Lost Samba – Chapter 31/02 – Rock from Rio in the Eighties.

Rock and Roll took Rio over by storm. Everyone seemed to have a band, and those who did not wanted to be involved in one way or another. In the middle of this revolution, someone inherited a Radio station in Niteroi and transformed it into the first pure Rock station in town, Radio Flumnense. Now, no one needed to buy records any more to listen to Led Zeppelin, Yes, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, the Who, etc… This bonanza was short lived as they were approached by the big record companies demanding royalties. Unable to pay, they resorted to playing exclusively 80’s stuff; despite losing their pirate station aura they became avant-garde and introduced Rio’s youth to what was happening in the local and international rock scene.

Michel, a future work colleague, was an international air steward at the time; during his time off in London and in New York he would buy the latest releases of the latest bands and would deliver them freshly to the station. As these bands were from independent labels and had never been heard in Brazil, they were less of a problem to broadcast. No other station aired that kind of music and playing in their station became the passport to success for all the local bands. Arrepio included, did everything they could for them to play our songs. Radio Fluminense was to be the soundtrack of the eighties and was a phenomenon that will never be repeated.

Charles, the studio owner, started getting us gigs, and with the little money we got from them we started investing in demo tapes in order to who knows, finally get some air space in Radio Fluminense. This lead us to better recording studios where we came across impatient sound engineers despising us behind the glass windows. This new phase made us more aware of what we played and taught us a lot. But in a way the pseudo professionalism in those studios got in the way of us getting the best results. The tracks were recorded separately which made those sessions very different to what we were used to; sometimes the musician would get his part wrong or sometimes the engineer messed up and there were endless repetitions where the essence of the band dissipated into technical details.

Felipe joined the band through a Posto Nove bump in too. Although he was not attached to the Circo Voador he had become a professional actor with an important role in the play “The Twelve Works of Hercules”, that was to be the cradle of many successful careers in the Brazilian acting world. He was dying to be a lead singer in a band and therefore we had an easy job to convince him to become ours. His voice was good, his presence was superb and with him we gained a new dimension; also, his contacts could break us into circles that could make it happen.

The next step was to do his début gig. Through his connections Felipe arranged one in a bar in Ipanema. It was going to the venue’s first Rock gig after decades of quiet nights of Bossa Nova. We set up our gear in the patio with the staff regarding us as barbarians coming in from the steppes; there was no pre-amplifier or sound engineer; just our instruments, borrowed microphones and the power of Charle’s amplifiers. After we had done the sound check in the afternoon he manager came up to greet us. He was apprehensive about the volume and asked us if we could play lower but we answered that because the drums were naturally loud everyone had to be at a similar level.

At night the guests started appearing; as Felipe was doing a minor role in a soap opera at TV Globo there were one or two famous faces and many desirable future starlets appearing in the room. When the hall filled up, we started. In the middle of the second number, I heard a noise in my ear and when I looked around the manager was shouting that we were too loud. I told him again that we could not play lower because of the drums. He went down and after two numbers, he knocked on my shoulder again and told me that there was someone downstairs wanting to talk to me. I replied that I could not talk then. The next thing we saw were six police officers coming up the staircase, taking the plug out of the wall and killing the gig.

The Felipe days were short lived; he signed a contract for a big role in a TV series and gave up his musical career. I went back to the vocals but arguments started to break out, the rest of the band was more concerned about their technique than my over-confident self; Marcos and Melo were still taking private lessons, which for me was very un-rock and-rollish and they did not want to understand that I couldn’t do the same for financial reasons. On the other hand, I took the venture more seriously; I believed that if we found a sound to set us apart from the other bands we could make it big and I was prepared to invest all of my energies. Meanwhile the other guys took the band with a pinch of salt and regarded the band as a fun weekend activity.

*

 The temple for goths, new romantics, quasi-punks, and other alien creatures was a night club in Copacabana, called Crepúsculo de Cubatão. The name paid homage to Cubatão, an industrial town on the coast of São Paulo state considered the most polluted place in Latin America. It was owned by Ronald Biggs, the famous British train robber, and had everything one would expect from an early eighties venue: the neo-gothic expensive futuristic look with classical overtones, girls and boys dressed up as vampires, a lot of exaggerated make up and no smell of cannabis or hint of heterosexual sex in the air. The ever-crowded door was controlled by a tiny Goth girl protected by two gigantic and un-trendy bouncers. She chose whom she would not let in by pointing at them and pronouncing the death sentence: “she/he looks like a nice guy/girl”.

Strange people started to appear in our lives talking about Post-Modernism and Nietzsche without understanding much of what they were talking about but causing a knowledgeable impression. London had become the new Jerusalem and the British magazines iD and The Face were the new Bibles; in some quarters having a sun tan was seen as a sign of belonging to the Neanderthal age. The irony about the obsession with the London standard was that coming from a semi-British background, I could have prospered big time but I stuck to my coherence and in my mind I was a defeated revolutionary who had stoically not sold out.

There was a fundamental absurdity in what was going on that I could not come to grips with: Rio de Janeiro’s natural settings did not combine with urban themes. The shallowness of the discussions about visual trends in foreign magazines and which bands and artists were free from the seventies aura had nothing to do neither with Rio’s eternal wildness nor with what I thought or intended to be. On the lighter side, it was amusing to see goths and punks walking around in black leather jackets and boots on 40 degree centigrade sunny weekends while everyone else was in their bikinis or trunks going and coming back from the beach. They looked like vampires in search of morgues to shelter in until night when they could come out and take over the city.

The Carioca middle class punks’ were another case of absurdity; the clothes they wore and the places they had to be seen were expensive and had nothing to do with Johnny Rotten screaming “no future” in London between one spit and another. The punk movement was much closer to the people crammed in buses in Sao Paulo’s outskirts and to people like me being sliced up by the economic lawnmower. We were being kicked in the face by a system that had promised a rosier world as we grew up. There was a lot of right wing talk going on about the survival of the fittest but what we saw was the survival of the ones with richer parents.

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The photo is more recent but reflects a bit what Punk in the Zona Sul was about.

Lost Samba – Chapter 13 – A short history of Brazilian modern music

Gilberto Gil and Os Mutantes in the 1967 music festival.

Célia was the pretty and skinny girl from the eleventh floor when we lived in Copacabana. She was friends with Sarah and one day she rushed in very excitedly to say that her Mum had given her two tickets for the International Song Festival for her birthday and, to my desperate envy, she invited my sister to come. The mega-event was in the Maracanãzinho, the Maracanã’s smaller brother, set up right next to it to host non-football related events.  This was a unique opportunity to watch the best artists in the country and other big international attractions live. This was something that went beyond what Eurovision is nowadays, the regime hoped to unite the nation around them and the artists that the organizers chose with the backing of record labels represented all segments of Brazilian society. The intellectual left would have Chico Buarque, the bossa nova purists would have Tom Jobim and Nara Leão, the rockers and psychedelics would have Os Mutantes; the black people would have Toni Tornado, the militant university students would have Geraldo Vandre, the tropicalistas would have Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso; the samba lovers would have Jair Rodrigues and Paulinho da Viola; and then there was Jorge Ben who pleased everyone.

These contests grabbed Brazil’s attention and the relatively recent TV stations transmitted them to the millions of televisions recently bought to watch the World Cup in Mexico.  The military felt proud to demonstrate that, although they did not allow their people to choose their administration, they had nothing against freedom of expression. This was only half-true, with the press closely watched and limited in its freedom, the festivals assumed the status of perhaps the only forum where the debate about the country’s reality could flourish. Although there was also an undeniable commercial aspect them; they represented a break with the Bossa Nova and with the old generations of radio stars and starlets. Most of the successful artists would end up filling the coffers of the record labels and father everything that came after them.

Many songs were indeed political, while others were about the catching up with the hippy revolution that was going on outside the country, and competed side by side with pretty love songs and happy sambas. However, the political controversy of the two main trends would end up in the inevitable clash between the hard-core Bolschevic revolutionaries and the flower power crowd, which caused strange events such as a rally against the electric guitar with the presence of eminent journalists and Gilberto Gil.

The effervescence of the repressed youth, tired of the solutions presented by the traditional left and by the traditional right, would make the festivals the stage of a cultural debate, perhaps too important to the liking of their sponsors. Parallel to this there were other important cultural expressions appearing in the art world, in cinema, in the theatre and in literature. On the other hand, there was a lot happening in terms of political and cultural uprising outside Brazil. Altogether, the nation hungered for expressions that mirrored their life experiences and expectations in times of deep changes. The tropicália movement would emerge from this moment. Although it is currently associated with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Os Mutantes the movement was much wider in its proposal and almost amorphous in its positioning. Under its big umbrella, there was nationalism, folklore, pop, sympathy for the Cuban revolution, love for the Beatles, Samba, and search for the roots of Brazil. Before going commercial and dissipating, the tropicália encompassed graphic artists, such as Hélio Oiticica, avant-garde musicians such as Tom Zé, journalists, writers, philosophers, intellectuals and a plethora of crazies and geniuses that still influence the current days.

What kept all those tendencies together was the opposition to the regime and to Brazil’s enormous social disparities that its rulers were unwilling to deal with. As the political grip tightened, the military realized that echoes of a creative explosion landing inside the nation’s living rooms was complicated.  Many of these festivals winning artists, and definitely the most popular ones, exhibited too much creativity for the ideologues of the coup and, worse, many openly voiced their opposition to the state of things.  For the military, stopping the party or excluding the stars would send out the wrong message, the way out was censorship.

After the AI-5 decrees, that took away all basic civil liberties from Brazilians, things turned to the worse. With no judicial system to answer to, the country’s rulers resorted to exiling and jailing artists, and the festivals died out.

A few years later, the military allowed the artists back as a gesture of reconciliation.  More than their music, their fans missed the political and the libertarian overtones in their songs.  They returned as heroes but had matured abroad and now they had even more professional agendas.  Their concerts acquired a special quality, mixing an authentic resistance pedigree, celebrity status and world-class musicianship.  When Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque played, the world seemed to come back to normal.

This was the time when I began going to shows. They were huge events, closer to football matches and political rallies than to musical concerts. When the doors opened the audience rushed in like cattle, and when everyone had taken their places, there was a similar atmosphere to being in the Maracanã.  It was a lot of fun; the several sections of the theater booed and cheered each other as if they were supporting different teams. They also sang choruses with related and unrelated themes some of them political, some of them related to drugs and some of them just plain funny.

When the lights went down, the room fell silent and the magic began.  In the best concerts, one felt as being in the artists’ lounge. The calmer songs provided a communal atmosphere that I have never experienced anywhere else and the more rhythmic ones, always saved for the end, resulted in out of season carnivals with the entire theater dancing on the chairs, in the corridors and on the stage.

Parallel to these concert-parties with political innuendos, there was something new creeping in. Rock bands were the expression of the new generation and were the underground of the underground. Their public was frightening: they looked dirty, had much longer hair than the average and took drugs that most people did not even know existed. One of the main expressions was Raul Seixas, his lyricist, Paulo Coelho touched on mystical and sex related subjects close to what bands such as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were doing in the international Rock scene. There was also the Secos e Molhados who adopted and androgynous style and make up that the American band Kiss would copy, and that surpassed many international bands in terms gay openness as early as 1972. These artists, although popular with the youth, shocked everyone and in intellectual terms, no one liked them, not even the Lefties.

As far as behaviour is concerned, they pioneered everything that most people would consider banal in the following decades, drugs, vegetarianism, and interest in mysticism and in oriental philosophies and the following of a sort of zen-individualist outlook of life. As Ipanema’s surfers, the rockers did not have any agenda other than living their lives intensely and ignored both the political dictatorship of the right and the intellectual dictatorship of the left. When disco kicked in, they discovered that looking good and shaking their moneymaker on the dance floor brought in more sex. This, and the large amount of drug casualties made that generation of pioneers mutate and vanish quickly.

With the gradual interchange of these two generations, the concerts slowly ceased to be about resistance to become simply a breath of fresh air from the claustrophobia of both the regime and of the audience’s homes. It also became more and more obvious that this was a rich kids’ club: in order to forget the military for a couple of hours, hang out with the cool crowd, buy the right records, go to concerts, and travel to alternative destinations, you had to have money and it was not everyone who had access to those luxuries.

There were never any representatives of the working class in the room. The masses weren’t hip: they were still the maids who had prepared our dinner, the bus drivers who had taken us there, the guys in the street who asked to look after our cars or and the policemen outside hungry to extort our money. The rebels from the less privileged classes listened to funk and went to their own parties, as portrayed in the film “City of God”, a true story of this period of Rio’s history.

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Scene from “City of God”

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Shamanism and Rock and Roll

“..at least one professional philosopher has taken mescaline for the light it may throw on ancient unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness” these words are from Aldous Huxley in his famous book The Doors of Perception, a book that links the highest of western erudition, rock and roll and the traditions of ancestral cultures of Latin America.

A small but visible long haired fraction of the generation above ours brought back to life this way of thinking and experiencing the world. They, and the bands they listened to, influenced every Brazilian rocker, or indeed every conscientious middle class youngster, from the seventies and the eighties. This was a subculture that took seriously the precept that the everyday life was fake and that the only way to perceive the truth was by experimenting with serious stuff, and that this mission was necessary for bringing mankind back to its healthier origin.

No one laughed at them, the authorities actually feared their strong energy. In the context of a military dictatorship their quest had a revolutionary edge that made them likeable forbidden fruit. Sexuality was also in the mix, and engaging in one’s owns desires and in hallucinogens and was seen as a powerful weapon against the bourgeoisie and the military regime.

If these pursuits are prone to caricatures nowadays it is because the system did everything in its power to diminish what was going on. Ever since there has been a billionaire police repression, as well as public relations campaigns to demonize users and desperate efforts to invalidate anything that appears to represent ideas out of control. The moneymaking machine behind the so-called system also bombarded the youth with products in the form of gigantic and over produced rock bands as well as fashion gadgets. If they were the mother of the more “acceptable” cultural formulas of the eighties, the ideas put forward by guys like Huxley and Timothy Leary were the father.

The right-wing and the left-wing were united in their fight against the opening of the doors of perception. They would not survive in the unknown and could not digest visions that went beyond their books. They did not want eternity happening there and then and didn’t want to hear questions that had never been asked nor answers that had never been answered.

Seen from the Brazilian native’s perspective, these were white men lost in their alienated ways. They were the original mescal and Santo Daime takers, they saw the effects as a sacred that maintained them connected with nature and with the entire existence. Those massacred people knew that the mind, the brain and the consciousness belonged to something bigger and that we, the crazy white men, had lost the connection somewhere in the past.

In our world there were “civilized” musicians who had come close to this indigenous richness such as Egberto Gismonti and Hermeto Paschoal although they had never taken mescal nor had followed Huxley’s path.

Let’s remember that music is an important expression for any society and that in the sixties and the seventies it had reached shamanistic heights in terms of bringing people together and spreading ideas and behaviors. The importance of bands such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are undeniable, even in our current time just see the video below and think about it.

Such cultural importance was difficult for the big record companies to deal with and they ended up reminding the public that it was money who was boss and not a clearer vision that showed that there is life beyond the big bucks. Their response was the watered down pop bands of the eighties who, despite their quality, were not beyond their masters’ control and who did not question the establishment.

Coming back to Brazil, the bands that sprouted from the new generation took a lot of chemical drugs but represented no cosmic connection. They were part and parcel of the eighties’ Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Their “novelty” was the crude pursuit for fame and success. The industry rushed out to call their predecessors “Rock dinosaurs” and sold the idea that to be “in” you had to reject everything that they were about,

However the “dinosaurs” had reached heights of fame and success that no band of the eighties ever would. Ironically, at least in their origins, they had not been interested solely in money but in walking down the path that thinkers such as Huxley had trailed. The origins of this path shun out of the destroyed civilizations of South America long before anyone had thought about rock or cash on those lovely shores.

Vimana – the origins of Brazilian Rock

Johnny was an American/Brazilian friend, perhaps because of this and because he had two older brothers he had a more liberated life than myself; his parents allowed him to surf and to go to rock concerts. The friendship opened doors to a world that I wished to get into, namely the surfer’s one.

Without parental consent he started to take me to where it was happening. We began by surf films: high school student union cine-clubs showed them in sessions advertised on A4 sized posters suck on to walls of the surf shops that were starting to pop up in Ipanema. Teachers and head masters certainly did not know what went on inside those rooms. The first one I went to was in the auditorium of a Church in Copacabana. The girls looked too wild for us and all the guys in the room had long hair and looked, or at least tried to look, like seasoned surfers.

As the lights went off the warrior cries and the surfer’s “yeehaa!!!” began. The first shot was a fly through the Hawaiian Mountains that landed on a beach with perfect waves. From there it cut to “real” long-haired american surfers which all of us knew from imported magazines. I think that was the first time in my life I was in a room where someone smoked weed. At the end of the session, although my parents forbade surf at home and weed was considered as the synthesis of evil I was a few steps closer to the surfing world.

The next step was going to a proper rock concert. Johnny invited me to go to see a really good band with an English singer that everyone was into. The name of the Band was Vimana.

As it happens that band was to represent the genesis of Brazilian modern rock. It featured guys who were to become major names in the Brazilian Rock scene: Lulu Santos, their guitarist and vocalist on some songs would become one of Brazi’ls biggest commercial successes in the 1980’s, Ritchie, the English singer also would become a household name when he launched the classic Menina Veneno a few years later and their drummer Lobao, only 16 at the time, is still one of the most influential names in Brazilian Rock.

The theater was the Teresa Rachel (see article about it in this blog) and the public was the same as in the surfing films but bigger. It seemed that everyone with long hair in Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone was in that hall. There was the inevitable smell of Cannabis in the Theater but what really caught our attention was the futuristic equipment and the similarity of the music that they played to what we heard on our record players: Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and Led Zeppelin.

The level was deafening and left a hum in my ear for almost a week. As I left the theater I was proud to have been to my first rock concert and that was boasting material for weeks.

Vimana was good even when compared to foreign bands. Unfortunately my pocket-money was not enough to buy the single that they released, the one and only they ever did. As most bands do, they ended up imploding but a few years later they were called up by Patrick Moraez, the keyboard play from the mega British Progressive rock band Yes to work with him, they rehearsed for months but it ended up not going ahead.

The video above is not great but is probably their only live recording ever. Hopefully you will enjoy it.

The post-tropicalistas

There is so much to say about the scale of Tropicalia in recent Brazilian culture, its importance, its vitality, its originality as well as its villainy, that one could write several books about it and still not reach a conclusion. The fact is that it left a lasting legacy in Brazilian culture and that it had many children some wanted, some unwanted, some rebellious and some loving.

Its first fruits appeared in the 70’s when the country was still under the military dictatorship and the new wave of artists came from further north than Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who are from Bahia, to “the south” (Rio and Sao Paulo). They were from the Northeast of Brazil: from Ceara as Raimundo Fagner, from Pernambuco as Alceu Valenca, from Paraiba as Ze Ramalho, the Novos Baianos, a case apart, were from Bahia too. Their influences were diverse but they had several things in common; they were disliked by both the left and the right, they mixed the folkloric side of Brazil with what was being done in the US and the UK and portrayed themselves as having something to say while having strong record labels behind them. Most of them were presented to the country either through being sound tracks to novelas or through festivals that TV Globo organized.

In the seventies, Brazilians from all classes listened to more homegrown music than people from any other non-English speaking country in the western world. This phenomenon had not only to do with the quality and the diversity of Brazilian music but also with the importance that music acquired in previous governments in trying forge a national identity and, after the military coup of 1964, as a means to resist the dictatorship and the American imperialism.

For the greater public of the more southern states of Brazil –  RIo de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais – the post tropicalistas from the Northeast were like exotic wild fruit discovered in one’s own backyard; they used familiar rhythms but their themes, their talent and their depth touched that generation and opened their imagination. As the Vikings, they considered themselves as the Northern conquerors of an untalented South as well as the new voices that would replace a commercialized tropicalia.

It is undeniable that Caetano, Gil, Jorge Ben and Cie. had already opened the doors for them so they had less tradition to shatter and, hence, were less ambitious and freer musically and ideologically. Their long hair and the presence of electric guitars were statements; also, they did not have the need to say things to hit the headlines or be important presences in the Brazilian Cultural scene, they just concentrated in the magic of their music, and sharing a new light on on the regions they came from.

Their gigs had a strong 70’s hippy/cannabical tint, and they were masters in mixing of rustic percussion and state of the art musical gear. Because most of them appeared in local university circuits and gradually acquired fame, they had a greater knowledge of how to relate to the public, and in this they were more accessible than the big Tropicalia stars who practically began their careers as stars. Their acts were great fun and always ended in something close to street carnivals with people dancing all over the venues.

As the 80’s approached they started to lose their freshness, and became either mainstream cheesy acts or were seen as old hippies, the smarter ones, namely Alceu Valenca, retreated to their own region and are considered as living legends to this very day.

After them Brazilian Rock burst into the scene, the economic crisis too. The new bands made a point of having nothing to do with what had come before. There weretropicalist and post-tropicalist attempts to catch the eighties wave, but they were greeted with rejection. Although with less brilliance, Rock was clearly different; it was urban, angry and in tune with the turmoil that was happening in the “real world”. Of course, the movement was also backed by the big record companies.

As a final note; although the post-tropicalists were the closest to get to what happened with Reggae in Jamaica. Their music was very intuitive and free and had deeps roots in the traditional music of the countryside. Despite this, and although they were from the same generation, there was never the equivalent of a Brazilian Bob Marley. To understand why, it is important to see what happened in Jamaica: their artists came from their Favelas. In Brazil this would never happen; the artists played for the middle class and this public would never fill a theater to see someone from the working class perform, there was the carnival for that.

On the other hand, depending on where they came from, the lower classes listened to Samba, or Forro, and musical tastes never crossed barriers. Bossa-Novistas, Tropicalistas, post-Tropicalistas and Brazilian Rockers were all artists from and for the middle and upper classes. In our opinion it is here where they failed.

A Pink Floyd tale in Rio de Janeiro

Daniel owed me one after hooking me up with Marcos. It was undeniable that Marcos’ deep voice blended well with my songs, and in the beginning the work looked promising. Marketing wise, things also looked good. Daniel knew many people at Radio Fluminense and the timing was correct; Punk was dying off and we could be presented as one of the new bands that were coming up; more sophisticated and less aggressive, something like a Brazilian Tears for Fears or Duran Duran. Every time one turned the radio to “Maldita FM” there was a new band happening. I was hopeful as many friends of mine who played as well as I did, were already touring the country and making it big.  However, three months down the line Marcos decided that he was not interested in endless rehearsals of songs that were not his, and walked away. This pissed me off and Daniel wanted to redeem himself.

Both of us worked as teachers at an English course, and Daniel was the colleague who had most to do with me there; British parents, deep into rock and with very similar musical tastes. These were times when the bands you listened to defined what you were about, and because of this we had important bond. Physically he looked like James Taylor with a mustache, but in the best Pink Floydian tradition he was an authentic English gentleman, and before being a teacher he had been a world traveled air steward.

In his defense, he was also upset with the Marcos affair because he had been serious about producing us. He played no instrument and, perhaps because of this, he was determined to be in the background of a rock and roll success story, something close to a Malcolm MacLaren of the tropics.  Although the breakup was another disappointment in a long line of set backs both of us were still hungry and Daniel maintained his faith.

This was the scenario in which he hooked me up with Danilo.

What the three of us had in common our passion for Pink Floyd. Danilo was hardest-core of us; he was the oldest and had been one of their first fans in Rio to. Far from being psychedelic crazed out guy, he came across as an intellectual, soft spoken, never said rude words, didn’t like football or cocaine and smoked weed only occasionally. He had called his daughter Emily, named after one of Pink Floyd’s early songs, which at that point I had never heard, but that we were to play in our band. His misses was Daniel’s misses’s best friend. Both the guys lived with their girfriends, and the two girls were phd’s in financial matters. Were it not for his past in the musical industry and for his love for the guitar he would be downright boring, but he was not. He had started doing gigs when he was fourteen; playing Beatles songs in parties with one of the first electric guitars in town. Later on, he joined the Analphabeatles (Analfabeto means illiterate in Portuguese) one of Brazil’s pioneering cover bands who my entire generation had heard of.

Pink Floyd was a tricky choice in the Eighties. Everyone knew that the “dinosaurs of Rock” went against everything that the decade represented, especially in a country that was at least five years behind in terms of Punk. However, playing Classics such as Echoes, Wish you were Here and Time with a guy like Danilo was exciting, and I felt proud of it. We were aware that we would never make it big but we could create a niche following, and above all, it would be fun. There were, no doubt, many aficionados around; ironically most the musicians of the eighties bands loved Pink Floyd, although they would never admit to it and face the penalty of being a fashion outcast.

The rehearsals had to be at Danilo’s; I had just moved with Rosa to a flat close to a favela. The area was great, it once had been the address of impressive mansions by the edge of the Tijuca forest but now a shanty town had taken over and my work partner refused to take his gear there.  I tried to explain that there was no problem as everybody knew me, but this was of no avail. I regularly went up and down its winding alleys bordered by open sewage to use the public phone and to buy groceries, which was seen with good eyes by the community. This also brought some sympathy with the drug guys because it showed at the same time that I was not a snob and that I was not afraid. They never harassed me, but because of their presence my window had a bullet hole in it and at least once a week I could see the gun fights happening on the other side the small river below the flat.

The only advantage of my place was that we could play as loud as we wanted. Danilo lived in a much safer area, Humaita, in a modern building with internal rules that forbade loud music from dinnertime onwards. The solution was to rehearse early; we would meet after lunch in his room overlooking the Botafogo district and delight ourselves in playing Pink Floyd classics until evening came. There was another reason I loved going there; his flat was close to the well-priced and excellent restaurant belt in Visconde de Caravelas Street. Before our sessions, we always went for the famous succulent steaks at the Aurora restaurant or for the squid and broccoli rice at the Spanish restaurant right in front of it.

After a couple of months, we had become a competent Pink Floyd cover band with the unusual formation of just two guitars and two singers who did vocal arrangments. We chose a name for the band: Ibiza Bar, based on one of Pink Floyds older albums, and we were ready for our first gig. The first venue we tried was too fashionable and they would not even listen to our demo cassette, I suggested we go to a more mainstream and busy place next to the Jardim Botanico Park, the Mistura Fina. He was not too convinced that we were good enough for the venue, but they accepted us at once. The next step was to promote the night, Danilo’s day job was as a graphic designer so he came up with a great poster using one of Floyd’s first album covers. I called all the other teachers from the course, friends from the University and whoever else I could think of. Daniel also did his best to promote the gig and in the end the house was three-quarters full, quite a good public for the kind of music we were doing our presentation went very well considering the limitations. The manager invited us to play there another two times and after that, we stopped.

Soon after, for several reason, I left Brazil to live in the UK, Daniel was furious but Danilo was understanding and decided to carry on with more instrumentalists. In a weird twist of fate, the other guys who replaced me were class mates from school. Now with a drummer, a bass player and a keyboard they went fully electric. Daniel ended up behind the scenes projecting ink stains behind the band, a device used by the pioneers of psychedelia in the 1960’s . They also changed the name of the band to Eclipse and the band grew to become recognized internationally.

The book about Brazil that was missing: Lost Samba

Brazil – You know that the economy is doing well, that the next Olympics and the next World Cup will be there, you have heard about its Football, its Carnival and the crime scene. But is this enough to really know anything about the country? Wouldn’t you like to know how it is to live there? How it would have been growing up there?

Surely you would like visit the country in its most exciting times experiencing memorable football games in the Maracana, unforgettable carnivals, days on some of the worlds most famous beaches, revolutions, hyperinflation, the seventies and the eighties, drugs and crime, and travel with a guide who you understand, and who understands you, through Ipanema, Copacabana, Bahia, Favelas, Salvador, Arraial d’Ajuda, Trancoso, Sao Paulo, Canoa Quebrada, and so many other places.

Wouldn’t it be great if he also explained Brazil’s culture and its football, its mentality, its ecology and its politics as well as taught you about Samba, Brazilian Rock, Frevo, Lambada and the Trio Eletrico?

You will find all of this in Lost Samba: a book about true stories bathed by the bitter-sweet happiness of Rio de Janeiro’s golden youth in the 60’s, the 70’s and the 80’s. In its pages you will know about the roller coaster of events that took that generation from the “Economic Miracle” of the sixties to the worst economic crisis in recent history in the eighties, all seen through the eyes of the Brazilian son of a British expat and a Holocaust escapee.

Radio Fluminense FM, the Damned

The video above is a collection of radio vignettes which may seem random and puzzling for the uninitiated; for the initiated they will bring alive an exciting era of Brazilian rock, especially for Cariocas (people from Rio de Janeiro). These were the soundtracks of a generation and will ignite tons of memories, not only the sounds but the record covers compiled by the video maker.

Radio Fluminense was inherited by a rock fan who decided initially to do a sort of pirate radio. In the early eighties suddenly everyone was talking about a radio station that played all of our favorite bands: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull etc.. etc… etc…

We didn’t need record players or cassettes anymore to listen to the music we liked, and couldn’t get enough from it. Alas the party couldn’t last long and soon they were threatened by the record labels and were forced to change their style.

They resorted to playing a new generation of bands: the Police, the Clash, the Cure, Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, the Smiths, New Order and so many others that no one had ever heard about but who the music moguls had less problems with music rights, and who I suspect were cheaper to be played.

This was a divider of waters, from then on the bands of the seventies became old school and the new bands became the thing to listen to; the eighties had begun.

In terms of Brazilian music they did the same: they played a lot of new independent bands and launched an entire new generation of Brazilian bands: Titas, Gang 90, Paralamas do Sucesso, Blitz, Lobao, Legiao Urbana, Ultraje a Rigor, the list is extensive. The mainstream would take at least two years to catch up with them and would never get as close to that generation as “the Damned”.

They also were pioneers in having female presenters and in playing Reggae in Brazil. A friend of mine, Nelson Meirelles, was given a slot for the genre. Instead of reaching his targeted audience, the South Zone of Rio where the upper middle class lived he reached the suburbs where a great number of Afro Brazilians tuned into his programme and because of this for years he was the king of Carioca and would end up producing most of the big names of local reggae.

Radio Fluminense marked an era and was instrumental in changing the musical scene in Brazil.

The summer of the Tin

What you see above was posted by Marcos Telles in his great site Pier de Ipanema (www.pierdeipanema.com) focused on Ipanema’s surfer generation in the 70’s.

The video is about one of the most unbelievable summers in Brazilian history: in 1988 the Australian ship Solana Star set sail from Singapore loaded with top quality Marijuana. In order to dodge the attention they took an unusual route: they traveled around South America and then up the Brazilian coast heading to the US when the maritime police intercepted them somewhere between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Instead of allowing themselves to be arrested, in the lack of a better option, they threw their cargo in the ocean before the cops arrived. It happened that the weed was kept in tins which the currents took to the coast where surfers and fishermen recuperated them. The youth received the content of those tins like manna from heaven and the resinous and heavy scented weed provided  an unforgettable summer that some people find hard to remember 🙂

Following the Brazilian tradition of giving names to summers, the one of 1988 was the Verao da Lata (the Summer of the Tin).