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Among the poems included in the end of The beginning, impacts one in the that Manolo García (Barcelona, 1955) speaks of a child who reads comic books on a sofa.
“That child lives in me” , he says. “Curiosity is stuck since I have use of reason, I start to disparatarme and to ask me questions. And soon I realize that answers will not be. In addition, it gives the same: the entertainment is holding the frying pan by the handle. is The start of enter worlds of others, fictional or not so fictional, it comes in the form of comics , before the comics. I’m lucky to have a flea market under the house that every Sunday it opens its doors to an eager audience of literature second-hand. All very cheap. I find the garlic soup with twelve years in this market of San Antón. Feel the call of the street, on my block had two radios and there was no tv, I speak to you in 1967. You start with the wild boar and the Captain Thunder and this leads to investigate more, to read Salgari, someone speaks to you of Jack London… There, now you’re caught”.
look to The art or painting, can also be traced back to that time?
Absolutely, he was waking up in a half-brutalized. My first experience is a neighbourhood, metallurgical furnaces, workers to the call of the siren… it Is a coastal area where it was located, the industry, railway tracks, locomotives, a world of men hardened by salaries lean it left the skin. My father comes from the field, where he was a reaper, and enters into that dynamic. In the summer, I take it to the field, where life is also hard, but as the child does not work, only helps a little bit, so idealized, as a romantic setting. In contrast, the place where the father works is something barbarous, in the mouths of the furnaces to temperatures brutal. And the art is the preserver. There is something that makes you out of your thoughts in front of what is waiting for you. Because your father warns you of what will be your future, it was a dream that will pay you the studies, in the university, that was unthinkable. “At the age of fourteen, you’ll be here working in the factory.” It was the only way to escape emotionally to a life that would be slavery. Then, start to draw and I enter another world of passion all. It is the beginning of my querencia, that has lasted a lifetime. It is “the site of my recreation”, as was said by Antonio Vega.
But it is not the only one. He gets this other table of salvation that is the music. Before The Fast and The Donkeys.
Before, well before. The Quick is the dream of any musician, an album with songs their own in a company, EMI Odeon, which at that time was in Barcelona. But I’ve been ten years with vans DKW jugándome life by national highways. In these years, by the day, work, and at night, test with a group that will be with which we diversify weddings, which we throw it. I have fifteen years and, in the neighborhood, a few of the lads fit for the music we get together. I go out to play at Lerida, Saragossa, I was the young boy. Every weekend, we took two actions, and we pay about two thousand pesetas, which, to a boy of my age, will help the family economy. But beyond that, there is the climb to the stage, the view that you like.
in the early 70’s, Barcelona is a shithole. Where is located Manolo García?
Absorbing like a sponge. Armhole, I remember your concert in the blue room, a myth of the Raval, and to see The Band Trapera, the punk in this case Cornella (where we are Tow). There, in that rehash, I go as I can. I remember one year that Miguel Rivers was on tour and I went to see him several times to learn what it was to make your own music on a stage. I was driving tricks to take well with the audience of a wedding, tipsy, or in the barracks lads in Teruel, where you go to what you want or you throw to the pylon [laughs]. But after watching Queen and Billy Joel in Barcelona, I discover that there is another thing that is magnificent, that is the artist who defends his own work, and I say to myself: “This is the way”.
“we are All prisms, we have many faces. Now: in the inner self there are no faces. There is a get along well with yourself”
In “the end of The beginning” claimed the power of poetry. You see echoes of the generation of ‘ 27 in his poems. Echoes especially in the approach to the woman.
The woman, for a poet, if it is, it is not muse, is a force of nature. In the end, that inner experience, that real experience, imagined, desired, not achieved, but longed for, is poetry. Poetry is the pretense of life, is that “at all costs, to exist”. Exist before, now and always. Because in the time of the poet there is a perpetuity, you are there tied up with a sweet tie, a knot sailor super, very nice, that ties you to an eternity. Is the woman, are the other men, is the nature, hug trees, talk to the turtles, we try to cook with love, we are trying to be poets all, in the end.
And the love for the small things.
Well, I call it “love in all directions”. Those first loves as a teenager, are recorded, but you will also vapulean. You begin to realize that it is best not to point in one direction, if not you’re right. Look, I had the good fortune of being an altar boy from a priest, then I found out I was a political activist at times very hard. Do you think that the love of this pastor is the one that interests me: the one who gives everything without asking anything in return. The one who asks, the one who proposes the covenant, which requires: no. And you don’t need to proclaim it.
“we Lose more than we win with the virtual world. My life plan is not to spend all the day sending ‘whatsapps'”
There is a contrast between the Manolo García energetic, able to give concerts three hours, as Springsteen, with the other, the one who makes poems, paintings, say a craftsman.
we are All prisms, we have a lot of faces and we use that interests us in each moment. Now, in the I interior, no faces. There is a get along well with yourself. What are you looking for? A calm. For me, one of the assets is not to have more or run more. It is to be quiet.
In his poem “this is life now” speaks of that paradox so that “you have ten thousand virtual friends and none of them go to the hospital”.
I’m going to risk: I think that we lose more than we win with the virtual world. Someone will think that I’m out of my time. But I choose my time. It gives us an apparent variety of possibilities so brutal that you lose. I, the mobile practically disappeared from my life. I now have one of the chinese on the corner, because my life plan is not to spend all day sending whatsapps. To me you give me a terrace, give a little the sun, with a newspaper, a book, a beer, a coffee, and watch people. O oysters! Is that it pacifies the soul.
Manolo Garcia with Quimi Portet, the other half of The Last of the Row, one of the groups of pop rock that garnered great success in Spain during the decades of 1980 and 1990
The Last of the Row were pioneers in incorporating in their letters from distant star to the insect. Do you think that the theme of our time is the relationship between man and Nature?
We are finishing an era. Now comes a second part that is going to be final. We already had to be tucked in a flour and to understand that we are a global tribe, that what happens in the northern hemisphere, reversed in the southern hemisphere. The flutter of the butterfly now she is serious, because it is not a poetic image. The extinction of species is detrimental to the human being. Nature has always been one of our best doctor.
“Querida Milagros”, “Insurrection”, “Like a donkey at the door of the dance”… they are songs that have become the heritage of the people. Do you notice something special about the creates? What is the public who makes them endure?
When I compose, I’m sitting with the guitar, headphones… And the song that I’m recording, a beat, two acoustic guitars, my voice and a harmonica, this is my model, which I then carry to the studio for my group to understand the idea. They pass through the weeks, and you see that song you hear a few times; in contrast, the other, you wake up and you go running to put the model. The hear hundred times. And you think: “Wow great song, I love it.” If you put the chicken meat, is the test of the cotton.
In a poem mentions Picasso. It gives you the feeling that you intend to live with the same illusion to the end.
Yes, yes. It is not a game by to appear, is that I’m crazy for making records. My new songs I will be clearing roads, “I fix the day”, as I say. See now, go stick, the confinement, the suffering of the people. I begin to write, to compose, to paint, to find a stash of happiness that will serve to others. I follow the trail of the Dylan of the early records, that are magical. Or my dear Creedence. I’m going to the greengrocer and the girl I text. I’m not planning on doing the work of my life. I’m going on skates. If my father could see me, holy man. “You’re a bum, you won’t get nothing in life”. What is typical, I wanted him very well, he was a wonderful person. But wanted to know nothing of their worries in the blast furnaces.
