Gil: Prison and Exile

Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were already proving to be a nuisance for the military. Their behavior during their appearances was transgressive for the time and was causing a stir. Their outspokenness on the TV show Divino Maravilhoso led the directors themselves to take it off air after only three months. 

Their involvement in protests and demonstrations also put them in the spotlight, and their performance at TV Globo's 3rd International Song Festival (Festival Internacional da Canção) in 1968 would prove to be the final straw for the country's leaders.

Just a little more defiance from Gil and Caetano was enough for the military to issue a warrant for them both to be arrested. At the 3rd International Song Festival, Gil performed the song "Questão de Ordem" (Question of Order) with the Argentinian group Beat Boys. 

The song sent a message to the military, who had taken power four years earlier: "If I stay at home / I am preparing / Slogans / For my comrades / Who are waiting in the streets / All around the world / In the name of love."

And the very title of Caetano Veloso's song "É Proibido Proibir" (It's Forbidden to Forbid) was a challenge to the "order" imposed by censorship. On December 27, 1968, they were arrested.

At night, it was pitch black. By day, a shaft of light allowed them to read books. At the headquarters in Realengo, Gil composed songs in his cell on a guitar borrowed from a soldier. When he got out, he wrote "Aquele Abraço", based on a TV presenter's catchphrase he heard his jailers repeat every day.

The song, with its samba beat, was also his goodbye to Brazil: Gil and Caetano were forced to leave the country to avoid losing their freedom once again, and Gil recorded the song before going into exile.

With no money and no clear plan for what they should do, Gil and Caetano decided to stage a concert in Salvador—called Barra 69—to raise funds to travel to the UK. On July 20, 1969, the evening that Man first walked on the Moon, Gil and Caetano were not following Neil Armstrong's adventure because they were on stage at the Castro Alves Theater (Teatro Castro Alves). They performed again the next day. 

When they returned from exile, the Barra 69 concerts would be released as an album, despite being precariously recorded on a cassette tape by Gil's percussionist Djalma Corrêa.

On their return to Brazil from the UK, everything seemed much calmer. But there were rules that Gilberto Gil—and everyone else—still had to follow. A hardened dictatorship was still in place and censorship was still meddling in artists' work. 

But it was cannabis that led to Gil being arrested for the second time, in 1976. It happened while he was on tour with Doces Bárbaros in Florianópolis, capital of the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, which is renowned for being more conservative.

The officer asked Gil if the cannabis belonged to him. Gil replied that it did and that he had brought it with him from São Paulo. The officer then placed him under arrest, to which Gil's response was "OK." "I stuck to the truth and that helped a lot," the musician explained in an interview after he was acquitted. The drummer Chiquinho Azevedo was also taken into custody.

During the trial, the representative from the Public Prosecutor's Office (Ministério Público) told Gilberto Gil and those present: "It was not the citizen who was arrested when caught in the act of possessing that evil weed, which causes so much misery in thousands of homes across Brazil.

"...It was not the artist Gilberto Gil, but the criminal Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira who, instead of sharing his brilliant music, found himself, perhaps unwittingly, propagating this drug that we are trying so hard to fight."

The case was heard on July 15, 1976. Reporters, photographers, and camera operators piled into the courtroom at the First Criminal Court (1ª Vara Criminal) in Florianópolis to follow the trial, which lasted almost two hours. Once recorded, Gilberto Gil's words would become famous and go on to be used in several documentaries about music and that era in Brazil's history.

He declared, in his defense, that he liked cannabis and that using it did him no harm, nor did it cause him to do harm. Gil declared that using cannabis helped him considerably in his mystical introspection.