The Cannibal of East Los!

A musical autopsy!

In the early 1960s, four handsome young men from the Ramona Gardens and other East LA housing projects became the chicano Dion & The Belmonts. Their exuberant lead singer, Frankie Garcia, called himself Cannibal, either because he tried (beating Mike Tyson to the punch by decades) to bite off the ear of someone he was fighting, or because it was his older brother’s gang nickname. The boys worked up a version of the Chris Kenner/Fats Domino song ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’, adding a refrain in which they sang the syllable 19 times over a melody missing from the earlier versions. It was a Top 30 hit, which got them invited to appear on Hullaballoo, on which a Mr. P. McCartney saw them and asked that they be invited to open for his own singing group on their 1965 tour, as they’d earlier opened for the Rolling Stones.

Cannibal & The Headhunters, from left to right, or, for Arab readers, from right to left. There are no videos of them performing their butt-abrading Rowboat. It is interesting and perhaps instructive to note that all four are what in Mexico would be called “light-skinned Mexicans”,

The most exciting part of their live show, according to all who witnessed it, was when the four of them would seat themselves on stage one behind the other, and do what they called the Rowboat (use your imagination!), which played havoc on their tender derrieres, but what price audience adoration? There are those who’ll tell you that Beatles enthusiasts was such that Mr. B. Epstein implored CHH’s manager to tell them to cool it, which they apparently did not, which may or may not have had much to do (I’m guessing the latter) with their quickly fading from view.

Frankie (Cannibal) Garcia and the bass player of the group for which CCH opened.

Given that the Frankie Garcia lot had apparently packed it in, vocal groups beyond counting took to billing themselves as Cannibal & The Headhunters, and to making handsome livings on the oldies circuit. There was a version of the group led by first tenor Robert “Rabbit” Jaramillo, and another led by second tenor Richard “Scar” Lopez, and a third by Rabbit’s brother, third tenor Joe “Yo Yo” Jaramillo. It is thought that even the late Ritchie Valens briefly got into the act, though most sensible people dismiss this idea out of hand.

The East LA restaurateur Brandon (Flaco) Gutierrez saw that there was a buck to be made — indeed, great truckloads of bucks! — and bought the rights to the name. Within six months, he had made deals with franchisees in Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Perú, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Paraguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, and even Equatorial Guinea. A projected Battle of the CHHs, to be staged at Madrid’s famous Las Ventas bullring, and televised all over the Hispanic world, had to be cancelled when Spain outlawed bullfighting in late 2011, 39 years after the fact. This paragraph is a real frontal lobe-twister, and I have no one but myself to blame.

The Equatorial Guinea Cannibal & The Headhunters. They played their own instruments.

A transcription of the refrain that made the CHH version the hit that the Fats Domino and Chris Kenner versions were not:

Na
Na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na