When doing the Amor Prohibido album, all I knew before even starting the album is that Entre Mi Mundo had done incredibly well, Como La Flor, as it's gone down in history now has been a huge hit and where almost every race from Cubans to Puerto Ricans, everybody knows Como La Flor and so when coming up with Amor Prohibido it was a little bit difficult like any album, following up an album that's a great success, it's hard. You can't really do a Como La Flor 2 or Carcacha 2 so I believe Amor Prohibido was a step up for Selena. It was a more mature sound and more versatile album. You had your more experimental songs like the Tecnocumbia, you had Chico Del Apartamento which was a little Colombian, well I can't even say Vallenato but a Colombian style cumbia and then you had Cien Aves which was a mariachi fusion with cumbia. I believe that in order for Selena to reach different audiences and farther, I had to make the music more, I guess more chic, a little more cooler, more acceptable to other countries. My favorite song on the album looking back now, when you work and you put albums together and you put music together, as a producer songwriter you just put the song together and then you just kind of chunk it behind you, it becomes a hit and you try to move on to keep going forward but I have to say one of my favorite songs on the album, actually I didn't even write but it was Fotos de Recuerdos which I was short for some material on the album. I had written a lot and was nearly having a nervous breakdown in doing the album. I was coming from the airport, I think I flew in from New York or somewhere and Back on the Chain Gang came out on the radio and magically I said, man, I said to myself that would make a great cumbia if we did it in Spanish and it came to be and was a very big success for Selena and it's one of my favorite songs on the album or my favorite song on the album. I had spent a while preparing the next album for Selena. I always felt it very important to keep the music fresh and to keep it moving forward. I start working on concepts and ideas already for the next project but it's kind of hard. The music industry is constantly changing. Every three months you've got new producers, new cats coming out on the market and the sound is constantly changing and the industry is constantly moving and shifting so I really don't recall how long it took me to put Amor y Prohibido together but I do remember that it did take me two weeks worth of work in the studio with the Dinos and with Selena getting everything together. I'd honestly say probably about six months at my best recollection. I can't say that, I mean, I believe that Selena's music was very experimental. You know, if you bought a Selena album, especially Amor y Prohibido, you're going to hear 50% of the songs are experimental. It's never been done before. As far as, let's say, your Si Una Vez with Mariachi with Cumbia in the mix or your Tecno Cumbias where actually she was rapping on the Tecno Cumbia which had never been done or singing R&B blues and just being real funky. I never at any point, not even with Como La Flor or Entre Mi Mundo, had imagined that the music would go where it was going to go. I just believe that with Selena and Dad, Suzette, myself, with the whole family, it was just a great running machine. We had all the chips and all the motor pieces to make a great motor and Selena was the most important part. She was the engine of the motor and us just gears and just mechanisms to help the motor go. For me, I never sat back and said, oh, this album is going to be a great ... I guess I'm my worst critic, you know what I'm saying, in the sense that Selena would love something and I'd go, oh, you think it's going to work and she'd go, yeah, I think it's going to work. If she gave me the okay and gave me the green light and it was cool with her, then I felt pretty confident about it. I think a song that really, the first song that comes to mind is Biddy Biddy Bom Bom because it was the first time a song like that had ever been done. It was kind of a little scary. I put it together. It was Selena's song. She wrote it along with Peter Sudillo and I just got up in the mix and put the music together for them. I was real surprised. What I can remember from the album is the company couldn't pick the first single. For me, I wanted Biddy Biddy Bom Bom to be the first single and Selena, I believe, wanted Amor Prohibido and the company wanted Amor Prohibido, but I actually was fighting to get Biddy Biddy Bom Bom out as the first single because I really liked ... After the song was finished, I really dug it a lot and now we can look back and see that it was a huge success for Selena y Los Dinos, but I wanted for Biddy Biddy Bom Bom to be the first single, but unfortunately the company went with Amor Prohibido and for me, either way, but that's the kind of system we had to where Selena supported anything that I'd done or anything that my dad done or Susie and we supported her. It was never a contest to see who was going to get the first single or anything. We just wanted to get the job done. One more thing that we could talk about, about Amor Prohibido, is when we were recording No Me Quiero Mas, she recorded the song. I think she'd done it in like four takes and I wanted her to do it again and she got mad at me. She told me she wasn't going to sing it again. She said, I've already had it. As a matter of fact, I've had it with you and this whole studio and I'm ready to get out of here. She didn't throw a little fit. We don't want to say throw a little fit, but she said, you know what, I'm going to go to the mall and I'm going to head out. What you got there is what you got there. Now looking back on No Me Quiero Mas, she really did a beautiful job of singing the song and it's got so much passion and so much. She interpreted the song so well and No Me Quiero Mas has become a classic and that's what I can remember from one of the most beautiful memories I have of Amor Prohibido. I love this song. I like it more than any other. I can't think of any other. I remember when we filmed the video for this song it was in San Antonio at the train station. San Antonio's train station. Right there in this place, it was filmed in the movie Selena when they were doing the fashion show. Naturally, I also like the song Bidi Bidi Bamba a lot. I think those are the two songs I like the most. But I want to mention that in this album, Amor Prohibido, all the songs were hits. Amor Prohibido was a very good album for us. It was, I believe, the album that had the most cumbias on it. This was a very fun album. A lot of these cumbias that are on it, especially Amor Prohibido, was one of my favorites. But the song that sticks out the most for me, there's two of them actually. It's No Me Queda Mas, which is a slow, romantic song that's just gorgeous. I believe Ricky wrote it. It's a very nice ballad type of song. I think that the video that we shot in San Antonio, Texas at a train station and they converted it into the set for the video. The funny thing about it was that I believe the dress that Selena wore for the scene in the video was the one that she had won the Grammy earlier that year. So it was double special. She had gained a couple of pounds. It fit a little tighter than what she wanted, but she got it on. I thought she looked gorgeous. It was a very long shoot. I remember that. The No Me Queda Mas video was a very long shoot, but I think it turned out really nice. The other song that I really, really liked was Bidi Bidi Bom Bom, which it appeals to different age groups, but I think a lot of children like that song. That was written by Selena. Actually, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom started off as us messing around on the stage. Actually, it was like little bitty bubbles and swim, swim, swim or something like that. Every time we would practice or do soundcheck before a show, we would mark timing and we started doing this little lick and everybody started putting their own little piece. Selena started off singing little bitty bubbles. I don't know. After a while, it turned into a song and she sat down and wrote lyrics for it and it turned into Bidi Bidi Bom Bom. On this particular album, we were feeling pretty secure in our sound. Our performances were very tight. We felt good coming in to record the album. I don't know if this goes for any other artists, but when you go into a recording studio and you record your stuff, you just hope that it appeals to everybody and you just hope that everybody really likes it and you hope that it's going to do well. We felt good about this album. I really liked Tecnocumbia. Tecnocumbia was definitely different. I feel that if she would still be here, we'd be leaning more towards that type of style of cumbia. I think that Tecnocumbia shows what the future would have held for Selena y los Dinos. Amor Prohibido. I remember back, it came out in 1994. For me, I really didn't notice the fact that the album back in the day had so many cumbias. Things were done differently before that, which was you would have only a couple of cumbias on an album and the rest would be rancheras or ballads or styles like that. This one had a bunch of them, but for me, they were so progressive and just good arrangements like AB and Rick did and Peter, him working with the guys and writing the lyrics that he was writing. These songs stood out from the other ones that, for me personally anyway, than any of the other groups that were out there doing this type of music. You couldn't really compare what ended up being the sound of Amor Prohibido. You could not compare that to anybody else. A lot of that had to do with the way AB puts the songs together and of course the keyboard sounds that he would use on this album. Speaking as a guitar player on this album is when I actually got to combine a lot of electric and acoustical guitar work together and just the whole back in the chain gang from the Pretenders, AB wanting to redo that one. Ideas like that were really exciting to me. The album, it ended up being one of my favorite albums because of the songs that are on here and of course Selena's natural progression as a vocalist, her getting better with every album. Just when you think that you had heard it all or that she couldn't really push it anymore or that everything was fine the way it was, she'd just blow you away with some new ideas. You play back the CD and notice right away the big steps that the band was taking from the last album to this one. While you're doing it, you don't really look at things that way or I don't personally. I kind of just try and contribute what I can contribute to the song in the studio and just kind of help everybody along, be the backbone for that. There's a couple of songs on Amor Prohibido that I really, really like. One being Fotos y Recuerdos which is back on the chain gang from the Pretenders because of the memories I had growing up with that song and it being a rock song and us being able to convert that into a cumbia. That was one of the reasons that that's my favorite and also Bidi Bidi Bom Bom. I mean it just seemed to happen so easily for everybody in the band to kind of come up with that. I remember we were doing a live show and I had just gotten this new wah pedal, Cry Baby. And we were going to do one of our songs. It was in one particular key and we were switching over to do the next song and I just started playing that riff with the wah pedal and Aby just kind of shot me this look like, you know, I could tell that he liked it. You know, we did that a lot on stage and a lot of times he'd look at me like, hey calm down, you know. But this one he gravitated towards and I mean he made an incredible arrangement out of it and wrote an awesome song with the help of Pete and Selena as well. I think she had written that song and had some English lyrics going for it live that she would sing and Peter of course took it and wrote some awesome lyrics in Spanish. Llano. I remember Aby coming to me when we were living practically next door to each other and he asked if I'd be interested in doing a rock track. And there was this song that he had written that I think his plans were to do it conjunto style and in typical Aby fashion approached me with this idea of making it a rock song like literally the night before we went in to record Amor Prohibido, start recording the album there at the studio. So I remember Rick Vela and I, we stayed up all night coming up with the drum sounds and you know programming the pattern for it and actually structuring the song and I couldn't believe that he was giving me the opportunity to just kind of go in there and you know I mean he lent me his direction and his ideas and things like that of course but to let me just kind of have fun with the song and layer my guitars on there and do what I guess my background being rock. He thought that maybe it would be a good idea. We just happened to do it like that and when it came down to crunch time in the studio it was kind of a let's see what happens you know see if he's going to like it and sure enough I mean it was good enough for Aby. The Amor Prohibido video was filmed in Joshua Tree National Park I believe is the name of the place that we did it in which is basically out in the middle of nowhere. I remember Selena and I getting picked up and I mean we didn't stay very far from the location where we shot the video. Needless to say the hotel was in the middle of nowhere as well but I mean it was a real exciting time you know we weren't really used to doing videos on that scale. I remember her being really excited to go and I mean she Selena was she loved acting and just the whole arts in general you know of course her her singing but acting as well you know she had started doing acting in Mexico and soap operas and things like that and in her video she did a lot of acting and Amor Prohibido was no exception to that you know we were out there from sunrise to sunset and just doing take after take after take and I remember looking at the monitor you know what they were filming and seeing how beautiful it was going to come out and I just really couldn't wait for everybody else to see it you know especially her dad and Aby and Suzette and her mom because I mean you know as it was going down I wish I could have you know call them and said man y'all got to see how it's coming out and she's looking really good and you know I mean it just came across really well on screen. When she was picking her clothes to do the video to get ready to fly out I remember her going through the closet and there was no shortage of clothes or shoes with her you know and then I remember her turning around and looking at my side of the closet and I was like what is she doing you know she started going through some of my shirts and sure enough she pulled some out and put them with hers and ended up wearing one of these red shirts that I had gotten from the mall you know in that video when she's wearing the red long sleeve shirt and she's got it tied up on the bottom that's one of my shirts. What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido? What is Amor Prohibido?