Everyone’s got a “Gig From Hell” story. This isn’t that. This was the craziest gig of my life.

Backstory: after I left Berklee and returned to NYC I was in a light fusion quartet with three great players: Georg Wadenius(g), Steve Robbins(k) and Terry Silverlight(d). We were playing our first gig at a downtown Beefsteak Charlies one night when a Latino guy in a nice suit came up and said we sounded great… and would we like to play on some recordings for a singer on his label, Kim Records. We had never heard of either Kim Records or the singer but we said “sure”.

A few days later we assembled at a midtown multitrack called Latin Sound. The gear was first rate — Neve console with NECAM automation, Studer A800 24 track, lots of Neumanns — so we knew the company had dinero. We met the arranger, an elderly Cuban guy named Germán. Germán didn’t speak a word of English. In fact, only the engineer did. Germán’s charts were professionally written though with actual written bass lines. They were simple enough that we got four songs completed in three hours for which we were paid the princely sum of fifty bucks. One of us got a little angry about that because he’d just recorded a disco album where he got double scale. But by then all the reps from the company had vamoosed so we took what we could get.

A few days later we got another studio call from Latin Sound, then another. That summer I think we did a dozen sessions, possibly more, always for a different singer, each of them progressively more challenging and more authentically salsa/timba. The engineer told us that after we left they brought in Cuban percussionists, horns, strings, the works, all overdubbing our tracks. We always asked if we could get a board mix of the completed tracks and always got the same “La próxima vez…” And we always got fifty bucks.

It felt like we were recording in Mexico City or Quito because all the comm was in Spanish. We picked up on the lingo. “Grabando” meant “recording”, “Jesucristo” meant our keyboard player who Germán thought looked like Jesus. And another: Salsa Gringa. That was how they referred to us. Four blond white doods playing salsa. One guy even called us “The Police of Salsa”, which sounded better in Spanish.

At the end of the summer I got a call from a secretary at Kim to meet at Radio City Music Hall Saturday morning. She had no other details. I assumed it was a record company brunch affair in one of the dining rooms in the facility. I arrived in my default black tee shirt and black jeans as did Terry. There were a bunch of well-dressed Latino folks mulling around Radio City’s main entrance who we assumed were party guests. Terry and I wandered around the building looking for another way in and saw Germán at a backstage entrance desperately motioning for us to hurry up. They put us in a funky room in the basement with Georg and Steve for about a half hour while we tried to find someone to tell us what was going on, where we were supposed to play and WHAT we were supposed to play. Or even IF were supposed to play.

Just as we prepared to leave, one of the Kim Records guys — someone who spoke English — asked us why we were dressed so poorly. (Because nobody told us why we were there?) Germán walked in dressed in a tux and gave me his jacket. Then they hustled us into a large room in the basement where there were about 20 other tuxedo’d musicians tuning up, organizing charts, and staring at us with amused curiosity. I was ushered to a seat where all my charts were laid out on a music stand. A few minutes later the stage started to lift. Wait! Is this  the famous Radio City band car? Were we going to play on the Great Stage at Radio City? Err… why??

As we rose from the basement I could hear the announcer talking in arguably rapid fire Spanish and heard “Salsa Gringaaaaaa!” Then we saw a sea of people and a roar of applause. I looked at Georg and he  looked similarly confused. But there was no time to soak it in because four spotlights hit each of us and the conductor started the count off before the elevator stopped.

We played for about a half hour. We were followed by some other acts. When we landed back in the basement I was still shocked. We went to a bar around the corner to try to make sense of it. We were joined by a couple of happy Kim Records guys who said it went great… sold out! It actually was a lot of fun playing with an ensemble that large and percussionists that tight but WTF was that??

They explained that the stuff we’d been recording were hit records in Central and South America and that we, Salsa Gringa, were being marketed as something like the Honky Funk Brothers of Medallín: four blond, long-haired Americans playing salsa. Except Georg was Swedish. It sounded like record company marketing hype to me, yet that WAS Radio City and the place WAS packed.

Later we were given “Salsa Gringa — Super Grupo” LPs that they said were big hits. I have it somewhere. It’s frankly not that impressive. Spanish Harlem Orchestra we were not. I love playing salsa but I’m not Héctor Rodríguez or Andy González.

I remember Georg’s dead pan comment: “But you guys don’t even know our fucking names!” It’s true. I was just “bajo” to Germán. We had next to zero emotional involvement in this “super group” yet we played on one of the biggest stages in NYC. Twice. There was something wrong about that.

“Are you ready to do it again tomorrow? This is just the beginning, amigos!” Nobody told us about Sunday of course. I had plans which I would break, foolishly anticipating that we would get paid some cut of the Radio City door and maybe some foreign travel in the future out of it. But guess what they gave us Sunday after the gig? Fifty bucks per show!

We sent word to Kim Records that going forward we needed AFM recording scale for the sessions, fair compensation for the records already in circulation, and a real conversation about live performance fees. Fifty bucks barely gets you an amateur musician at the Sack O’ Suds, and this was Radio City.

To no one’s surprise we never heard from them again.

This was and still is the biggest WTF? of my life.

UPDATE September 2026:

40-odd years later: Holy shit. I found it! The album was retitled Salsa Verde Va by Supergrupo/Germán Pifferrer, Kim Records K-721, released in 1982—and Discogs actually has the credits. Terry Silverlight, drums; me, electric bass; Georg Wadenius, guitar; Steve Robbins, keyboards. Salsa Gringa existed. Apparently we even had names.