Origins of the band's name
This band should win a prize for the most misspelled variations ever. People have asked me for years what it means and I invent a new answer each time. Other people reckon that you shouldn't have a musical genre as part of your name (i.e. Great Funk Railroad weren't funky) However, Funkadelic were! You can never please everyone!
It all started when I went to the Fremantle Library and got out an album by pianist Bill Evans. In it, there was a song called Funkallero. At the time, I was putting a band together with my brother German and was obviously looking for a name. I had written more than album's worth of music in Spanish, which I had never done before that (1998) because I was involved in original and experimental rock bands in Perth. So I thought Funkalleros would be a good name for a Latin band that didn't play traditionally, but a more adventurous fusion of Latin, Rock, Reggae, Jazz and Pop.
The rest is history!
Mind you, I still come up with names for bands, it's fun!
I wrote a song based on the Funkallero theme, inspired by a sad traditional Puerto Rican tune called Teses de Curia, which had a "tumbao" figure played on a Puerto Rican tiple guitar. The song was about a mother giving his dying child some sort of medicinal tea to make him better. So I associated the word Funkallero with the downtrodden, desperate, poor but hopeful migrant that travels from place to place to make his life better and he ends up being a mix (in this case of Spanish and English)