Used-Bin Bargains: Wilson Simonal

Wilson Simonal - Destino E Destino De Severino Nonô Na Cidade De São Sebastião Do Rio De Janeiro (Oh Yeah!) (Odeon 1970)

Wilson Simonal – Simona / Odeon

My introduction to Wilson Simonal came with my first exploration into the amazing hip-hop, jazz, funk and soul magazine, Wax Poetics (of which I now read like a bible). Featured about three-fourths way through issue number eight, Greg Casseus gives an exhaustive account of the tumultuous career of Simonal and in turn introduces one of South America’s biggest fallen pop stars to an entirely new audience. (This is probably the best time to point out that the majority of the information I am about to divulge was pulled from that article, “The Saga of Wilson Simonal” –Greg Casseus, Wax Poetics, Issue Number Eight, Spring 2004, as well as the Allmusic.com entry, and you are best suited to read the entire story from the people doing the all-important legwork). It is downright amazing that a performer as gigantically popular as Simonal was in Brazil and South America as a whole in the 60s is still relatively unknown to the rest of the world. It just goes to show you the monolithic influence of the press, who condemned Simonal in the early 70s for supposedly acting as an informant for the infamous Department of Order and Social Protection/Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS) and the destructive right-wing military coup that would reign over Brazil from 1964 to 1984. During his 40-year musical career, which stretches all the way to his death in June of 2000, Simonal went from being Brazil’s biggest Black entertainer, rivaling Pelé at the peak of his popularity, to an ignored outcast in the very same country. It is a story that screams for a drama-filled biopic… oh! and there is some amazing music involved as well. Since we like to concentrate on a particular album with this column, I am going to highlight 1970’s Simona, not only because it features Simonal at a creative crossroads of style and at nearly the peak of his popularity, but also (mostly) because it’s the album I cheerily stumbled across in the used section of Reckless Records last week.

The Rio de Janeiro-born Wilson Simonal De Castro began his musical career following a stint in the army in the late 50s as a personal assistant to Carlos Imperial, a writer, talent scout, booking agent and maybe the first man in Brazil to take rock-and-roll seriously. The time spent with Imperial was schooling in all things media and entertainment, from how to handle critics to performing in any style thrown at him. He developed a pop star’s grasp on how to sway a crowd and a silky smooth, genre-transcending baritone that rarely was caught off-key. He debuted on wax with 1962’s A Nova Dimesão do Samba and signed to Odeon Records where he would stay for the next decade until controversy forced him to sign with rival label Philips. Throughout the 60s, Simonal would take on every popular style in vogue and mix and mesh them into completely new genres at will. His debut album, a commercial misstep, featured arrangements in the vein of American R&B and doo wop but with traditional samba rhythms. 1963’s Tem Algo Mais, on the other hand, found a comfortable blend of bossa nova, jazz and orchestral pop that established Simonal as a musical force. For the rest of the decade, he continually paved the way for hip new sounds by experimenting with combinations of styles and enlisting young, aspiring songwriters including the whose who of Tropicália (who would later rally against him and even later retake his side) including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Geraldo Vandré.

By 1966, the military coup had taken over the Brazilian government and the popular music scene underwent significant stylistic changes. Bossa Nova was being ousted by a superficial form of Beatles-inspired pop/rock aimed at teenagers known as “iê- iê- iê” and Simonal was experimenting with a new collage-happy sound known as pilantragem or “piracy.” With his excellent boogaloo-inspired soul-jazz-samba backing trio, Som Três, he basically pulled source material from wherever he found inspiration and utilized it in his music. This stylistic philosophy (not too far from sampling really) elevated Simonal’s career to pop star status and along with hugely selling records, he hosted his own weekly TV variety show. At what was probably the apex of his career, ’66-’68, he issued a series of albums called Alegria! Alegria! which produced a great amount of popular singles in Brazil as well as being the beginnings of world-wide recognition. Simultaneously, there was exponentially growing tension between the overthrown Brazilian government and the bubbling university counterculture. The military leaders were shouting “Brazil: Love It or Leave It” completely skewing all views of patriotism while the burgeoning leftist and Tropicália movements (who ironically where the most patriotic of the bunch) were demanding people and especially pop stars to choose sides. Simonal was stuck in the middle; he was a rich, widely known Black man who really had no interest in politics or supporting the military regime which pissed off the coup as much as the young left-wingers who either considered you “one of us” or “one of them.”

This about brings us to 1970 and the release of Simona. Simonal had just outperformed global star Sergio Mendes and the Brasil ’66 in front of tens of thousands of people and started his own production and management company Simonal Produções Ltda. to try an expand his growing media empire. His backing band, Som Três, were making a name of their own with the albums he produced, his songs were being made into themes for the national soccer team who won their third-straight World Cup in Mexico 1970, and funk was beginning to grab a hold of Brazil as well as the rest of the world. Simona, his third-to-last for Odeon, features Simonal in a number of masks including party-starter, balladeer and pop star. His shape-changing, silky-smooth baritone jumps from classic Brazilian soul to almost Rat Pack-like crooning with equal ferocity. With Som Três performing in full form, the album opens with the upbeat Fred Falcao/Arnoldo Mederios-penned “Sem Essa” which features the sound of Northern Brazilian soul: smooth, buoyant vocals with multi-layered shaker rhythms, popping horns and orchestrated accompaniment. My personal favorite, “Destino E Destino De Severino Nonô Na Cidade De São Sebastião Do Rio De Janeiro (Oh Yeah!)” follows with this completely infectious stripped-down funk pop groove. Fittingly, the lyrics tell the tale of a northeastern singer becoming a star in Rio and forgetting his roots, how poignant. If this track has not been cleverly sampled, then it’s a damn shame. The Latin influence shows it’s head with the cha cha rhythm and smooth orchestra-pop of “Comigo é Assim,” and “O Mundo Igual De Cada Um” features a light and fluffy funk-pop spirit that rides a baritone sax squawk, horn stabs and vibrant Brazilian guitar. The second half of the album is decisively more laid-back with tracks like the absolutely ghostly “Sistema Nervoso” which includes Twilight Zone-like sound effects and the patient organ crawl of album closer “Não Tem Solução.” Even “Aí Você Começa A Chorar,” which I assume would be considered a bit aged and overproduced for the time, is still completely addictive with Simonal’s vocal dexterity jumping from oddly tuned falsetto to low growl. With my limited knowledge of the coinciding music scene at Simona’s release, it is hard for me to put the album in accurate cultural and musical perspective, but I will say that is an absolute joy to listen too no matter what the context. It is definitely much smoother, produced and mainstream than any of the Tropicália records but just as infectious, if not more so.

From here on out it was all downhill for the career of Wilson Simonal. Leading the way for the MPB movement that would dominate Brazilian music through the 70s, Simonal recorded two more albums for Odeon before a hugely traumatic mistake that would take 30 years to recover from. In 1971, Simonal met with his accountant, Rafael Vivani, to go over his books and determine where he stood financially. After Vivani informed him that despite selling millions of records world-wide, his over-exuberant pop-star lifestyle had in fact left him not only broke but also in debt. Simonal poorly chose in a fit of rage to contact his “friends” at the DOPS to threaten the accountant while they were off-duty in an attempt to reveal conspiracies of embezzlement. Nothing was accomplished and Vivani sued Simonal for extortion, which instigated a wave of terrible press accusing Simonal of being in cohorts with the government and acting as an informant for the DOPS. Not completely unlike the Red Scare in the U.S., Simonal was ousted and blacklisted by the music industry and being an easily accusable public figure, was always assumed guilty in anything related to political-media scandals, like Veloso and Gil’s exiles for example. The decisively non-political musician kept on recording albums after signing with Odeon rival Philips and later RCA in the 70s, but his popularity was diminishing by the day as both the left and right condemned him for false accusations. There were even a few albums in the 80s and 90s on independent labels, but the damage was done and it was almost as if the complete memory of Simonal’s amazingly productive music career was wiped from existence. He married a lawyer who spent the majority of the 90s successfully clearing his name though Simonal was already on the slippery slope of alcoholism and depression. Two years after his final album, 1998’s Bem Brasil-Estilo Simonal, Wilson Simonal died of cirrhosis. His name was eventually cleared after the Justice Ministry and Department of Strategic Affairs documents were liberated in the post-dictatorship amnesty. Thankfully, through the last decade’s interest in Brazilian music and vinyl collecting along with the hard work of his sons Max De Castro and Wilson Simoninha, both prospering musicians in their own right, Simonal’s music is once again reaching fans across the globe. Like Simona, his LPs are being reissued on CD for lucky music fans like myself to merrily stumble across in record stores everywhere.