During a recording session, engineer Richard Kunc and the Mothers of Invention discussed their high school days and love for doo-wop songs.
Ray Collins and some of the other members of the band started singing and performing the songs, and Frank Zappa suggested that they record an album of doo-wop music.
[2] Collins later left the Mothers of Invention, and Zappa began working on a project entitled No Commercial Potential, which included songs inspired by 1950s vocal groups, which were later reconstituted into a concept album called Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (1968).
[7] In 1971, Guevera Jr. staged an avant-garde play, Who Are the People?, which fused spoken word, theater, music, and dance to present a criticism of the Vietnam War from a Latino perspective.
[6] Ruben and the Jets dissolved in the mid-1970s, though some members played another performance later, backed by a future Guevera Jr. band, Con Safos.
[8] Although the Mothers of Invention's "Jets" recordings generally tried faithfully reproduce the sound of 1950s doo-wop and rock and roll,[2] the arrangements included quotes from Igor Stravinsky pieces and unusual chord changes and tempos.
[9][10] Zappa has noted that the album was conceived in the way Stravinsky's compositions were in his neo-classical period: "If he could take the forms and clichés of the classical era and pervert them, why not do the same ... to doo-wop in the fifties?
[6] After a transformative visit to Mexico, Guevera Jr. began to produce solo performance art and spoken word poetry which addressed Chicano identity.
[6] Guevera Jr. founded a record label, Zyanya, which distributed compilations of Latino and Spanish singing bands,[6] and continued to stage experimental plays, including La Quemada and Aztlan and Babylon, Rhythm & Blues (both 1990), which discussed Mexican and Latino history.
[17] According to a post from his daughter on his Facebook page, Robert "Frog" Camarena died on March 8, 2018, after a long illness following a liver transplant.