“Even early on he had killer musicians, guys who represented the real Tejano sound he’d come from,” said Jesse “Chuy” Varela, a Latin music expert and program and music director at the radio station KCSM. “As he evolved he kept bringing in different folks, like trombonist/arranger Wayne Wallace and drummer Brian Andres. A lot of the gigs weren’t going to pay a lot, and he’d be paying musicians out of his pocket. For Loco, it was more about spreading joy through the message.”
That message traveled much further than Cuéllar expected. His sound and visage made a particularly deep impression in Mexico City, where rock en español pioneers Maldita Vecindad viewed him as the embodiment of borderlands cool. They’d scored a major hit in 1991 with “Pachuco,” a song celebrating the sartorial style of Mexican American young men exemplified by zoot suits, “and they saw him as the last pachuco,” said Greg Landau, the eight-time Grammy Award nominee who started working with Dr. Loco as a producer and sideman in the 1990s.
In a final act of friendship, Landau produced an era-encompassing concert last month at Brava Theater Center, “A Rockin’ Jalapeño Tribute Concert: Celebrating the Musical Legacy of Dr. Loco.” Landau had already been thinking about pulling together a celebration, but Cuéllar’s terminal diagnosis put the project on a fast track. The sold-out event featured three generations of Rockin’ Jalapeno bands playing songs from the albums Movimiento Music, ¡Puro Party! and Barrio Ritmos & Blues.
“He was so overwhelmed,” Stacie Powers Cuéllar said of the concert, which Dr. Loco attended but was unable to perform at in his full capacity. “One thing he did through his music was connecting people all the time, in the classroom, at events. He had a really good time, but it was also heartbreaking for him, to know that was a defining moment and not be able to direct it. He so was proud of all the musicians and all the work and gigs they’d done.”
Born April 3, 1941 in San Antonio, Texas, Cuéllar often described obtaining a saxophone as a high school senior as a strike of lightning that changed the course of his life. He learned the ropes on the Texas roadhouse circuit with the Del–Kings, a mostly Chicano R&B band with a book of full of honking numbers by Junior Parker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, B.B. King and T–Bone Walker, with a little Five Satins-style doo-wop thrown in for romance.
He put down his horn when he enlisted in the Air Force, and trained as a dental technician. But upon mustering out, he realized that he didn’t want to face the hurdles “it would take for a Mexican to be a dentist in Texas, as presented to me by my dentist,” he told KQED in a 2023 interview. He returned to the saxophone, a more stimulating work tool than a dental drill.
José Cuéllar, 82, holds a photo of himself playing music in the early 1990s at his home in San Francisco on July 21, 2023. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
While Cuéllar spent the ’60s performing in Vegas and Southern California, he gradually found his way back to school, enrolling at Golden West College in Huntington Beach to study music. The anti-Vietnam War movement started his politicization, and when he transferred to Long Beach State in 1969, the rising Chicano movement, then deeply entwined with anti-war protests, shaped his scholarly direction.
He managed to juggle music and graduate studies, eventually earning a PhD in anthropology from UCLA in 1977. A tenure-track position at the University of Colorado at Boulder, however, left him bereft of musical comrades. “I wanted to get more involved in my academics too,” he said. “So the horn went into the closet and stayed there until I got to Stanford in 1983.”