2. Real and Pretend Gangsters
6/2/202641 min
In the mid 1960s, young musicians Joe Bataan and Willie Colón are quickly owning the boogaloo scene in East Harlem and the Bronx. The problem—Morris Levy, the mob boss who owns hit-making labels, is one of the few routes to stardom. Bataan and Colón have to figure out how to avoid Levy, while projecting a gangster image themselves.
Listen to the Music Behind Our Thing: The Birth of Salsa in Nueva York playlist here.
Archival courtesy of The Bronx County Archives at The Bronx County Historical Society Research Library, Buyout Footage, Craft Recordings, a Concord company, and Mary Kent’s Salsa Talks interviews, Maria Hinojosa for Latino USA, Martin Cohen Congahead Archives. This episode also utilizes a fair use clip from NBC Boston.
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First 90 secondsRosie Perez· Host0:00
Before we get started, I wanna let you know that you can listen to the entire season of Our Thing: The Birth of Salsa in Nueva York right now ad-free, plus exclusive episodes on Futuro Plus. Our Thing: The Birth of Salsa in Nueva York was made possible by the Mellon Foundation, which seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Heads up, this episode contains some explicit language. [Instrumental music plays] For a Brooklyn kid like me, taking the train across the city and hanging anywhere uptown, downtown was a vibe. But places like Harlem and the Bronx were on a whole other level. Even though we wanted to listen to the same jams as folks from there, uptown was also kinda scary, and the dudes from uptown were tough. Today's episode starts with one of those tough guys. His name is Joe Bataan. [upbeat music plays] And in the late 1950s, he got caught riding in a stolen vehicle. The police stopped him.
Joe Bataan· Soundbite1:27
[siren blares] I remember being