Week 52: My Summer Vacation 3, El Topo

One of the things I always look forward to when visiting my family in Puerto Rico is spending some time with my uncle. Yes, the same uncle that had the mysterious room filled with strange music, strange girls and even stranger smells that I've talked about before. My uncle is the closest thing I’ve had to a music mentor. As a kid, he taught me how to properly get a note out of a saxophone and gave me recorder lessons. As a teenager, he let me borrow his beaten up first guitar, which became my first guitar, and later taught me the fingerings for 9th chords and how they are used in Brazilian music. I also inherited many of his late 1960s and early 1970s heavy rock records, and when I was in college in the late 1980s he introduced me to Vico-C and other early reggeaton records, before the genre was stifled by its own popularity. Over the years, every time I visit, he always has some new music to tell me about, most often music that I can't readily access.

My uncle’s biography reads like a manual on how to be the black sheep of the family. His catholic high school principal (the same principal that would years later be my principal) spent the summer, personally teaching him the history class he needed to fulfill his graduation requirements just so she could hand him his diploma and send him on his way and be done with his long hair, his hiding up in trees to smoke, and his other un-catholic habits. Well, who would say not to that? So while his peers spent senior year doing what catholic school seniors do, my uncle saved some money and bought a one way-ticket to Europe. During his time in Europe he roamed the land with his guitar, until he had spent all his money on whatever seventeen year olds spend their money while traveling through Europe. But he's a laid back guy, so he simply sat on a corner with his guitar, and busked until he had enough money to buy a plane ticket back.

Upon his return he went back to living with his parents, and enrolled at the Yupi (pronounced U.P. as in U.P.R. as in Universidad de Puerto Rico) to get his music degree in guitar. He would spend six years getting his degree and then he spent a couple more to get a masters playing the saxophone. I will never forget going to see his master thesis recital at some dingy smoky bar in Old San Juan where my uncle and a few other jazz scholars laid down some mind bending free jazz for about an hour. My grandparents - his parents - didn’t seem as bewildered as me, fourteen years old, and probably more intoxicated from the heady atmosphere of the club than from the one beer I forced down in a weak attempt to not feel completely out of place.

The first time he moved out of my grandparents' house was when he married his first wife. They had a baby and my uncle, who always had a good voice, got a job as a news reader at the Yupi radio station. After some time doing that he decided to get a masters in communication, and soon he was reporting for a local paper. But I don’t think he can stop living his life the way he does anymore than sand can avoid being blown by the wind. So he found himself reporting at a local political rally when the mayoral candidate passed out while in the middle of a speech. The photographer that was accompanying my uncle tried to get close to get some pictures, and before she realized it, a group of the mayor’s bodyguards and assorted bullies had surrounded her and were trying to pry the camera from her hands. My uncle, a skinny hippie looking guy (see above photo), intervened and not surprisingly got beaten up by the bunch. Well, if they didn’t know it then, they know it now – it’s not good campaigning to go around beating-up members of the press. The next day my uncle’s face, complete with black eye and swollen lips, was looking out in a daze from the cover of every local newspaper, who unanimously proclaimed him the hero reporter.

After that he began to get some big assignments, traveling overseas to report on international events in Nicaragua or Russia, but my uncle was never a big time kind of person. I think his realization of this came after accepting the job of news director at a local TV station. He lasted about a month on that job and then quit without fanfare. No fun at all, I think is how he described it. So instead, he and his wife got a divorce and he started law school. Which meant he was back at the college where he had already spent at least 10 years and back at his parents house, where he still holds the record for most years living at home.

During law school, he met the woman with whom he would have his second child. He finished law school and open a small law office in Old San Juan, but the 4pm to 4am business hours are not the most conducive to a law firm and he left that behind to go back to work for the newspaper. He would eventually go on to have a third kid from a third partner, the one he recently divorced to go back to living with his mom for another year, just in case anybody else had any thoughts of breaking his long standing record, he told me. In the midst of all that, however, he managed to win the top journalistic award in the country for the last two years in a row. He has also grown a ponytail, probably to compensate for his thinning hair, although he claims, with a smirk, that it's because he's ‘old school’.

Like most black sheep and many musicians, my uncle seems to have the constitution of a horse, which has allowed him to spend most of his life standing on street corners and by pool tables drinking, smoking, playing music and doing whatever else night owls do until fifteen in the morning. Then, the next day, he gets up to put in a full days work while also finding the time to be a good father to his three kids, which by all accounts he seems to be. It really is a neat trick how he manages all that.

El Boricua has been a little bar on the periphery of the Yupi for many years. I had been there once about 20 years ago, but generally I didn’t frequent the Yupi bars since they required more driving than I liked to do, and generally there was plenty of good bars around my neighborhood. I remembered the bar as a typical local dive, which meant there wasn’t much to remember that I couldn’t find a block form my house. But when my uncle says to me that El Boricua has become a really good place to go see music, I pay attention, and I say, let’s go.

As soon as we got there, I realized that things had changed. We parked a block away and already we could hear the music as if it was in front of me. The reason being was that it was in front of us. The music wasn't being played inside the bar, but right on the sidewalk.

The bar is located on a fork on the road, so there is a wide sidewalk in front of it that ends in a point at the junction of the fork. This wide cemented area was now filled people hanging about or sitting on a few small tables and chairs that had been pulled out for the occasion. The crowd was energized as they listened to the band which was lined up on the sidewalk laying down some serious rumba.

Rumba is musical genre which originated in Cuba in the 19th century from the combined music of Spanish colonists and African slaves. It quickly spread through the Spanish Caribbean, and was easily adopted in Puerto Rico since learning it required only a few variations to already existing local genres such as the bomba and the plena.

In recent years there has been a traditionalist/revisionist movement that has been reshaping traditional folkloric music such as the bomba or rumba without popularizing* the genres. These music groups are using traditional instrumentation and musical structures, but are doing away with the formal presentation that has stifled these genres for many years. Picture the difference between watching a traditional folk music and dance troupe performing at Epcot Center, and watching those same people ditching the formalities and getting down at their local bar among friends. Something like that is what is going on, and was going on that night at El Boricua that night.



At El Boricua, five musicians were lined up on the sidewalk in front of the bar. Three conga players with five congas between them, one cajón player, and one other musician that switched between various hand percussion instruments, such as the claves or güiro. They all sang and were laying down the kind of rumba that prompted otherwise average looking audience members to spontaneously get up and dance, not with each other, but by themselves or with one of the conga players in a way that made them seemed slightly possessed.

My uncle and I stepped inside the bar to get a drink. My uncle suggested we get a ‘full court’, which is a shot of spiced rum and a Medalla beer (the local beer). I ordered two ‘full courts’ for us and the bartender said, that will be five bucks, so I corrected her saying I ordered two of them. Yes, I know, she said, that's five bucks. Five bucks for two beers and two shots of delicious rum! Could this night get any better?

Well, yes it could, because as soon as we stepped outside there was a special guest who was there and wanted to sing a couple of tunes with the group. El Topo, needed no introduction, everyone knew him, and he had been there listening to the band since we got there. My uncle explained that he has become a regular at El Boricua, but even my uncle had never seen him get up to sing with a rumba group. The only way I can think to convey the monumentality of the occasion to a non-Puerto Rican audience is with a comparison. Having El Topo get up to sing with a rumba group at El Boricua would be something like going to your local dive, say the Pik n Pak in Houston, or the Cave in Chapel Hill, and Bob Dylan is there and he gets up to sing with the ragtime band that is playing that night. Something like that.

El Topo is a legend in Puerto Rican folk music. A high school teacher turned singer-songwriter in the 1960s, Antonio Caban Vale, aka El Topo (The Gopher), has worked within traditional Puerto Rican mountain music to pen songs that have become standards of popular culture. His song, Verde Luz (Green Light), has practically substituted the Puerto Rican national anthem in most ways except officially. Verde Luz is the kind of song that thousands will spontaneously start singing during moments of national pride.

I can't tell you the pride I felt in seeing El Topo at the ripe age of 64, still out and about having a few drinks at a local dive, and getting up to sing with a local band of rumberos. It was very inspiring to say the least. El Topo, like the seasoned professional that he is, said a few words to the rumba players who then kicked into a slow güagüanco, the slowest of the rumba styles and the one best suited for lyrical improvisation. El Topo then proceeded to improvise three or four güagüanco songs in a row, each one more heart wrenching that the previous one. El Topo bared his melancholic soul like his life depended on it. It was truly a beautiful thing to witness.

Additional note:
Rumba is probably one of the most bastardized styles in latin music, everyone puts a little rumba in what they do and they throw the word around a lot, but traditional rumba is not that easy to find outside of museums and other art centers where it is stylized for mass consumption. So here's an excerpt from a good doc on the Rumba called "La Rumba" by Oscar Valdes. The narration is in spanish, but even if you don't understand what is being said, it is worth watching just for the rumba clips it includes and how these are juxtaposed with the more stylized versions.

Here's also a very good blog all about rumba, the depths of the rumba are truly amazing. Oh, and the blog is in english.

*By "popularizing" I mean the use of pop production, instrumentation and composition that is often applied to traditional genres in an effort to give them greater mass appeal.

Photos are of my uncle playing guitar by the river, and of El Topo singing at El Boricua.