Mark Guerrero with Los
Illegals
"Piecemeal Too"
MacArthur Park
Los Angeles, California
March 23, 1986
"Piecemeal Too" was an avant garde show involving
five performance art groups. It was a multi-cultural
mix of groups including African-American, Asian-American,
Anglo-American, and Mexican-American (that would be us).
Our piece ran about twenty five minutes and involved music,
an Aztec dance, film and photographic projections, spoken
word, costumes, a set built on scaffolding, lighting and sound
effects, and more. The Alienz, who consisted of a
female dancer, a sax player, and other performance artists,
were part of our piece. "Piecemeal Too" was performed
four times. Thursday, Friday and Saturday night it was performed
at City Space, a gigantic downtown Los Angeles warehouse.
On Sunday, it was performed outdoors at MacArthur Park, also
in downtown L.A. The clip below is a ten minute clip
of the finale song, "Victory." The quality
of the video is not the greatest (it's somewhat dark) but
it captures part of our piece and idea and spirit of what
went on that night back in 1985 that would otherwise be lost
to the mists of time. About half way into the song,
all the performers from the other groups, along with some
random people from the audience, come on stage and dance to
the music.
Musicians: Mark Guerrero (lead vocal, acoustic guitar), Willie Herrón
(lead vocal), Manuel Valdez (lead guitar), Mike Tovar (bass),
Bill Reyes (timbales), and Mario Flores (sax).
"Victory" words
and music by Willie Herrón and Mark Guerrero
