The Poet Capinan and Soy Loco por Ti America

It was dawn on October 9th, 1967. That was when the Argentinian revolutionary leader Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was captured and executed by the troops of the Bolivian Army working in cooperation with CIA agents, in Higuera, a small guarani-majority village.

Miles from there, in Rio de Janeiro, a sleepless Law student, Juan Carlos Capinan, was writing the lyrics for “Soy loco por ti America,” under the impact of Che’s death. The verses could not name the revolutionary leader:

El nombre del hombre muerto / The name of the dead man
Ya no se puede decirlo, quién sabe? / Cannot be said, who knows?
Antes que o dia arrebente / Before the day breaks

After all, those were the dark years in Brazil. And the darkest night appeared to be all over Latin American. It was the beginning of the creation of those times, beset by violent dictatorships and military coups.

“I wrote ‘Sou Loco por ti America’ crying,” says Capinan, born in 1941 in Entre Rios, a small town in Bahia, whose primary inhabits were indigenous, the Tapuias.

In an exclusive interview, the songwriter recalled how he purged his sadness while seeing the end of his “true myth” and the dream of having Latin America people free of geopolitical interference by the United States and authoritarians regimes:

“I was a member of the Communist Party, deeply admired Che, for he had become a minister in Cuba and yet abandoned the ministry to get back to guerilla warfare in Africa. He created the romantic representation of a revolutionary. That captivated me.”

An admiration that was also aimed towards the young men of his generation. At least for a couple of years. The lyrics of “Soy loco por ti America” were perpetuated in the beautiful melody by Gilberto Gil and in the voice of Caetano Veloso. At that time, Capinan lived in Rio de Janeiro, while Gil and Caetano lived in São Paulo.

The lyrics were handed to Gilberto Gil during an intermission of MBP Festival, broadcast by TV Record channel, in São Paulo, in which the singer performed, beside Os Mutantes, his song “Domingo no parque”, considered to be Tropicália’s starting point.

In this festival, which took place from September 30th to October 21st, 1967, the song “Ponteio,” by Edu Lobo and Capinan, was the winner. Gil got the second prize.

“I went off to São Paulo to watch the finals. I handed Gil the poem in the dressing room. In this story, Caetano has a wonderful presence in its first recording, and stating that ‘Soy loco por ti America’ is a dancing rumba. He brought a lot of life to the song,” says Capinan.

Capinan would only hear the result of the partnership in Caetano’s voice a while afterwards: “I had to get back to Rio. The lyrics were Bible-like. And Gil had not modified anything, or barely almost anything in the lyrics. I cannot remember any cuts. He wrote the melody keeping the lyrics ipsis literis, in full…

“… Afterwards, I think I saw Caetano singing it in the Chacrinha TV show. I cannot remember whether this was the exact occasion. I thought it was genius. It is one of the songs out of my work that I admire the most”.

The song was written in “portunhol” [a mix of Portuguese and Spanish], a reference to the Americanist spirit and to the revolutionary urge that the counterculture young people had in the 1960 and 1970s, in Bahia.

“I wanted to value the sound of the words. It is written with words in both Portuguese and Spanish which have a cool, musical sound in them.”

The spirit was of appreciation of Americanism. And, in the Salvador of those days there was an effervescence of rhythms, Latin cultural references, and the ubiquitous Cuban revolution. “Tropicalism has a lot of Latinness, which was so entrenched within our generation…

“… By the time we got into the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA, in Portuguese acronym), there was an encounter of the underdeveloped world, not only Latin-American countries,” says Capinan.

During the term of president Jânio Quadros, lawyer San Tiago Dantas would argue for a more autonomous role for underdeveloped countries and an independent foreign policy for Brazil.

After Jânio Quadros’s resignation in 1961, and the establishment of parliamentarism, he moved on to act as ministry of Foreign Affairs in the administration of João Goulart. From 1963 on, with the return to presidential system, he was appointed for the Ministry of Finance.

San Tiago Dantas promoted the resuming of relations with the USSR and, in the meeting of American countries chancellors, held in Punta del Este, he disagreed with the United States stand, who intended to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States.

This atmosphere and the legacy of the Rio de Janeiro’s lawyer, journalist and minister San Tiago Dantas (1911–1964) aroused the dreams of a free America. “He was a character with a strong and Americanist discourse.”, says Capinan.

“Cuba was a reference with its revolution, which deeply marked the history of Americas and resisted even after the fall of the URSS, thanks do Fidel’s leadership. It is the black culture, basically Afro, which resembles Salvador,” compares the songwriter.

With verses referring to Cuba’s revolutionary warfare and military dictatorships that would torture and assassinate opponents, “Soy Loco por ti America” joined many other songs that made MPB, in the 1960 and 1970s not only a resistance foxhole against dictatorial regimes[CF1]

but also a bridge that reinforced identity bonds and ambitions of a culturally, economically, and politically autonomous continent. Something that Tropicalism would identify with, by poetizing the Carnaval, the underdevelopment, the political interventionism, the economic dependency…

and the affirmation of our cultural identity. “Soy loco por ti America” sang the struggle against the regimes of exception, the colonial heritance and the sharing of common Americanist aspirations, but ended up also highlighting Brazil’s self-exile from its neighbors, either for the language or for turning the back to everything that could get us together. 

Gilberto Gil and Capinan met in the garage of the old Federal University of Bahia Law School, then located at Joana Angélica Avenue.

In that site, they, along with other names that stood out in Cinema Novo, Cinema Marginal, and Tropicália (Glauber Rocha, Tom Zé, Fernando Peres, Florisvaldo Mattos, Paulo Gil Soares, Geraldo Sarno, Caetano Veloso), would meet and rehearse.

Performances would have both theatre and music concerts promoted by the Popular Center of Culture, a movement tied to the National Union of Students [UNE, in the Portuguese acronym].

There was also an “educational alphabetization project applying the Paulo Freire method”, recalls Capinan. “It was the last year in which the Law School ran outside UFBA campus. Gil and Caetano enrolled around the same time I did, plus or minus a year or two. Gil in Business Management; Caetano in Philosophy.”

With a “short subversive résumé,” Capinan had to leave Bahia due to repression in 1964. “I wrote a play at the time, a musical, called Bumba Meu Boi, in partnership with Tom Zé. It was an adaptation of the popular festivity in a version of strong social criticism…

“… and that was worth a military police indictment.” Capinan went to São Paulo, but soon moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for almost ten years. Yet the friendship and musical partnership with Gil remained.

 “I had found it very easy to work with Gil, in those moments when he first appeared, having immense lyrics, such as ‘Água de meninos.’” Capinan wrote “Misere Nobis” for the album Tropicália, in which he is portrayed in the photography set for the iconic album cover.