Ghetto Brothers: Latin Garage Rock

In the late 1960s and early 70s, music and politics were extensions of each other. For the Lumpen, they were one and the same: the California-based group became the Black Panther Party resident R&B band. At the same time, across the country, a group of guys in the Bronx were inspired by the Panthers and Puerto Rican nationalism to organize as well. They called themselves the Ghetto Brothers, and when they weren’t playing music, they were operating as a gang under the same name.

Benjy Melendez was a teenager with a fondness for the Beatles. Melendez and his two brothers had played covers together as the band Los Junior Beatles (they once opened for Tito Puente). But Melendez told WNYC’sSoundcheck that by the late 60s, the pressure to belong to a gang soon overwhelmed them. “I didn’t want to join,” Melendez said of the neighborhood gangs. “Because I knew that if I was to join, I would have to go by what the leader tells me to do. If he told me ‘shoot this person, rob this person’ — I wasn’t raised that way. I wasn’t going to do that. That’s why I started my own thing.” Melendez founded the Ghetto Brothers first as a gang. But even as they grew in numbers, he and his brothers kept playing and developing their Latinized garage rock sound. The Ghetto Brothers released the album Power Fuerza in 1972. A rare collectible for decades, the record was rereleased in 2012.

Although one of the gang’s members was killed by a rival gang in 1971, Melendez insists the gang rarely got into trouble. And the tracks on Power Fuerza are upbeat, full of sunny harmonies and lyrics of love, girls, and good times — a sort of pop escape. The Ghetto Brothers ultimately made that escape a reality by hosting block parties, where rival gangs would peacefully mingle and enjoy the music in neutral territory. Those parties turned out to be a breeding ground for the next chapter in South Bronx music history: hip hop.