Miguel Ríos, Soleá Morente and 30 artists recall Los Ángeles, fifty years after the crash

In Spanish pop, Los Ángeles occupies a peculiar kind of absence. The Granada quartet built their reputation through the late 1960s and early 1970s — melodic, meticulous, with a commercial precision that earned them hits across Spain and a devoted following in their home city. Then on September 26, 1976, a car crash on the road to Madrid killed singer Poncho González and guitarist José Luis Avellaneda. No farewell record, no formal end. Just an abrupt stop, and fifty years of unprocessed grief in a city that claimed them as its own.

What arrives now is an attempt to fill that silence. «Amanecer» — Spanish for dawn — is the opening single from the forthcoming double album «El eco de Los Ángeles 1976 – 2026», performed by Pablo G and Popi González, Poncho’s sons. The track carries a charge that is difficult to separate from biography: two voices standing in the space their father left, fifty years on. The announcement frames it as a generational encounter — an act of transmission as much as commemoration, in the sons’ own words an emotionally charged meeting across time.

Double vinyl edition of the album El eco de Los Angeles 1976-2026 — Image: El eco de Los Ángeles / The Borderline Music

The album releases on October 21. Eleven days later, a tribute concert at Granada’s Teatro CajaGranada assembles a lineup that spans several generations of Spanish rock and pop. Miguel Ríos is on the bill. So are Lori Meyers, Soleá Morente, Antonio Arias, José Ignacio Lapido, Quini Almendros of La Guardia, and Juan Alberto of Niños Mutantes — alongside many others. It is the kind of gathering that takes considerable momentum to pull together, and the fact that it is happening in Granada, Los Ángeles’s city, sharpens the intent.

The institutional dimension matches the scale. Spain’s SGAE hosts a round table and acoustic showcase on November 18 at the Teatro Alhambra, joined by music journalists José Ramón Pardo and Fernando Díaz de La Guardia. In December, a documentary exhibition opens at the Sala Zaida inside the Fundación Caja Rural Granada, tracing the band’s arc from their earliest years in the mid-1960s to the anniversary. The single «Amanecer» is available now on digital streaming platforms.

Tribute projects of this size — a family-recorded single, a 30-artist concert, an institutional SGAE showcase, a documentary exhibition — are unusual at any scale. Most anniversaries settle for one or two of those things. That this one reaches for all four, anchored by the sons of the man whose death stopped the band, says something about how long this particular grief has been waiting for a public form.

Tags: Los Angeles, music-en1, Amanecer, El eco de Los Ángeles, Miguel Ríos, Pablo G