Caetano Veloso: “Tropicalism is, first of all, due to Gil”

Maria Muniz, an actress at the Theater School of the University of Bahia, a very original, intelligent woman, liked us, who had appeared on the Salvador scene and were enriching the movement born in Bahia during the 1950s with the motivation of the UFBA dean, Edgard Santos.

Maria would gather our crew for soup, talking, and singing at her house’s balcony at the Suíço Boulevard—a street where I myself had lived before our family moved to the end of the Nazaré line.

We sang things we liked, Gal sang while playing guitar, even Bethânia eventually did that, Gil played a lot, and we showed new songs we were working on.

We also talked about articles from the newspaper Diário de Notícias, whose cultural page was already edited by Glauber.

It was very nice. And the soup was always good.

I was motivated to contribute to the growth of production and prestige of the group formed fundamentally by Gal, Bethânia, Gil, and me (not forgetting names like Tom Zé, Perna Fróes, Alcivando Luz, Djalma Correia…).

However, I always did that with the intimate decision of trying to make movies and leave the music to the real musicians.

When, with that already well on its way, with Bethânia a national idol, we all doing a concert directed by Augusto Boal in São Paulo, I told Gil I wouldn’t be committed to music any more, and he answered: “If you stop making music, I will too.”

This was repeated in a similar way a few years later in Tropicalism. So, yes, I only make music because of Gil: he taught me what I was capable of learning and then he made sure I didn’t abandon the challenge.

You mention the song “Trovoada”: I don’t remember anything with this title. It’s mysterious to me that I’ve forgotten so much about this show. I remember the concerts we did together and I know we planned to start doing solo concerts.

The first one was Bethânia's, in 1964, before she came to Rio to perform at Opinião Theater. I remember Calazans Neto’s set, made for the performance of They Don't Use Black-Tie, which we kept for Bethânia’s show. She sang “Opinião” and “Acender as velas” in front of a piece of favela.

I remember mine, in which Dedé participated and which Duda Machado scripted for me. And I know Gal was the only one of the four not to do a solo at the Vila. But I only remember that Gil’s solo happened and that I took part in the production. But no details.

We always talked. Gil had been fascinated by the recording of “Strawberry fields Forever” by The Beatles. I, living at the Solar da Fossa hotel, used to hear a lot of things about mass culture, quoting Rogério Duarte, Edgar Morin, and Walter Benjamin.

I listened a lot to José Agrippino de Paula, the writer who also made plays and movies. One day, Bethânia told me I needed to see the Jovem Guarda TV show, by Roberto and Erasmo Carlos: “MPB is lacking vitality; in Jovem Guarda there is much more poetic vitality.”

“… We have to pay attention to Roberto Carlos and do something like the Beatles do, only with our own history.” 


 I was excited! From that came all that, more than a year later, came to be called Tropicalism.

But I didn’t have a beat. I played only the chords on the guitar at each tempo. Gil created that riff which goes under the spoken song and which, in the end, characterizes the song. I included his name as a co-author and so we recorded the song.

I like all the songs we did together and, of course, I’d like to do more. I love “Chega de mágoa,” which was composed by a group I was also part of but which owes 80 percent of its musical composition to Gil. He takes the guitar and it comes out easy.

Gil has a mysterious personality. I was already recording my tropicalist album with arrangements by Júlio Medaglia and Damiano Cozzella, Rogério Duprat had already returned to São Paulo and contacted Gil, introducing him to the Mutantes.

I had already sung “Alegria, alegria” with the Beat Boys, which led the audience to boo me at the beginning of the song (which later won over most people and became a radio hit), and Gil, with “Domingo no parque,” had already rehearsed with the Mutantes under Duprat's divine baton.

Gil had started a relationship with Sandra, my then-wife Dedé’s sister. She had gone to spend a few days in São Paulo with us. They started a romance and Gil slept with her at our apartment, which was big. Dedé warned Gil without the cops noticing.

Gil went home and waited. When we stopped by the door of his building, I felt guilty, as if I was arresting him. Gil showed a firm, calm courage—which lasted through all our time in prison—of which I wasn't capable at that time.

Since that meeting on Chile Street, we’ve always been much more than friends. There was the certainty of an almost missionary meeting of partners. I still feel this today. We both always managed to keep that something there, here, everywhere.

We haven’t ever even behaved as friends generally do, with shared confidences and bonds of formal loyalty. It’s always been something beyond that. We are more like brothers and lovers than friends. There is a respect that goes over our own eventual low points.

As I once said: I don’t believe in God, but I believe in Gil and Gil believes in Him. But in fact there is a complementarity that often puts us in opposite positions. When he discovers something (usually before me), I don’t see it.

When I do see it, he seems to have forgotten it or lost interest in it. And it’s not just with time. Places reveal very different things to him and to me. But what we have been doing, without having planned, is learning to be independent of all this.

And to each be the old man he can and deserves to be. Without symmetries. But we can’t erase what brought us here.

I stayed in Bahia for three years. I only got out to do concerts and came back quickly. My new start was with Araçá Azul, an album made in a few days in a studio in São Paulo, without a producer and with my decision to not even write songs before the recording period. It was an experimental record.

Around the 1970s, I radicalized in rebellion with the creation of the band Outra Banda da Terra, with whom I made about five records without a producer entering the studio, all in an anarchic atmosphere with a screaming Brazilian sound technique. Gil went, like many of our artists, to the “LA” (Los Angeles) side.

But that was also part of the complementarity. I remember not liking “Realce.” I felt repulsed by words like that of the title [in English, “Highlight”] and the mood of disco nights. My “Odara” had been an adherence to the taste for nightly dancing, but in contrast to its compulsive aspects.

And my first album with A Outra Banda da Terra shocked critics and drove buyers away. But we insisted on it. Gil and Gal were identifying with the “well-recorded” pop. I felt closer to Bethânia in that sense. But none of these nuances caused any distance or discomfort between us.

It's always an emotional delight to be able to write a song for a friend. In the one you quoted, it was almost a miracle.

Reading a book by Souzândrade, the 18th-century poet from Maranhão who Augusto and Haroldo de Campos critically resurrected, I found this passage that seemed to describe Gil: “Gil begets a Gil nightingale.”

I wrote a small piece in which I myself play the piano (it was the Araçá Azul!), repeating that small verse, and named it with the nickname I had given to Gil many years ago: Gilberto Misterioso.

I was very happy that on a record with my music recorded by Japanese artists, this track was chosen by one of them: heard there (I think with a Japanese sound clarity that improves the quality of the piece), the song seemed to me to be worthy of the honoree.

I’ve had almost no direct dialogue with Gil lately. One night he called me—on the cell phone of a son or a co-worker, because I don’t have a cell phone—, I was in the car and he said that he had reread Tropical Truth and felt a strong desire to see me.

The summer before this last one, we were together at Regina Casé’s house in Salvador and had a little chat. After that, it’s been some time since I’ve seen Gil or talked to him.

Curiously, you asked me for this interview when I was considering writing him an e-mail with updates about many things. Including fundamental things from our formation in Bahia. I still have that in mind.

It was really good. I suffered a little during the first concerts because of my technical inability in the face of Gil’s musical exuberance.

But I have always been deeply happy to hear “Não tenho medo da morte” on so many different nights and to sing along with him some songs in which our voices sounded good together.