I begin the year with a new series of memoirs, events that one has lived and with this one, I make the eleventh installment. I also complete one hundred articles for this forum that offers me expoflamenco, which I opened in January 2021 with the title A bare rope.
It is well known, and if you don't know I'll tell you, that the great guitar masters usually receive copies from the guitar makers in their workshop in order to promote the sonantas with their signature. Nobody escapes the fact that A guitar in the hands of a great is the best promotion a luthier can dream of. And in the case of the largest, it was perhaps all too common. One day Paco de Lucía He confessed to me in the dressing room of the Vienna Stadthalle, a sports hall with four thousand seats that the Algeciras native filled every time he went to the Austrian capital, that he didn't know what to do with so many guitars that were given to him. Wherever he went, there was always some builder who, without hesitation, "donated" his most exquisite instrument to the brilliant Andalusian player so that he could carry his name around the world.
What I am going to relate below is not fantasy, it happened one night, I think in 1985, in the Spanish restaurant The Manchegan Winery, run by my friend Juan Hernández, a place where my menda lerenda played once a week and where the Sexteto de fenómenos de Big Boss He always travelled after his concerts in Vienna. I remember the I was embarrassed when the Sextet's concerts coincided with my gigs at that venue near the Friedensbrücke in the ninth district. My old friendship with Rubem Dantas He opened the doors to Paco's dressing room for me and so I was able to realize one of my dreams, to meet those great musicians in person, especially Jorge and Carlos, whom I admired from his years together Max Suñé y Salvador Fog, in that prodigious Trio of the late seventies. And then, when the concert was over, still trembling from the emotion that listening to that flamenco band produced in me, I ran to the subway and got up on the two-square-meter stage that Juan had installed at the back of the restaurant. I took out my guitar Alhambra F, somewhat dilapidated by the blows to which it was subjected (one who is rough when playing) and then Paco, Pepe, Ramón, Jorge, Carles entered, Manuel Soler and my Rubem. The winemaker would sit them at a table already reserved and I would start with my rumbas. Paco would look at me with compassion, surely thinking: “Look at him there, the poretic, mistreating the poor guitar while "Look for life." The truth is that the whole group treated me with affection, I did not leave their side during the days they were in Vienna, which were always four: the day of arrival, the day of the concert, the day of the extension concert because the tickets had sold out the day before and the day of travel to the next city, normally to the neighboring Budapest or Prague.
"I told him that the maestro had given it to me as a gift, and he replied, 'Well, you have to pay me back.' And so I spent thirty weeks paying him one hundred shillings until I had paid off the debt of three thousand at which the man had valued the instrument."
It turns out that that night, after the first of three forty-five minute passes that I scraped by, a Viennese guitar maker He took one of his guitars to the winery, took it out of its case, white, immaculate, smelling of a workshop, and showed it to Paco. I remember that Pepe took it first and got some sound out of it with a few strums, passing it to his younger brother for approval. Paco gave it a little tuning and gave it back to the luthier, excited by the fact that the greatest had put his blessed fingers on the fingerboard that he had built with such passion. And the man then told him no, that it was a gift, that it was given to him. That it was an honour for him to play it, to which the Algeciras native, an old hand in these matters, replied that no way, that an instrument like that costs a lot to make and that he should give it a better life. The other, I think his name was Paul, he said no, that he had made it thinking of him. That he had wanted to give it to him at the Stadthalle but he could not get into the dressing rooms, so he went to the restaurant knowing that it was where they normally went after their concerts in Vienna. Faced with his insistence, Paco agreed, with a serious face. I was witnessing the scene and the genius looked at me at that moment. With his eyes he said to me, “See, what I was telling you before in the dressing room.” I nodded nervously because of the complicity in that look. Paco de Lucía, even at short distances, imposed himself, at least to me whenever I was near him he instilled a respect in me that if it didn’t fit when I saw him it was so as not to make a fool of myself, but I confess that sometimes my body asked for it.
The guitarist, having fulfilled his mission, left after the second pass. I finished my work for that night and sat down at the table where, as always happens with the flamencoYes, it was all a joke, a joke and a joke, constant laughter. Those people were a family, inseparable, happy to be together. They were without a doubt the golden years of the group that Paco had managed to bring together to carry out the flamenco, like a rock & roll band, on the biggest stages in the world. With that powerful sound that hit you in the stomach, with the supernatural beat of the maestro and the resounding support of the young cajón flamenco inaugurated a few years earlier in the hands of the Bahian Rubem, and of course Benavent's fretless bass, played with a pick, a low octave extension of Paco's thumb. I was the happiest person in the world sitting there, laughing with them and their antics.
So I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back, Paco gave me the guitar that had just been given to me by the Viennese guitar maker and said, here, for yourself, I have five hundred at home. I was speechless. The truth is that my Alhambra was in tatters and that was something that Paco had not missed. I was speechless. Paco whispered to me, put it in the case and take it away, discreetly, so that no one finds out. So I did (the photo that illustrates this article is from moments after that).
We were leaving, and I told Juan that I would leave my guitar there, that I would pick it up the following week, and I left with the new one, a gift from the Big Boss!!! Life went on. As always, I went to the university at eight o'clock, and at six in the evening to the opera, to watch, standing, whatever they were playing. It was a habit I had during my nine years in Vienna. I went to the opera every day, which cost nothing for students, but standing (Stehplatz). After the opera I went, with my guitar, to sing wherever they were playing that day: Roter Engel, Macondo, Papas Tapas, El Túnel, El Andino, La Bodega, wherever. Every day. How else was I going to pay for my studies in an expensive city like Vienna, and the truth is, it's wrong for me to say it, those who lived through those years can confirm it, with my rumbas and sevillanas I was a crowd at every gig. Until one night, more or less a month after the event I just recounted, that guitar player appeared at the Roter Engel He told me that the guitar I was playing was his and that it had been a gift for Paco. I told him that the maestro had given it to me, to which he replied, hold on, 'well, you have to pay me for it'. After trying to convince him that I hadn't, and in order to avoid an altercation in view of the vein in the man's neck as he was telling me, and being also aware of the pain that it meant for him to give away several months' work to end up in my hands, I told him that I would pay him in instalments. And that's how I spent thirty weeks paying him a hundred shillings until I completed the debt of three thousand at which the man had valued the instrument. The shit.
