Ruben and the Jets

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For Real! album cover

Ruben and the Jets is real doo-wop band named after the 1968 Frank Zappa album Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. That album featured a cartoon cover by Cal Schenkel featuring caricatures of The Mothers of Invention (portrayed as dogs), and a talk balloon that read "is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a different name in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio?" The answer of course was a partial yes, but Zappa also recorded the album as a tribute to the doo-wop music he had a love-hate relationship with: a love for the music, but a great disdain for the lyrics.

The "real" Ruben & The Jets consisted of Ruben Guevara, Tony Duran, Robert "Frog" Camarena, Johhny Martinez, Robert "Buffalo" Roberts, Bill Wild, and Bob Zamora. In the early 1970s, they approached Zappa to ask him if they could use the name "Ruben & The Jets" for their band. Zappa not only approved of the name, he produced the band's first album, which was titled For Real!, a direct reference to the 1968 Mothers album with the "fake Ruben & The Jets." A year later, they recorded a second album called Con Safos which was not produced by Zappa, but by Denny Randell. Both albums were distributed under a sub-label of Zappa's DiscReet record label, called In-Discreet.

The 1978 movie Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke contains a reference to the band at the end of the movie: Cheech Marin's character commenting that they'll be "bigger than Ruben & the Jets." Ruben & The Jets leader Ruben Guevara has an appearance in that film, and later went on to write the title song and do the music coordination for another Cheech & Chong movie, Nice Dreams and make another cameo appearance in addition to doing the music coordination for Cheech's Born in East L.A.