phone conversation and from it, I assembled a biography of the band for the website, which, looking back at it, could have been much better than it was!
That event was what truly set the gears in motion for what this website has now very proudly become: the official voice of Los Dug Dug's, with the full support, input and cooperation of the band. Armando's ten-day visit to the New York/New Jersey area was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Personally delivering a ton of photos, posters, apparel, and rare recordings of the band to me, spending many memorable hours touring the metro area with me as his trusty tour guide, and offering a greater amount of detail on the band's history than before, Armando so overwhelmed me with his generosity that I cried the morning he left to go back to Mexico City. Along the way, my parents and I threw a dinner party for him, I reunited him with his former U.S. manager Frank Mangano, and his girlfriend Alejandra eventually flew out and joined him for a few days! It was an absolutely unforgettable experience for everyone involved...most of all myself!
Armed with the knowledge and materials he gave me, I set out to make my small, seedy fancied into a full-fledged, official, info-packed website that offers instant gratification to the curious Dug Dug's fan still wearing the shoes I once wore, before this incredible adventure happened to me. And for the first time, I am proud to present the website in Spanish, and reach out to the fans of rock en espanol in ways I might have been unable to before. And hey, do you know something? Even after all this, I still feel like this website has only just begun..........
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By the late 1990s, of course, this thing called the Internet entered into our lives, and it seemed like a silly little joke to even think of the possibility of a Dug Dug's website popping up. But when I found out how easy it is to produce a website, I thought, why not start one myself? So in July of 1997, Los Dug Dug's Homepage, as it was originally called, was launched. The first edition of the site had just three pages: a cover page, an article detailing my obsession with and futile search for information on the band, and a page describing and picturing the three records I had found by them. To say my expectations for the success of this website were low is quite the understatement. But to my surprise, within a week I had information on three other Dug Dug's albums, supplied to me by a fellow fan and collector. Eventually I received crude-sounding but very significant cassettes of those three records. One of them, SMOG, sounded like the apocalypse. I didn't know it at the time, but my first listen to the amazing, 12-minute "Hagámoslo Ahora" medley was just the start of a series of events that I could not have imagined ever happening in my wildest of dreams.
Armando had promised to send me a package full of Dug Dug's goodies, and as much as I distrusted the Mexican postal system, I kept my fingers crossed and checked my mail each day for weeks and weeks afterward. But what Armando hadn't told me was how he planned to get this package of souvenirs into my hands. Which is exactly why I almost fainted dead away when, on April 16, 1998, I received a call from him informing me that he needed someone to pick him up at Newark Airport on the 20th, and wanted to know if I was available to do the honors......