Três trópicos da tropicália

caetano and tanks

Caetano usually sleeps till 2pm. So arresting him before midday and waking him up was a little indelicate.

They could say that in military barracks one sleeps early. That is if anyone sleeps their first night in prison, with that emptiness in your head, (and that crushing silence).

One day I saw two men holding hands in the middle of Avenida Paulista (São Paulo’s main boulevard) on a really hot day. One was a policeman, the other his prisoner. I looked, and thought of an absurd verse to begin a song:

“Toda ditadura é sexual” (“Every dictatorship is sexual”).

… After all, the big guys in those days were Caetano and the military: one because of his charm, the others through brute force. And Caetano was so indifferent! (Geraldo) Vandré, for example, wasn’t. Vandré still wrote verses to them and in his songs even spoke of “soldados armados ou não” (“soldiers armed or not”), of barracks and ideas, of the motherland. But Caetano, no way! He was so indifferent it hurt! He never even protested in favor of the environment (or against the environment, whatever, as long as he did something!). No, he only wrote about swimming pools, margarine, Brigitte Bardot’s legs… so alienated!

What indifference! How ungrateful he seemed to me! Curiously, Vandré was never arrested. I’ll repeat that, in case you think it’s a printing error: Vandré was never arrested.