When Seu Alejandro played, men kissed each other and women ovulated. Brasil is the land of the boy from nowhere, the footballer from the favela, the musician from the mines, the sugarcane cutter from the sertão. Milton Nascimento was a Minas Gerais boy. The late great Chico Science, father of Mangue, was from Olinda. It’s part of our national mythology: in this great nation anyone can rise to anything from anywhere. Cane cutters can become presidents. It’s also part of our national mythology that, like Chico Science, like Seu Alejandro, they should die young. There’s a pure beauty in imagining what they never achieved. The ghost samba can never disappoint you.
He went back for the tapes. He should never have gone back for the tapes. But he was a musician. It would have been like leaving a child in that burning studio. They were the masters for his new collection, the long-awaited second album that would crown the achievement of Boy on the Corner. All second albums are difficult—that’s music—but some are more difficult than others. Seu Alejandro threw out a batch of songs because he wasn’t happy with them. He was going to use Paulistano punk band, then he wasn’t. He was going to duet with LoveFoxxx, then he wasn’t. It was going to be him, alone, with his guitar and a drummer, the way I first heard him in that club in Lapa. Then it wasn’t. His record company put out press releases that it was coming out in two weeks time; that would slip. Months, a season, a year. Four years. That would be the end of a career for anyone less angelically gifted than Seu Alejandro. It merely served to increase the appetite. Then word came that he was going back into the studio. The songs were right. The musicians were right. The arrangements were right. The soul was right and the ideas were running through him like lightning. We’d heard it before. But of course the producer wasn’t right and the studio wasn’t right, so he was going home, back up into Vila Canoas to the little bedroom studio where he produced the first collection of three songs for the MySpace site. And that was where on April 11, 2012, Wilson Severino de Araujo, known as Seu Alejandro, died in a stupid studio fire trying to save the masters of his second album. Pretty Petty Thieves joined the list of legendary albums-that-never-were.
It’s five years since Seu Alejandro died and in that time he has grown from cult to myth to legend. Five years it’s taken me to track down those masters, from legend back through myth to a scorched hard drive. I’m at a bar in Laranjeiras. You wouldn’t know it, you’ve never even heard of it; if you were to come here you would think it dazingly trendy but the moment has already moved on from it. It’s my job to know such things. The people who know all know me as Cento-réis: hundred-réal Man. The joke goes that that’s the amount of money I’ll spend in one session on music. You’d know me better as Rubem de Castro. Columnist reviewer commentator blogger pundit radio-wit and professional idler: the last of the Real Cariocas. All those little things a man must do not to be seen to be trying too hard. If you met me you’d hate me. I’m the guy on the music forums with so much cooler recommendations than yours. At a party I’ll sneer at the host’s unforgivably populist playlist and tell you who you should be listening to now and where to find them. I might even slip on my own podcast and you’ll say, Who are these guys? While you’re jabbering away on your social networking sites about have you heard Tita Maria and Duane Duarte and Bonde do Role? I’ve already moved on to the next thing after the next thing. I could take you to the clubs and the bars and the sound systems but once I’d taken you, that would be the end of it, you know? For four decades I’ve surfed the sea of music that breaks around the rocks of this most lovely of cities. It’s tiring and relentless and it’s no way for a middle-aged man to live, but the moment you lose the wave, you go under.
Because I’m a middle-aged man still living on teenage overhang, when I hear the word “masters” I expect tape. I expect digibeta, DAT; the romantic part of me hopes for reels. The masters for Pretty Petty Thieves are on a hard drive the size of a cigarette packet. They sit on the table next to Guinle’s real packet of Hollywood Blues. Some bright-eyed singer-songwriter is picking out her heart-fluff to the fourths and fifths on the little stage. I’ve heard a thousand heartbreaks just like hers. I move my beer away from the drive. It’s been through fire and deep lost time but I’m terrified of spilling Antarctica over it.
“Can I hear some?”
“It’s a hard drive.” When Guinle left the police, like most of the cops who paid enough to be safe up in the favelas, he set up a private detective agency. His specialism was kidnappings: footballers’ mothers and pets. Now he runs a successful stable of gumshoes so he no longer has to hack security cameras or go through anyone’s garbage with chopsticks and only tackles those cases that interest him. I know him from the days when the New Bossa swept through the city. There’s an old musicians’ gaydar: we recognised each immediately at our tables on opposing sides of the dark, noisy club. It’s the set of the body, the sit and slight lean, the tilt of the head that says that whatever else you are hearing, you are always listening to the music.
I say, “I could be buying someone’s collection of boy-porn.”
Guinle holds out his phone. A set of white earbuds is plugged into it.
“Do you want to listen to it?”
“Have you listened to it?” Panic snatches sudden and cold at my heart. I can’t bear it that Guinle could have listened to the masters before me. It makes it dirty, used. It’s almost a sex thing, like someone else’s girlfriend after an indecently short interval.
“Not a note. What do you take me for? I just copied it because I knew you’d ask me that.”
“Promise me you won’t…” The need in my voice is ridiculous. Have some dignity man.
“I’ll give you until tomorrow morning. Once you’ve remembered that other little matter.”
I slide the envelope of cash across the table. It’s a big envelope, A4, too full to seal down the flap. There’s a pheromone of notes, of ink and hands and trade. Guinle scoops it into his briefcase. He’s too much a carioca to count the notes and too much a pro to query his clients’ cash calls.
“I make no representations about the state of the contents. You asked me to get the masters, I got them.”
“I must ask you how you did that sometime,” I say but I can hear my voice go off the moment, the way you hear it when a singer loses a cover of a song he doesn’t really understand or believe in. Just words. Because I have it. I have the lost Pretty Petty Thieves. In that slightly blackened titanium box is the last musical testament of Seu Alejandro. The world thought it was lost, but I found it and now it sits in the palm of my hand. I see that hand shake.
“Yes, you really must,” says Guinle.
I have a ritual. Everyone has a ritual. I know a great great singer who can only face an audience if he’s masturbated. You’d know him too. He’s a household name. There are footballers who have to put on one boot first, or never wear two the same colour, or carry a picture of the Pope or Our Lady next to their hearts. Truckers bless their rigs, coders bless their keyboards, policemen bless their guns. And then there is sex. There is always sex. Some have times and places and positions; some have foreplay that’s scripted and rehearsed as a high mass. Some cannot achieve anything with the lights on. For some it’s clothing: something they have to wear, or have the other wear, without which they cannot be remotely aroused.
I practice my ritual in the best room in the apartment. It’s not the biggest or the best aired or the quietest but it has a breathtaking view out over Botafogo and Guanabara to the hills of Niteroi beyond. Out of the right-hand window are Leme Morro and the Sugarloaf. In the evening, in the sudden lilac twilight when the lights come like a necklace around the shoulders of the moros, it is heartbreakingly beautiful. Here’s what I keep in this room. A chair of course; an old, deep leather armchair with the springs going so I can sag into it. A beer fridge. A small side table for the beer and the remote. The sound system, in the holy corner where the two views meet. This is my listening room. This is my church. I take my place in the chair. I’ve had it positioned scientifically to get the best surround sound separation. My cleaner is under orders never to move it on pain of instant dismissal. I settle my fat ass deep into the seat. It’s important to get comfortable. I’m going to be there for a while. I take one Antarctica from the fridge and pop the can. Rio spreads like wings on either side of me. I love her so hard it hurts. Then I lift the remote control and start Seu Alejandro’s Pretty Petty Thieves.