Carlos Zanón (Barcelona, 1966) belongs to that redoubt of faithful who continues to go by each month with unwavering loyalty to Route 66 magazine, the last bastion of Rock & Roll lovers in Spain.
There he first read an article about how during a brief time the musician Townes van Zandt formed with a friend and the woman of him “a strange perfect trio”.
And so he was born, a bit for flash, which is the sixth novel of him, Love Song (Salamandra), seventh if we have identity problems, the continuation of the Carvalho series.
Love Song is a Novile Road on three good musicians already carved, something punished for life and somewhat sentimentally defeated who undertake their last tour of third Costa de la Española.
They are called cowboy, jim and eileen (it costs to read without mentally eaten eileen from Dexy’s Midnight Runners), and although the trip begins as a well-avented triangle, the balance will take little to stagger.
“Talented people attracted me to express themselves through creation and finding beauty in music.
In general, he has always been interested how we ended up living in order to do that, to be able to write or compose.
The idea of three very good musicians playing songs from 1985 by Campings where no one recognizes me seemed very fun, “explains Zanón.
And so is: Eileen, Jim and Cowboy are walked through bad-death garments by touching Rocans and Strange Topics of Groups of the 90 while the public, which in the background just wants his ration of Beatles and Satisfaction of The Rolling Stones,
irremediably.
Why do you decide Eilean staying to live in 1985?
“I was 19 years old and I remember songs that were as flashes.
Many of the albums that they still like me are that year, like the Steve McQueen of Prefab Sprout or The Whole of the Moon of the Waterboys.
It was a peaceful time, in which it seemed that nothing happened. ”
Neither the protagonist trio nor the secondaries of Love Song are what we would call people of order, but rather that kind of people who continue to wander the night after night, as if they would take “the corpse of a young man who is resisting to be buried.”
“Creative people are, in general, quite unable to manage the living of civilians.
Creation and acting are something so beast that it is difficult for you to land.
Drugs, get into trouble or make mistakes is a way of feeling that you are still moving.
For the protagonists it is their way of life.
Sometimes what serves you to fly very high prevents you from walking, “Reflects Zanón, which describes the sordid routine of intoxication of his characters with sufficient distance to ward off any atturge of idealization of bad life.
“What I like least about all that world is the folk romanticism of the rock star or the tormented artist, that goes laziness.
No matter how much you have lived, you know how badly that ends always, “she says.
“I was interested in explaining that friendship, like love, also has some destructive process,” he explains.
“There was a moment in which I realized that I was explaining the story of Byron and Shelley.
Both died for demonstrating something to the other: Byron died in Greece, fighting for freedom against the Turks, trying to do something altruistic who would have loved Shelley;
And Shelley died drowned on a boat in full storm, which is something very Byron.
In the novel, Cowboy and Jim want the other and that destroys them ».
But surely what the most resonent of Love Song is the inability of its protagonists to know what happens to them inside and explain it.
“This is the clumsiness and male vulnerability.
That feeling that when you enter a site, your own volume makes you end up spoiling everything.
I was interested in reflecting how the fact of being a man sometimes represents an emotional disability, “says the afternoon author, evil and never.
“Beyond defending the tribe of Lions, there is nothing we can do moderately better than you,” he jokes.
There is also in Love Song the need to get lost on the way back home.
“One, to make adult, has to break the affective ties that ties and sustain it.
Actually until you lose your parents do not face life. ”
The novel is traversed from the first to the last page for the disease, which appears and disappears as a shadow that is omen, condemnation and accelerator of decisions.
“He has always been interested in the subject.
I spent a lot of sick time, “explains the Barcelona writer.
“At 18 I was diagnosed with hepatitis C. I did many treatments, some very aggressive who did not work.
But just when I was shot by the cancer-canceled index and was already on a waiting list for a transplant, a new medication that healed me began to be commercialized.
I was very lucky”.
That’s why all the songs that Touch Eileen in the novel are from The Muffs, a Californian Band of Punk Rock of the 90 whose singer and guitarist, Kim Shattuck, died of ELA.
“He can be sick in many ways.
In my case, I could not drink alcohol but when they tell you that with 18 years, some days you forget.
Let’s say I did not take care of everything I owed.
And when I cured myself, I entered the desire to recover lost time.
Each one has its obsessions.
In the case of Eileen, she knows how the story is going to end and that’s why she decides to find Jim freedom before everything ends. ”
“I needed to leave the comfort zone,” concludes the author of you do not call home.
«Do not make a black novel again.
After taxi and identity problems I wanted to go from Barcelona.
This is an important book for me, “he summarizes.
“A point and apart with everything I have done so far».
