Two golden torrents converged on Friday night in Las Vegas. One was made up of thousands of hockey fans, who came to the stadium to watch the Golden Knights play out the season in the NHL playoffs. Just a few meters away, on the opposite sidewalk, the other one used shiny gold jackets to identify themselves. The garment showed on the back the name of the phenomenon that summoned them: Los Bukis. This group spoke in Spanish.
Los Bukis was one of the main names of the Mexican group scene that took off in the 1980s. It served to catapult the legend of Michoacan Marco Antonio Solís, who is today one of the most successful artists in Latin America. And as of this Friday, the group increases its figure after becoming the first Latin group to do a residency completely in Spanish in Las Vegas. The group will have fifteen concerts from May 3 to September 21.
-”Tonight we will only have songs by Los Bukis. Out of respect for them, only Bukis songs,” Solís announced to the audience at the Dolby Live theater minutes after the spectacular start with Crazy for You, where the group was revealed behind some flying curtains. They were all dressed in shirts and blue sequin suits. They wore a buckle with the name of the group and a thick gold medallion hung from their chests. Solis also had a ribbon on his forehead.
The singer made it clear with his message that during the residency his songs such as More than your friend, The blessing came o If you had not gonethe song that Solís wrote in 1984 for the Mexican-American singer Marisela and that several years later gained worldwide fame thanks to And Your Mother Tooby Alfonso Cuarón.
The announcement did not matter to the public, who sang almost each of the songs that were played during the start of the residency. It was a two-hour tour of the varied style of Los Bukis and the characteristic sound of the Guadarrama brothers’ synthesizers. From their first songs, influenced by the Spanish rock groups of the sixties, to more regional genres, such as tumbara and cumbia. In Mi najayitaFor example, Solís leaves the guitar to move on to percussion.
Solís’s gesture is also a recognition of the bitter separation that the group suffered in 1996, when record label executives chose to separate the charismatic artist from the group that started with him in the mid-seventies. After the star’s departure, the rest continued playing under the name Los Mismos. Today they claim to have left their differences behind.
The original Bukis reunited in 2021, after the pandemic, to carry out a successful tour of the United States. They performed nine concerts in six stadiums with Una historia cantada. They filled the 70,000-seat SoFi in Los Angeles a couple of times. In Las Vegas they also filled the Allegiant, which hosted the Super Bowl in February. They raised nearly $50 million, making it the sixth most profitable tour in the United States that year, according to the specialized publication. Pollstar. Los Bukis extended their performances to 2022. As if that were not enough, Marco Antonio Solís did a solo international tour in parallel.
Despite this huge push, Los Bukis did not sell out their first night in Las Vegas. Several empty seats were seen at the debut of the residency in a theater with 6,000 people. It mattered little to the attendees, many of them coming from states like Texas or Utah. Ramón Juárez, a local, said that that night there was no better place in Las Vegas for a Mexican. At 52 years old, this migrant from Zacatecas came with his mother, his wife and his daughter. He broadcast much of the concert live on Facebook and even gave a couple of cousins permission to upload them on social media so people would think they had gone with him.
A Los Bukis concert has something of a religious experience. Solís, who thought about being a seminarian when he was young, has for decades cultivated his resemblance to Jesus Christ with his long black hair. Every Easter he makes jokes about the resemblance. On stage he drinks from a silver chalice and between successes he works on the faith of the congregation. “God is good and he proves it to us every day, little brothers,” he said at one point.
The Bukis know well those who have followed them for decades. The bassist, Eusebio Cortéz, who has earned the nickname El Chivo because he keeps going from one place to another during the concerts, greeted the construction workers who had paid the ticket price, which ranges from $80. until 900. At another time, El Chivo also winked at the single mothers in the audience.
In addition to I need you y Your prisontwo of the group’s most successful songs, the audience chanted at the top of their lungs little brunette, a topic loaded with feelings for those who left their country of birth to migrate north. “I had to leave / and I could barely resist, walking with my pain,” Solís sings in a song full of nostalgia that sounds like a Zacatecan march, one of the communities that has expelled the most Mexicans abroad.
Los Bukis’ first concert in the United States was in Chicago at the dawn of the eighties. After having spent time in bars and cafes in the Zona Rosa of the Mexican capital. They published their second album in 1977, I had you and I lost you. Since then they set out to conquer the Mexican public living in the north. Forty years later, they are in the entertainment capital occupying the same venue as Lady Gaga, Maroon 5 and Bruno Mars. And they do it singing in Spanish.