CHAPTER III


interviewed by
Luiz Roberto Oliveira

English translation: Jerry Lombardi
photos: Eduardo Pires Ferreira





Let me tell you

CB: Sometimes Tom would get irritated about certain things, and one time he put the kabosh on one of my lyrics.
LR: Which one?
CB: I don't remember which tune it was, it was a long time ago, I'd started to write the lyrics and he started making jokes with it (laughs), and I just lost (my willingness to do it). Afterwards I even used the lyrics in one of my own compositions. It went like this: "Quem vem lá ? Que horas são ? É você ? É o ladrão ?" ("Who's that coming? What's the time? Is it you? Is it a thief?") And instead he sang it like this: "É o sapatão?..." ("Is it a lesbian?") (laughs). Then he opened up this big notebook he had, taking my half-finished lyrics, and started to write new lyrics with his own words in huge letters. And I said, "Hey, Tom???!!!" It was actually pretty funny... Because we never fought, but sometimes it reached that point...
LR: Kind of tense?
CB: Yeah...
LR: Without intending to, maybe he was making fun of you a little bit with this business about "Monday", "o sapatão", and so on - did it hurt you at all?
CB: No, no, it didn't hurt, because I was sure about what I wanted. If it had been back in the days of "Retrato em Branco e Preto" then yes, but afterwards no, I argued with him over the lyrics every step of the way, and by then I no longer treated Tom with any kind of formality or reserve, and I knew he had a side of him that was very critical, that wanted to interfere in the process of writing the lyrics. That's when I'd say: "Tom, write the words yourself; you're your own best lyricist".
Often, a lot of tunes he gave me I didn't write anything at all for them, not because I didn't want to or didn't like them - sometimes I just couldn't figure it out, and later he would write beautiful lyrics himself. "Luiza" is one that he'd given me to write lyrics for. "Wave" was another.
LR: How was it with "Wave"? They say you did the "Vou te contar" part.
CB: Exactly, "Vou te contar" ("Let me tell you") and nothing more than that...
LR: So the phrase "Vou te contar" came from your pen? (laughter).
CB: It's funny, I remember when he showed me "Wave" and I took a long time with the lyrics, nothing was coming to me except that phrase "vou te contar", and he said to me: "For Chrissake, Chico, don't you want to be rich?" (laughter) He was already figuring "Wave" would be one of his most frequently performed compositions, he already felt like it was going to be a success.


Playing soccer

And so, to sum up, it turned out to be a funny story. (Astor) Piazzola one time sent me a composition to do the lyrics for him, a gorgeous piece, in 1970-something. I never did it. And then one time he came to Brazil to do a TV appearance, on that show I had with Caetano. So when he showed up, he was going to spend a week rehearsing and I remembered that tune he'd sent me and I said to him: "O, Piazzola, let me try to do those lyrics, the tune is so beautiful, it'll be great for us to sing it on the show." A previously unreleased tune and all that. He told me he couldn't remember what I was talking about, so I found the cassette somewhere and taught him the tune, he got the hang of it, did the arrangement and all the rest. A week later, on the day of the taping, I still hadn't been able to figure out what kind of lyrics to give it - either you get or you don't, you know?
LR: It just wouldn't come out...
CB: I remember during the rehearsal he found out I hadn't done any lyrics for it and he became furious, poor guy, he just didn't understand...
LR: He thought you just hadn't bothered?
CB: They said to him: "Chico'll be here later on, but right now he's playing soccer". Heck, I wasn't gonna write any lyrics if I couldn't play soccer, I was playing soccer because I always play soccer... When I showed up at the studio Tom was there trying to get Piazzola to calm down, the guy was practically having a nervous breakdown: "That's the way Chico is, he keeps playing soccer all the time" (laughter). So it was only because it came from Tom, him talking like that, that Piazzola accepted the explanation.


Sabiá and Ligia
LR: And how about "Sabiá ? Are the lyrics entirely yours?
CB: The lyrics are mine.
LR: I heard someone say that when you were doing the music, you were traveling and Tom finished the last verses.
CB: No, the story happened this way: I did my lyrics, I finished them, and then when I went traveling, or a little before that, Tom felt like he had to add something more, and I either didn't have time to work on it or else I was already traveling or I didn't agree to make the changes, at any rate I didn't add any new lyrics - and as far as I was concerned that was it. When I finished the lyrics he thought there was something missing because the tune repeats some more, he felt like it was needing some more words and I thought it didn't. So he went and wrote them without my knowledge while I was away, a little piece of lyrics which later disappeared.

LR: Remember what they were?
CB: "Que a nova vida já vai chegar", ("That a new life will come along soon"), something like that; "que a solidão vai se acabar" ("that this loneliness will end"), do you remember that?
LR: I'd forgotten, but it comes back to me now that you mention it.
CB: He added it later; I didn't like that.
LR: There was a recording that included those verses.
CB: Yes, it was recorded, he decided to do it with that part that he'd written but afterwards he changed his mind, because later he must've sung that song a thousand times and he never again sang that part of it.
LR: Exactly...
CB: I said nothing more to him, left it at that, y'know?... we hadn't agreed.

Ligia

LR: Chico, what was the story with "Ligia", because there are two versions, one with the line "olhos morenos" ("dark brown eyes"), and another with "olhos castanhos" ("light brown eyes")...
CB: "Olhos morenos." But "Ligia" happened like this....
LR: Did you do one of those versions?
CB: "Ligia" happened like this: the lyrics are by Tom. I didn't sign my name to it as a co-authored work - the fact is, he handed me the lyrics already well advanced and I just added the final touches, or he asked me to redo something and I just fiddled with the lyrics a little. But at least half the words are his, and in that period I was having a lot of problems with the government censorship so I made a record with only material by other composers. Caetano wrote one for me, Gilberto Gil wrote one for me, and I recorded one of my own compositions under the pseudonym of Julinho da Adelaide, and I recorded "Ligia" with only Tom's name on it.
LR: I get it.
CB: And Tom said to me: "No, you're the partner", and so on and so forth. First, because the lyrics had needed to be fixed up somewhat, and later because of the technical reason that I hadn't wanted my name on any of the tunes on that record, and because it was a question of giving credit where credit is due, later on Tom let it be known: "Chico's fingerprints are on these lyrics". But I never signed my name to them. And it looked like they were mine anyway, because I was the first person to record them, on that album called "Sinal fechado" ("Red Light").
LR: What changes did you make?
CB: The beginning is all by Tom, the nice part... "Eu nunca sonhei com você, nunca fui ao cinema, não gosto de samba, não vou a Ipanema, não gosto de chuva, nem gosto de sol" ("I've never dreamed about you, never been to the movies, I don't like the samba, don't go to Ipanema, don't like the rain, don't like the sun") ... that's all Tom. One part I definitely did: "E quando eu lhe telefonei,...foi engano, seu nome eu não sei..." ("And when I called you up,...it was just a wrong number, I don't even know your name...") I had a hand in that part. But when he gave me the lyrics they were already well on their way.


Bate boca (Argument)

In the case of "Bate boca" ("Argument"), the unreleased composition, to this day I don't know what to do, because I'll feel the lack of Tom butting in when I write the lyrics, you know?... Paulinho (Jobim) asked me: "Aren't you going to do 'Bate boca'?", and so on... When Tom gave me the cassette of it, the lyrics were almost finished. I said: "Tom, do them yourself..." And he said: "No, you have to finish them, you have to fix them up somehow".
LR: So Tom had already done a preliminary version of those lyrics?
CB: He had, in one of those notebooks he used to write in, and every time he sang he would say something: (humming) "Você não quiz, você não diz, você não é..." I remember him singing various pieces of lyrics and I said: "Tom, just put them together... ask somebody to organize the lyrics for you, they're all ready..." And he kept bugging me to be the one who finished them, but I didn't do anything to them. It's funny... because with Tom I had this kind of difficulty I never had with any other writing partner, but today, with him not here...
LR: You miss it.
CB: Let me tell you, for a guy to stick his nose in my busines like that, to mess with my lyrics, turn down the things I wrote, to... he did these things because he was nuts - I remember "Sabiá", the controversy about using the feminine article with the masculine noun...
LR: "Uma sabiá"...
CB: He used to say: "It's good like that, 'uma sabiá', because it's like the language of a hunter... a hunter doesn't talk about 'um sabiá', he says 'uma sabiá', 'uma gambá' "... and then later he recorded "O meu sabiá" (with the article of the correct gender). (laughter) He used to sing: "Minha sabiá... o meu sabiá..." Tom was very funny that way; I used to die laughing around him. Maybe when this is written down it looks like we were fighting, but it was impossible to fight with him because I always found his interference very funny... it was just petulance on his part, which was sort of infantile, and to me it was amusing to see this big, important guy getting worked up about "Mandei subir meu piano na mangueira"... (laughter)... because I knew that it was just orneriness, a fit of pique, and it was funny, that he was that way. Back in the days of "Retrato em branco e preto", there was still that formality between us, and if he'd said anything I'd be devastated - and maybe he noticed this and consequently said nothing, he accepted me as I was... But later on there was always an intimacy, and a certain conflict. Maybe that's why Vinicius stopped...
LR: Vinicius let the hot potato fall in your lap (laughter).
CB: He passed the buck to me... maybe that was it...

I hate music !
Tom was really interested in writing and literature. He used to say: "I'm a man of letters...'I hate music!'"
LR: He used to say that in English?
CB: He liked to say that. It was hard to talk about music with Tom... he'd talk about anything else except music.
LR: I never got him to talk about music for more than ten minutes at a time.
CB: Exactly, he didn't like to talk about music... I never saw him talk about chords, for example; and he never talked about politics.
LR: He detested politics...
CB: Hated it. He adored literature - he could recite entire passages from Guimarães Rosa, poems by Drummond, T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", entire texts that he knew by heart. So he was strongly connected to the literary aspect of his songs. 

In the next installment:
Chico tries to bring Tom back
for one final collaboration.

Home Page em portuguêsHome Page in English
Top of Page