We celebrate 50 years of Woodstock, the festival that marked a whole generation
- In the summer of 1969 the radios of half the world, including the United States, tuned the 'Hymn to Joy', adaptation of the famous piece of Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony'. This brilliant success was the jump to fame of Miguel Ríos, a 25-year-old young man from Granada who came to dominate the Spanish rock and roll scene.
The human being is a rope lying between ruin and glory, or vice versa, "a rope over an abyss." At least, that's how Zarathushtra spoke, which was an insightful ash. Not like Friedrich von Schiller , who was so optimistic that he composed an Ode to joy . In the revolutionary era the students sang it with music from La Marseillaise and the young Beethoven freaked out so much that before he retired he put it happily into the fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony. To greater glory not only of Schiller but of Miguel Ríos , who crossed the rope over the abyss of Zarathustra without breaking the chrism and with the planetary applause.
When, on Sunday afternoons of a Granada stunned in beauty, Miguelito fell asleep in that kind of eternity that is tedium, he perceived life as ruin, but had faith in glory; that is, who believed in the occurrence of the improbable. And that illogical belief was fulfilled, at first little by little and then, in the summer of 1969 , of blow and ball. At 25, by the hand of the Argentine arranger and conductor Waldo de los Ríos , he made a strange movement and fell into the arms of another Beethoven movement, the fourth of the Novena.
That summer of 50 years ago, the man stepped on the Moon and David Bowie recorded Space Oddity , but in Spain the only one who traveled to space was Miguel Ríos , who had a galactic year because, in addition to triumphing over the top with The River , published the single Hymn to Joy . To the arrangements of Waldo de los Rios they put a letter that greatly lowered the prosopopeia of the Schiller Ode, which began like this: "Joy, beautiful flash of the gods!". With Miguel's powerful voice and the good roll of the lyrics, the theme worked despite the criticism of the apocalyptics, that if Beethoven raised his head and all that. It was even part of the masses of the priests as a Eucharistic song.
Orchestra director Cyril Templeton prepared a beautiful rhymed English lyrics in consonant and Miguel recorded A song of joy , the version that sold a bunch of copies worldwide. The funny thing is that I could not play it on the homeless in those years. Impossible to take to the stage his symphonic sophistication, until Miguel went to England to get a mellotron [a precursor to modern synthesizers] like the Moody Blues .
The year after the release of the Spanish version, the English Anthem had reached number one in a lot of countries and Miguel was doing a Valerio Lazarov program at the Osaka Expo. There he received a telegram to fly to Los Angeles because the disc had entered the American charts, at number 49. But it was the time of the monsoon and Miguel took 20 days to shoot the program. When he landed in Los Angeles, the disc was at number 9 and rising, it was sold as a pacifist song against the system . It did not take long to reach Billboard number 2, a brilliant climb that did not peak due to Simon & Garfunkel's bridge over troubled waters, which did not leave number one with hot water.
It was edited by A&M , whose letter A corresponded to Herb Alpert , trumpeter and singer with a record of vertigo. The trip to America was amazing, A&M gave him a star treatment and a slave job: from party to party, radio on radio and limousine in limousine. A whirlwind in which he even intimated with an authentic Californian beach girl on his only night in Los Angeles. He also visited Vancouver, Cagliari, Toronto and Montreal, to finish in New York. Alpert placed him as a road manager to a manager who did not speak Spanish, but turned out to be a very 'roll up' guy who made first-class hash pipes in the plane. Life is a cherry tree and the sour cherries you don't get in the tree are left, that was his philosophy. The epicurean, the good one, everything else is metaphysics of donkeys that get bored.
In those long days of short nights he had time to attend meetings with the media to photograph himself with his gold record and attend the strip of surreal interviews, because his English only gave the answer to "very funny question" and asked him what they asked. "How can a song like this be done with Franco's dictatorship?" Miguel's legs were shaking because he only understood the word Franco: "It's a very funny question, very, very, very," he replied with a cold sweat. And the interviewer: "How horny."
The arrival in New York was the most. The promoter, Jerry Love , a black two meters tall, was waiting for him in a kilometer limo. "Look, Miguel," he let go, "you're going to be here for less than 24 hours, we want you to spend it as a fucking mother. What do you want to do?" "No idea, brother." "Look, they've told me that you like this," and he took out a king-size pointer from the powerful Acapulco Gold, the most beautiful Mary, bundled with paper that had the stars and stripes flag printed. Well placed, they saw New York as God: from the rooftop of the Empire State Building. Again in the limo, friend Love, an uncle's love, asked him: "Do you want to hear yourself on the radio? Go past the dial", and after a while the Anthem sounded. Brutal: the Big Apple was like to eat it and Miguel took good bites. The next day he was packaged for London, where he made the famous Top of the Pops.
When he arrived in Madrid he felt like Christopher Columbus back home. He had met the Carpenters, Leon Russell, Scott McKenzie, John Williams, Mama Cass and a lot of A&M stars, and Herb Alpert was determined to record the Aranjuez Concert. On the side of the glory of the rope over the abyss, he was tasting the present without forgetting his virginal past (although Miguel had been diverted in Granada by a pious neighbor, much older than him). The most modern thing I heard then was the Dynamic Duo in the Ganivet Billiards juke box or in guateques where Old Gold, American blond, smoked, as they voiced it at the pipe stands.
He left school after finishing primary school in the Salesians to enter as an apprentice in the record section of the Olmedo Stores in Granada, for 325 peels a month, and in the store he discovered Elvis, the Teen Tops, Bobby Darin, the Platters, Ricky Nelson and the Argentine Billy Cafaro who - I don't know if they are old enough to remember - I wanted a girl who "is sincere, does not paint, smoke, or even know what rock and roll is." A Marcianita, go, like the fans of Pepe Mairena, who sounded a lot on the radio of Granada singing My little sheep .
His adolescence in the luminous aridity of the South was not very cosmopolitan, especially in winter. At least in summer I sensed that there were other worlds beyond Sara Montiel's gutter in La Vioteratera, because tourists were going to see the Alhambra and from somewhere they had to come. In Things I always wanted to tell you, his memories, Miguel draws a Granada drugged by beauty and dreary by the absence of sex, petas and rock and roll.
If you had something in your chest that deserved to be called a heart , you had to escape from the Cartuja Bajo Cercado, the Ganivet billiards and the Olmedo Warehouses. The vertigo of the different, the epic of the challenge, the luminous horizons and the crazy compass: shake and you already have a fugitive. In the Tennis Club he sang with Los Nevada 'Io sono il vento', by Marino Marini, and 'Pity', by Paul Anka ; they made a tape for the Cinderella 1960 program and, as one thing leads to another, they listened to it at Philips and that was how that pipiolo who was lost by Elvis's Hound Dog took off to Madrid on a night train. Not that I wanted to be modern, what I wanted is to be from somewhere else, from somewhere I dreamed I would frame.
They started by changing his name: Miguel became Mike, not Maik but Mique. In Granada, Mi'que was the popular way of saying look at what the word 'cocks' always followed. Total, that when he released the first album he renamed Mike Pollas. In addition to having to embarrass with the bad follá of Granada, the beginnings were sordid: trick Carpanta and pensions with the smell of cabbage and 20-watt bulbs. But a name was made - besides that of Mike Pollas - in the morning of the Price and in the fleeting apparitions in La Tuna, Imperator, Consulate or El Embarcadero. The sets began to appear - Los Tonys, Pekenikes, Los Pasos, Los Sonor, Los Lámpagos - with which he recorded a lot.
In the No-Do they took the rock of New York crazy with the twist - that "foreignizing" fashion, they said - and in the hotel Hernán Cortés de Gijón announced Mike Rios as "The king of the twist". The king because there was no other . That's why they hired him in many places. In 1964 he got tired of Mike, recovered his name and the record company announced it with a funeral and a birth in Fonorama magazine: "Mike Ríos is dead. Miguel Ríos is born."
He was 22 years old and Sonoplay was paying him 40,000 pesetas a month until he released the first album with them. He went to live on Doctor Fleming Street. Nivel, Maribel: the best apartment building in Madrid , with tenants as an uncle of the Vatican Bank. He soon made good crumbs with the Argentine Waldo de los Ríos , artistic director of Hispavox who made arrangements for Jeanette, Karina, María Ostiz, Los Payos, Pekenikes and Raphael, the brightest star in the Hispavox sky.
For Miguel came fame . And they also arrived at his apartment The End , with which he recorded some things. They were brought by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman , who also stayed at home. The Stones were already the copon, but Wyman was uglier than Picio and although he was reputed to be the band's fucker, in Madrid he didn't eat a chin. Miguel preferred drinks nights with Fernando Arbex, who made him El Rio, whose flood flooded the Spanish musical ecosystem.
He jumped to the big format with 'Mira towards you', a melodic debut with psychedelic airs, epic production, angel look, a couple of slightly rocky songs and some ballads. Miguel Ostiz's 'You don't know how I suffered' was taken by Miguel from intimate folk to psychedelic rock with harmonica included. Miguel was like a goat's stomach: it would digest everything. Even the pockets of banana peels to be placed and the Romilar so that banana companies were not cushioned. Good times.
That summer he was already doing the Hymn to joy with the mellotron of the Moody Blues and got fed up with galas. Six zeros checks came from him: from selling one hundred and one thousand records from El Rio, a big hit for Spain, to selling almost three million in Germany. Only time tells us how much beer there was and how much foam in that 50-year-old blockbuster anthem. Only now we see that that Beethoven for beginners to Miguel did not go to his head like a pichiniqui - as they said in Granada to those who believe what they are not -, he only lowered his pocket and gave him the security to build the status of fucking rock master in this peripheral peninsula of the Eurasian continent.
André Breton said that "who can not visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot," what Miguel visualized was Joe Cocker galloping next to an abyss over Beethoven's hump. And he got in the car.
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