Once, a long while before it became myth—or something that would ask to be mythologized—Los Believos drove into the hills in a silver Saab 900 Turbo. There wasn’t much to the car by then, except a lingering smell like chain oil and patchouli, a rear fender that bore the scrape-marks of countercultural highways, and a dashboard clock that could hold time only the way an old vinyl holds a warmth no digital can catch. The driver, whose name drifts in the retelling, had that half-smile of people who majored in something with “literature” but never wrote more than a paper about “the river” in Don DeLillo.

They were coming from three—some say four or five—directions, each in the wake of other bands, names that would ring bells if you grew up in those borderlands between towns with old bookshops, radios tuned to public stations, and the kind of quiet you can only really get in New England after everyone’s gone home for break. There is a photo, or the suggestion of one, shot on a disposable camera: just the Saab filtering through the fog at the edge of a field, patched together by frost.

What binds every origin story isn’t chronology or even style—the only certainty is the session, the way people converge on a house so far out you only find it with directions written on the inside cover of a mailbox. The gear they carried—two battered amps, a thrift store keyboard with masking tape on three keys, a set of drums rented for cash—looked accidental. But there was a sense, I am told, of collective relief, as if for a weekend, the pressure of “which band gets the headline” and “whose songs will last” was dialed down. Nobody intended to be Los Believos, not at first. It may have happened the way so many things do in the shadow of real intention: someone joked, “We could make a band out of this, just for tonight,” and nobody objected.

The session, if you listen to what’s left (the files circle, now, traded like talismans from hand to hand), carries all the marks of its improvisation—the harmonies are a little off, and yet perfect for being off, the lyric sheets crossed out and rewritten mid-take, laughter kept in because erasing it would weaken the spell. “Huelva,” their one consensus song, was built around an image someone brought from a Spanish lit class and then left open, a placeholder turned invocation. They wanted the freedom of something unclaimed. The idea was, don’t let this become another band that people want things from, another promise you have to keep. So after a few days—maybe only hours—the tapes and the rights to the name were given away, gently, with instructions to never look back and never take credit.

For a while, you could find Los Believos in the way stories circulate in coffee shops or through the seat fabric of every used Saab 900 Turbo in Hampshire, Franklin, and Cumberland County. Sometimes, it was friends of friends who played the material, trusting in the logic that the whole point was not to want in. The original members went back to their own projects. Some of those bands stuck around. Others faded. Here and there, a chord progression or a bridge not used would surface years later, haunting the setlist of a Thursday night at the local.

To this day, there’s a theory—the one I prefer—that Los Believos was the apex of what can happen when nobody is trying to sign, or impress, or poster over anyone else. That the Saab, and the snow, and the slow climb into and out of one another’s musical lives, made a space for a kind of band you can’t keep, but can only pass on as rumor. The songs aren’t as important as the fact that they happened exactly once, and then belonged to whoever needed them most right then.

If you want to know if Los Believos existed, ask yourself if you’ve ever heard something you loved so much you didn’t want to see it pinned to a timeline. Ask if you’ve ever driven, late at night, hands warm against the wheel, and felt a harmony emerge from the static and fold you home.

That’s Los Believos.