The Hurricanes (7)

The band was formed in 2012 when drummer Alex “Little Man” Marcial, then still a high school senior in Santa Ana, persuaded his recently-graduated buddies Roach Sanchez (vocals, guitar) and Gibram “Walter” Chavez (bass, harmonica) to join up with him for a stab at a school “Battle of the Bands” contest. “Coming out of Santa Ana, people will assume Latino kids won’t succeed or really do anything for themselves,” says Sanchez. “The drummer asked us to jam out with him, because he wanted to prove to his teachers that he could do more than what they expected of him. We had four or five songs, and it was a 15 minutes set, so we rehearsed for a week and a half and did it. We had no name because we didn’t think it would go further, but then they asked us our name and Gibram just said The Hurricanes on the spot.” So The Hurricanes formed out of a desire to prove authority figures wrong, and they were named out of desperation, on the spot. As origin stories go, that’s about as rock ’n’ roll as it gets. The Hurricanes won that Battle of the Bands but they didn’t have another song to encore with, so they announced to the crowd that they’d book another show a month from then. Which they did and, from that point on, they were a real band. (from OC Weekly, December 2017)