“Domingo no parque”: passion, jealousy, and death in three acts

Last week, by week-end
João decided not to fight
On Sunday afternoon he left in a hurry
And did not go to Ribeira to play capoeira
Did not go to Ribeira, he went dating instead
José, as always, on the weekends
Stored his market stand and vanished

On Sunday he went for a stroll at the carnival
Next to Boca do Rio
It was in the carnival that he saw Juliana
Then he saw

Words only cannot comprehend the song “Domingo no parque,” one of the most representative in Gilberto Gil’s career.

It takes the ability of thinking with image and sound. Joining the lyrics of this song—a dramatic narrative on a crime of passion taking placing in Salvador, Bahia—with its sound ambience, similar to the incidental track of a movie.

It feels like we were in front of a sung short-movie, a script that, instead of being filmed, found in the vinyl grooves the support to be brought into this world, around 1967.

“The big-wheel goes round, the ice cream, until then, ice cream only, is a strawberry ice cream, so that it can be red, and the rose, until then, a rose only, is red too, and the red starts to imply blood—like in an American movie—and, in the cut, the knife and the cut itself…

“... The sudden impetus, the sudden manifestation of a potency in José: he reveals himself as strong, daring, enough. The courage he lacked to approach Juliana he did not lack to commit a murder,” says Gilberto Gil.

[…] It was at the carnival that he saw Juliana
Then he saw
Then he saw Juliana in the big-wheel with João
A rose and an ice cream in her hand
Juliana, his dream, an illusion
Juliana and his friend João
The rose’s thorn hurt Zé
And the ice cream froze his heart
The ice cream and the rose (oh, José)

The rose and the ice cream (oh, José)
It danced in his chest (oh, José)
Of the jester José (oh, José)
The ice cream and the rose (oh, José)
The rose and the ice cream (oh, José)
Wow, spinning in the mind
Of the jester José (oh, José)
Juliana spinning (wow, spinning)
Wow, in the big-wheel (wow, spinning)

The ice cream is strawsberry (it is strawberry)
wow spinning and the rose (it is red)
wow, spinning, spinning (it is red)
wow, spinning, spinning
There is a knife! (There is a knife!)
There is blood on the hand (hey, José)
Juliana on the ground (hey, José)
Another body on the ground (hey, José)
His friend João (hey, José)

It was as if Gil had adopted a writing-assembly to be able to appropriate reality through the synedoque typical of cinema and deal with it based on a dialogue between the “haunted” (empathy between the artist and the audience).

He keeps an artistic and creative distancing, by treating the real as a “mere fragment of the world matter” (as conceptualized by Russian linguist Roman Jakobson), under which he builds a narrative discourse.

“It is forgiveness on one side and affections on another, with their positive and negative aspects, haunting us. The anger, the rage, the jealousy, the intolerance, and so on. “Domingo no parque” is the picture of a crime of passion…

As cinema is the closest art to thought, paraphrasing American filmmaker John Ford, by taking this language to the song Gilberto Gil made us enter the head of the character through a fragmented and rounded ladder.

This fragmented and rounded ladder leads José to ecstasy of committing homicide and femicide—which were classified, under the old Civil Law, as “crime of passion.”

What is very helpful is the reference Gil makes to the cycle of a capoeira play, base inspiration of the song, in very marked elements: the songs chanted at the play, as if they were mantras, and which set the players in a sort of trance.

In this sung-movie, one that Gil also intended to be a song in the style of Caymmi’s, impregnated with Bahia and Bahia feelings, it is the emotion that undermines its structure, sewing the pieces of story and sensibilizing an imaginary silver nitrate.

Nitrates are silver compounds that, sensibilized by the light drawn by the camera, make up the image to be revealed, in the process of the beginnings of Cinema, when the plastic films were still used, listeners would have in their heads, in order to forge their own images out of what they have heard.

Beyond the hybridization of language, something that makes “Domingo no parque” a timeless masterpiece are the experimentations that have turned it in a sort of ground zero of Tropicália. Coming from the same batch of songs that were born at Danúbio Hotel.

Gilberto Gil stayed at the hotel for one year, during his first time in São Paulo, and the song was born to mimic the tradition of regionality and the modernity of global pop, engendering a sonority that Gil knew was fresh.

New, but also revolutionary and even subversive for the standards back then, and for the political moment Brazil was going through, “a claustrophobic dictatorship,” as defined, later on, by singer and songwriter Rita Lee.

The song was written to be presented at the III Festival of Brazilian Popular Music, broadcast by Record TV, and such was the innovation that, because of it, Gil got a loud “no” from Quarteto Novo, a band formed by Hermeto Paschoal, Theo de Barros, Airto Moreira and Heraldo do Monte.

The negative came when the singer proposed that they accompany him at the festival. They felt scared by the mix of “George Harris and Keith Richards electric guitars with the Jorge Ben’s acoustic guitar, Luiz Gonzaga’s accordion and the Brazilian regional rhythms with the electronic sounds.”

This is described in the book Gilberto Bem Perto.

Lost with that negative, but encouraged by conductor Rogério Duprat saying that he and Caetano were down to a good path, Gil was introduced by Duprat to Rita Lee, Arnaldo Baptista and Sérgio Dias, Os Mutantes.

“Let’s go, let’s innovate, let’s venture, let’s take some chances, let’s do things!,” the conductor would say. Os Mutantes not only accepted the adventure but also put the performance of the song in the finals of the festival into history.

It was a seeding moment for Tropicália and Gil, opening the Pandora box; from it, not only a deeply Brazilian sonority came out, though unknown in the central part of the country, but also one that was connected to what there was of most modern in regards to music in the world.

About that night, Rita Lee wrote, in 2012, in a text for the exhibit Gil 70: “Gilberto Gil, generous friend, came to me and said ‘get ready, Ritinha, I will introduce you to music.’ […] Gil remained calm, pero sin perder his boldness [a wordplay with the famous quote by Che Guevara “pero sin perder la ternura {although without losing kindness}].

“… Off we went to the front armed more and more with the paraphernalia that hurt the ears of the so called purists of MPB, while it was also tearing apart the old hat and made joy sprout out of people.”

If only the apparent calm would sprout deep in the artist. Gil had admitted, in several occasions, having had a panic attack that almost kept him from the anthological perform “Domingo no parque,” precisely because he realized the magnificence of the song he had in hands.

He felt it would be a turning point in the art and political behavior in Brazil from that moment on. As Caetano Veloso puts it, in his autobiography Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music And Revolution In Brazil, Gil felt they were “messing with dangerous stuff.”

In an interview given to directors Renato Terra and Ricardo Calil, for the documentary Uma Noite em 67 [A Night in 67], Gil speaks of such an overwhelming panic that he erased from his memory the first performance of the song in the finals of the festival:

“I do not remember it, because it felt like I had a 107 F fever, almost hallucinating, bordering unconsciousness out of panic, so much panic. That was one of the scariest moments in my life. Nowadays I see the images, I singing like that and tell myself…

Gil recalls, in Todas as Letras, the urges that led him to write “Domingo no parque” in a single night, at the hotel room he shared with his second wife, Nana, daughter of Dorival Caymmi.

The song came to him after he arrived from a visit to the house of painter Clovis Graciano, friends with Caymmi, and feeling “impregnated” with the conversation they had in Bahia and also about his illustrious father-in-law, who forged the concept of “being a Bahia-born.”

“I will do a Caymmi-like song, do a Caymmi anew, a Caymmi today!,” said Gil about the writing process in Todas as Letras.