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THE BOY WHO BURIED HIS NAME There is a version of Lionel Kratz that does not exist on any record sleeve, any liner note, or any surviving contract. He went by another name then — Leonel Carrasco — and if you listen closely enough to the later Apostrophes tapes, you can still hear him trying not to sound like himself. Before the desert, before the peyote years, before the apostrophe became a symbol instead of punctuation, Lionel Carrasco was a prodigy in the most inconvenient sense of the word: young, brilliant, Latin, and unmistakably out of place in early-’60s Southern California. He played guitar the way some people solve equations — rapidly, obsessively, with a hunger that bordered on desperation. He could quote Baudelaire and José Martí in the same breath. He spoke English fluently but sang Spanish like it was something physical, something inherited in the bones. By sixteen, Carrasco was already sneaking south of the border. The Tijuana Sessions, as they’re now known, were never formal recordings. They were survival gigs — weeknights in cantinas and border clubs where the beer was warm, the pay was unpredictable, and the audience cared less about your future than your volume. The early Apostrophes, still half a garage band and half a dare, played sets stitched together from boleros, rancheras, surf instrumentals, and rough-cut originals that leaned heavily on rhythm and repetition. Those nights mattered. They taught Lionel Carrasco how to command a room that didn’t want to listen. They taught him how Latin music could hypnotize without apologizing for itself. They also taught him — cruelly, efficiently — how quickly that same music could be dismissed north of the border as novelty, as ethnic texture, as something you “grow out of.”