Hector Camacho
From New York to Phoenix
Hector came to Arizona from New York in 1976. Music was already part of his life. His stepfather played keyboards and worked lounge and bar gigs after the family arrived, while Hector had been playing drums since he was a little kid. By the time most teenagers were only discovering records, he was already looking for people to play with.
One of the earliest doors opened around 1979, when Hector met Dave Dickey and Ray Bouchard near a North Phoenix park. They needed a drummer. Hector happened to be riding by on a Mongoose bicycle. That chance meeting led to Faded Black, backyard rehearsals and the first real stretch of his Arizona band history.
From Drums to the Microphone
A few years later Hector entered another Phoenix chapter with Him's Rage, a band he places around 1983 and through much of his high-school period. This time he was not behind the drum kit. He was singing.
Him's Rage lived in the world of house parties, heavy-metal covers and all-ages opportunities, the kind of scene that rarely left behind a professional archive. Hector remembers Metal Church, Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath as part of the musical vocabulary, but the real importance of that period was the network forming around him: musicians, parties, rehearsal rooms and the people who would later populate a much heavier Phoenix underground.
When Hector Started Pointing a Camera at the Scene
By the time Phoenix heavy music was changing in the early 1990s, Hector was doing more than playing. He and a friend created Arizona Underground, a cable-access program on Dimension Cable, and began filming local bands at a time when almost nobody carried a camera everywhere they went.
That matters now because some of those bands barely exist online. Flyers disappeared, demo tapes were thrown away, clubs closed and people moved on. Hector says some of his 8mm footage still survives, leaving him with pieces of Arizona music history that may exist nowhere else.
When the Machines Got Loud
Hector's road eventually carried him into the industrial side of Phoenix heavy music. Black House Twins became tied to the Mason Jar, while Godless became associated with the Nile and another part of the Valley's growing industrial scene. The sound had changed dramatically from the Zeppelin and Sabbath-influenced music of his youth, and Hector changed with it.
That transition is one of the reasons his story matters. He did not experience Arizona music from a single decade or genre. He watched the scene move from seventies-style rock into eighties metal, then into industrial music, electronics and a much darker 1990s underground.
More Than a List of Band Names
Hector's larger Arizona family tree runs well beyond the bands named here. Later chapters include a hiatus, a return to writing, Latency, ADDICT3D and 24 Thorns, but putting every date, lineup, recording, show and transition on this page would defeat the purpose of the book.
What belongs here is the reason to keep reading: Hector has lived long enough inside this scene to remember several different Phoenix music worlds, and unlike many people who were there, he also kept things — tapes, photographs, recordings, video and memories that can still help reconstruct what happened.
The Rest Belongs in the Book
This website profile is only the doorway. The complete Hector Camacho feature in The Death of Local Music — Volume II: Arizona Legacy Bands goes deeper into the bands, the clubs, the industrial years, the people he filmed, the stories behind the surviving archive, the musicians who vanished from the public record and the later chapters that carried him into another generation of Arizona heavy music.