2023-08-16 13:45:00
For José Alfredo “Pollo” Fuentes, going out into the street was quite an experience. Straight, he could not walk calmly. This is what happened to him one lost afternoon in the early seventies, when he was leaving Café Jamaica, between Huérfanos and Estado. Usually, when he had to do some paperwork, he tried to get out as fast as he could to avoid the harassment of the fans. But, almost by chance, he came across another key name in the culture of the moment; the singer-songwriter and theater director, Víctor Jara.
“I was trying to hide because I couldn’t go out into the street in peace and I went quickly to look for my car, but when they came out of the cafe they took me by the shoulder and greeted me. It was Víctor Jara with his smile. He was very nice and cordial to me, ”recalls the popular“ Chicken ”in a chat with the journalist Freddy Stock for the book 5 Minutes: the eternal life of Víctor Jara, recently published and now available in stores in the field.
Always curious, Jara wanted to talk with the singer and later television man. “He was very interested in knowing how he handled this fame thing and how he did it to walk on the street. Then we met at baby football matches organized by Ritmo magazine, I was on a team with Wildo, Buddy Richard, and other New Wave singers, and he played with the Quila, he was very fast and skillful”.
In those years, Jara paid attention to the phenomenon of youth singers. Unlike his fellow militants, who viewed the most popular and massive artists with a certain disdain, and even more so Anglo-Saxon phenomena like The Beatles (considered “foreigners”), the man from El Cigarrito had noticed the potential of music to reach the masses. Somehow that led him to opt to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter over that of theater director in which he had excelled since the second third of the sixties.
For this reason, Jara was linked to emerging groups. Thus, he was an admirer of Los Blops, whom he not only invited to participate in his album El derecho de vivir en Paz, but also managed them personally (and with some discussion through) the recording of their first album with the Dicap label, of the Communist Youth, despite the label’s deep distrust of the group, whom they considered hippies with no political commitment.
That crossing with Los Blops was not accidental. After learning first-hand about the experience of young people from California and London, he realized that even without communist affiliation, there was a progressive youth with yearnings for social change.
“He understood that in music was the power of popular communication -explains Freddy Stock to Cult-. He had an admiration for the popular, for phenomena like Pollo Fuentes that could serve for progressive ideas. With his great friend Gladys Marín they had this idea of looking beyond alliances, looking at progressivism, getting closer to the DC progressivism that he saw in young people. A much broader concept than was dreamed of at that time”.
Understanding the scope of rock and popular music, Jara began to have differences with the direction that Dicap was taking. So he decided to start his own project. An idea that he began to outline with Víctor Caro, manager of the record label and friend of the artist. “The project was to create a popular record label, but not folkloric,” Caro details in a testimony collected in Stock’s book. , but they were not grassroots militants (…) the difference (with Dicap) was that we were going to work, let’s say, with the ethics that we had formed in Dicap, but with a progressive spirit”.
“Víctor Jara wanted to make an independent production company that went beyond partisan -says Stock- He wanted to show off these youthful phenomena like Marcelo, who may not be far from the left, in fact over time it was seen that El Pollo Fuentes ended up in acts of the dictatorship. But they were youth vehicles”.
In the same text, Caro recalls how she suggested Marcelo Hernández, the future Tío Marcelo of the children’s program Cachureos, at that time a youth singer who had already participated in the Viña Festival and had managed to impose the hit Mundo Felíz, in 1969. There was also dabbled in soap operas. “When I suggested, for example, to Marcelo that he participate in Víctor Jara’s project, he was super happy: ‘Huevón, oh, how wonderful,’ he said.”
Determined, Jara decided to probe Marcelo. The singer and television face details in the same book an occasion when after leaving “an office located in Alameda, I ran into Víctor Jara all dressed in black, who greeted me affectionately. I don’t know if it was that time or another because at that time we had many work meetings for records and presentations… It’s a pity that (the project) didn’t come to fruition”.
For his part, when José Alfredo Fuentes was consulted by Stock about the project, he had rather vague memories. “I am really surprised by what you tell me about the label, I would have been happy to sing with him or participate in something like that. I still have a lot of admiration and respect for him.”
Furthermore, Víctor Jara was working on the installation of a show production company, the National Show Organization (ONAE), something like what commercial production companies do today that have a booking of artists and also put on their own shows. “We even already had the support of the religious office of the presidency, we had all these issues,” Caro details. Víctor performed in some ONAE shows which, in practice, was what would be known today as a representation company with commercial recitals”.
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