I respect. A guy deserves it –Luis Aguilé (Buenos Aires, 1939-Madrid, 2009)– capable of composing and singing without blushing Nobody takes my vacations in Castellón from me. Someone who was a finalist for the Planeta novel prize and who, being a musical idol in Cuba, met not once but twice with Che Guevara. It is possible that being both Argentines, the guerrilla turned a blind eye and let good Luis go with some of his earnings. Located in Spain since 1962. He was immensely famous for his humorous and opportunistic compositions served by a touch as Argentine as French, he looks like a seller in the El Corte Inglés section of large sizes and those crazy ties that would have left Juana Dolores ojiplática. They are his songs: When I left Cuba.
Among other achievements of Luis Aguilé is that of having sung what is considered the first song of the summer: Juanita Banana. As in all the milestones of humanity, there is no unanimity in this regard, since there are those who give this distinction to Los Bravos with any of their hits from that 1966: La moto and Black is black. The temptation of living 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 Yolanda Díaz in the majority and does not miss the heifer in the new edition of Gran Prix ??. For all these reasons, Juanita Banana is more us than any other modernity.
Juanita Banana is a composition taken from Mexican folklore composed by Tash Howard and Hurray Kenton, which had a chorus taken from Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, specifically the aria “Caro Nome” (act 1, scene 2 ). Do not frown, Madonna did the same with ABBA for her Hung up and we all thought it was great.
The theme was premiered by a ridiculous group called The Peels, and the staging of its translation into French, by the generally respectable Henry Salvador, was even more ridiculous. It is more than likely that Aguilé’s version drank from the latter. The Spanish-Argentinean managed to give some dignity to a song set in a banana plantation (in perspective and in comparison, Castellón, that banana location, must have seemed simple to Aguilé) without there being much reason for it either.
The anecdote is simple but only at first glance. We are on the Mexican border. A father and a daughter. Confused and punishable sexual tension and perhaps hence the subliminal nature of the title (the eighties version of The Inhumans followed that path). a banana plantation The father is the owner, the daughter, the worker who has a dream: to become an opera singer. For this and for that reason, she spends the day singing the same aria over and over again. The father 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 banana plantation. Not only to be a singer, but to put land in the middle with her father, which shows that the composers had carefully read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published only eleven years earlier, since similarities between the persecution of the father and Humbert Humbert’s.
The girl takes refuge in the city and, of course, triumphs in the world of opera with the blessed Verdian aria. The father, who was going for the girl to make her return to the plantation, whether for work, parent-child or lascivious reasons, realizes that the money is not among the bananas but in the world of entertainment and, quickly, as he did for those On the same dates, John Lennon’s father (who already had his one: he abandoned him as a child, and when he was older, he took advantage of his fame to record a record), grabbed a guitar and launched into music… with the same aria that the daughter. The theme is resolved with a duet of both voices, abusive father and helpless daughter. It is easy to see their later influence in duos like Romina and Albano or Enrique and Ana.
The truth is that Luis Aguilé billed a catchy, nice and insipid song for that summer of 1966 if you are not an expert in Freud or simply a bad thinker. With Juanita Banana he found a humorous and direct mold that would serve him for future such popular songs like this one, served by a singer who was likeable, 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 to ban his drunken, kooky vision of San Fermín: Let’s go to Pamplona.
