A good friend gave me a little gem: the first Raimon album released by Edigsa in 1963. The vinyl contains, as is well known, four songs: La pedra, Som, A cops and the mythical Al Vent, which was his letter of introduction. . These days, we celebrate the sixty years of the publication of this song, written in 1959 and inspired, as its author has explained many times, on a motorcycle trip between Xàtiva and Valencia. I confess that he had never heard the first Al Vent recording, only the later, more stylized, mature versions. The experience is moving: the youth of the voice, the groundbreaking attitude, the sincerity, the emphasis and the security are of an extraordinary intensity, still today. Especially today.
The radical modernity of the piece crosses the decades and fashions, and sticks in our present as the offering of a classic. In the text on the album cover, written by Joan Fuster, I give the best explanation: “Raimon sang Al Vent to us, and it seemed to all of us that we were also discovering a clear possible energy, coming from the bottom of the earth or from a forgotten corner weather". The essayist accurately described a then emerging phenomenon, unparalleled.
It's a cliché to say that Raimon's song is a scream, but this term falls short. It was a miracle. From a land folklorized by the regime and from a time of misery, from a silence –as Raimon himself would later say– “antic i molt llarg”, beyond all expectations, springs the insolent song of a young university student, who opts for the language of the home, not the official world or the market.
Other Valencian boys, during the sixties and seventies, will become successful singers in Spanish, although their mother tongue is, in many cases, the same as that of Raimon: Nino Bravo, Camilo Sesto, Juan Bau or Bruno Lomas, this the latter also from Xàtiva and from 1940. How is it that Ramon Pelegero doesn't do the same as them?
"Illusion and song became one and the same thing, and Raimon discovered in his voice the words of his people." Fuster said. No more no less. This discovery makes all the difference. Today it is difficult to understand the enormous importance of Raimon's decision, which is parallel to that of a group from Barcelona, those who will launch Els Setze Jutges. The one and the others have the same intuition: to sing in the language they speak, the one that the dictatorship does not allow teaching in schools.
Marta Vallverdú has written an essential book, Seixantisme. L'esclat cultural català dels 60 (L'Avenç), which explains with many data how Catalan culture and language break the corset of Francoism thanks to the fact that the resistance attitudes of the first post-war period evolve when the creation of companies and entities is possible that will play the card of an incipient mass culture. In the cracks created by economic modernization, the new cultural Catalanism will promote publishing houses, magazines, encyclopedias, schools and a new aesthetic that will connect with Europe. Raimon's first album has a very attractive cover designed by Jordi Fornas, with a photo of Oriol Maspons. The rediscovered identity summoned the future. There was a country that did not want to disappear.
That is what should be explained today in all schools in Spain, if it were, truly, a multicultural state. That would perhaps prevent people from being as uninformed as Begoña, the young nurse from Cádiz who works in the Vall d'Hebron and does not want to learn Catalan.
