"Barra 69": the concert-legacy of Tropicália

There is an affective divergence between Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil as for which one of them was the “organizer” of Tropicália; who really created the movement and made it the main stronghold of vanguard in the country, capable of changing behaviors, shades and take Brazilian music into other spheres, such as political and social.

They seem to never reach an agreement. “Tropicalism is credited, in the very first place, to Gilberto Gil,” says Caetano, in an interview to journalist and researcher Chris Fuscaldo for this work.

“All I can accept is a co-responsibility. Whether it was God or the two of us. The argument he uses to state I was the creator gives me room to use several others and prove he was the creator,” replies Gil in an interview.

Yet, whether a partnership between friends is to be the crib of Tropicalism, the one who certainly made its end official was Gil, for he was the one ahead of the process ending up in the concert Barra 69, the last one given by the duo in Brazil before they left for exile in Europe.

Out of money to fund the travel and support himself in exile, he came up with the idea of a concert that, at the same time, would be a fundraiser and a good bye. It was Barra 69, held in July 20 and 21, 1969, in three sessions:

There was a matinee on the 20th plus two night sessions on the 20th and on the 21st, at the Castro Alves Theater in Salvador, Bahia, where artist were in house arrest. Out of coincidence, the first session of Barra 69 happened to be the same day a man set foot on the moon.

This caused a dilemma with their friend, Tom Zé, who told newspaper Folha de S.Paulo: “When you were about to start the concert in Bahia before leaving to Europe […] I was outside the theater, watching on a TV the landing of mankind in the moon. […] I would think:

“… ‘Lord, I cannot leave Caetano and Gil.’ You were about to start and (astronaut Neil) Armstrong was climbing down the ladder. Then I left him around the third step and went inside.’”

It all begins when Gil and Caetano are freed, on February 1969—an Ash Wednesday, after being subjected to “two months of an arbitrary arrest in military barracks in Rio de Janeiro,” as Carlos Calado says in his book Tropicália: A História de Uma Revolução Musical [Tropicália: The History of A Musical Revolution].

The two friends are sent back to Salvador, where they remain in “confinement policy”—a sort of informal house arrest, with no clearance for public appearances and/or to perform artistic activities of any sort.

They were also obliged to daily report to the headquarters of the Federal Police, in Salvador, for monitoring purposes. Under these measures, they were deprived of the possibility of being both the owners of their faiths and providers for their own survival.

All of it happened at the height of their careers and peak of their work and creative capabilities. Caetano Veloso, who had returned from prison already weakened, would just comply with what had been imposed to him, without further questioning and reaction.

It was as if he were empty on the inside, in an apathy compatible with depression symptoms. Gil would keep the behavior he had been showing since prison:

Despite going through that Kafka-like situation of being arrested for no reason and of being afraid of imminent death or torture, Gil tried, in a very stoic way, to find a balance.

Perhaps because he was more concerned with Caetano than he was with himself—feeling that Caetano needed his shoulder and his strength to bounce back.

As explained by Roberto Santana, a cultural producer who worked, along with Paulo Lima, on the show Barra 69, in an interview given in 2017 for the essay Um Axexê para a Tropicália—Con-fabulações, Memórias e Criação no Documentário [A Candomblé funeral ceremony for the Tropicália—Confabulations, Memories and Creation in Documentary], by this author:

“There was the emotional thing from Gil and Caetano themselves, you know… Gil is a colder person, really, you know… It is not like he did not suffer, of course he did. But he had Caetano’s back at that time. Gil was very supportive in holding Caetano. Gil held Caetano.”

Under this perspective of holding balance in the middle of madness, there is the relentless search of Gil for the dialogue, even with his tormentors: the militaries who had incarcerated him.

The military who were watching him would make it easier for special food to get to him, as he was following the macrobiotics diet at the time. They would treat him respectfully and with deference, and even had an acoustic guitar delivered to him, in jail, where he composed songs such as “Cérebro eletrônico.”

It was this same attitude towards dialogue that made Gil look for a way out of the situation in which they were in Salvador: both of them languishing unable to provide for themselves; and Caetano languishing over the suffering for the violence and injustice he had been through.

Thus, in his visits to the Federal Police headquarters to report, Gil ended up making friends with Colonel Luiz Arthur, in charge of the two artists in the Bahia jurisdiction. The relationship they had developed sealed the fate for the two friends.

Gil talks about it in a conversation with Moreno Veloso, recorded by Rio de Janeiro’s newspaper O Dia: “I was arrested on December 27th; we were freed by January end. Early February, actually. Then we stayed February, March, April in Salvador…

“… At the turn of June, Colonel Luiz Arthur went on saying… because we chatted a lot, and he would ask: ‘What is up? What do they want with the both of you?’ I would say: ‘What do I know? If you don’t know, what about us!’ Then he said:

“… ‘I will go to Rio. I will go to Rio to find out, get to talk to them.’ Then, he spoke to the people of the II Army and got back with this instruction: ‘Get ready to leave the country,’ because that’s what they had decided here. So, on this thing of getting ready to leave the country, he was the one to say:

“… […] Get ready, let’s have a concert… It is important that you have a concert, just to let people know, your fans, people and such.’”

That was the farewell sonata of a “career phase for Gil and Caetano,” as said by Rio de Janeiro’s tropicalist manager and producer Guilherme Araújo. It was the farewell to Tropicália as a behavioral revolution of an era.

Because of it, Barra 69 was, for them also, a cathartic moment from all the absurdity they had suffered. Despite being designed with the intent of raising funds for the exile of the tropical duo, the concert failed to do so.

“… I remember the première day, nine in the morning, there was Baby Consuelo [now called Baby do Brasil], a young girl. […] On that day, she met Pepeu, for example, who ended up being the father to her children. So that what this concert was about:

“…there was the political commotion side of it, but it was about music, it was Pepeu starting his guitar practice, playing in a way that became an important brand of Brazilian music…

“… It was a farewell that was inaugurating a new era, a new way of gathering ‘peoples’ in the poetry, ‘peoples’ in the music, ‘peoples’ in the theatre. Roberto Santana later on became an important director in the Brazilian scene, collaborating on and producing several other albums.”

Above all, it was inaugural for Gil and Caetano, too, in the sense that it opened up new paths for their careers. The concert’s repertoire alone would point to that, with Tropicália songs along with others written in prison, which translated the new strands they would go.

Thus, the concert was a celebration of freedom, of the force of art and music as a tool of contestation, denunciation, and especially, of vanguard. From this concert, which had in its audience illustrious people such as writers Jorge Amado and Augusto de Campos, a record came out:

It is not unusual for the critics to refer to the resulting album as a minor work in the discography of the artists; failing to mention the weight it had as a turning point in the careers of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

It was a mark of the loss of innocence of the duo and of the search for other post-Tropicália sounds. It had established a concrete exchanged between the tropicalist generation and the new musical generation emerging from this pot, those who stayed in Brazil, for example, to start Os Novos Baianos.

Above all, Barra 69 engraves itself in the history of Brazilian music as a muffled, deaf cry of freedom in a Brazil that was suffering through the obscurity of a dictatorial regime.