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After 14 years the members of Mambo Combo seem to finally be taking their band seriously-at least as seriously as fellows in Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, and knee socks can. Sitting in the blond-paneled lobby of 1137, the recording studio he co-owns, guitarist Bob Friedman, with drummer "Hoppy" Hopkins, recalls the improbable origins and unlikely longevity of this full-on party band.
Mambo Combo's long, strange trip started nearly 20 years ago when Hopkins-at the time a member of Da Moronics, an early local punk band-turned up at one of Friedman's gigs at the now defunct No Fish Today. Friedman was playing in a band called the Fabulous Dogtones, and midway through the group's set, the drummer went down and out. Friedman recalls, "He got so high that he literally fell off the drum stool backwards in the middle of a song."
"This was the 1970s, so these things seemed to happen on a regular basis," Hopkins adds. "I was in the audience, and I just sort of raised my hand as if to say, 'I'll have what he's having.'"
"We knew Hoppy was a drummer, so we got him up there and he played the rest of the night," Friedman says. "That was the first time we played together."
Thus began a good-natured but tenuous relationship between Friedman and Hopkins, a musical partnership that resulted in eclectic bands such as the Shameless Mooks, Rude Shoes, Eight Balls, and Self-Righteous Brothers.
"I kept quitting Bob's bands," Hopkins says, "because I was afraid I'd be stuck with them forever if I wasn't careful. Then, they'd put an ad in the paper looking for a drummer, and I'd see it. Not knowing who it was, I would call, and it would be them again. And I'd go back."
In 1983 the two rallied around a concept Friedman had for a new band. He was organizing the Ad Hoc Fiasco, an alternative-to-Artscape arts festival, and had come up with a band name: Mambo Combo. "We decided to put together a band to fit the name," Friedman says. "We thought, 'If there was a band called Mambo Combo, what kind of songs would it do?'"
The answer was a south-of-the-border, Latin-laced, Caribbean-drenched hybrid. "None of us had any previous inclination to play this music," Hopkins says. "In fact, none of us had been south of Virginia. It was done completely as a joke."
For the festival, the six-piece band (three drummers and three keyboards) donned outrageous costumes and hats, drew on fake mustaches, and decorated the stage with cardboard palm trees. Mambo Combo was born.
"It was all kitsch, a show thing," Hopkins recalls. "We had to have all those props to take people's minds off what we were playing. We'd play two-thirds of a tango and leave out the really hard part."
For years the band refused paying gigs under the premise that forcing itself to play it straight would violate the spirit under which the group was founded. But Mambo Combo eventually accepted payment for a wedding, the first of what would prove to be many wedding gigs.
Friedman and Hopkins varied the group's instrumentation (to include bass, guitar, and percussion), weathered numerous personnel changes, and developed a deeper understanding of the music they were playing.
"Bringing [keyboardist] Didier [Prossaird] and [percussionist] Steve [Bloom] was a big leap for us," Hopkins says. "We'd never had real guys in the band before, and having them around forced us to learn to play the music correctly: the tango, soca, samba, zouk, all of it."
"What we've learned over the years is that the beats have a history," Friedman says. "You can't mix traditions. You can't do a samba with a rumba. It just doesn't work. When we started out we didn't know the difference, but we've matured a lot in our understanding of the pieces we play."
As a result, Mambo Combo has built a solid rep as one of the city's premiere party bands and lands gigs with increasing frequency. City Paper named it the "Best Band" in 1984, Artscape (ironically) booked the group in 1990, and last year Baltimore magazine dubbed it the "Best Band to Draw a Crowd." Mambo Combo now averages 100 shows a year.
The band has an infectious new debut disc, Mr. Happy, to hawk at gigs. Full of material recorded in the studio at 1137 and "live" at the Belvedere's 13th Floor, it's a percussion-driven, Latin-flavored party-in-a-jewel-box. Over the course of 14 tracks, the band shifts gleefully from genre to genre and comes across more as a vibrant live group than studio novices. Original compositions such as "Smother Your Mother Tango" and "Samba Ieamanja" simmer and bubble, a cover of Tom Waits' "Jockey Full of Bourbon" is both fresh and nuanced.
Friedman and Hopkins say there's more material in the can for a second disc, and both seem genuinely surprised by the band's longevity. "We always take gigs for next season," Friedman adds, "so that means there's no quitting."
Editor's Note: Beloved local venue Memory Lane had its last live rock show May 17. The club will reopen, but it will no longer serve as the city's punk-rock haven. Watch this space for details in the next issue.
Updated on May 27, 1997