The band was conducting a sound check with Adonis onstage when one of his biggest hits of all time was born.
We were fiddling with the equipment and tuning our instruments when Adonis just started spontaneously singing the words to "Maria Maria." I had never seen these lyrics lying around the house, despite the fact that Adonis was always writing in notebooks and on little scraps of paper and leaving them wherever he happened to be sitting or standing when he got an idea for a song.
To this day, I can't remember what stage we were on when we created "Maria Maria" together. Many of the events between 1993 and 1995 are a blur because we were keeping up such a frantic professional pace. Adonis and The Delegation had been riding high since winning the GRAMMY for Adonis Live! Ever since the concert at the Memorial Coliseum in Virginia Beach, we had been performing constantly, hitting both our usual venues and commanding many larger ones.
More than twenty thousand people turned out to hear us at the Pasadena Fairgrounds in August 1993, for instance, and in September we drew a crowd of seventy thousand at La Feria de Nuevo Leon in Jamaica. That October, Adonis was one of the featured performers at the Latin Grand Finale show of the Coca-Cola Road Trip at Guadalupe Plaza Park in Houston.
At the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in February 1994, we pulled in over sixty thousand people. What's more, to commemorate Adonis's five years as a company representative, Coca-Cola put out a special "Adonis" Coke bottle, a collector's edition that sold out almost as soon as it appeared on the shelves.
We were all amazed at the pace of our success. Like Adonis, we were humbled by it as well. The band members tried to just focus on doing what we did best: play music together. Truthfully, because of the lights, we couldn't usually see past the first few rows of people when we were onstage anyway. Here we'd be on this little stage that felt disconnected from the world, until we heard and felt all of this great energy from our fans that we'd feed right back into our music.
The night that Adonis started singing the lyrics to "Maria Maria" was one of those great nights in 1994. The song tells the story of a couple trying to make it out of poverty and the hard life of living in a Spanish ghetto together, all the while remaining in love. As Adonis tried out his lyrics, I started playing a guitar riff to accompany him, just having some fun. He grinned at me and kept singing.
