"The Rrollo does not seem like it will win the next elections, but that is not why it will try to seize power through violence, terror, or organized subversion. Nor will it change the world, nor will it probably become a mass movement. Those of the Rrollo have no intention of forming a political party, a revolutionary organization, or a union. But the Rrollo, more or less masked, is a reality. It is everywhere under different names and with different brands, some registered and others still to be registered. Even many of those who 'are in the Rrollo' do not know it. You yourself, for example, may be in the Rrollo, or your son, or your beibi."
With this forcefulness, Jesús Ordovás expressed himself in 1977 in his book De qué va el Rrollo, a concept that the author used as an umbrella to describe every deviationist expression in that society that was leaving behind 40 years of dictatorship and was going to meet something that, still, was not very well known what it would end up being. And the doubts persist even today.
In fact, that book spoke of counterculture. Of diverse sensibilities, appetites, angers, and audacities that coalesced into a marginal framework that combined the echoes of May '68, the first transvestism seen on our streets since the 30s, American and British rock, Mediterranean music, environmentalism, hippism, protopunk, gonzo journalism, feminist activism, underground comic, free theater and a constellation more of small realities that converged around an idea of difference, of rejection of the established. A cry, more or less unanimous, that warned that you are not going to fool us anymore.
A cry, more or less unanimous, that warned that you are not going to fool us anymoreIt was the moment of AjoblancoandStar, the comics of Nazario, Ocaña, Bar Kike, the first Màgic, the photographer Flowers, Companyia Elèctrica Dharma, Sala Villarroel, Zeleste, Club Helena, Kairós publishing house, the acid folk of Pan y Regaliz and the Progressive of Máquina, and the early punk of La Banda Trapera del Río. Of the communes, small-scale LSD, marijuana grown in the Balearic Islands and hashish dispatched by legionnaires in theChino.
"We are in a country that, as Manolo Vázquez used to say, has a youth more or less up to date with their feet, but not with their tongue. The ideology (organized as such or quite the opposite, although it is still ideology) that has dominated youth culture in recent generations, producing continuous and successive convulsions, has been received here adulterated by a thousand and one intermediaries. This, when it arrived...", lamented journalist Claudi Montañá, who would take his own life in 1977 and whose anthology of articles, Estoy Hablando de Mi Generación, has recently seen the light.
Counterculture at Palau Robert
All that creative, indigenous, and self-sufficient struggle against the frustration and hardships of that third world, in social and other terms, is reflected in the exhibition L'underground i la contracultura a la Catalunya dels 70: un reconeixement, which occupies room three of the Palau Robert until November 28.
The idea began to take shape "at the end of 2019, when Jordi del Río, director of the Palau, suggested to José María Lafuente and me to study the possibility of setting up an exhibition on counterculture," explains Pepe Ribas, curator of the exhibition and a deeply influential figure in the development of journalistic underground in this country as director of the legendary magazine Ajoblanco. He adds that he accepted, "with the essential condition of total freedom and of being able to find a collaborator who had lived through the period in a different way than mine. I drew up a plan and hired Canti Casanovas from Websensenom and Dani Freixes, who has been a fundamental piece due to his knowledge of the era. We didn't want reinterpretations. We wanted facts, materials, and experiences. To show more than to interpret, to transmit emotions without ignoring the historical context. The materials speak for themselves," he adds.
--- Do they talk about everything that happened after the dictator's death?
--- Liberation did not begin with Franco's death, it began in 1968, with the first Folk Festival in Barcelona's Ciutadella Park.
Looking back, but without nostalgia
In his autobiography, The Magnitude of the Disaster, the recently deceased Oriol Llopis, considered a Lester Bangs of music journalism here on the perennial edge of self-combustion, recalled that Barcelona with a certain weariness: "The truth is I never had a good time, what you call a good, good, good time. On Saturday afternoons, a few of us would get together to smoke joints and listen to music at the Plabosch brothers' house [...], but that and dropping a tab ---also within Barcelona--- is not something that, with the perspective time gives, can be considered wild fun."
Llopis recalled that era of constant, almost desperate, search for stimuli ---"we attended absolutely ALL the concerts held at the Palacio de los Deportes"---, of an almost atavistic need to escape the contextual gray. "It was a vibrant era in which, with hardly any means, a lot was created and well," explains Ribas.
Llopis recalled that era of constant, almost desperate, search for stimuli, of an almost atavistic need to escape the contextual gray"It happened at a time when Franco's power was languishing and the new power did not yet exist, which opened up spaces for free experimentation. We lived through an era of rock, counterculture, and new global perspectives of liberation on many levels. Francoist and anti-Francoist politicians were obsessed with power; some wanted to keep it, and others plotted to take it. They paid no attention to a new rebellious generation that was disrupting daily life.The theater, music, sexuality, art, human relationships were renewed."
"Ecology, naturism, feminism, gay liberation, the fight against militarism and against the repressions caused by Francoist Catholicism and by the conservative Victorian morality of the 19th century appeared. We lived the era of 'us' to the fullest. The new generation transformed mentalities by bringing together art, life, and play. We cleared the way for a secular society, without asylums, without repression of the gay world, without military service, without the death penalty, without guilt." And all of this is sought to be reflected in the exhibition at Palau Robert with an objective that "is not only to remember, because I don't like nostalgia," but almost as a declaration of principles, as a memento that "we are still alive and free in mind and heart."
Barcelona, countercultural capital
"La Rambla between 1973 and 1978 was a shared poem, lived in every moment with an intensity that today is impossible to comprehend," explains Ribas, who points out that Barcelona "was the cultural and social capital of the Hispanic world."
In that urban scenario, which in 1973 experienced the first major raid against drug trafficking ever carried out in Spain, led by the feared Antonio Juan Creix, "counterculture involved inventing the common from what we lived on the street, while freeing ourselves from conservative morality. We fled from the father's house to experiment outside authoritarian homes and without paying the slightest attention to institutions. We had to lose fear of the future and invent the present. We shared discoveries with great intensity. Think that with fifteen percent of, for example, a postman's salary, you could rent an apartment that you ended up sharing with others in a semi-commune Mediterranean style."
"We fled from the father's house to experiment outside authoritarian homes and without paying the slightest attention to institutions. We had to lose fear of the future and invent the present. We shared discoveries with great intensity," recalls Ribas.In that countercultural city, explains the journalist, "there were causalities. Consumerism was scarce. Few signed their works or articles because authorship mattered little in those years of so much action and so much learning. Many of us created in groups through debate, free participation, spontaneity, permanent dialogue, and some sex. What we most wanted to recover was the polytheistic spirit of the Mediterranean, the excitement for creative culture, for authenticity, and for the reunion with the Iberian libertarian past."
--- An almost utopian landscape…
--- We achieved something unusual: living as we thought. As far as possible from dogmas and authoritarianisms.
The Antagonistic Punk
The first expressions of punk in Barcelona were generated around the countercultural environment, mostly by Xavi Cot who, in December 1977, would organize the first Punk Rock Festival ever held in Spain at the Casino l'Aliança del Poblenou. Cot himself narrates this adventure in his book Cuc Sonat, where he recounts his pioneering career as a music promoter.
However, punk, especially that of Barcelona which, unlike Madrid's, does not have the backing of an institutionalized Movida, establishes itself as an antagonistic subculture, distanced from a counterculture with which it breaks. It is the fracture that could exist between La Banda Trapera del Río's Ciutat Podrida and Último Resorte's Barcelona es Diferente.
Punk, especially that of Barcelona which, unlike Madrid's, does not have the backing of an institutionalized Movida, establishes itself as an antagonistic subculture, distanced from a counterculture with which it breaks"The first punk was the war cry of the outskirts against the collective overthrow of the countercultural world. InAjoblanco, the most Marxist sector declared punk as something reactionary. I have always allowed everyone to think and write what they want, but punk found a good part of the work already done. For example,in the field of sexuality, the great step had been taken. The general mentality had already changed," asserts Ribas, who also encountered the difference between aundergroundnative and self-sufficient from Barcelona with respect to aMovidaMadrid-based protected by theestablishment.
"I left Ajoblanco, gave my share to Toni Puig, and went to the countryside for a year. Then I lived three years in Madrid in the heart of the Movida, until 1983. Back then it was called Nueva Ola. I experienced it as a modern, fun, and necessary chotis, but I didn't get involved, although I was at the center due to the apartments I shared, where music, new pictorial figuration, photography, cinema, and theater were created. What I had experienced in Barcelona was foundational; what I lived in Madrid was largely supported by the new State, by advertising agencies, by TVE, by Radio 3, by El País, and by international record labels. The goal was to sell Modern Spain to the world."
What killed counterculture?
The exhibition places the 1978 edition of Canet Rock, with the participation of international punk and emerging New Wave artists, as a moment of change, as the beginning of the end of counterculture as it was known. "It's surprising that in a festival with a strong hippinationalistalibertarian accent, organized by a trio of progressive singers known as La Trinca, who have carved out a niche in Catalan song with funny tunes, a number of bands and artists of the moment managed to sneak in," recalls José María Sanz, alias Loquillo, in his Barcelona Ciudad, regarding that event.
--- But then, what killed counterculture? Was it punk and the Nueva Ola?
Ribas takes the floor: "It died after the failure of the Libertarian Conferences of 1977 when the CNT failed to create sensible coordination among the many libertarian and underground worlds; it died due to the radicalization and dispersion of the movement in 1978; it died due to the state terrorism that was the Scala Case in 1978; it died due to the Transition pacts of 1978 and the appearance of politicians who took power through a mediocre parliamentary democracy that instrumentalized culture and social issues in favor of a corrupt distribution and order; it died because advertising agencies and the marketing world promoted the era of the self and consumerism as the only path to modernity since 1980. The artisans disappeared, and the dirigiste representatives were born."
"It died after the failure of the 1977 Libertarian Days when the CNT failed to create a sensible coordination between the many libertarian and underground worlds, it died due to the radicalization and dispersion of the movement in 1978 and it died due to the state terrorism that the Scala Case represented in 1978," Ribas defends.But, despite having died, the journalist vindicates the validity of everything that was achieved. "Catalan countercultureit is not past but part of what is pendingreal ecology, the control of pharmaceutical companies, freedom of the airwaves, the end of junk food, gender violence and real democracy were things claimed and elaborated then and remain pending, unresolved."
They, the damned
The exhibition includes a very special mention of Pau Maragall, better known as Pau Malvido, the rebellious brother of the former mayor ---between the 80s and 90s--- and mayoral candidate in the last municipal elections.
Deceased in 1994, his legacy is the series of articles Nosotros los Malditos (We the Damned), a title that would also be given to the book that was to be the first bibliographic reference on the countercultural phenomenon. "Pau Maragall was complex, contradictory, drug addict, laborious, fascinating, a unique and unrepeatable character, a pure and coherent underground," recalls Ribas. And the work of all these damned, at least a good part of it, can be enjoyed until the end of November in room three of the Palau Robert.
"The counterculture and the underground of the 70s was not just a party. For the exhibition we have spoken with many people and found dispersed material. We have located photos and recovered videos that very few knew, practically unpublished, and we have restored them. We have also dialogued for many hours with committed and free survivors," concludes the curator of the exhibition who, upon visiting it, once again harks back to the words of Jesús Ordovás: "The Rrollo is really cool. On every corner of every city you find a guy or a girl setting up their own magazine, their own comix, their own song, whether on toilet paper, plastic or stone. Any material is good. There's no stopping this now."