There is a basic law in the art of songwriting and production: Come up with a nice melody verse and play it with basic instruments. Then, save the real good idea you had for the chorus to inflame it with many more instruments and choirs. If the verse has a quality of 7 out of 10, and the chorus, of 10 out of 10, go choosing mansion.
PODCAST: Freedom for Mustache Rice
Well, Libre (from Armenteros y Herrero) obeys that model, sung by Nino Bravo with the same strategy: less deployment at the beginning and then giving away all the lung when it explodes in an unbeatable “free, like the sun when it dawns…”. When we listen to it, we feel what invades that “bird that escaped from its prison”, or the very liberation of those who managed to cross the Soviet iron curtain.
Although many did not succeed. Quite the contrary, the real protagonist of the letter, Peter Fechter, what he felt was a gunshot in the hip and his own weight unraveling in the no-man's-land of the Berlin Wall, the wired space between the two parallel canvases that separated the sectors Soviet and western German city. Fechter and his friend Helmut Kulbeik - who did escape - walked casually for several weeks through different sections of the wall of shame: they considered the variable width of the corridor between walls, located the watchtowers, located the automatic firing systems, timed the changing of the guard ... Until they decided to leave the hall of a bakery from which they could attempt a quick jump without being seen by the guards of Democratic Germany.
But after all, his plan was to jump and run a lot. And it was not enough. As the lyrics say, “he was so happy that / he didn't hear / the voice that called him”. Rather, he did not want to hear it since it was the "stop!" of a sentinel. The shot, the fall and the gushing of blood are also in the text: "And lying on the ground she stayed / smiling and not speaking / crimson flowers on her chest / constantly sprouted".
On the other hand, some of the 40,000 detained by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) did manage to get out of the more than 1,000 detention centers that the military regime set up throughout Chile. And they were able to fill their chests with that liberating chorus: “While we waited in the stands to be questioned (…), we sang Free to those who were forming to be released. Free was a catharsis, a mixture of joy for those who were leaving and hope for those of us who stayed, ”the Chilean musicologist and researcher Katia Chornik told a reprisal who spent two months in 1973 —the year of the song's great success— in a prison camp. The professor at the University of Manchester gathers these testimonies and many documents on the use of music as “non-contact torture” that the US CIA began to practice in the 1950s at cantoscautivos.org.
The anonymous testimony continues: "The dictatorship and its civil or military henchmen used it for their own propaganda." And so it was, for two reasons: first, with the aim of stealing their anthem of freedom and throwing it at their faces, as read in the statements of Paicavi Painemal, a Mapuche tortured by the Chilean DINA: “They played songs by Nino Bravo, especially Free. They put them on me in the background and loudly so that my screams would not be heard so much ”. The second reason why the repressors played the song was to use it as anti-communist propaganda, because of that of a pro-Soviet soldier killing a man fleeing to freedom.
What no one would expect is that this almost philosophical diatribe would come together in a figure as less solemn as that of Mustache Arrocet. In 1974, a few months after the coup against Allende, the then singers impersonator came out to perform it at the Viña del Mar Festival. It is the great Spanish-American contest, there is an audience to burst and it is broadcast live on television. An enthusiasm that would not be politically noteworthy if it were not for the fact that in the front rows a Pinochet and his wife enjoyed the evening to whom the presenter Antonio Vodanovic had given phrases such as "it is the Chilean youth who appreciate your presence." The question in Chile has been the same for 46 years: did Edmundo Arrocet want to sing it on behalf of the reprisals or the dictator? He limits himself to saying that it was a simple tribute to his "friend" Nino Bravo, who died shortly before. But perhaps the answer lies in these two questions: why did Bigote sing it again in 1978 with all panache at the same festival that was the regime's international showcase, and after the controversial controversy it sparked in 1974? Does anyone think they would keep that great hair if they had done it for democratic purposes, and on two occasions?
Rewinding: Bravo for Luis Manuel
- Album: My land (Fonogram / Polydor).
- Year: 1972.
- Charts: The single was number 1 from January to May 1973.
- Nino Bravo (Aielo de Malferit, Valencia, 1944) was actually called Luis Manuel Ferri Llopis (Manolo), but according to his representative, Miguel Siurán, he named him Nino in honor of the composer Nino Rota. He added the last name after the manager blurted out a "Bravo, nano!" a man who intervened in a Valencian gambling den in favor of a prostitute with whom three sailors were arguing.
In cantoscautivos.org you can consult all the songs that prisoners, jailers and politicians used (and played) as political weapons or simple vacation and consolation. There is an index of all of them together with testimonies (including DINA guards) of the use that they were given.
The truth is that Bigote Arrocet did not defend himself badly singing, although the imitation was none.