The Bukis arrive at the Dolby Live theater surrounded by a small swarm. The popular Mexican musical group makes its way through a cloud of representatives, assistants and the team that has helped them launch their successful residency in Las Vegas, the first completely in Spanish for a Latin group. The seven members are dressed in black. On their chest each one has a personalized playing card from the red heart deck.
—Who would be the wild card?—asks the journalist.
Everyone automatically points to Marco Antonio Solís, the leader of the group and undoubtedly the biggest star to emerge from this group.
—He plays drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and sings—says the rest of the group, made up of brothers Roberto and José Guadarrama, Joel Solís, Javier Solís, Pedro Sánchez and Eusebio Billy goat Cortés, who gravitate around the 64-year-old artist, known as El Buki Mayor.
—And I also have to be the joker, the clown on TV—Solís jokes. His good humor connects with the more than five million people who follow him on social networks, where it is common to find jokes, recipes for people with broken hearts, and everyday philosophy. All this between concert announcements and music releases. In the middle of the pandemic, for example, he sent his followers a message asking people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. “Get vaccinated without fear! His ex must have done more damage to them and they are all very alive here,” he wrote in one of his viral messages.
One of the biggest phenomena of the Mexican group movement is back in Las Vegas since July 12 for the second part of his residency in the gambling capital. This summer they share the same venue with Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga and Mariah Carey, big names in the world of entertainment. But no one like them makes us look back so many years into the past. A Mexican group formed in the seventies that reunited in 2021 after the pandemic to make the sixth most profitable tour worldwide, according to the magazine Pollstar.
“Even if you are already an older person, music makes you feel young, it makes you transport yourself for free to any part of the planet,” says Joel Solís, one of the founders of the group with his cousin Marco Antonio. Joel seems to be talking about Bukis’ followers, who are reliving hits from more than thirty years ago with the residency. He actually talks about himself. The reunion of the group, which had acrimoniously separated in 1996, has been for him a breath of oxygen that allows him to rejuvenate after health problems that required kidney transplants. “Music has the gift of healing and of healing everything, there is no doubt,” adds Marco Antonio Solís, looking his cousin in the eyes.
The beginnings in the United States
The residency has meant the coronation in the United States of a group that began experiencing what millions of Mexicans migrate to the north. “We came illegally to play in Chicago in 1977. They took us there to work at a nightclub, but we didn’t get there because the trip was complicated… We were able to get there until the following week, when the whole event was over,” Marco Antonio Solís remembers about the first experience north of the border. From that experience the song was born The fences: “They had left Mexico/ They came to Tijuana/ For not bringing their papers/ They crossed barbed wire fences…” says the lyrics of the song, which describes an illegal crossing.
Solís, who talks the most in the interview, also remembers the first time they came to play in Las Vegas. They were hired to play on a Monday, the only day off for most casino and bar workers. “They then gave us about 100 dollars each to play with. That was all the salary. They put three or four groups together and we played for about 25 or 30 minutes each. “That’s how we got to know the city,” he says.
Forty years later, they have sold out 15 dates on the Strip through September 21, where there is wild competition for the attention of the many tourists and locals. “We never imagined that we were going to be the first event of Mexicans, or Latinos, doing a residency. The public has forgotten many artists years ago, but we have been present on the radio. Our music has never left the public’s taste,” says Marco Antonio Solís, who recognizes the path opened by other Hispanic figures who passed through the city before with a catalog that included songs in English: Shakira, Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin, the first to do it.
Bukimania
Throughout the first series of concerts, held in May, the group showed that Bukimania is still alive. The group stuck to songs from their catalogue, excluding the songs Marco Antonio Solís had become hits over time in his solo career. In July, they announce, they will modify the repertoire to hold a series of different concerts, but without discarding the most important songs, which everyone sings.
Several of the songs that Bukis perform are part of a cultural heritage with which many Mexicans came to the United States in the eighties and nineties. Most of the members of the group come from two states that are major expellers of Mexicans abroad. Solís founded Bukis with his cousin Joel Solís in Ario de Rosales, a town 100 kilometers south of Morelia, the capital of Michoacán. Javier Solís, one of Marco Antonio’s seven brothers, has been an official member of the group since 1982, when they published the popular Yor I need you, the album for which they were nominated for a Grammy a year later. The keyboardists, the Guadarrama brothers, are originally from Chalchihuites, Zacatecas.
In the concert that opened the residency, the bassist, the Billy goat Cortéz, who earned the nickname because he doesn’t stop for a second on stage, took a minute to greet the construction workers who had paid for the tickets, which ranged from $80 to $900. At another point, he said also a nod to the single mothers in the audience.
“The service people in the houses listen to our music. And this catches the attention of Americans. I have met many who want to learn Spanish to understand our lyrics. They like music and connect with style,” says Marco Antonio Solís.
The group’s leader, who was named Person of the Year at the 2022 Latin Grammys, has taken advantage of his residency in the United States to launch a solo tour. Eternally grateful will take him to tour 18 states in the country on 22 dates between August and November. On August 18, he will be the first Latino to inaugurate the Intuit Dome, the new home of the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA, with capacity for 18,000 people.
New album?
Solís, a prolific composer who wrote more than 60 songs during the years of the pandemic, admits that the live experience with the Bukis has led him to think about recording what would be the group’s first album in decades. The group would replicate their original experience: renting a studio for a couple of months and being together indoors experimenting with the sounds and essences that have made them famous. “I am maturing the idea more and more. It will be interesting because, as my brother says [su primo Joel], in this reunion I found the same essence in each of us, but with incredible maturity. “It is a very important energy,” she says. And he adds: “The public deserves this. And I think it is also a gift for us.”
