¡Ja! ¡Ja! ¡Ja! ¡Que risa me da!

Aned y Calzado

David Calzado was on Disco Fiesta today, spruiking the Charanga Habanera matinee at Galiano. I can’t imagine he’d need to, but there you go. The played an “estreno”, which seemed weird, seeing as El rey de los charangueros isn’t that old. Well, I guess the bootlegs hit the street when I was here last year, so that’s 10 months ago. Maybe that is old in Charanga years. Even though I haven’t liked anything they’ve done since the ’90s, I thought that, seeing as it was a matinee, and seeing as it was in my zona, I should stick my head in, if there was nothing else more pressing. I didn’t make a huge effort - I thought that it might be a full house, but I didn’t wander down till after 6.30. I got there about 6.50 and as I reached the other side of the street I kind of found myself hoping it was “cerrado”; and when the guy in the box office said it was $20, I really wished it were (and maybe that’s why it wasn’t...) But I coughed up and went in.
It might not have been a full house but it was probably as full as it can be without shutting the doors. The place was heaving. The house music was blaring. The Bucanero was spilling. There was piles of beer cans and stacks of plates with chicken bones and cold chips. Puddles of beer on the floor. People slipping. I wondered what I was doing there. Especially when the house ended and the reggaeton started. Then, about 7.15, some salsa. Yay! Almost got me in the mood! Then Con la conciencia tranquila was cut off by the Casa’s theme song, and llegó la orquesta in a flurry of badly mixed pre-recorded music.
After some posing by the band, the singers finally appeared - all five of them (Dantes is still in the line-up). They had some homoerotic cowboy thing going on with checked shirts and faded jeans (a big improvement in all that shiny shit they used to wear). All buff of course. Dantes maybe one of the oldest, but he is also by far the prettiest. He thought so too: whenever he despeloted, he looked down to admire his nether regions. And how pretty they were.
The sound was pretty bad - the bass booming, way too loud; but the songs are all very ordinary, anyway, so I don’t know how much it matters really. The crowd loved it - the air was filled with phones and cameras recording the event in some form from start to finish (myself included, ironically). I don’t get it. I can’t even hear any hooks in them - there is nothing to latch onto, except for that “que risa me da” in El Cañon, and that line is old, of course. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of good ideas there. But it’s “un show”, I guess, as they say here. And now I've seen it (I last saw them in 2003).
My kind of show is coming up later tonight: finally I will get to see Pupy. I wonder how they can clean up so much mess in so little time - they only have an hour in between the end of the matinee and the beginning of the night session - or when they put the matinee back an hour, did they put the nights back an hour too? I don’t know, seeing as I always try and get there minutes before the band goes on (tricky when it’s a weekend, the band doesn’t go on till 1-ish, and you have to walk through Centro Habana...). I’ve always imagined a firehose, just washing it all out somewhere in a great torrent. But this being Habana and tapwater not always being abundant, it probably isn’t the case.

[Pupy report to follow when I'm not so knackered.]