Death took care of announcing the news to me with an obituary. His name was Alejandro Reyes and lately we have been communicating here on the Internet. I owe him musical evenings whose memory will accompany me to my remains. As a model, let’s take the night Chet Baker arrived at the concert shivering, with the drooping smile and the itchy ankles that drug addicts feel when they miss. For reasons that no longer matter today, I found myself in a taxi with the American trumpeter, heading towards one of those streets where pale women smoke heroin in silver paper.
Chet Baker was eager to find a peak that would calm him down. I remember it well. It was in a portal behind the Gran Vía; a few tickets collected in advance and a few stairs going down to hell. During these years, I traveled through the worst places in Madrid, among men and women for whom life was worth as much as your pocket. “You saved the concert,” Alejandro Reyes told me when he saw me appear in the dressing room with Chet Baker ready to go on stage. I did little or nothing, that’s the truth. In any case, this is the perversity of the heroine when it is presented well cut. You can imagine the rest, although reality never supports all the imagination when it comes to Chet Baker of Colegio Mayor San Juan Evangelista, Johnnyas fans called it.
It was March 11, 1988. Chet Baker was accompanied by Marc Johnson and Philip Catherine, double bass and guitar. Why else, when Chet began to sing and lost his gaze in the brilliance of his trumpet, he did so by overcoming the remorse that assailed his bruised memory, always entangled in dark paths, where silence is agreed in advance. The interpretation that was marked My funny Valentine’s Day will always accompany me. This is how I met Chet Baker, on his way to death, during one of his last concerts before ending up lying in a pool of blood in the pale light of the Amsterdam night. For this concert, and for those that followed, I owe my life to Alejandro Reyes; Without forgetting the concert that started it all for me with the group Gwendal and their legendary recording in Johnny; country music and joints. I remember the queue going around; also the manes, the beards and the smoke of jachis which contained a whole period scene.
I dare to imagine a parallel universe where all the concerts I have experienced Johnny with Alejandro Reyes in his armchair, where the column, smoking a veguero, savors the simplicity of things well done; still indebted for a life that has just left him.
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