To Selena, With Love (28 page)

More than twenty thousand people turned out to hear us at the Pasadena Fairgrounds in August 1993, for instance, and in September we drew a crowd of seventy thousand at La Feria de Nuevo Leon
in Mexico. That October, Selena was one of the featured performers at the Tejano Grand Finale show of the Coca-Cola Road Trip at Guadalupe Plaza Park in Houston.

At the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in February 1994, we pulled in over sixty thousand people. What’s more, to commemorate Selena’s five years as a company representative, Coca-Cola put out a special “Selena” Coke bottle, a collector’s edition that sold out almost as soon as it appeared on the shelves.

We were all amazed at the pace of our success. Like Selena, we were humbled by it as well. The band members tried to just focus on doing what we did best: play music together. Truthfully, because of the lights, we couldn’t usually see past the first few rows of people when we were onstage anyway. Here we’d be on this little stage that felt disconnected from the world, until we heard and felt all of this great energy from our fans that we’d feed right back into our music.

The night that Selena started singing the lyrics to “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” was one of those great nights in 1994. The words “
bidi bidi bom bom
” are meant to be the sound of a beating heart, and this song tells the story of someone so entranced by her crush that her heart goes crazy and starts pounding whenever he walks by. As Selena tried out her lyrics, I started playing a guitar riff to accompany her, just having some fun. She grinned at me and kept singing.

“Stop!” A.B. called to me from the other side of the stage. “What key are you in?”

“B flat,” I said.

“What are your chords?” he asked.

I told him and played a little turnaround. A.B. came up with a
bass line and we started playing together. Suzette started a rhythm pattern on the drums and the song just kind of happened right there onstage.

Then the show began, and Selena was enjoying herself onstage as she always did. To be a truly successful entertainer, you have to be doing something onstage that makes people stop and stare. Selena always came out dancing. Beyond that, she communicated directly with her audience in ways that many entertainers don’t know how; these days, especially, entertainers stick to their scripts. Selena wasn’t like that.

No matter how successful we became, every one of our shows was different, because Selena always stayed in the moment. If she’d heard a funny joke before coming onstage, she would tell that joke in between songs. She was always real, and people could pick up on the fact that this wasn’t an act. Selena never made people feel like they were watching a show. She recognized that the people in the audience were just like her, and made everyone feel as if we were all enjoying the evening together. That’s a hard thing to do when you’re up onstage, but Selena pulled it off every time.

The band never did anything by rote, either. We would always change up the set list, because A.B. would watch the crowd closely to see what kind of music they were reacting to and call out the songs accordingly. Other than the first song, we never had any idea what we’d be playing on a given night or in what order. We would just go.

On this particular night, Selena was talking to the crowd between songs when I heard A.B. call out, “Hey, let’s play that song you were doing in sound check, Selena.” He started playing the rhythm pattern and Suzette jumped in. I came in with the guitar
intro and Selena started singing the words. Obviously she had written them somewhere or had them in her head. The crowd went nuts for it.

Afterward, A.B. was all smiles. “That’s going to be our new hit song,” he announced.

Back in the studio, Selena worked with Pete to put the lyrics and the melody together, and we recorded “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” as one of the tracks on the new album we were working on,
Amor Prohibido
. When it came time to add my part, A.B. told me how we were going to arrange the song and then said, “Here’s where you’ll do your guitar solo.”

Then he left the studio, trusting me to put together a solo that would work. I remember thinking,
This song is going to be huge
, because I felt it the way A.B. did. “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” was a woman’s proud celebration of love. I wanted to create a radical guitar solo that would truly blend a hard rock sound into a Tejano cumbia, in much the same way that Selena and I had grown up in traditional families to become a contemporary couple. I wanted, more than anything, to support the rich, optimistic sound of Selena’s singing with my guitar.

The song worked on every level, and before long, “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” took on a life of its own, becoming one of Selena’s most beloved, most enduring hits.

I don’t know how that song just fell into place like that. I don’t even know how we managed to find time to make the next album. The more successful Selena became, the more we had to travel and the more pressure she felt. To add to her time constraints, both of
the boutiques were now off the ground in Corpus Christi and San Antonio, and she was traveling to Monterrey with increasing frequency to talk about opening a clothing factory and a boutique there. If Abraham, Suzette, her mom, or I couldn’t accompany her somewhere, Selena sometimes asked Yolanda to go with her.

We were still playing a lot of concerts in Mexico, and we had also started performing in other Latin American countries. We were always treated like celebrities—more so than in the U.S.—and given luxurious accommodations.

In one hotel in El Salvador, for instance, I was standing by myself in the lobby when I suddenly realized that I was surrounded not only by the usual El Salvadoran armed militia men, walking around in their army gear and carrying machine guns, but also by the U.S. Secret Service.

I scanned the lobby to figure out the reason for all of the security, knowing it couldn’t possibly be us. I was startled to see former President George Bush and his wife Barbara standing not quite five feet away from me. I edged away from them slowly, trying not to look suspicious, afraid that somehow I’d make a wrong move and be shot on the spot.

Another time, Selena and I were playing a show in Monterrey when I saw billboards advertising the appearance of the Scorpions, a popular heavy metal band that I had admired since childhood. I had always wanted to see them play live, and as we returned to the hotel after our show, I was feeling a little down that I hadn’t known in advance that they were playing in Mexico, too.

As Selena and I stepped into the hotel elevator with our security guard, a couple of other people were already there. One man was small in stature, maybe just five feet tall, and wearing a black beret.
When he and the other man didn’t move out of the way, Selena and I had to slip into the elevator behind them.

Just as the elevator started moving, the smaller man in front of me turned to say something to his companion, and I realized that he was Klaus Meine, the legendary lead singer of the Scorpions. I elbowed Selena in the side.

“What?” she said loudly.

I felt my face go hot. I didn’t want the singer to know that I’d spotted him. “Nothing, never mind,” I said. “It’s no big deal.”

Inside, though, I was going crazy. Selena was still staring at me, so I jerked my head at the guy in front of us again and silently mouthed, “It’s him! It’s Klaus Meine!”

Selena mouthed back, “Huh? What?”

Finally the Scorpions got off on their floor. As soon as the elevator door closed, I started freaking out. “That was him!” I said. “That was Klaus, the lead singer from the Scorpions!”

“What? And you didn’t say hi?” Selena cried.

“No, no. I didn’t want to bother him.” I dug my hands into my pockets.

“You want to go down and find him?” she said. “Let’s go get his autograph!”

“No, that’s all right,” I insisted. “He’s one of the biggest stars in Mexico! I’m not going to go chasing him for an autograph.”

“I can’t believe you,” she said. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not as brave as you,” I said, and that made her laugh.

During another tour in Mexico, Selena y Los Dinos played a big concert with a lot of other popular Latin American artists. One of them was Alejandra Guzman, known as the “Queen of Rock”
in Latin America. I remember the first time I ever saw Alejandra and heard her sing. This was on Big Bertha, right after I’d joined Los Dinos and long before Selena and I were a couple. The TV was on, and Alejandra was performing on one of those Spanish-language variety shows.

“Man, who’s that?” I asked Selena as we sat there watching Alejandra sing.

Selena told me Alejandra’s name and laughed. “Why, do you like her?”

“Sure, she’s hot,” I said, just to tease Selena. “Let me check this out.”

In fact, it was Alejandra’s music that I admired more than anything else. I went through a serious Alejandra phase after that, buying her CDs and listening to her music.

So, naturally, when Alejandra came into the back dressing room to meet us during that show in Mexico, she and Selena started joking around, and Selena said in Spanish, “Hey, Alejandra, come and meet my husband Chris. He has a huge crush on you.”

I wanted to protest, but of course my Spanish wasn’t good enough, and Selena and Alejandra were already cracking up at my flustered expression anyway. I knew it was a lost cause.

Selena and I respected each other as artists. I knew how great she was: Selena had the talent, voice, personality, and looks to make it to the top. For her part, Selena admired how different I was from other Tejano musicians. The other guys in our band were really good at Tejano music and I learned a lot from them, but by 1994 I was adding my licks on top, bringing their best stuff along for the
ride with me and adding a legitimate rock sound to Los Dinos, as I had with our remix of “Fotos y Recuerdos,” a song originally done by the Pretenders, on
Amor Prohibido
.

I don’t remember Selena ever playing the diva. She never complained about her mix or the sound onstage, which is rare for most vocalists. I never heard her say, “I don’t want to do that.” She was talented enough that she could stop by the studio while the band was working on a new song, hum her part a little, and then go off to shop at the mall, saying, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll know what to do when y’all are ready to record this.”

We didn’t have to worry. To be perfectly honest, I never heard Selena do anything wrong onstage. None of us ever had to ask her to change something in the studio, either. In fact, sometimes she’d track her vocals by herself, and she would be the one who would request a second take so that she could add little harmonies she’d create on her own. She was that good, and she was getting better with every album.

For
Amor Prohibido
, we did things the way we always did. Like a well-oiled machine, Selena and the band members laid down our tracks separately in the studio only after we’d perfected them during preproduction sessions, and then A.B. arranged and mixed the music. There was one exception to this. Late the night before we were supposed to go into the studio, I got a phone call from A.B.

“Can you come over and listen to something real quick?” he asked.

I went to his house and listened to “Ya No,” which would become the last song on the CD. It was a
conjunto
song with an accordion. “I want to turn this into a rock song,” A.B. said after I’d heard it a couple of times. “What do you think? Can you do it?”

“What, you mean for the album?” I asked. “But aren’t we supposed to be in the studio first thing tomorrow morning?”

He nodded. “What do you think?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”

We spent the night in his studio, trying to get an arrangement done that worked. Selena was at home, calling repeatedly as we worked. “Is he okay?” she asked A.B. “You all are still there?”

Finally she fell asleep. When we were finished, I walked from A.B.’s house to ours feeling just dead tired and wondering how I was going to get up in the morning, drive to San Antonio, and record this album.

When we woke up the next morning, Selena said, “So how did it go?”

“It went,” I said. “But I don’t know how it’s going to sound today.”