PLEDGE WEEK: “La conferencia secreta del Toto’s Bar” by Los Shakers

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025.

For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon.

If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey.

Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one.

This episode is going to be a little different from normal, because I'm covering a band about whom there's almost no information in English.

Normally I do all the research myself, but in this case I've had to ask Tilt, who can speak a little Spanish, to help with finding some of the information and also with the pronunciation of some words and names.

Any mistakes I make are still mine, and I will definitely still be mispronouncing things, as I have a mild speech impediment, which means I literally can't make some of the phonemes in Spanish, but anything I've got right you can probably credit him for.

That's because today we're going to take a look at Los Shakers, Uruguay's most important band of the 60s, and at their masterpiece, La Conferencia Secreta del Totos Bar.

Los Shakers, like many of the greatest bands, were based around brothers who were pushed into show business as a proxy for the ambitions of a musical father.

Antonio Fatorosso lived in Montevideo and ran an electronics repair shop which also sold records, but was a frustrated musician.

In the 1950s he formed a small trio, Trio Fatoroso, with two of his sons, Ugo and Osvaldo, with Ugo on piano and accordion, Osvaldo on drums, and Antonio playing a bass made out of a bucket, a broom, and a piece of string.

This trio seems to have played a sort of Uruguayan equivalent of Skiffle, playing boleros, tangos, and so forth at street parties with rudimentary instruments, in much the same way as small groups like the quarrymen were playing in the UK.

When he was 16, Ugo switched from keyboards to bass and joined a band called the Hot Blowers, who seem from the small amount of information I've been able to find out about them to have been a Uruguayan equivalent of the trad bands playing in the UK at the same time.

The Hot Blowers recorded at least a few EPs while Ugo was a member of the band.

I've been unable to find exactly when the hot blowers split up.

I've seen sources claiming years from 1961 to 1963.

And I've also seen some suggestions that Osvaldo was a member of the band at one point, which seems likely given that throughout the rest of his career, Ugo always worked with his brother.

But what we do know is that, like so many musicians, the Fataroso brothers had an epiphany in 1964.

The brothers had actually become aware of the Beatles before almost anyone else in South America, as the daughter of a local baker had visited the UK in late 1962, and brought back a copy of Love Me Do, which had not impressed either of them.

But in early 1964, they saw something at the cinema that changed everything.

Depending on what sources you look at, they either saw Ya Yeah, Paul John Georgie Vingo, the Spanish language title for A Hard Day's Night, or a trailer titled The Beatles Are Coming.

Either way, they seem to have had an almost Damascene conversion, and soon they were blowing cold rather than hot on jazz, and had formed a new group clearly inspired by the Beatles.

Osvaldo switched from drums to guitar, while Ugo also switched to guitar, but also carried on playing keyboards.

The duo started writing songs together, with Osvaldo writing the lyrics and Ugo the music.

Joined by Roberto Pellin Capobianco on bass and Carlas Caio Villa on drums, they formed Lus Shakers, the Uruguayan Beatles, and signed to Odeon Records, an EMI subsidiary that operated in non-English speaking countries, mostly in Latin America, and released their first single, Rompan Todo.

The group's first album, just titled Lo's Shakers, featured that track and covers of It's My Party and Del Shannon's Keep Searching, along with 11 other originals, almost all written by the Fatoroso brothers.

While the song titles were in Spanish, the songs were written in English, and the lyrics tend to be the kind of thing that you would expect from people for whom English isn't their first language.

Some song titles translate as Everybody Shake, Shake in the Streets, and Baby Do the Shake.

But while the group's lyrics were rudimentary, though they do a much better job of writing in English than I would in Spanish, they had managed to perfectly absorb the melodic style of the early Beatles, and they were at this point very specifically being influenced only by the Beatles.

They had not particularly enjoyed rock music before the Beatles, having all been jazz musicians, and they had no interest in any of the other bands who were around at the time.

On the first album, songs like Parati y parami are perfect pastiches of the Beatles' sound.

sorry, too.

But there's nothing we can do.

No more gifts for you and me.

Good night, my lovers, goodbye.

Can't hold it tomorrow to tender.

And the group released a series of singles that came even closer to the Beatles style, like Solo and Tuzohos.

If I'm really lonely,

I'll be right to you.

I only wish to

love you so true.

I look into your eyes.

I've never had

any other girl like you.

I trust you,

I trust you.

While the group were from Uruguay, their recording career was based in Argentina, and they quickly became the biggest group in either country.

They even spearheaded a mini-Uruguayan invasion of Argentina, where they were soon followed by Los Makas, not the same band as either the 80s New Zealand New Wave Band or the more recent Powerpop band from Virginia, who were billed as the Uruguayan Rolling Stones.

I don't want to work,

but I have to do.

I don't like my job,

but I got to dress you while I'm alive.

I don't want you more,

but I can't leave you alone.

I can't stand you more,

but I must work for you.

There was even an attempt to break the shakers in the US to very limited success.

They were signed by a small company called Audio Fidelity, who originally existed to promote stereo sound.

I have a copy of an album by the trad band The Dukes of Dixieland on Audio Fidelity, which I was given when I was eight or nine, and in its gapefold sleeve it actually has a long explanation of what this new technology, stereophonic sound, actually means.

Of course, by the mid sixties, all the major labels were also releasing stereo albums, and Audio Fidelity had lost its unique selling point.

The label was also aimed very much at the audiophile market, which at that point was older adults who liked jazz or classical music, and they had little or no experience in the pop market.

For the album on audio fidelity, titled Break It All,

the group re-recorded their South American hits and some tracks off their first album, retitled with English titles.

Urugo had a bad throat on the day of the recording, and so Osvaldo took the lead vocals instead.

That album wasn't a success, as the label didn't know how to promote it.

But because it had a North American release, for a long time it was the only album by Lost Shakers to be known outside South America.

More recently, though, the group's EMI catalogue has been reissued in expanded editions.

While Break It All is the hardest to find, it's currently only available on vinyl as the second disc of a set with their first album.

The group's similarity to the Beatles was not entirely a positive thing for them, and they started expanding their musical palette for their second South American album, Shakers for You, incorporating some of their jazz influence and also the samba and bossa nova music that was popular in their home country on tracks like the single Nunke Nunka.

I have ever asked you to be true to me.

Never, ever, ever,

I have ever asked you.

I want you to tell me all your feelings about me

that never,

never

you to me,

and going psychedelic on Espero que les gusto, a song which showed the strong influence of John Coltrane on the group, although the backwards guitar and heavy bass also showed that they were still listening to the Beatles.

But their label was actually pushing them to be more Beatly.

As they were signed to an EMI subsidiary, they had access to forthcoming Beatles releases before they came out, and the label pushed them to release cover versions before the originals were released, so the label would get two bites of the cherry with each song.

Sometimes these would be straight sound-alikes, as close as possible to the original.

Sometimes there would be completely rearranged inventive covers

Michelle,

my bed

These are words that go together

my Michelle

Michelle,

my belt, son l'Ét mon qui bon tre bien ensembles, tre bien ensembles

I love you, I love you, I love you

That's all I want And sometimes, as with Submarino Amario, their Spanish language cover of Yellow Submarine, the result just doesn't work.

The group's most influential album, La Conferencia Secreda del Toto's Bar, released in 1968, is often called the Latin American Sergeant Pepper.

But this is actually a rather lazy comparison based more on the group's earlier Beatles imitation.

By this point, they're doing something very different from pure Beatles copycat material.

The opening and title track is about a summit of the members of the Organization of American States that had been held in Uruguay in 1962, when Cuba had been kicked out of the organization, but relocated in the group's mind to their local bar.

spend the holidays as a member president.

And I can hear echoes of all sorts of different musicians in the album.

Maslago K.L.

Ciruela is closer to some of the material and pet sounds of Odyssey and Oracle than to anything the Beatles ever did.

me.

They were just a woman of men, and they

understand.

Living out together on our way season.

Well, Cantombe incorporates music from the Uruguayan Cantombe style of music, which is not to be confused with the cantomblé I talked about in part 3 of the Sympathy for the Devil episode, even though both are Latin American styles incorporating complicated percussion parts.

Poor girls like him used to smile with a green

That track pointed the way to the direction that Latin rock music would go in the next few years, no longer an imitation of northern hemisphere music, but something of its own.

La Conferencia Secreta del Toto's Bar is definitely an album of its time.

But anyone who enjoys Ogden's Nut Gone Flake by the Small Faces, Mighty Garvey by Manfred Mann, Gorilla by the Bonzo Dog Dudar Band, Odyssey and Oracle by the Zombies, or Genuine Imitation Life Gazette by the Four Seasons, owes it to themselves to check out the album, which is one of the finest examples of that kind of eccentric psychedelic Baroque pop.

It would, however, be the last album by Lost Shakers for nearly 40 years, though Pelling Capubianco and Caio Villa would record an album as Lost Shakers without the brothers' involvement in 1971.

By this point, Uruguay, which in the early 60s had been one of the most liberal countries in South America, was facing unrest from left-wing militias which led the president to impose a state of emergency.

Over the next few years, the country grew steadily more authoritarian until by 1973 it was under a military dictatorship.

This was not a time to play at being the Beatles, and by the time La Conferencia Secreta del Toto's bar came out, the group had disbanded.

Ugo and Osvaldo moved to New York and went back to the jazz they had grown up with, first recording a duo album of Bossa Nova music, including one Beatles cover, one back rack cover, several new songs, and several remakes of Shakers songs.

Ever, ever, ever,

I have ever eyes for you.

Before joining the band of Brazilian jazz legend Erto Merreira,

in the mid-70s, they formed their own jazz fusion band, Opa.

Opa recorded several albums, including one under the name Otto Shakers, meaning Other Shakers, titled I Lost Shakers in 1981, which was a tribute of sorts to their earlier band.

Both Fatarosa brothers became major figures in the Latin jazz world, especially Ugo, and in that genre they played with a huge number of major figures, both together and separately, and received many awards.

In 1998, they reformed the trio Fataroso, with Ugo's son taking the place of their father on bass, and Osvaldo back to his first love, the drums.

The original lineup of Lus Shakers also reformed in 2005, recording an album titled Bonus Tracks.

Una coirs que canseña cantar

si tenseña samir.

Masage a ver tiempo y

el da

lunas momo paz de una mure quietra señor.

Sadly, the album didn't capture the old magic, and Osvaldo died in 2012, Capo Bianco in 2015, and Villa in 2019.

Ugo continues to perform The Last Remaining Shaker.

Los Shakers didn't make much impact on the world outside South America, but in their home continent they were one of the biggest and most influential bands of all time, and some of the music they made is easily the equal of some of the bands that are household names in Britain and North America.

Their career and this episode is a reminder of why this podcast is a history, not the history.

Because for every story that I can tell in this space, there are entire continents' worth of stories I can only glancingly allude to.

Entire histories written in languages I don't understand, about musicians every bit as important as the ones whose lives happen to be told in English.

on and down, round and round a sway with these swells

in the spell

called the rolling, rockin' rhythm of the sea.