In his memoir, ‘Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil,’ Caetano Veloso shows us the other side of the sixties. Sex, drugs and pop music were all still present, but in 1964, the democratic left-wing government of Brazil was subjected to a military coup which would mark the beginning of over twenty years of right wing military dictatorship.

Veloso was born in the north-eastern state of Bahia in 1942. Growing up in the fifties, he could not really get into American popular culture. He was living in a country where the population was predominantly poor and leftist, and where the right was often allied to Catholicism. At the age of 17, he heard bossa nova singer-songwriter João Gilberto for the first time. It would be the beginning of a life-long love affair with samba and Gilberto’s work. In spite of this, Veloso’s own early reputation as a singer-songwriter would be as an iconoclast, tearing up the conservative elements of Brazilian music, and generally sticking two fingers up at the establishment.

Originally intending to pursue a career in film-making, writing or academia, Veloso fell into the music business through writing songs for his teenage sister, Maria Bethânia. He became part of a group of Bahians who rose to prominence in the mid-60s: Maria Bethânia, their friend Gal Costa, and Veloso’s close friend and collaborator, Gilberto Gil. Gil and Veloso’s careers would come together in their creation of the defiant tropicalismo movement. Bringing in other figures in music, such as the teenage rock band, Os Mutantes, the tropicalistas sought to take what was generally frowned upon or devalued, like rock music, the songs of Carmen Miranda, and so forth, and mix it together into something new, which succeeded in upsetting just about everybody, the left (to which they were aligned), the right, the Catholic establishment, the nationalists, the military, and other artists. At one music contest,

”…as soon as Os Mutantes began to play the introduction, the overwhelming majority of those in attendance turned their backs to the stage in an unnerving demonstration, whereupon Os Mutantes had the wit promptly to turn themselves around, and began playing with their backs to the audience.”

Veloso had intended to recite a poem by Fernando Pessoa, typical of the cultural cannibalism of their performances. Instead he began to shout at the audience, who, curious about what was happening, turned their faces, which were full of hatred,

"in a voice at once uncontrollably insecure and confidently prophetic, I said: ‘So you’re the young people who say they want to take power! If you’re the same in politics as you are in music, we’re done for."

Gilberto Gil then joined them onstage, and they were pelted with balls of paper, plastic cups, and a chunk of wood which hit Gil and drew blood. The group left the theatre“a little frightened.” But it didn’t put them off. Far from it, on television, which was still watched only by a minority of Brazilians, they acted out The Last Supper, with a table laid out with bananas. They sang, ate the bananas, and Os Mutantes carried out a mock funeral with a cardboard headstone inscribed, ‘Here Lies Tropicalism.’

“The number of Catholic ladies who protested in letters from metropolitan São Paulo, as well as the interior of the state, indicated the program had a larger audience than we had suspected.”

The initial military coup of 1964 was relatively mild in its effects compared to what followed on December 13th, 1968, when the “coup within a coup” brought in a more brutal regime which revoked the right of habeas corpus and instituted a police state. Veloso and Gil were already on a list of artists the military wanted to pull in for interrogation. Days later, the group’s Christmas show went out on television, as provocative as ever.

“As tribute to the great composer Assis Valente, who had committed suicide, and also to deflate all the rosy Yuletide sentimentality, I myself would sing the beautiful, sad song by that composer (‘I thought everyone was a child of Santa Claus…’) while pointing a gun to my head. And so I did.”

On December 27th, he and Gil were arrested. It would be the beginning of a two month prison ordeal, followed by four months of effective house arrest, and two and a half years of exile in London. For Veloso, it was a three year nightmare. Gil handled it better. They were kept apart in prison. At one point, marched out of a communal cell at gunpoint, Veloso, half-naked, walked to what he thought might be his execution. Instead, he found himself in front of the prison barber and his head was shaved. It was meant as a punishment - Veloso was famous for his hair. Sometimes prisoners or guards would ask Veloso to sing. As the weeks went by and he waited for his interrogation, it became clear that there was some confusion about the reason for his arrest. This, in turn, made it difficult to secure his release.

Veloso admits that he got off lightly compared to some. But his feminine nature coupled with a greater immaturity and emotional vulnerability meant that he was ultimately more bitter about the experience than Gil, who used it as a springboard towards a more ascetic lifestyle, pursuing Eastern spiritualism.

Veloso’s most famous work comes from the seventies and eighties. His memoir, however, focuses almost exclusively on the tropicalismo period, with his exile in London, and return to Brazil in 1972. The book is packed full of ideas, artists, film-makers, and writers who may not be familiar to most Westerners, but who were vital in influencing the thinking behind tropicalism. It was a movement that had elements of punk about it - from the meat hooks on the walls of Veloso’s apartment, to the plastic suit he wore at a performance. Veloso veers off into discussions of philosophy (which he studied before dropping out of university), the cultural imperialism of the West, and the position of Brazil in the world, particularly its poverty. His sentences are long, his interests erudite. Brazil’s history threads through the book.

There are some quibbles however. Because of the amount of space given to the early fascist period, it would have made sense to give more information about the seventies and the return of democracy in the mid-eighties. Veloso himself says that this period is outside the remit of the book: tropicalism was effectively dead by then and he had progressed in the seventies into a serious music career which would ultimately lead to him being compared with the likes of John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Certainly, he is one of the most successful popular music composers of the twentieth century. The mid-eighties is a period Veloso sketches only briefly, and in personal terms: his move to Rio for psychoanalysis, the break up of his long marriage to first wife, Dedé, and meeting future wife Paula Lavigne, then a thirteen year old member of a teenage theatre group. The meeting was “eventually to have great consequences.” At the time of writing his memoir (1997), they had been living together for over ten years and had two sons in the nineties. It’s not clear how old she was when they got together. His first marriage appears to have been a happy one, right up until the end, according to Veloso, but it’s unfortunate that nothing is said about the break up since Dedé is one of the more significant characters in the book. There are other elusive facts too: as a boy, Veloso appears to have been in love with some girl, an unconsummated passion that had great significance for him, but this person is never named or described. He mentions in passing that at the age of nineteen he fell in love with a young man. Again we’re given almost no information, except that it too was unconsummated.

‘Tropical Truth’ delves deeply into intellectual, artistic, historical and philosophical concerns, and is no light read. But it also successfully relives the impetuosities and passions of youth. Veloso says in the book:

"At age twenty-four I looked like an adolescent. And in fact I felt even more like a teenager than I looked. Someone said that men who set their minds to what is faced in childhood produce profound works, while those who revisit indefinitely the questions and illusions of adolescence are fated to wander the labyrinth of repression, sexual definition and the fulfilment of the will to freedom. I find myself in this latter group. The whole wave of the sixties was an elevation of adolescent personalities or persons of adolescent style.”

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. She is currently completing her first novel. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.