Jaime Hernández, music promoter, on the terrace of his house in Corçà (Baix Empordà).Vanessa Montero
Jaime Hernández agrees to pose on one of the fig trees in his garden, also in front of two double computers in the attic that serves as his study, next to the wall of his neighbor’s spacious villa or on the terrace with the laptop on his knees and surrounded by the music press, which he has consumed since his youth. The only thing he resists is being photographed with an acoustic guitar in his hand. He would feel like a “fraud”. He plays it “very rarely,” although it helped him introduce his children to music, and years ago he sold the pair of electric guitars that accompanied him on his brief journey as an alternative rocker in the Barcelona band Parkinson DC .
This is a phase that is considered “more than complete”. He left it behind 25 years ago, shortly after founding Houston Party, the record label and concert promoter into which he poured his passion for music: “It started as the label where we released the last four Parkinson DC references , a single, an album [Still in Spain, 1998] and two EPs, but this allowed me to confirm that our previous record label hadn’t misled us after all, that we were indeed a band with some prestige in the local indie scene, but had almost no commercial appeal. The band broke up and Hernández (Barcelona, 53 years old) clung to the Houston party. His first big signing was the American power pop band The Posies: “Two good friends [Jon Auer y Ken Stringfellow] “That, in an act of trust and generosity for which I will never thank them, they gave me their live album Alive Before the Iceberg, which we ended up selling more than 12,000 copies of.”
Part of her music collection on CD, arranged alphabetically.Vanessa Montero
Hernández welcomes us to his home in Corçà, in the Catalan region of Baix Empordà. Houston Party is turning a quarter of a century and he has decided to celebrate by bringing on tour Jody Stephens, the sole survivor of one of his fetish bands, Big Star, the legendary Memphis combo who, according to Hernández, “sold a ridiculous number of copies of their debut album, but everyone who bought the album formed a group.” Stephens performs under the umbrella of The Music of Big Star, a supergroup that also includes Mike Mills (REM), the aforementioned Jon Auer, Pat Sansone (Wilco) and Chris Stamey (The dB’s) and which begins its Spanish tour today in Barcelona’s Sala Apolo. Tomorrow they are in Madrid (La Riviera), on the 18th in Santander (Santander Stage) and on the 19th in Valencia (Sala Moon). “A concert lasting several hours, intense, emotional and very professional, with big star songs that deserved big hits in their time and are cult pieces today,” says Hernández.
Hernández remembers listening to pop songs “forever.” The first song that shocked him was “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys: “I was six or seven years old, I came out of my parents’ garage and these wonderful vocal harmonies were playing on the radio, it took my breath away .” His baptism of fire as a musician would come a few years later when he took part in “a student exchange program in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.” There, at the age of 15, he studied “the equivalent of our second year of BUP.” He discovered “a small, but very lively local punk scene that was nurtured by groups like Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, New Order, REM, Black Flag…”.
Hernández poses in front of the wall of one of his neighbors’ houses.Vanessa Montero
After returning to Barcelona, he delved further into this tradition and discovered The Stooges, The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth. “All this incredible music that still fascinates me and that very few Spanish teenagers heard back then.” At the age of 18, he founded the band Los Replicantes, the embryo of Parkinson DC. Together with the Bonmatí brothers (Alfonso and Guillermo) and Ramón Serra, he experienced “six excellent years” between 1992 and 1998, during which they released four albums and joined the first emergence of national indie music.
“I remember the crazy tours where we drove through Spain in a Vanette, experienced hellish heat, exhausted but euphoric.” They performed at one of the first editions of the now legendary Benicàssim Festival and were “the opening act for great youth heroes like Yo La Tengo.” Despite everything, Hernández assures that this period has left a bittersweet residue: “I feel like we didn’t reach our full potential. As we began to grow and solidify as a group, we experienced a maturity crisis that we could not overcome.”
Detail of Jaime Hernández’s attic with photos of concert posters. Vanessa Montero
Houston Party started with amateur criteria but quickly became professional. The worst moments came with the crises of 2008 and 2020: “15 years ago, when digital piracy broke out on a massive scale, I was on the verge of throwing in the towel.” The solution was to concentrate on concert promotion. “Then the lockdown in 2020 was another hard blow, but we were able to weather the storm.” Once these moments of fear are overcome, Hernández looks to the future with moderate optimism: “Our business is live music,” he argues, “and that will never die.” Seeing a good artist in the right environment and in the format that best suits their abilities is a great experience. And I have, modestly speaking, dedicated almost my entire career to making this happen.”
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