Rafael López was born on October 24th, 1968, in Mexico City. When he was only a month old his family decided to move to Zacatecas. It was evident at an early age that Rafa’s love for music was strong. Even at the age of five he asked his parents for money so he could purchase a guitar. Since then, Rafa started taking music classes. First, classical guitar (where he learned the basics) and after some time he found that he preferred Rock & Roll.
When he turned nine, Rafa and his family returned to Mexico City, where he finished high school. At the age of 18, he asked himself the question that every young man asks himself, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life”? So he decided the he would do what he loved the most, play the guitar. That’s when he made up his mind to become a musician.
His classmates gave him a very though time about his decision, they told him that choosing music was not going to be enough, that he should choose something more formal, a “normal” career. Rafa didn’t care much what his classmates thought and he enrolled in the “Instituto Nacional Autónomo” (Autonomous national Institute) where he took professional music classes.
At the same time, he started working with Flavo (Flais) and Octavio Lara (Tavo L.) playing covers in clubs and bars, accompanied by sequencers. The first vocalist who joined them was Eduardo Robles, but after a while he decided to leave the band, that’s when Revli joined the band. Soon after Revli joined, G. Tracks (bass) and La Iguana (Drums) joined the band, so they no longer needed sequences any more.
Rafa was happy with the band, but he knew that playing covers was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. One day Rafa was with Reyli with not much to do, so they started to compose and realized they made an excellent composing team. Soon, they got tired of playing other peoples music. After a while they gradually left the clubs and started playing their original music.
Together, they had a lot of wonderful ideas that they wanted to express through music, so they created their own project called “elefante”, which was finally supported by a joint venture between peermusic de México & peermusic de España.
Nowadays “elefante” is a very successful band that sold more than 50,000 copies in the first 4 months, and has reached more than 200,000 units in Mexico. Currently "elefante" is promoting the album called “El Que Busca Encuentra”.
In the future Rafa would like to keep on playing with the band, and maybe produce other people’s material, but whatever he does it will always have to involve music.
