Mexico has fed many aspects of my inner geek, but none so much as the part of me that likes (and gets spooked by) old recordings, the cracklier the better. Awhile ago I found a vintage record shop on Xola Avenue called Discolandia, where $30 gets you a stack of legal CDs so huge that you have to sandwich it between your hands and chin on your way to the cashier, in the style of Cinderella's Gus Gus (if you don't already have this image seared into your early childhood memory, it's here at minute 3:40).
Since Discolandia is so cheap I usually rely on non-traditional methods of selecting CDs, like pulling out every album with the word "Super" in the title, or pre-war sibling duos, or women wearing large hats. There is only one artist, or really just one song, that I have searched for on purpose.
I first heard Olimpo Cardenas' Lagrimas de Amor when I was streaming pandora at work last year. His voice was so smooth, and the song's bassline so simple and catchy, that I went back to the website every day and sat through countless less-amazing old Mexican songs, crossing my fingers that Olimpo would come up. I scoured the internet for a recording I could buy, but no luck.
Fast forward a year, when I started making repeated trips to Discolandia in search of this song. I bought four separate Olimpo anthologies, which to my amazement featured multiple occurrences of duds like Osito de Felpa ("Plush Teddy Bear") and Lagrimas del Alma ("Tears of the Soul"), but not a single track with Lagrimas de Amor ("Tears of Love.")
As frustrating as it was, it also seemed weirdly cool that this song refused to be captured. It's one of several 20th-century feelings I don't expect to have very often in my lifetime. I should be satisfied, I decided, with occasionally hiring trios of elderly men in Plaza Garibaldi to play Lagrimas de Amor for me, where their struggle to remember the lyrics only adds to the song's elusive appeal.
I finally tracked down the song a few weeks ago, as I was running past a CD vendor on my way down the steps to the Balderas subway station. I caught a glimpse of Olimpo's face on a CD jacket, peeking out from under a pile of other Mexican artists* - my fifth (and final!) anthology.
*Olimpo was born in Ecuador, but made a tremendous splash in 1950s Mexico.
