When I arrived in Madrid with my family in 1972When I was eleven, my father found a small apartment on Palencia Street, near the Alvarado metro station, near Cuatro Caminos. Leaving the paradise of Vigo for the Forum was very hard for the four brothers. Accustomed as we were to going to Panxón and its splendid beaches (where I returned half a century later) every Friday after school until Monday, it had become a delightful routine. Soccer on the beach and adventures in Monteferro, today attacked by dozens of chalets who conquered the coves of that iron mountain that was our own theme park. He enrolled us in Sorolla High School, a school in Tetouan that in no way resembled the Apostle Santiago de Vigo, with its forest where I learned to smoke when I was nine. In Madrid, it was a fifteen-minute walk from home to school along Dulcinea and Infanta Mercedes streets, with a stop at the potato factory that sold the cuttings for a peseta.
It was there that a teacher told me that the guitar wasn't played backwards (I'm left-handed), and I, who was already dabbling in playing and singing popular songs, had to relearn playing the guitar "right-side up," which for me, as a left-hander, is the other way around, hence my poor play. But anyway, the best thing about those years was that in the early seventies, Madrid was boiling with the incipient rock & roll that had been brewing since the sixties. My neighborhood and my school were TeixiLeader Lentil jam, a group that quickly became a hit with its Take the three ten trainAnd there I met the members of what would be my first group, TaintraYears later we discovered that it was actually written “Tantra,” but that’s another story.
Near the school was the Parish of San Germán, on General Yagüe Street (now San Germán), and there was a basement where a group that I immediately joined used to rehearse, playing modern songs at Sunday masses. In that group, we even put together a youth version of the musical Hair, which wasn't going too badly for us. And there was a friend, Juan José, of whom I have not heard anything since, taught me to play rumbas. As far as I can remember, it was my first contact with a style close to flamenco.
«My countryman Franco had not yet died or his death was very recent when I began to look into what for me, for decades now, has been the best music of Spain, the flamenco, which I approached through Andalusian rock and flamenco songs.
I was totally into rock, increasingly inclined towards the symphonic branch due to the influence of Genesis, Jethro Tull and Yes, which was what was most listened to at home thanks to the exquisite taste of my beloved brother José, who died two years ago, a true phenomenon of nature that God deprived us of too soon. In my house we heard all this, and the works of Beethoven y Mozart of whom my late father was a devoted admirer.
That swaggering touch brought me closer to a totally new world for me, that of Peret, Las Grecas, Bambino, and I immediately got hooked on it Triana y Lole and ManuelThat was my school of flamencoAnd I owe it all to that friend from my local parish who had the patience to explain to me the proper right-hand strumming (my left hand) on the Spanish guitar. Little by little I began to value nylon over Swedish steel, Spanish over Anglo-Saxon. My little brain, completely colonized by the Beatles and the aforementioned English groups, began to consider the richness of a culture, the Andalusian one, which, although it was denied in my native Vigo, was as appreciated in Madrid as in Seville itself. My countryman had not yet died franc or his death was very recent when I began to look into what for me, for decades now, has been the best music of Spain, the flamenco, which I approached, as I say, through Andalusian rock and flamenco songs.
My blessed mother one day finally agreed to take me to the Corte Inglés on Generalísimo, which was its name, it must have been 1974, after I insisted on getting a pair of jeans. And after much begging, we finally went to buy the damned little pants. And look, with the purchase of the jeans, they gave me two tickets to see a certain Paco de Lucía at the Felipe II Sports Palace. That concert was an absolute revelation. I listened raptly to the recital of the giant from Algeciras who, from the row furthest from the stage, was a tiny dot, and the lightning-fast riffs of that improvisation recorded a year earlier in Source and Flow with the title Between two watersWho would have told me then that fifty years later the family of that genius would ask me to write the expert report for a lawsuit in which the family of Jose Torregrosa having inadvertently claimed fifty percent of the royalties for that and dozens of other works by Paco, due to the fact that he had written the score for registration with the Society of Authors. Today, now that the lawsuit has been won, I recall those memories of San Germán, the budding rumba scene, and that concert I was able to attend thanks to the "Tajo Británico," as we used to call the aforementioned department store in the neighborhood.
That experience led me to take the child one Sunday, without saying anything to my older brother. Aqualung and a couple more records that I don't remember, I threw on the red poncho I had gotten to dress up as a hippie back then, and that's it, I tried to sell them at the Rastro. A lady who was reselling them bought them for three thousand pesetas, which was the money I needed to buy El Patio from Triana. Shortly after, I got under the coat New day by Lole and Manuel, LPs I soon wore out from listening to them so much. I became addicted to that music, even though it wasn't appreciated at home, so I had to wait my turn in front of my father's record player to listen to them. No one in my family understood why I was so deeply into that gypsy music. I couldn't have imagined what would happen next. Daily contact with the Gypsy children in the dungeon during my years of military service and the need to earn a living with the "beaten-up flamenkito" in Vienna did the rest. flamenco would be a part of my life forever, and now, at sixty-four, all that seems like it was yesterday. The things.
