La Bamba

Against los lobos it is still a good version although the quality of the track is a little dull.

This just my personal opinion of course, but for me the stand-out track by far is the title track, and the rest are pretty poor in comparison. I actually prefer the soundtrack to the film of the same name (which I also have) where the songs are all covered by Los Lobos. I don't think this one will get played much.

While there are loads of Ritchie Valens albums, they all essentially regurgitate the same tragically small amount of material that the man recorded during his so brief recording career, some with and some without the demo material and/or some of lo/fi live recordings made at Pacoima High School. This one isn't better or worse than others but it's an economically efficient way to pick up his stuff. Or perhaps I should say, "La Bamba" and the rest of his stuff.That may sound rather brutal but for me, "La Bamba" is head and shoulders above everything else that Valens recorded. Indeed it's head and shoulders above a lot of records that were released in 1958 (and that was a real vintage year). "La Bamba" was and still is, an awesome track, a merger of electricity and the adrenalin of rock'n'roll with the sensitivity of mexican traditional music unprecedented in the history of either genre and dare one say, never really followed up. In part of course the lack of follow up was due to Ritchie's death but I should add that Los Lobos have made some valiant attempts to produce another "Bamba" and those efforts are well worth a listen. The sheer awesome-ness of the record is even more evident when one considers the way that it has inspired variations over the years; "Twist and Shout" in initially, black vocal styling, then Merseybeat and "Louie Louie", the classic American garage anthem. Even Mick'n'Keef in the Stones "Get off my cloud" tipped their proverbial hats to this song and, more than that, to this performance.Its flip, or to be strictly correct, the original A side, "Donna" has a pretty good go at matching "La Bamba" for intensity but falls short by some way. The song is possibly one of the very first that you'd think of when you hear the words "teen ballad". It has that particular chord sequence - C Amin F G - beloved by writers of such ditties but Valens does his best to transcend the predictability of the material and by dint of his aching sincerity, succeeds in producing another two minute masterpiece.After that it's the tex-mex Hollyisms of "C'mon let's go" but little else of real consequence. It all has that attractive period sound - there's a blues, some good instrumental work, several ballads - but nothing that really grabs you. You do see references to Ritchie Valens as a creator/producer of latin based rock material but there's very little apart from the title track that warrants that tag.Whether Ritchie would have gone onto greater fame if he'd lived we'll never know but I strongly suspect that "La Bamba" would never have been surpassed.

自分は映画、ラ・バンバを見てファンになったんですが、元祖も悪くないですね。人によっては歌唱力がないとか言う人もいますけど個人的にはいい声だと思います。値段も手頃でおすすめです。このsun recordのシリーズ最高です！

Great old school music.