SINCE BLACK DOG

I was somewhere between 8 and 9 years old when I saw a guy on my black-and-white TV set, singing in English, squeezing a giant tube of toothpaste with his legs. The guy had make-up in his eyes. The dye spread, almost hiding his eyes, just like the eye socks in a skull. Later, in another song, the same guy showed up with a gigantic snake around his neck. That happened in 1974, and it was the very first time that distorted notes produced by the strings of an electric guitar made sense to my neurons.

I started paying attention to the music on the TV, to my sisters’ favorite songs, and to the ones I heard occasionally on the streets. Whenever there was the sound of a guitar, my attention doubled. Then one day, while riding in the car of my brother’s friend, I heard Jimmy Page’s guitar. The song was “Black Dog”, and he asked, as he lowered the volume of the tape player:

"Where’s your brother?"

"He went out with that brunette who was talking with you"

He shook his head and smiled.

"Are you doin' anything?"

"Nope"

"Come up, let's go for a ride"

"What kind of music is this?"

"This is Rock! Rock'n'roll!"

And that night, driving around on the streets of the deserted city, I listened to Led Zeppelin for the first time. I didn’t know the name of the song and only kept the “tanana-nana-nam” in my mind, to tell a friend of mine who might know what I was talking about. And yes, he knew. His brother’s record collection was huge. It is, indeed, the biggest one I have ever put my eyes at. Vinyl and CD.

"If you liked the second song on side A, you’ll get crazy about the fourth one."

He was talking about “Stairway to Heaven”. But the funny thing about all of this, our English skills were horrible. While in my mind, “Black Dog” was connected to the devil — a feeling brought by the permanent terror impinged on me by having watched “The Exorcist” twice in the theater — “Stairway to Heaven” meant forgiveness. Then came other juvenile nonsense, of course. “Smoke on the Water” talked about smoking pot in a bathtub. From there it was all downhill…

In 1983, I went to a KISS concert at the Morumbi stadium. Ituzaingo, the unforgettable big-bus from the paulistan dawn that saved us and took us from a walking-distance home, to the Tatuape neighborhood. Not mine, as I haven’t turned into a paulistan yet. But with the guys from the Sao Bernardo street, I got to know Iron Maiden and AC/DC. My brother enjoyed Queen and asked me to record cassette tapes for him.

It was ingenious to work the songs to “fit” in the tape. Other concerts came, I started to buy records, to learn English better, to read more about everything I was interested in. Now, I am about to host a local radio show, talking about what I have heard and read on rock’n’roll through all that time.