Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

744 Popular Music and Identity since the Nineteenth Century merengue was completely identified with the tyranny and had been usurped by the enormous popularity that rock ‘n roll had awakened in Dominican youth. 102 It was hard formerengue to competewith rock and salsa, sowhenVentura started his own band in 1964, he incorporated elements of the contending musics. The group’s name, Johnny Ventura y su Combo-Show, expressed the international contacts and modernity that its music embodied. « Combo», of course, alluded to Cortijo’s eminently popular Combo and the conjunto format that Ventura’s band sharedwith salsa, while theAmericanism « Show» referred to a choreographic display that that Ventura’s singers put on at performances. Ventura’s clothing and stage presence were strongly reminiscent of Elvis Presley; even the merenguero’s wry smile was similar to that of the North American rocker, and Ventura borrowed the idea for the Combo‑Show from rock‘n roll. It was a winning combination: Johnny Ventura y su Combo-Show became the top merengue band of the 1960s, and his innovative use of dance on the bandstand was eventually picked up by other merengue bands. During the dictatorship, there had only been three major dance bands in the country. The Trujillo family’s retreat from the music industry allowed new talent to come to the fore, and bands proliferated. Other than Johnny Ventura’s group, the most important of the new conjuntos se were led by Félix del Rosario and Rafael Solano. While the United States might have represented freedom to some after Trujillo’s death, it had also violated Dominican sovereignty when it invaded the country in in support of pro Balaguer elements during the Revolution of 1965. Johnny Ventura explains that he enlisted merengue in the Revolution: We sang to the soldiers who were fighting, because a feeling of inertia and discouragement came about at a certain point among the Constitutionalist troops. Somehow or another, we had to encoura- ge and support them, to promote patriotism. And they sustained themselves. 103 It may seen paradoxical that Ventura’s expression, so influenced by American rock, also expressed opposition to U.S. hegemony. But Ventura spells out the peculiar effectiveness of this contradiction: If I had the power in those days, I might have done other things to save merengue from extinction, but I didn’t have that power. Being