Jaguares Go on the Prowl

The Jaguar stands on a Hollywood street corner and howls at the moon. Howls at the lunar eclipse, actually, big and red and slung low in the sky. OK, it’s not actually a howl. It’s more of a poetic stream of consciousness, uttered into a cell phone in tones both reverent and innocent.

Said Jaguar’s name is Saul Hernandez. He is the longhaired lead singer for Jaguares, one of North America’s most influential and popular rock bands, based in Mexico but with an impressive U.S. fan base reaching from Southern California to Texas, Chicago and beyond.

This is supposed to be an interview, mind you, a traditional thing full of technical points about Jaguares. Official. Hernandez, 36, is supposed to be talking about his feelings on Jaguares’ Grammy nomination in the Latin rock/alternative performance category, their first.

There should also be musings on the band’s upcoming gig at the 16,000-capacity Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim on Saturday, as this will be its first time headlining a major arena in the Los Angeles area. The band was scheduled to make its U.S. English-language TV debut performance this weekend on “The Saturday Early Show” on CBS.

But this is Saul Hernandez, there is an eclipse, and so what you get is poetry, breathless childlike wonder at the moon, questions about how the moon could possibly continue to be so beautiful over Los Angeles, a painful city, almost obscenely paved, an unnatural swath of earth where people are isolated in their cars and moved along quickly and by all the wrong values. A lonely city, a city without a center, without a heart. What a moon!

The nomination? Oh, right. Hernandez is pleased with the nomination. He thought at first it might have been a joke. It’s wonderful. Asked about derisive comments one of his bandmates made to a Mexican newspaper about all of the other nominees except Cafe Tacuba, Hernandez says he knows nothing of it and wishes no ill toward any nominee.

“Everyone who makes it in this business must be a very hard worker,” he says. “It’s a hard business, and I appreciate anyone who’s making any contribution.”

Hernandez is, by many estimates, Spanish-language rock’s leading artsy bard, a thinker who has been compared by critics to everyone from Jim Morrison to Bob Marley. And this makes Jaguares one of the most popular rock acts in Mexico and in U.S. cities with heavy Mexican American populations.

“The appeal of the band comes from Saul’s stature,” says Emilio Morales, publisher of the Long Beach-based Spanish-language rock magazine La Banda Elastica. “He’s an icon, a mythic figure among kids. Even though many people don’t understand what he means in his lyrics, somehow people find personal meaning, which is weird because you see 13-year-old kids taking Saul’s lyrics as the Bible. I mean, he has that kind of power.”

Jaguares have been compared again and again by critics to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, not so much because of the band’s sound, which is far more airy and modern, but rather because of cultural impact and fan worship. Nonetheless, Morales says, “All the Mexican intellectuals, the intelligentsia, say he’s just a lightweight who writes really obscure lyrics in an attempt to hide his lack of clarity.”

Many of these same types of comments were, of course, made by intellectuals in the U.S. and England about the Beatles and other popular groups in the 1960s and ‘70s, and continue to be made about pop acts such as Madonna and Fiona Apple. In many ways, youth culture in Mexico now is similar to what was seen in the U.S. in the heyday of the Beatles, when U.S. college campuses were filled with social unrest and student movements were nightly news fare.

Hernandez, with his obscure lyrics and catchy mood rock, has been embraced in much the way Morrison was, by similar types of fans. He is also living proof that rock, which is on the decline in the U.S., is still a politically meaningful chain linking millions of young people to one another, including tens of thousands of Jaguares fans in Los Angeles.

Jaguares’ most recent show here, at the Universal Amphitheatre in September, sold out in a matter of minutes, and concertgoers, with their rock shirts and acne cream, were lined up for blocks outside. The new Jaguares album, “Bajo el Azul de Tu Misterio” (Beneath the Blue of Your Mystery), had only been out a matter of days, but many of the fans seemed to know all the words to all the songs.

Because there’s little radio exposure around these parts for a band like Jaguares--Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles remains either very pop or very country--the nearly religious fans here find out about the group’s new recordings and concerts through the Internet, says Hernandez.

“It is our lifeline,” he says of the World Wide Web. The Grammy-nominated album features a live disc and a studio-recorded disc, in part, Hernandez says, because the fans are an integral part of the Jaguares experience and he wanted to include their energy.

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Jaguares is actually the newest incarnation of the band Caifanes, which formed in 1987 but split up in 1995 because of problems between Hernandez and then-guitarist Alejandro Marcovich. Marcovich had acquired the equivalent of a trademark for the Caifanes name, so when Hernandez and Caifanes drummer Alfonso Andre wanted to re-form the band without Marcovich, it had to be under a new name.

“I dreamed about a Jaguar,” Hernandez says, adding that the animal was a perfect choice, because it is revered in Mexican indigenous folklore as a fighter.

Combined album sales for Caifanes and Jaguares are estimated by the band and its label, BMG Latin, at 5 million.

As for Marcovich, Hernandez has no comment. Morales says Marcovich has been producing rock records in Mexico, but overall has been keeping a low profile, out of necessity.

“He picked the wrong guy to fight with when he picked Saul,” Morales says. “Saul is so, so, so revered in Mexico. I’ve known of many instances where [Marcovich] has been at a bar in Guadalajara, or some other city, and people will try to pick a fight with him, because he’s the one who fought with Saul. That’s how they see him. He is like the Judas of Mexican rock. It’s very sad. That’s how much people in Mexico love Saul.” *

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Jaguares play Saturday at the Arrowhead Pond, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim, 7 p.m. $25-$55. (714) 704-2500.