To Selena, With Love (24 page)

She sighed. “I’m thinking about the mainstream English album.”

“Are you nervous?”

“No, I’m not nervous,” she said. “That’s not it.”

I tried to reassure her anyway. “It’ll be fine, you know. Look at the hard work we did for the Latin side. It won’t be as hard as it was when we played in Mexico the first time, and you succeeded there. You’re doing great. You won’t have to worry about anything. You’ll be an American artist, same as you are now, only you’ll be singing in English over and over again just like you’re singing in Spanish over and over again now.”

This made Selena laugh. “I know,” she said. “I know it’ll be a lot of work, but I can do it.”

“Right,” I said. “You’ve never been afraid of working hard, and you’re going to be great.” I watched her for a minute, alarmed because I saw that Selena was on the verge of tears.

“Tell me,” I said. “Please talk to me. Why are you so sad?”

She shuddered a little and turned on her side to face me. A tear slid down one cheek and her voice was hardly over a whisper. I needed to lean closer to her to hear the words.

“It’s just that I was thinking about what it’ll be like when I have to go and do those concerts in English,” she said. “The music is so different from Tejano. You’re probably the only musician in the band who can play pop songs. A.B. is already saying that he can’t go because he’s not that kind of bass player. Suzette can’t play drums like that, because she doesn’t know how to play drums for pop music. Los Dinos won’t cut it in the mainstream.”

I took Selena’s hand but couldn’t say anything. I knew that she was right. I just hadn’t thought about this before. I had grown up playing rock music and pop music, and I was a good enough guitar player to learn anything off a record.

I knew that I could play the music the label wanted us to do for a mainstream English-language album. The other guys couldn’t, other than Ricky, probably, but that wasn’t where his heart was. If Selena was going to stay at the top of her game and make it in the mainstream commercial music world, she needed to be backed by a band as tight and sophisticated as Mariah Carey’s or Whitney Houston’s. She didn’t have that in Los Dinos.

“So what do you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to not make the album?”

Selena cried harder, hearing this. “I already signed the contract. Besides, you know I want to make it. But I just don’t know if I can be singing onstage, turn around, and not have A.B. and Suzette up there with me. It’s not going to be the same.”

“No,” I agreed. “It won’t be the same.” I took a deep breath, then
asked, “Are you telling me that, if you’d thought of this before, you would have told them you wouldn’t make the English album?”

Selena looked me in the eyes and nodded. “Yes. That’s what I would have said.”

I was conflicted. I knew that Selena wanted to succeed on an international level—that’s what she had worked so hard for all her life—but I also understood her enduring loyalty and love for her family.

“Everything is going to be fine,” I said at last, even though I only partly believed this. “Suzette can take drum lessons and A.B. can start stretching himself on the bass. They can learn. And we’ll still play some Spanish songs with the other guys for more Tejano albums, too.”

“You really think we can make it work?” Selena asked.

“We can try,” I said. “That’s all anybody can do, right?”

Selena Live!
came out on May 4, 1993, shortly after Selena gave me the truck for our first wedding anniversary. When it was nominated for a Grammy, none of us could believe it, despite all of our recent successes. Selena and I flew to New York with Suzette, A.B. and his wife for the awards ceremony in Radio City Music Hall. Of course we were all excited to be nominated, but I don’t think any of us ever imagined that we might actually win.

Selena and I were mainly thrilled to have a chance to meet some of the performers we admired, or at least see them perform in person. I was particularly looking forward to seeing Sting, but the one Selena couldn’t wait to see was Whitney Houston, who was one of her favorite singers.

As our plane began its descent over the Manhattan skyline, I looked past Selena and out the window. The Twin Towers loomed in the distance, and I couldn’t believe how tall they were. I thought those must be the buildings that King Kong had climbed on in the movies I’d watched as a kid. We could see the Statue of Liberty, too, small but gleaming in the distance, and a tingle of excitement ran up my spine. I couldn’t believe that I was finally going to see New York City.

We took a limo from the airport to a hotel around the corner from Radio City Music Hall. As Selena and I stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel, we were immediately assaulted by the smells, the blaring car horns, and the crowds of people. New York was nothing like Corpus, or even San Antonio.

Selena entered the hotel ahead of me. As I moved to follow her into the lobby, an angry altercation broke out on the street as a taxi driver got out of his car and started yelling and swearing at another driver, who came over and banged on the taxi’s hood with his fist.

I must have come inside in a hurry and with some weird expression on my face, because Selena said, “Everything okay, Chris?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “These two guys were fighting outside. A taxicab driver and some other guy.”

“Don’t go back out there alone,” she advised.

I immediately agreed. We had seen New York City in the movies, but it seemed like the people here were even crazier than they seemed on film.

The awards show wasn’t until that night. Abraham had arranged for Selena to have meetings with record label executives that day, so she went to those with A.B. and then went shopping with Suzette.
I did end up braving the New York City streets alone, meanwhile, and bought some gear I couldn’t find in Texas.

For the show, Selena wore a floor-length beaded white dress with a fishtail hem in the back. She was really nervous by then, and kept losing her temper with me because the back of the dress dragged on the floor and I kept walking too close to her and stepping on it by mistake.

“Back up a little bit, Chris,” she whispered at one point. “It’s hard enough to walk in this thing. If you step on the hem, I’m going to fall down, and I sure don’t want to do that right here in front of everybody.”

We all sat together in the Radio City Music Hall theater. When Selena’s name was called as the Grammy winner in the Best Mexican-American album category, we all jumped up out of our seats and cheered.

“Oh, Chris!” Selena whispered to me. “I can’t believe I won!”

I gave her a hug and then nudged her. “Come on, come on. You’ve got to go down there and make your speech!”

“What if I fall on this dress? Oh, please don’t let me trip and fall on the way down there,” I heard her murmur as she made her way out to the aisle and started toward the stage.

Selena didn’t trip, and she had never looked more beautiful than that night in her beaded white dress, with her hair tamed into an elegant updo, as she gave her brief speech thanking Jose Behar, the band, and all of her family members.

After the speech, Selena was whisked away backstage while the rest of us enjoyed watching the remainder of the show. Selena had been so starstruck by the idea of meeting other artists at the Grammys that she had brought a camera to take pictures of herself with
them; unfortunately, they hadn’t allowed us to bring the cameras into the theater, so I knew that she must be feeling frustrated backstage. Besides, I thought with a grin, Selena would be the one that everyone would want pictures of now, since she was one of the winners.

As we left Radio City Music Hall that night, we heard people screaming Selena’s name outside. She couldn’t believe they knew her name. But she was still cool, waving at all of them like she was the First Lady or something, even though that whole time she was worrying about falling on that dress.

Then it was over, and Selena could say that she had won a Grammy. It’s funny how winning a Grammy doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you win it—and then it’s a very big deal indeed, mainly because you’ve been recognized by the music industry and other doors begin opening up to new opportunities all around you, simply because you’ve earned the industry’s nod of approval.

For A.B., too, this was a big day. He had been trying to get people to pay attention to his production quality, and at the end of the day, he was recognized as a great producer. We were all parts of his puzzle, but he was the one who had put the pieces together.

Many thought of Selena as a solo artist—the name “Los Dinos” had even been dropped from the front of her albums by the time she won the Grammy, and we were credited only on the back—yet I knew that every time we put out a new record, other groups were now trying to imitate our sounds, and would be for a long time to come. Selena was right: all of us had come to rely upon one another as family, and it was important for us to stick together.

AP Photo /
Houston Chronicle,
Paul Howell

A
braham had once called me “a cancer” in the Quintanilla family. I turned out to be benign. Nobody detected the real cancer, which appeared in the form of a short, homely woman named Yolanda Saldivar.

I first met Yolanda shortly before Selena and I were married, when we were still seeing each other on the down low. My first memories of Yolanda are vague. I used to see her at some of our shows, usually in San Antonio. Occasionally she would be on the bus, too, visiting with Selena and Suzette. Once I became acquainted with her, I might say, “Hey, what’s up?” if I walked by Yolanda at a show or on the bus, but that was it.

Beyond that, everything I knew about Yolanda at first was hearsay. To me, she was just another friend of the Quintanilla family—a friend whom everyone seemed to like and trust. I was polite to her but that was as far as our relationship went in those early years.

I had heard somewhere that Yolanda, a registered nurse, attended one of Selena’s concerts in 1991, and was apparently so entranced by Selena’s music that she had approached Suzette, who
was in charge of Selena’s merchandising. Yolanda had proposed starting a fan club in San Antonio.