Half a century of the album ‘Señora Azul’, the masterpiece of Spanish pop that nobody understood | Culture

It happened exactly 50 years ago and today we unanimously consider it a historic and essential episode for Spanish pop. But back then, no one, absolutely no one, was able to notice its significance. Four twenty-somethings with unusual artistic poise and vast experience for their tender age brought their names and talents together in an album that sublime the art of vocal harmonies and looked head-on at their great Anglo-Saxon idols, from The Hollies to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, from whom they even copied the way they named the band. The result, Blue ladyis listed in all the lists among the five or ten best Spanish albums of all time, but its creators, Cánovas, Rodrigo, Adolfo and Guzmán, only received a resounding collective silence in response. The four of them still remember that feat with pride and a bit of frustration, but it has been quite impossible to revive it for some time: the first one is in poor health and the second has long since retired, irrefutably, from the madding crowd.

It could have been an event of colossal dimensions, but it remained a secret to which only a few refined palates had access. In that Spain of 1974 in which the most sold albums were Once upon a time there was a circusby Gabi, Fofó and Miliki; the compilation The Philadelphia Sound o The Love Unlimited Orchestra, Barry White’s orchestral project, the sonic and literary delicacies of Blue lady They seemed like an extravagance. “With our beards and bell-bottoms we looked like four intellectual hippies, and people weren’t prepared for that,” José María Guzmán (Madrid, 1952), the youngest member of the quartet, smiles today, resigned.

Adolfo Rodríguez also appeals to a seasonal factor: “We were seen as a winter group at a time when soloists and summer groups were in fashion, in the style of Formula V or Los Diablos.” ​​And a review of Only successes: year after yearFernando Salaverri’s most reliable manual for historians of our pop, corroborates this perception: among the songs that reached number 1 that season are: Blas’s party and Heatedas well as male idols such as Roberto Carlos, Camilo Sesto, Juan Bau, Danny Daniel and Demis Roussos.

Today, however, no one can hide their amazement at the 11 original songs (Rodrigo García and Guzmán contributed four, Juan Robles Cánovas two and Adolfo one, the latter three with lyrics by Rodrigo) that were simmering in the Madrid neighbourhood of Usera, in the Robles family home, and took final shape in the legendary headquarters of the Hispavox label on Calle Torrelaguna, “studios larger than Abbey Road and at the same technological level”, according to Guzmán.

A special edition (on blue vinyl, what else) will serve to commemorate this half century of life from October 11th. Blue ladya phonographic milestone to which we should add the publication of Adolfo’s highly entertaining memoirs, Along the purple path (editions Sílex). The man who was also an actor and singer of Los Íberos tells the journalist Concha Moya about an almost novelistic life journey, rich in picturesque adventures such as his initiation experiences in the wild Torremolinos of the sixties or his nine years of residence in Sweden, where he emigrated for love, learned the language and made a fortune as a dental prosthetist, a profession about which he had no prior knowledge.

Those first Cánovas, Rodrigo, Adolfo and Guzmán had something of a prodigy and a miracle, dream team sudden and fleeting in the same season in which Cruyff took the Bernabéu by storm. All that remains is the memory of a formidable work that time has only made grow, sometimes in unexpected directions: I only think about you In 1982 it became the theme tune of the daily Venezuelan soap opera Ligia Elenaplayed by heartthrob Guillermo Dávila for four seasons; and the until now much less publicized Supreme Director It has become an emblem for the live performances of the Cantabrians Los Estanques, a praised psychedelic pop quartet whose members come from the millennial generation.

There is also, without a doubt, bitterness at the lost opportunity, the waste of such a fabulous and fleeting alliance. The song Blue ladysometimes wrongly read as an opposition to Francoism, was in fact a diatribe against those conceited music critics who “impose their stubborn will” and “from the sidelines often see things that are not there and appear to be.” And the specialized press was, in fact, the first to ignore it. “Apart from Vicente Cagiao and Manolo Fernández, who were always very enthusiastic about us on Popular FM, and Juan María Mantilla on Radio Peninsular, almost no one paid attention to us,” Guzmán summarizes.

But they were willing to look for external causes: the final blow to the project was dealt by the group itself when it decided not to defend that brand new repertoire on stage. At first, the four preferred to act as backing musicians for Karina, whom Hispavox was then reinventing with the album Lady Elizabeth and with which Rodrigo García himself began a romance that was quite publicized by the gossip press of the time. And García himself was the one who ultimately preferred to earn his living as a session musician (Mocedades, Juan Pardo, Rocío Jurado…) instead of performing just once those cuts that are now pure history of Spanish music, from The playboy to The river, If you could see either Mr. Samuel Jasmine.

Both Adolfo and Guzmán sigh when they think of the great opportunity they missed in those years of brilliant artistic plenitude. “We were not a group but a cooperative, a temporary union in which each one thought things in his own way and did not put the general interest first,” laments the former. “Adolfo and I were more in favour of hitting the road and hitting the ground running,” argues Guzmán, “but Cánovas and Rodrigo were more reticent, more fearful. I felt elated, full of energy and eager to take on the world, but… it was not to be.” In fact, the group would take 10 years to get back on its feet with two consecutive works, Dear colleagues (1984) and 1985the following year, for which there was also no quorum when it came to going out on the road. Like Rodrigo, Adolfo and Guzmán (Cánovas had left) reappeared in 1994 with a homonymous and much less inspired album. And they did not dare to perform together until 2004, following the recognition that the commemorative compilation represented. Grand Reserve: 30 years old.

Seeing them make their live debut that autumn, albeit three decades late, at Madrid’s Galileo Galilei was a magical episode, but also a mirage. The reconciliation and intergenerational fervour that it already aroused Blue lady This prompted CRAG to think about a definitive blow on the table, a great reunion album in which each one would contribute equally three new songs, to avoid suspicions, misgivings or distinctions. “There was very good material,” Adolfo recounts, still hurt, “but when I announced that I would have an external lyricist for two of my songs and that the third would be in English, Rodrigo vetoed them all. And that was the definitive break. Until today.”

This is how bittersweet the journey of these four gentlemen is, who have not stopped working in different directions, but who never shone as much as during the ephemeral periods in which their paths converged. The new listeners who with the anniversary and the reissue now discover Blue lady They will be stunned, half a century later, by the vocal and instrumental finesse of those 35 minutes, by the self-confidence of those youngsters who took on their own arrangements. “Rafael Trabuchelli (the illustrious Milanese producer and orchestrator) let us do and undo when he saw that we knew what we were doing,” notes José María Guzmán, who even acted as cellist while Rodrigo also took on the violin in person. Oh, and the LGTBI community will be amazed by a lesbian ode to the beauty of Maria and Amarantaalso conceived by Rodrigo 16 years before that Woman against woman with which Mecano believed in 1990 to address a theme that was unprecedented in our popular music.

What remains forever, however, is “the good things we once did together,” as the 1984 song said. Dear colleagues. The memory endures thanks to Along the purple pathAdolfo’s fascinating and enlightening memoirs, to which will be added in a few months Guzmán’s autobiography, provisionally titled Under the sign of PiscesWe can take a look at Rodrigo’s digressions through his blog, Reflections of the hippocampuswhere he clearly positions himself with the postulates of the right and denounces “the fringes of pretension progress of superfluous flexibility”. And we will do better if we search for other hearings linked to Blue ladywhich we will note here in case the algorithm is going to get carried away: the fabulous only album by Solera (1973), where Guzmán and Rodrigo shared the lineup with the Malaga brothers José Antonio and Manuel Martín; the eponymous LP by The Iberians (1969), recorded in London by a very young Adolfo who was also ahead of his time; Guzmán’s extraordinary solo debut, The country of light (1978), which was not released on CD until 2000 and cries out for a proper reissue; or the progressive flirtations of Cánovas with Franklin, the band produced by Teddy Bautista and led by a pubescent Antonio García de Diego, with Miguel Ríos’s lieutenant in his later years and, above all, Joaquín Sabina.

How would I summarize? Carouselthe opening theme of Blue lady: “Colored lights, music from yesterday / Throbbing happy days.”