respect It deserves a man – Luis Aguilé (Buenos Aires, 1939-Madrid, 2009) – able to compose and sing without being ashamed Nadie me quita mis vacaciones en Castellón. Someone who was a finalist for the Planet of the Novel award and who, being a musical idol in Cuba, interviewed Che Guevara not once, but twice. It’s possible that hearing the two Argentines, the guerrilla turned a blind eye and let Luis’ good man walk away with some of his earnings. Established in Spain since 1962. He was immensely famous for his humorous and opportunistic compositions served with an Argentinian and French accent, El Corte Inglés salesman’s pint in the plus size section and those crazy ties that would have left Juana Dolores in awe. They are his songs: Cuando salí de Cuba, El Frescales, Es una lata el trabajar, La vida pasa felizmente or Camarero, champagne.
Among other important events of Luis Aguilé, he sang what is considered the first song of the summer: Juanita Banana. As with all human milestones, there is no unanimity on the subject, as there are people who give this distinction to Los Bravos with any of their hits from that 1966: La moto and Black is black. The temptation to live in a country where the song of the summer is Black is black is great, but it hides the same fantasy of believing that Spain votes for Yolanda Díaz en masse and does not miss the bull in the new edition of the Grand Prix. For all this, Juanita Banana is more us than any modern contribution.
Juanita Banana is a composition taken from Mexican folklore composed by Tash Howard and Hurray Kenton, which has a refrain taken from none other than Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, specifically, from the aria “Caro Nome” (act 1, scene 2 ). Don’t scrunch up your nose, Madonna did the same with ABBA for her Hung up and we all thought it was great.
The song was premiered by a ridiculous group called The Peels, and the staging of its French translation by the generally respectable Henry Salvador was even more ridiculous. It is more than likely that Aguilé’s version had influences from the latter. The Spanish-Argentine managed to give a little dignity to a song set in a banana plantation (in perspective and comparison, that of Castelló, that banana location, had seemed simple to Aguilé) although there is also not much reason to to this
The anecdote is simple, but only at first glance. We are at the Mexican border. A father and a daughter. Confused and punishable sexual tension and perhaps hence the subliminal part of the title (this is the way the eighties version of Los Inhumanos went). A banana plantation. The father is the owner, the daughter, the pencaire who has a dream: to become an opera singer. For this reason, the day is spent singing the same aria over and over again. Dad can’t stand it. Neither the song nor the daughter’s dreams of greatness. So she, fed up and without expectations, runs away from the plantation. Not just to be a singer, but to get away from her father, which shows that the composers had carefully read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published only eleven years earlier, as there are clearly similarities between the father’s pursuit and the by Humbert Humbert.
The girl takes refuge in the city and, of course, succeeds in the world of opera with Verdi’s happy aria. The father, who was after her to bring her back to the plantation, whether for work, paternalistic or lascivious reasons, realizes that the money is not among the bananas, but in show business, and quickly as John Lennon’s father did at the same time (who was also hairy: he abandoned him as a child, and when he grew up, he took advantage of his fame to record an album), picked up a guitar and started in the world of music… with the same aria that the daughter sang. The issue is resolved with a duet of the two voices, father taken advantage of and daughter helpless. It is easy to see its later influence in duos such as Romina and Albano or Enrique and Ana.
The truth is that Luis Aguilé created a catchy song, cute and bland if you’re not an expert on Freud or just a bad thinker, for that summer of 1966. He found in Juanita Banana a humorous and direct mold that would serve him for future songs as popular as this one, served by a singer who was cute, always on the verge of parody, unfairly forgetting that he was one of the first to sing rock’n’roll in Spanish and got the Pamplona City Council forbid him from his infidel and drunken vision of San Fermín: Vamos a Pamplona.
