I remember it perfectly: in a rehearsal with Jorge’s parallel band (who died this Tuesday), I was playing bass and I got a note wrong. Jorge Ilegal stopped the rehearsal and head-butted me. He said: “I’ve always had very expeditious ways of making my bands sound great. You’ll see how you won’t make mistakes again.” And so it was. I wasn’t wrong again. But it wasn’t the only way of teaching he had. Their conversations were pure poetry, they had the seduction of Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zaratrusta, the cultured evocations of Borges and the epigrammatic tone of Quevedo. He mixed everything, everything served him. Behind this apparent bestiality, there was a person who had invested too many hours in alcoholic battles that no longer brought him anything and was striving to recover the time spent.
He genuinely cared about you and would call you at odd hours just to check on you. He was incredibly generous; with his knowledge, but also with his contacts (Babylon Chàt helped us get the desired record contract “in Madrid”) and, like a good Asturian, he wouldn’t let you pay even if they killed him. He offered to produce you or to have you come to his studio to record. He himself painted his collection of tin soldiers wonderfully and, from time to time, he would give them to you: “Here, for your children.”
With him, everything was extreme. There were glorious nights and others you could end up in the emergency room, but the best moments were not on the street, but at home, stripped of his Nosferatu character. With a little luck you could see him finish a new song: he was looking for the right word while his hands chased unusual chords within his enormous internal musical dictionary.
He had the much coveted gift of turning the place he entered into something better. His mere presence generated a new electricity in the air and even time vibrated in a different way.
There was something about him that was different from other musicians. It wasn’t just his overwhelming culture or his very personal guitar sound, but he seemed like a mythological character that went beyond reality. His extraordinary lucidity would have allowed him to converse with Ortega y Gasset and it was easier to imagine him in The banquet, of Plato, who in naked lunch by Burroughs.
Jorge always told me that genius and stupidity were inherent to human beings and that, except for technology, we had not changed that much in thousands of years.
We will miss him too much. It will not be easy to forget his resounding laugh, his alert conversation, his northern sea eyes and his constant restlessness.
As an epitaph, a phrase for the posterity of exterminating angel, one of his best songs: “The world is garbage, but I like being alive.”