Aw yeah “saudade” I know that word
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I just spent some time going through my recordings from January and matching them to their original air dates. This was actually really difficult to do, because each tape reel had two sides, and each side had a different episode on it. The boxes that were labeled did include the air dates, but it was never clear which side corresponded with which date! On top of this, some of the tape reels were in unlabeled boxes, and my notes from the weekend I recorded everything are not nearly detailed enough. Whoops! But I’ve now made the best approximations I could for everything.
That was the hard part I’d been dreading, so I’ll probably be uploading new episodes soon.
I continue to be nervous about the contents of my grandpa’s monologues at the starts of these episodes because it does sound like he might be talking about nostalgia for the monarchy, but I don’t speak enough Portuguese to say for sure. He left Portugal pretty shortly after the marxist Carnation Revolution that toppled the fascist regime, and the only real explanation I’ve ever gotten for why he left was that things were chaotic there at that time. Feels sus but he really doesn’t come of as a reactionary, more of an apolitical type. Perhaps I’ll call my mom tomorrow and see if she can translate some of his talk breaks for me.
maybe you can retitle it The Super Salazar Super Hour if the translation goes sideways
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Good news, these opening monologues are NOT reactionary. It turns out the monologue at the beginning of most of these episodes is actually a passage from an epic Portuguese poem from the 1500’s, considered a classic in that country, Os Lusíadas.
I got the whole history from my mom – my grandfather actually first came to the US in the 60’s. He and his wife were elementary school teachers. Under the Salazar dictatorship, educators weren’t getting paid shit, and they were having a lot of trouble making ends meet. They knew a couple who were doing very well running a Portuguese bakery in Provincetown, MA, and they ended up emigrating to the US in hopes of working with them. They ended up working at a meat packing plant and taking other odd jobs. They left their kids in Portugal under the care of an aunt.
In 1974 they returned to Portugal because they missed their kids and they heard from an old friend about an investment opportunity in his construction company that they hoped could sustain them. Fortunately, during that year the Carnation Revolution overturned the dictatorship, but unfortunately for them, the upheavals during that period led to the closure of the construction company and the total failure of their investments. After a couple years back in Portugal they ended up moving back to the US, this time taking their kids (including my mom) with them.
In the US, my grandparents ended up finally actually working for that Portugese bakery, and somewhere along the line they ended up taking on ownership of it.
As far as my grandfather’s politics go, it seems like he’s basically a normie. He definitely was no fan of the Salazar dictatorship. He was drawn to the US for its comparatively less authoritarian society. He doesn’t seem to hold a grudge against the revolution for messing up his investments. He’s never been particularly involved in American politics, though he did vote Republican in the 80’s, largely because he was a small business owner and liked all that “smaller government” rhetoric for obvious reasons.
Bottom line, it seems like his radio show was quite patriotic in tone, not out of any explicitly right-wing motivations, but rather out of nostalgia for his home country and its music, and as a strategy for connecting with other Portuguese immigrants who were feeling similar saudade.
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ohh heck, sorry i should have listened to those waaaayy back and i forgot
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Totally OK!
I’ve finally uploaded a third one of these!
Nothing as crazy as that Herois do Mar vaporwave stuff, but there are two absolutely gorgeous ballads starting around 20:25 that I really enjoyed. There are also a few tracks that go so far beyond corny that they wrap around to being kind of good.
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OK so that first ballad 20 minutes in is so good that I had to investigate. I was hoping that the artist would have a long career full of great albums I could dive into, but it turns out it’s one of the only songs by this singer and it’s exceedingly rare. This was actually actress Helena Isabel’s entry into the 1974 “Festival RTP” Portuguese Eurovision-style televised song contest. It was only released as a single, and now I’m really curious about the b-side. Unfortunately, the record seems to be quite rare. I’m going to have to call my grandpa up and see if he still has his copy of it.
I did find this video of her performing it during the actual contest though!
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Wait holy shit I just realized, that song debuted at the 1974 Festival RTP, the year of the Carnation Revolution!
So I had to know, did this event happen before or after the revolution?
It turns out, it helped TRIGGER the revolution!
Like most pop festivals in isolated countries, it was a very important event for the still incipient music industry of the 1960s and 1970s. Left-wing composers and writers would try to squeeze subversive lyrics in the contest, with great effect. After the 1974 revolution, incidentally code-triggered by that year’s winner being played on national radio, Portugal became increasingly open to foreign culture, thus deeming the Festival as a lesser musical event, dominated by below-standard pop songs with little or no impact in the industry, although remaining a popular TV show.
I needed to know more about this, so I kept digging. The wikipedia for the winning song, E Depois do Adeus:
The song’s airing on April 24th, 1974 at 10:55 p.m. on Emissores Associados de Lisboa Radio Station, was one of the two secret signals which alerted the rebel captains and soldiers to begin the Carnation Revolution.
The marxist military coup against the fascist dictatorship used the winning song from this festival as the covert signal to initiate their uprising!
Here’s the song (with a lot of cool photos of the revolution too):
So I guess the song I was enjoying so much in my previous post didn’t even win that year… It came in 6th place, lol.
It’s amazing the rabbit holes history goes down sometimes.
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I know some Portuguese but I picked it up from my time in Brazil and so whenever I hear Portugal Portuguese I immediately understand about 75% less. Like at the 21 minute mark when she says saudade, I’d expect it to be saudadjee but maybe Portuguese people don’t say it like that? Or is it another word entirely? Either way, I’ll listen to more of this treasure trove because I love the language
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I’m going on a road trip with my partner and I’m gonna put this on! We’ve been really into Sergio Mendes lately, exploring his various eras with bands like Brasil 66 and 77 to our various delight. And I remembered you talking about doing this OSB, which is such a cool story, so I thought it would be a good time to check it out finally!
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That’s awesome, thanks for checking it out! It’s not all great music but there’s some good stuff in there, and it’s certainly an interesting snapshot of a musical time/place that doesn’t get a lot of international exposure.
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ah! do you have these as mp3s?
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I have them as wav files, want them?
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that would be perfect! I don’t think we’ll have very stable signal where we are going is all.
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Sure, I’ll upload to google drive and send you the link!
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